"Salaam, Sahib," said Bakha, putting his hand to his forehead as he got up.
"Salaam, salaam, you sit, don't disturb yourself,' squealed the Colonel in wrong, badly accented Hindustani, patting Bakha affectionately the while.
There was something wonderful in the brave effort the Colonel seemed to make to be natural in this unnatural atmo- sphere. But he was not self-conscious. He had thrown aside every weight-pride of birth and race and colour in adopting the customs of the natives and in garbing himself in their manner, to build up the Salvation Army in India. And he had swamped the overbearing strain of the upper middle-class Englishman in him by his hackneyed effusions of Christian sentiment, camou- flaged the narrow, insular patriotism of his character in the
jingo of the white-livered humanitarian. What has happened? Are you ill?" the Colonel asked, bending over.
Bakha felt confused, embarrassed by the flood of kindness. "Charat Singh, he thought, 'was kind to me this afternoon; the sahib is generosity itself. And he wondered if he were dreaming. He looked and saw the form of the Colonel real enough before him. And hadn't he heard the strange, squeaky voice of the Englishman speaking Hindustani? Good Hindustani, Bakha thought, considering it was spoken by a sahib, for ordinarily he knew the sahibs didn't speak Hindustani at all, only some useful words and swear words: Acha (good); Jao (go away); jaldi karo (be quick); sur ka bacha (son of a pig); kute ka bacha
(son of a dog)!" 'Nothing, Sahib, I was just tired,' said Bakha shyly. 'I am sweeper here, son of Lakha, Jemadar of the sweepers."
I know I know! How is your father?"
'Huzoor, he is well,' replied Bakha.
"Has your father told you who I am? asked the Colonel,
coming to the point in the practical manner of the Englishman. "Yes, Huzoor. You are a sahib," said Bakha.
No, no, pretended the Colonel. I am not a sahib. I am like you. I am padre of the Salvation Army." "Yes, Sahib, I know," said Bakha, without understanding
the subtle distinction which the Colonel was trying to institute between himself and the ordinary sahibs in India whose haughti- ness and vulgarity was, to his Christian mind, shameful, and from whom, on that account, he took care to distinguish himself, lest their misdeeds reflect on the sincerity of his intentions for the welfare of the souls of the heathen. To Bakha, however, all the sahibs were sahibs, trousered and hatted men, who were generous in the extreme, giving away their cast-off clothes to their servants, also a bit nasty, because they abused their servants a great deal. He knew, of course, that the Colonel was a padre sahib, but he did not know what a padre did except that he lived near the girja ghar (church) and came to see the people in the outcastes' colony. To him even the padres were of interest because of their European clothes. This padre did not wear a hat like the padre in the barracks of the British regiments. But that was of little account. He wore all the other items of clothes that the sahibs wore. He was a sahib all right. And this sahib had conde- scended to pat him on the back, to speak kind words to him, even to ask him why he was looking so sad. He could have cried to receive such gracious treatment from a sahib, cried with the joy of being in touch with that rare quality which was to be found in the sahibs. In spite of it all, however, he seemed to be vaguely aware of the difference the Colonel was trying to define.
I am a padre and my God is Yessuh Messih,' emphasized the Colonel. If you are in trouble, come to Jesus in the girja ghar.' He was seeking vainly to paraphrase the promise, 'Come- all ye that labour and I will give you rest."
Bakha was struck with the coincidence. How did the padre know he was in trouble? And who is Yessuh Messih to whose. religion my father told me this padre wanted to convert us? I wonder if he lives in the girja ghar ? He recalled that the girja ghar had seemed to him a mysterious place whenever he had passed by.
"Who is Yessult Messih, Sahib ? Bakha asked, eager to allay his curiosity.
'Come, I shall tell you," said Colonel Hutchinson. 'Come to the church. And dragging the boy with his arm, babbling, babbling, all vague, in a cloud, and enthusiastic as a mystic, he led him away on the wings of a song::
"Life is found in Jesus, Only there "tis offered thee; Offered without price or money Tis the gift of God sent free."
Bakha was dumb with amazement, carried away by the
confusion, feeling flattered, honoured by the invitation which
had come from the sahib, however much that sahib looked like
a native. He followed willingly, listening to each word that
the Colonel spoke, but not understanding a word: 'Life is found in Jesus,"
the Colonel sang again, absorbed in himself, and unconscious that he was in charge of a soul in trouble.
Jesus! Who was Jesus! The same as Yessuh Messih? Who was he? The sahib says he is God. Was he a God like Rama, God of the Hindus, whom his father worshipped and his forefathers had worshipped, whom his mother used to mention quite often in her prayers? Those thoughts gushed into Bakha's mind, and he would have exploded with them had it not been that the Colonel was absolutely absorbed in his sing-song:
Life is found alone in Jesus, Only there 'tis offered thee; Offered without price or money "Tis the gift of God sent free.
'Huzoor,' said Bakha, breaking in impatiently at the close of the third recitation, 'who is Jesus? The same as Yessuh Messih? Who is he?"
"He died that we might be forgiven, He died to make us good. That we might go at last to heaven, Saved by His precious blood,"
answered the Colonel quickly, rhythmically, before Bakha knew what he had asked. He was still baffled. The answer, if it was an answer, was like a conundrum to him; words, words. He felt overwhelmed and uncomfortable. But being, of course, too happy to be seen walking with the sahib, he bore all, trying to remember parts of the Colonel's song and asking himself what they meant. But apart from the muffled sound of words he
could not catch anything. "Sahib, who is Yessuh Messih?"
*He is the Son of God,' answered Colonel Hutchinson, coming down to earth for a moment. "He died that we might be forgiven." And then he burst into song again:
"He died that we might be forgiven, He died to make us good, That we might go at last to heaven, Saved by His precibus blood."
"He died that we might be forgiven,' thought Bakha. "What does that mean? He is the son of God! How could anybody be.
the son of God if God, as my mother told me, lives in the sky? How could He have a son? And why did His son die that we should be forgiven? Forgiven for what? And who is this son of God?"
"Who is Yessul Messih, Sahib? Is he the God of the sahibs 7" Bakha asked, slightly afraid that he was bothering the white man too much. He knew from experience that Englishmen did not like to talk too much
'He is the Son of God, my boy,' answered the Colonel, ecstatically revolving his head. 'And He died for us sinners:
He died that we might be forgiven, He died to make us good, That we might go at last to heaven, Saved by His precious blood."
Bakha was a bit bored by this ecstatic hymn-singing. But the white man had condescended to speak to him, to take notice of him. He was happy and proud to be in touch with a sahib. He suffered the priest and even reiterated his enquiry:
'Do they pray to Yessuh Messih in your girja ghar, Sahib ?" "Yes, yes, replied the Colonel, breaking into the rhythm of a new hymn:
Jesus, tender shepherd, hear me, Let my sins be forgiven! Let there be light, Oh, shed Thy light in the heart of this boy."
Bakha was baffled and bored. He did not understand anything of these songs. He had followed the sahib because the sahib wore trousers. Trousers had been the dream of his life. The kindly interest which the trousered man had shown him when he was downcast had made Bakha conjure up pictures of himself wearing the sahib's clothes, talking the sahib's language and becoming like the guard whom he had seen on the railway station near his village. He did not know who Yessuh Messih was. The sahib probably wanted to convert him to his religion. He didn't want to be converted. But he wouldn't mind being converted if he knew who Yessuh Messih was. The sahib, however, was singing, singing to himself and saying Yessuh Messih was the son of God. How could God have a son? Who is God? If God is like Rama, He has no son, for he had never heard that Rama had a son. It was all so puzzling that he thought of excusing himself by lying to the sahib that he had to go to work and couldn't come with him.
The Colonel saw Bakha lagging behind and, realizing that his new follower was losing interest, exerted the peculiar obstinacy of the enthusiastic missionary in him and dragging at the boy's sleeve, said, "Yessuh Messih is the Son of God, my boy. While we were yet sinners, He died for us. He sacrificed Himself for us." Then again he became rapt in his devotional songs:
"O Calvary! O Calvary! It was for me that Jesus died On the Cross of Calvary!"
He sacrificed himself for us, Bakha reflected. His idea of sacrifice was something very certain and definite. He remem- bered that when some calamity brooded over the family, such as an epidemic of sickness, or starvation, his mother used to make offerings to the goddess Kali, by sacrificing a goat or some other animal. That sacrifice was supposed to appease the goddess's wrath, and the evil passed over. Now, what did this sacrifice of Yessuh Messih mean? Why did he sacrifice himself?
"Why did Yessuh Messih sacrifice himself, Huzoor? he asked.
"He died that we might be forgiven, He died to make us good,
That we might go at last to heaven,
Saved by His precious blood,"
answered the Colonel, forgetting, as he had often done while he had been with Bakha, that the sweeper-boy didn't understand a word of what he was singing. Then in a sane moment he recog nized the look of anxious solicitude on the face of the boy and realized he had been babbling too much, and mostly to himself.
'He sacrificed Himself out of love for us,' he said. 'He sacrificed Himself to help us all; for the rich and the poor; for Brahmin and the Bhangi.'
The last sentence went home. 'He sacrificed himself for us, for the rich and the poor, for the Brahmin and the Bhangi. That meant there was no difference in his eyes between the rich and the poor, between the Brahmins and the Bhangis, between the pundit of the morning, for instance, and himself.
Yes, yes, Sahib, I understand,' said Bakha eagerly. 'Yessuh Messil makes no difference between the Brahmin and myself."
"Yes, yes, my boy, we are all alike in the eyes of Jesus," the Colonel answered him. But he began garrulously: 'He is our superior. He is the Son of God. We are all sinners. He will intercede with God, His Father, on our behalf."
He is superior to us. We are all sinners. Why, why is anyone superior to another? Why are we all sinners?" Bakha began to reflect.
"Why are we all sinners, Sahib ?' he queried.
"We were all born sinners, replied the Colonel evasively, the puritan in him shying at an exposition of the doctrine of original sin which seemed called for.
We must confess our sins. Then alone will He forgive us, otherwise we will have to suffer the eternal torment of hell. You confess your sins to me before I convert you to Christianity."
'But, Huzoor, I don't know who Yessuh Messih is. I know Ram. But I don't know Yessuh Messih. Ram is the god of the idolaters, the Colonel said, after a
pause, and a bit absentmindedly. 'Come and confess your sins to me and Yessuh Messih will receive you in Heaven when you die."
Now Bakha was utterly bored. Never mind if it was a sahib who was giving him his company. He was afraid of the thought of conversion. He hadn't understood very much of what the Salvationist said. He didn't like the idea of being called a sinner. He had committed no sin that he could remember. How could he confess his sins? Odd. What did it mean, confessing sins? "Does the sahib want some secret knowledge? he wondered. 'Does he want to perform some magic or get some illegal knowl- edge? He didn't want to go to Heaven. As a Hindu he didn't believe in the judgment day. He had never thought of that. He had seen people die. And he just accepted the fact. He had been told that people who died were reborn in some form or other. He dreaded that he should be reborn as a donkey or a dog. But all that didn't disturb him. Yessuh Messilt must be a good man," he thought, "if he regards a Brahmin and a Bhangi the same. But who was he? Where did he come from? What did he do? He had heard the story of Ram, He had heard the story of Krishna. But he hadn't heard the story of Yessuh Messih. "This sahib will not tell me the story,' he said to himself. But he still hoped he might give him a pair of his cast-off trousers. And he followed
him half unwillingly. 'Look, that is our home,' said the Colonel, reaching the gate of a compound leading to a pile of mud-houses among the neem-trees with thatched and sloping roofs.
'I know, Sahib,' said Bakha, who had often passed by it. "It was a drug-house once, an opium distillery," said the Colonel with great pride. But five years ago we took it.' He paused for a moment to recall the trouble it had cost him to acquire the piece of land to erect a building, and he burst out piously into an exclamation of his gratitude to Christ. 'O Lord, how great are Thy works, and Thy thoughts how deep! God has indeed brought light into the world! Then turning from his thoughts to the young man, he said: 'He has cast out the heathen from the place."
A muffled song proceeded from the tall mud-house in the centre of the compound, which Bakha knew to be the girja ghar. The Colonel gave it shape for the benefit of the young man by lifting his finger and reciting:
"Share your blessings, share your blessings, Share them day by day; Share your blessings, all life's long way; Share your blessings, though you've only one, And it will surprise you how much good you've done."
"George, George, tea is ready !' came a shrieking, hoarse and hysterical voice, tearing the Colonel's squeaky song to bits.
Coming, coming responded the Colonel automatically, standing where he stood, but with his arms and legs all in a flurry. He had heard his wife's voice. He was afraid of her. He was confused. He didn't know whether to go into the mud-house on the right which was his bungalow, and to take Bakha in there, or to take him to the church. He stood hesitating on the edge of a conflict.
"Where are you? Where have you been all the afternoon?" came the shrieking voice again. And behind it appeared the form of a round-faced, big-bellied, dark-haired, undersized, middle- aged woman, a long cigarette-holder with a cigarette in her mouth, a gaily-coloured band on her Eton-cropped hair, pince- nez glasses on her rather small eyes, a low-necked printed cotton frock that matched her painted and powdered face and reached barely down to her knees.
Oh, is that what you've been doing, going to these blackies again!' she shouted, frowning, her heavily-powdered face showing its layers of real, vivid scarlet skin underneath the coating. I give you up. Really you're incorrigible. I should have thought you would have learned your lesson from the way those Congress wallahs beat you last week!"
"What is the matter? I am just coming. I am coming, re- sponded the Colonel, impatient, disturbed and embarrassed. Bakha was going to slip away in order to save the Colonel the displeasure of his wife, for which, he felt, he was mainly
responsible.
"Wait, wait,' said the Colonel, holding the sweeper-boy's hand. I'll take you to the church."
"So that the tea should get cold !' exclaimed Mary Hutchinson. "I can't keep waiting for you all day while you go messing about with all those dirty bhangis and chamars, and saying this, she withdrew into her boudoir.
Bakha had not known the exact reason for her frowns, but when he heard the words bhangi and chamar he at once associated her anger with the sight of himself.
'Salaam, Sahib,' he said, extricating his hand from the old man's grasp before the missionary realized he had done so. And he showed his heels; such was his fear of the woman.
"Wait, wait, my son, wait,' cried the padre after him.
But in the white haze of the afternoon sun he hurried away as if the Colonel's wife were a witch, with raised arms and crooked feet following him, harassing him.
The old man was piously reciting another hymn as he stood staring at Bakha's receding figure:
'Blessed be Thy love, blessed be Thy name."
'Everyone thinks us at fault,' Bakha was saying to himself as he walked along. He wants me to come and confess my sins. And his mem-sahib! I don't know what she said about bhangis and chamars. She was angry with the sahib. I am sure I am the cause of the mem-sahib's anger. I didn't ask the padre to come and talk to me. He came of his own accord. I was so happy to talk to him. I would certainly have asked him for a pair of white trousers had the mem-sahib not been angry."
He walked along, vacantly oppressed by the weight of his heavy cloud of memories. He felt a kind of nausea in his stomach -the spiritual nausea that seemed to rise in him when he was in difficulties. He was unnerved again as in the morning after his unfortunate experiences. Only, he was now too tired to care. He just let himself be carried by his legs towards the edge of the day. There was a faint smell of wetness oozing from the dusty earth which paved his way, a sort of moist warmth that rose to his nostrils. High above the far-distant horizon of the Bulashah- dales the sun stood fixed, motionless and undissolved, as if it could not bring itself to go, to move or to melt. In the hills and fields, however, there was a strange quickening. Long rows of birds flew over against the cold blue sky towards their homes The grasshoppers chirped in an anxious chorus as they fell back into the places where they always lay waiting for food. A lone beetle sent electric waves of sound quivering into the cool clear air. Every blade of grass along the pathway, where Bakha walked, was gilded by the light.
As he went on, striding lightly from his heavy rumps, his head bent, his eyes half-closed, his lower lip pressed forward, he felt the blood coursing through his veins. He seemed full of a sort of tired restlessness. The awkwardness of the moment when the missionary's wife emerged from her room on to the veranda of her thatched bungalow and glared at her husband, stirred in his soul the echoes of those memories which had shaken and stirred him during the morning. There was a common quality in the look of hate in the round white face of the Colonel's wife and in the sunken visage of the touched man. The man's pro- truding lower jaw, with its transparent muscles, shaken in his spluttering speech, came before Bakha's eyes. Also his eyes emerging out of their sockets. The Colonel's wife had also opened her little eyes like that, behind her spectacles. That had frightened Bakha, frightened him much more than the thrust of the touched man's eyeballs, for she was a mem-sahib, and the frown of a mem-sahib had the strange quality of unknown, uncharted seas of anger behind it. To Bakha, therefore, the few words which she had uttered carried a dread a hundred times more terrible than the fear inspired by the whole tirade of abuse by the touched man. It was probably that the episode of the morning was a matter of history, removed in time and space from the more recent scene, also, perhaps, because the anger of a white person mattered more. The mem-sahib was more important to his slavish mind than the man who was touched, he being one of his many brown country- men. To displease the mem-sahib was to him a crime for which no punishment was bad enough. And he thought he had got off comparatively lightly. He dared not think unkind thoughts about her. So he unconsciously transferred his protest against her anger to the sum of his reactions against the insulting personages of the morning.
His attention was diverted to a black leper who sat swathed in tattered garments, exposing his raw wounds to the sun and the flies by the wayside, his crumpled hand lifted in beggary, and on his lips the prayer: 'Baba pesa de (Oh, man, give me a pice). Bakha had a sudden revulsion of feeling. He looked away
from the man. It was the Grand Trunk Road near the
railway station of Bulashah. The pavements were crowded with beggars. A woman wailed for food outside one of the many cook-shops which lined one side of the road. She had a little child in her arms, another child in a bag on her back, a third holding on to her skirt. Some boys were running behind the stream of carriages begging for coppers. Bakha felt a queer sadistic delight staring at the beggars moaning for alms but not receiving any. They seemed to him despicable. And the noise they made through their wailings and moanings and blessings oppressed him.
He heard the rumbling thunder of a railway train which passed under the footbridge he was ascending. Almost simul- taneously he heard a shout from the golbagh garden rend the still, leafy air. The shadow of the smoke-cloud that the engine had sent up to the bridge choked Bakha's throat and blinded his eyes. Then the fumes of smoke melted like invisible, intangible flakes of snow, leaving a dark trail of soot behind. This too paled in the sunshine. The train had rushed into the cool darkness of the tin roof on Bulashah station.
Two choruses of voices tore through the air this time: one charged the sky from the platform where the train had stopped; another rose above the tree-tops of the golbagh, undulating from horizon to horizon.
Bakha stood for a moment on the platform of the footbridge and stared towards the tin roof. Myriads of faces were jutting out of white clothes. He looked in the direction of the golbagh. A veritable sea of white tunics faced him in the oval, where, ordinarily, he had seen the city gymkhana play cricket. Now there was a profound silence. He waited in the hush and listened. The chorus began again. As a spark of lightning suddenly illumines the sky, the myriad of voices leapt up the curve of the heavens before Bakha and wrote in flaming colours the cry: 'Mahatma Gandhi ki-jai. And, in a while, there was a rush of eager feet ascending the footbridge behind him shouting: "The Mahatma has come! The Mahatma has come !"
Before Bakha had turned round to look at them, they were descending the steps south of the bridge. A passing man answered the questioning look of all the pedestrians by informing tham that there was going to be a meeting in the golbagh, where the Mahatma was going to speak.
At once the crowd, and Bakha among them, rushed towards the golbagh. He had not asked himself where he was going. He hadn't paused to think. The word 'Mahatma' was like a magical magnet to which he, like all the other people about him, rushed blindly. The wooden boards of the footbridge creaked under the
eager downward rush of his ammunition boots. He began to take
several steps at a stride. He was so much in a hurry that he didn't
even remember the fact of his being an Untouchable, and actually
touched a few people. But not having his broom and basket with
him, and the people being all in a flurry, no one noticed that a sweeper-boy had brushed past him. They hurried by. At the foot of the bridge, by the tonga and motor-lorry stand, the road leading to the fort past the entrance of the golbagh looked like a regular racecourse. Men, women and children of all the different races, colours, castes and creeds, were running towards the oval. There were Hindu lallas from the piece-goods market of Bulashah, smartly dressed in silks; there were Kashmiri Muhammadans from the local carpet factories, immaculately clad in white cotton; there were the rough Sikh rustics from the near-by villages swathed in handspun cloth, staves in their hands and loads of shopping on their backs; there were fierce-looking, red-cheeked Pathans shirted in red stuff, followers of Abdul Gaffar Khan, the frontier revolutionary; there were the black- faced Indian Christian girls from the Salvation Army colony, in short, coloured skirts, blouses and aprons; there were people. from the outcastes' colony, whom Bakha recognized in the distance, but whom he was too rushed to greet; there was here and there a stray European there was everybody going to meet the Mahatma, to pay homage to Mohandas Karam Chand Gandhi. And like Bakha they hadn't stopped to ask themselves why they were going. They were just going; the act of going, of walking, running, hurrying, occupied them. Their present motive was to get there, to get there somehow, as quickly as possible. Bakha wished, as he sped along, that there were a sloping bridge on which he could have rolled down to the oval.
He saw that the fort road was too long and too congested. Suddenly, like a stag at bay, he swerved round to a little marsh made by the overflow of a municipal pipe in a corner of the golbagh, jumped the fence into the garden, much to the consterna- tion of the sweet-peas and the pansies which grew on the edges, but wholly to the satisfaction of the crowd behind him, which, once it had got the lead, followed like sheep. The beautiful garden bowers planted by the ancient Hindu kings and since then neglected were thoroughly damaged as the mob followed behind Bakha. It was as if the crowd had determined to crush everything, however ancient or beautiful, that lay in the way of their achieve- ment of all that Gandhi stood for. It was as if they knew, by an instinct surer than that of conscious knowledge, that the things of the old civilization must be destroyed in order to make room for those of the new. It seemed as if, in trampling on the blades of green grass, they were deliberately, brutally trampling on a part of themselves which they had begun to abhor, and from which they wanted to escape to Gandhi.
Beyond the bowers, on the oval, was a tumult, and the thronging of the thousands who had come to worship. The eager babble of the crowd, the excited gestures, the flow of emotion, portended one thought and one thought alone in the surging crowd-Gandhi. There was a terror in this devotion, half ex- pressed, half suppressed, of the panting swarms that pressed round. Bakha stopped short as he reached the pavilion end of the cricket ground. He leant by a tree. He wanted to be detached. It wasn't that he had lost grip of the emotion that had brought him swirling on the tide of the rushing stream of people. But he became aware of the fact of being a sweeper by the contrast which his dirty khaki uniform presented to the white garments of most of the crowd. There was an insuperable barrier between himself and the crowd, the barrier of caste. He was part of a conscious- ness which he could share and yet not understand. He had been lifted from the gutter, through the barriers of space, to partake of a life which was his, and yet not his. He was in the midst of a humanity which included him in its folds and yet debarred him from entering into a sentient, living, quivering contact with it. Gandhi alone united him with them, in the mind, because Gandhi was in everybody's mind, including Bakha's. Gandhi might unite them really. Bakha waited for Gandhi.
Eager and unconscious, he recalled all that he had heard of this man. People said he was a saint, that he was an avatar (incarnation) of the gods Vishnu and Krishna. Only recently he had heard that a spider had woven a web in the house of the Lat Sahib (Viceroy) at Dilli (Delhi), making a portrait of the sage, and writing his name under it in English. That was said to be a warning to the sahibs to depart from Hindustan, since God Almighty Himself had sent a message to a little insect that Gandhi was to be the Maharajaha of the whole of Hindustan. That the spider's web appeared in the Lat Sahib's kothi (Viceroy's residence) was surely significant. And they said that no sword could cut
his body, no bullet could pierce his skin, no fire could scorch him! "The Sarkar (Government) is afraid of him,' said a lalla standing by Bakha. The magistrate has withdrawn his order against Gandhi ji's entry into Bulashah."
That is nothing, they have released him unconditionally from gaol, chimed in a babu, spitting out a phrase of the Tribune, pompously, in order to show off his crudition. "Will he really overthrow the government ?" asked a rustic.
He has the shakti (power) to change the whole world," replied the babu, and he began to vomit out the whole article about Gandhi that he had crammed from the Tribune that morning. This British Government is nothing. Every country in Europe and America is passing through terrible convulsions, politically, economically and industrially. The people of Vilayat (England), the Angrez log (the English), are less convulsed on account of their innate conservatism, but very soon every country on earth including Vilayat will be faced with problems that cannot be solved without a fundamental change in the mental and moral outlook of the West. Without a radical change from a hankering after sense-gratification, which is the goal of Western civilization, through a striving after sense-control, whether in individual or in group life, which is the essence of India's dharmic (religious) culture! India has been the privileged home of the world's eternal religion, that teaches how every man and woman, according to their birth and environment, must practise swadharma (sense-control), how through sense-control they must evolve their higher nature, and so realize the bliss of divinity, deep-seated in the hearts of all beings. For this bliss all humanity blindly pants, not knowing that neither cigarettes nor cinemas nor sense-enjoyment can lead to the path of dharmic discipline, which alone is the highest bliss to be realized.... Gandhi will reveal this path to the modern world, he will teach us the true religion of God-love which is the best swaraj (self- government)....
'How clever you are, Babu,' said the peasant, staring at the lecturer. He was impressed by the babu's speech, but baffled. To him Gandhi was a legend, a tradition, an oracle. He had heard from time to time during the last fourteen years how a saint had arisen as great as Guru Nanak, the incarnation of Krishna-ji- Maharaj, of whom the Ferungi Sarkar (English Government) was very afraid. His wife had told him of the miracles which this saint was performing. It was said that he slept in a temple one night with his feet towards the shrine of the god. When the Brahmins had chastised him for-deliberately turning his feet towards God, he told them that God was everywhere and asked them to turn his feet in the direction where God was not. Upon this the priests turned his feet in the direction opposite to the one where the image of the god was, and lo the shrine of God moved in the direction of his feet. He had hungered for a sight of the saint since then. His wife wouldn't be content with anything less than a touch of the Holy Man's feet. But it was a good thing she wasn't with him. The peasant reflected that if she had come, the boys would have wished to accompany her, and they might have been crushed to death in the throng. It was a good thing they didn't know. For myself, I am glad I shall see him. It is lucky he is coming on the day that I came out shopping.
Bakha had listened hard to the babu, and, although he couldn't follow every sentence of his rhetorical outburst, he had somehow got the sense of it all.
Tell me, Babu, Bakha heard the yokel say to the round, felt-capped, bespectacled man who had made the oration, "will he look after the canals when the Ferungis (British) have gone?" It seemed the peasant had more than a vague idea of what Gandhi was about.
'Bhal ji (brother), don't you know,' said the babu, "that according to Mr. Radha Kumud Muker ji we had canals in ancient India four thousand years before Christ? Who made the Grand Trunk Road? Not the British !"
"But what about the mukadamas (lawsuits)?" asked the jat rustic. "The five elders of my village use the Panchayat (committee of five) to wreak vengeance on their enemies, or to bring pressure on the village menials, if they become too independent, and I hear Gandhi says we must not go to the Sarkari Adalat (British Courts of Justice), but must take up our suits to the Panchayat."
A good Panchayar,' replied the babu sonorously, 'can get the villagers to do their bit from time to time in preventing damage by erosion and other causes. It may not be a good judicial body now, but it was, and always has been so in the past. So far as affairs of executive action are concerned, however, you know that the Panchayats have done much good in the service of this country, in the cause of good administration in general, in making walls, rebuilding roads, etc.
The peasant didn't understand that. Nor did Bakha. But the mention of village menials by the peasant recalled to Bakha's mind the fact that he had heard that Gandhi was very keen on uplifting the Untouchables. Hadn't it been rumoured in the outcastes' colony, lately, that Gandhi was fasting for the sake of the bhangis and chamars? Bakha could not quite understand what fasting had to do with helping the low-castes. "Probably he thinks we are poor and can't get food,' he vaguely surmised, so he tries to show that even he doesn't have food for days."
' "We are willing to do all we can,' the lalla disturbed Bakha's cogitations with a dramatic gesture towards the babu. 'We can boycott Manchester cotton and Bradford fancies, if it is going to mean that in the end we will have a monopoly of swadeshi
cloth. I hear, however, that Gandhi ji is making terms with
Japan." "You must ask the Mahatma that,' the babu replied, flurried because he heard noises at the gate from which he presumed that Gandhi was approaching. He wanted to work his way to a position from which he could obtain a good view of the great man.
'Mahatma ji is not speaking about swadeshi, or on civil disobedience, put in a Congress volunteer authoritatively. "The government has allowed him out of gaol only if he will keep strictly within the limits of his propaganda for harijans (men of God, as Gandhi chooses to call the Untouchables), for the removal of untouchability." And he walked away after this declamation, showing a little of the glory that he assumed, on account of his powerful position, as an official appointed to serve the community, during the reception to be given to Gandhi.
Harijan ! Bakha wondered what that meant. He had heard the word before in connection with Gandhi. 'But it has something to do with us, the bhangis and chamars,' he said to himself. "We are harijans. He recalled how some Congress men had come to the outcastes' street a month ago and lectured about harijans, saying they were no different from the Hindus and their touch did not mean pollution. The phrase, as it dropped from the mouth of the volunteer, had gone through Bakha's soul and body. He knew it applied to him. It is good that I came !" he thought. Is he really going to talk about the outcastes, about us, about Chota, Ram Charan, my father and me? What will he say, I wonder? Strange that the sahib of the Mukti (Salvation Army) said that the rich and the poor, the Brahmins and bhangis, are the same. Now Gandhi Mahatma will talk about us! It is good that I came. If only he knew what had happened to me this morning. I would like to get up and tell him.' He imagined himself rising on the platform, wifen all was still and the meeting had begun, and telling the Mahatma that a man from the city, where he had come to remove untouchability, had abused him for accidentally touching him and had also beaten him. Then the Mahatma would chastise that man perhaps, or, at least, he would chide the citizens here, and they won't treat me again as they did this morning. He seemed to get a thrill imagining himself in this scene. He felt theatrical. Then a queer stirring started in his stomach. He was confused. His face was flushed and his ears reddened. His breath came and went quickly. A chorus of "Mahatma Gandhi ki-jl' released his tension, as it came from the distance and chilled the heat of his body with a sadden fear that it brought into his soul.
He looked across and saw that a vast crowd had rushed the gates of the golbagh and surrounded a motor-car in which, presumably, the Mahatma was travelling. He didn't know what to do, stand still or rush. He realized he couldn't rush even though the Mahatma had abolished all caste distinctions for the day. He might touch someone and then there would be a scene. The Mahatma would be too far away to come and help him. He hesitated for a moment, then he looked at the tree overhead. There were some people perched on the branches like eagles waiting for their prey. He made for the trunk. His ammunition boots were an encumbrance but he scrambled up, using his knees as rests against the round trunk. He looked not unlike an ape as he sat commanding a view of the advancing procession along the road.
Behind a screen of flower petals showered by ardent devotees under many-coloured flags, with garlands of marigolds, jasmine and molseri around his neck, amid cries of 'Mahatma Gandhi ki-ji, Hindu-Mussulman Sikh ki-jai, Harijan ki-ji,' the great little man came into sight. His body was swathed in a milk-white blanket, and only his dark, clean-shaven head was visible, with its protruding big ears, its expansive forehead, its long nose, bridged by a pair of glasses which were divided in the lenses in two, the upper for looking, the lower for reading. There was a quixotic smile on his thin lips, something Mephistophelean in the determined little chin immediately under his mouth and the long toothless jaws resting on his small neck. But withal there was something beautiful and saintly in the face, whether it was the well-oiled scalp that glistened round the little tuft of hair on the top, or the aura of the astral self that shone like an aureole about him.
Bakha looked at the Mahatma with a mixed feeling of
wonder and fear. The sage seemed to him like a child as he sat
huddled up between two women, an Indian and an English-
woman.
That's Mrs. Kasturabai Gandhi, Bakha heard a schoolboy whisper to a friend who sat on a branch of the tree next to him.
And who is the other lady ? the boy asked.
"Mahatma ji's English disciple, Miss Slade, Miraben. She the daughter of an English Admiral.
is "He is black like me, Bakha said to himself. "But, of course, he must be very educated.' And he waited tensely for the car which was marooned right under his eyes among the throngs of men and women seeking to touch the Mahatma's feet. The Congress volunteers struggled to carve a way through the turbans and fezes and boat-like Gandhi caps, and at last they succeeded in getting the car under way. Half pushed, half towed with the engine shut off, the chauffeur steered the vehicle to the gate, improvised at one end of the oval, with broad-leafed banana-trees decorated with flowers and paper-chains.
Bakha saw a sallow-faced Englishman, whom he knew to be the District Superintendent of Police, standing by the roadside in a khaki uniform of breeches, polished leather gaiters and blue-puggareed, khaki sun helmet, not as smart as the military officers', but, of course, possessing for Bakha all the qualities of the sahibs' clothes. Somehow, however, at this moment. Bakha was not interested in sahibs, probably because in the midst of this enormous crowd of Indians, fired with an enthusiasm. for their leader, the foreigner seemed out of place, insignificant, the representative of an order which seemed to have nothing to do with the natives.
'Mahatma Gandhi ki-jai, Mahatma Gandhi ki-jai, the cry went thundering up into the smoke-scented evening. Even Bakha's attention was switched off the man who held the sceptre of British rule in the form of his formidable truncheon, and, turned to the diminutive figure of the Mahatma, now seated in the lotus seat on the Congress pandal (platform), surrounded by devotees, who had come soft-footed up the steps, joined hands in obeisance to the master, touched the dust at his feet, and scat- tered to sit around him.
The Mahatma raised his right arm from the folds of his shawl and blessed the crowd with a gentle benediction. The babble of voices died out, as if he had sent an electric shock through the mass of humanity gathered at his feet. This strange man seemed to have the genius that could, by a single dramatic act, rally multi-coloured, multi-tongued India to himself. Someone stood up to chant a hymn. The Mahatma had closed his eyes. and was praying. In the stillness of the moment Bakha forgot all the details of his experience during the day, the touched man, the priest, the woman in the alley, his father, Chota, Ram Charan, the walk in the hills, the missionary and his wife. Except for the turbaned, capped and aproned heads of the men and women sitting on the grass before him, his eyes seemed intent on one thing and one thing alone, Gandhi, and he heard each syllable of the Hindu hymn:
"The dawn is here, O traveller, arise; Past is the night, and yet sleep seals thine eyes. Lost is the soul that sleeps-dost not thou know? The sleepless one finds peace beyond all woe.
Oh, waken! Shed thou off thy slumber deep, Remember him who made thee and oh, weep. For shame, is this the way of love-to sleep When he himself doth ceaseless vigil koep?
Repent, O soul, from sin and find release, Oerring one, in sin there is no peace. What boots it now to mourn on bended knees, When thou thyself didst thine own load increase?
What thou wouldst do tomorrow do today, Do thou the task that thou must face today. What shall avail thy sorrow and dismay When thieving birds have borne thy grain away?"
Then his attention began to flag. His mind wandered. He thought of the race he had to run to get here. He noticed how still everyone was. It irked him to see everyone so serious. The silence was getting on his nerves. But a part of him seemed to have flown, to have evaporated. He felt he had lost something of himself and was uneasy on account of it, yet thrilled about it, happy. He felt pleased to be sharing the privilege of being in a crowd gathered before the Mahatma. The hymn seemed so heavy. Yet the other feeling was light. The sage seemed so pure. Yet there was something intimate and warm about him. He smiled like a child. Bakha gazed at him. It was the only way in which he could escape feeling self-conscious. By doing that be forgot himself and everything else, as he felt he ought. The brown and black faces below him were full of a stilled rapture. He sought to feel like them, attentively absorbed. Luckily for him, just then, the Mahatma began his speech. It was a faint whisper at first, the Mahatma's voice, as it came through a loud-speaker: I have emerged, he said slowly, as if he were measuring each word and talking more to himself than to anyone else, 'from the ordeal of a penance, undertaken for a cause which is as dear to me as life itself. The British Government sought to pursue a policy of divide and rule in giving to our brethren of the de- pressed classes separate electorates in the Councils that will be created under the new constitution. I do not believe that the bureaucracy is sincere in its efforts to elaborate the new constitu- tion. But it is one of the conditions under which I have been released from gaol that I shall not carry on any propaganda against the government. So I shall not refer to that matter. I shall only speak about the so-called "Untouchables," whom the government tried to alienate from Hinduism by giving them a
separate legal and political status. 'As you all know, while we are asking for freedom from the grip of a foreign nation, we have ourselves, for centuries, trampled underfoot millions of human beings without feeling the slightest remorse for our iniquity. For me the question of these people is moral and religious. When I undertook to fast unto death for their sake, it was in obedience to the call of my conscience."
Bakha didn't understand these words. He was restless. He hoped the Mahatma wouldn't go on speaking of things he (Bakha) couldn't understand. He found his wish fulfilled, for a potent word interpreted his thoughts.
I regard untouchability,' the Mahatma was saying, 'as the greatest blot on Hinduism. This view of mine dates back to the time when I was a child."
That was getting interesting. Bakha pricked up his cars.
I was hardly yet twelve when this idea dawned on me. A scavenger named Uka, an Untouchable, used to attend our house for cleaning the latrines. Often I would ask my mother why it was wrong to touch him, and why I was forbidden to do so. If I accidentally touched Uka I was asked to perform ablutions; and though I naturally obeyed, it was not without smilingly protesting that untouchability was not sanctioned by religion and that it was impossible that it should be so. I was a very dutiful and obedient child; but, so far as was consistent with respect for my parents, I often had tussles with them on this matter. I told my mother that she was entirely wrong in considering physical contact with Uka as sinful; it could not be sinful..
"While on my way to school, I used to touch the Untouchables; and, as I never would conceal the fact from my parents, my mother would tell me that the shortest cut to purification after the unholy touch, was to cancel it by touching a Mussulman passing by. Therefore, simply out of reverence and regard for my mother, I often did so, but never did it believing it to be a religious obligation."
As each part of the story which the Mahatma related about the beginning of his interest in untouchability fell on his ear, Bakha felt as if he were Uka, the scavenger. By feeling like that, he thought, he would be nearer the sage, who seemed a real and genuine sympathiser. "But the speech, the speech,' he became aware that he was missing the words of the Mahatma's speech.
He eagerly returned to attention and caught the narrative at: "The fact that we address God as "the purifier of the polluted souls" makes it a sin to regard anyone born in Hinduism as polluted it is satanic to do so. I have never been tired of repeating that it is a great sin. I do not say that this thing crystal- lized in me at the age of twelve, but I do say that I did then regard untouchability as a sin.. I was at Nellore on the National Day. I met the Untouchables
there, and I prayed as I have done today. I do want to attain
spiritual deliverance. I do not want to be reborn. But if I have to
be reborn, I should wish to be reborn as an Untouchable, so that
I may share their sorrows, sufferings and the affronts levelled at
them, in order that I may endeavour to free myself and them from
their miserable condition. Therefore I prayed that, if I should be
born again, I should be so, not as a Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya,
Sidra, but as an outcaste, as an Untouchable.
I love scavenging. In my ashram an eighteen-year-old
Brahmin lad is doing a scavenger's work, in order to teach the
ashram scavenger cleanliness. The lad is no reformer. He was
born and bred in orthodoxy. He is a regular reader of the Gita,
and faithfully says his prayers. When he conducts the prayers,
his soft melodies melt one in love. But he felt that his accom-
plishments were incomplete until he had also become a perfect
sweeper. He felt that if he wanted the ashram sweeper to do his
work well he must do it himself and set an example."
Bakha felt thrilled to the very marrow of his bones. That the Mahatma should want to be born as an outcaste! That he should love scavenging! He loved the man. He felt he could put his life in his hands and ask him to do what he liked with it. For him he would do anything. He would like to go and be a scavenger at his ashram. Then I could talk to him, he said to himself. But I am not listening, I am not listening; I must listen." "If there are any Untouchables here,' he heard the Mahatma say, they should realize that they are cleaning Hindu society." (He felt like shouting to say that he, an Untouchable, was there, but he did not know what the Mahatma meant by 'cleaning Hindu society.") He gave ear to the words with beating heart and heard: They have, therefore, to purify their lives. They should cultivate the habits of cleanliness, so that no one shall point his finger at them. Some of them are addicted to habits of drinking and gambling of which they must get rid. 'They claim to be Hindus. They read the scriptures. If
therefore, the Hindus oppress them, they should understand
that the fault does not lie in the Hindu religion, but in those who
profess it. In order to emancipate themselves they have to purify
themselves. They have to rid themselves of evil habits, like
drinking liquor and eating carrion." But now, now the Mahatma is blaming us, Bakha felt. "That is not fair!" He wanted to forget the last passages that he had heard. He turned to the Mahatma.
"They should now cease to accept leavings from the plates of high-caste Hindus, however clean they may be represented to be. They should receive grain only-good, sound grain, not rotten grain and that too, only if it is courteously offered. If they are able to do all that I have asked them to do, they will secure their emancipation."
That was more to Bakha's liking. He felt that he wanted to turn round and say to the Mahatma: 'Now, Mahatma ji, now you are talking.' He felt he would like to tell him that that very day, in that very town where he was speaking, he (Bakha) had had to pick up a loaf of bread from near the gutter; that today, there, in that very city, his brother had had to accept leavings of food from the plates of the sepoys, and that they had all to eat it. Bakha saw himself pitied by the Mahatma in his mind's eye and consoled by him. It was such a balm, it was so comforting, the great man's sympathy. If only he could go and tell my father not to be hard on me! If only he could go and tell him how I have suffered, if only he could go and tell my father he sympa- thises with me in my sufferings, my father would at once take me back and be kind to me ever afterwards."
I am an orthodox Hindu and I know that the Hindus are not sinful by nature,' Bakha heard the Mahatma declaim. "They are sunk in ignorance. All public wells, temples, roads, schools, sanatoriums, must be declared open to the Untouchables. And, if you all profess to love me, give me a direct proof of your love by carrying on propaganda against the observance of untouchability. Do this, but let there be no compulsion or brute force in securing this end. Peaceful persuasion is the only means. Two of the strongest desires that keep me in the flesh are the emancipa- tion of the Untouchables and the protection of the cow. When these two desires are fulfilled there is swaraj, and therein lies my soul's deliverance. May God give you strength to work out your soul's salvation to the end."
When the crowd scattered irreverently at the end of the Mahatma's speech, Bakha stood on the branch of the tree spell- bound. Each word of the concluding passage seemed to him to echo as deep and intense a feeling of horror and indignation as his own at the distinction which the caste Hindus made between themselves and the Untouchables. The Mahatma seemed to have touched the most intimate corner of his soul. Surely he is a good man,' Bakha said.
Muffled cries of 'Mahatma ji ki-jai,' 'Hindu-Mussulman ki-jai, Harijan ki-jai' arose from the middle of the throng again, and Bakha knew that the sage was going from the platform to the gate. He clung to his position on the tree, and was rewarded for his patience by the sight of the Mahatma passing beneath him.
A man seated on a high wooden board, with a bucket beside him, was distributing water in a silver tankard to Muhammadans in red fezes and Hindus in white Gandhi caps.
"He has made Hindu and Mussulman one, remarked a citizen, surcharged with the glow of brotherliness and humanitarianism which the Mahatma had left in his trail.
Let's discard foreign cloth. Let's burn it the Congress volunteers were shouting. And true enough, Bakha saw people throwing their felt caps, their silk shirts and aprons into the pile, which soon became a blazing bonfire.
'Sister, said another citizen to a grass-cutter's wife, who struggled in her heavy accordion-pleated skirt to take her two children home, let me help you through the crowd. Give me the big boy to hold.'
There was only one queer voice which dissented from all this.
'Gandhi is a humbug, it was saying. He is a fool. He is a hypocrite. In one breath he says he wants to abolish untoucha- bility, in the other he asserts that he is an orthodox Hindu. He is running counter to the spirif of our age, which is democracy. He is in the fourth century B.c. with his swadeshi and his spinning- wheel. We live in the twentieth. I have read Rousseau, Hobbes, Bentham and John Stuart Mill and I...
Bakha came down the tree like a black bear, and arrested
the democrat's attention by the ridiculous sight he presented. He was going to slink away shyly, but the man, a fair-complexioned Muhammadan dressed in the most smartly-cut English suit he had ever seen, interrupted him:
"Eh, eh, black man, come here. Go and get a bottle of soda- water for the sahib."
Bakha came back with a start and stood staring at the dignitary who had called him. The man wore a monocle in his left eye and Bakha, who had never seen anything of that kind, wondered how a single glass could remain fixed on the eye without a frame.
'Don't stare at me!" shouted the gentleman, while Bakha was wondering who the man could be, too sallow-faced for an Englishman, too white for an Indian, and clad in such fine clothes, yellow gloves on his hands and white cloth on his buck- skin shoes.
"Ham desi sahib (1, native sahib), don't stare at me,' said the man deliberately using the wrong Hindustani spoken by the English, but becoming kinder for a moment. I have just come from Vilayat (England). Is there a soda-water shop near here?"
Bakha had been taken unawares. He couldn't adjust himself to this phenomenon. So he moved his head to indicate that he didn't know. Fortunately for him the man's attention was switched off to his friend, a young man with a delicate feline face, illuminated by sparkling dark eyes and long black curly hair, who stood next to him dressed in flowing Indian robes like a poet's. Bakha's inadequate answer did not, therefore, evoke the insolent flourish of the democrat's cane as it might have
done. 'It is very unfair of you to abuse the Mahatma,' Bakha heard the young poet say gently, as he walked a little way away from the two men who were now surrounded by a group of people. "He is by far the greatest liberating force of our age. He has his limits, of course. But...
Precisely, Bakha heard his companion interrupt. "That is exactly what I say. And my contention is
"Yes, but listen, I haven't finished,' the poet was saying. "He has his limitations but he is fundamentally sound. He may be wrong in wanting to shut India off from the rest of the world. by preaching the revival of the spinning-wheel, because, as things are, that can't be done. But even in that regard he is right. For it is not India's fault that it is poor; it is the world's fault that the world is rich!...
You are talking in paradoxes. You have been reading Shaw, interrupted the monocled gentleman. "Oh, forget Shaw! I am not a decadent Indian like you to be
pandering to those European film stars! exclaimed the poet. But you know that it is only in terms of economic theory that India is behind the other countries of the world. In fact, it is one of the richest countries; it has abundant natural resources. Only it has chosen to remain agricultural and has suffered for not accepting the machine. We must, of course, remedy that. I hate the machine. I loathe it. But I shall go against Gandhi there and accept it. And I am sure in time all will learn to love it. And we
shall beat our enslavers at their own game- They will put you into prison, someone interrupted from the crowd.
'Never mind that. I am not afraid of prison. I have already been a guest at His Majesty's boarding-house with a hundred thousand others who were imprisoned last year....
"The peasant who believes this world to be maya (illusion) will not work the machine,' remarked the supercilious man in spats, as he adjusted his monocle to reflect the cynical glint in his eye.
"It is India's genius to accept all things,' said the poet fiercely. "We have, throughout our long history, been realists, believing in the stuff of this world, in the here and the now, in the flesh and the blood. Man is born, and reborn, according to the Upanishads, in this world, and even when he becomes an immortal saint there is no release for him, because he forms the stuff of the cosmos and is born again. We don't believe in the other world, as these Europeans would have you believe we do. There has been only one man in India who believed this world to be illusory- Shankaracharya. But he was a consumptive and that made him neurotic. Early European scholars could not get hold of the original texts of the Upanishads. So they kept on interpreting Indian thought from the commentaries of Shankaracharya. The word maya does not mean illusion, it means magic. That is the dictum of the latest Hindu translator of the Vedanta, Dr. Coomaraswamy. And in that signification the word approxi- mates to the views on the nature of the physical world of your pet scientists, Eddington and Jeans. The Victorians misinter- preted us. It was as if, in order to give a philosophical background to their exploitation of India, they ingeniously concocted a nice little fairy story: "You don't believe in this world; to you all this is maya. Let us look after your country for you and you can dedicate yourself to achieving Nirvana (release from the trammels of existence)." But that is all over now. Right in the tradition of those who accepted the world and produced the baroque exuberance of Indian architecture and sculpture, with its pro- found sense of form, its solidity and its mass, we will accept and work the machine. But we will do so consciously. We can see through the idiocy of these Europeans who deified money. They were barbarians and lost their heads in the worship of gold. We can steer clear of the pitfalls, because we have the advantage of a race-consciousness six thousand years old, a race-consciousness which accepted all the visible and invisible. values. We know life. We know its secret flow. We have danced to its rhythms. We have loved it, not sentimentally through personal feelings, but pervasively, stretching ourselves from our hearts outwards so far, oh, so far, that life seemed to have no limits, that miracles seemed possible. We can feel new feelings. We can learn to be aware with a new awareness. We can envisage the possibility of creating new races from the latent heat in our dark brown bodies. Life is still an adventure for us. We are still eager to learn. We cannot go wrong. Our enslavers muddle through things. We can see things clearly. We will go the whole hog with regard to machines while they nervously fumble their way with the steam-engine. And we will keep our heads through. it all. We will not become slaves to gold. We can be trusted to: see life steadily and see it whole."
The harangue was impressive with such fire was it delivered. Not only was the crowd moved, but the anglicized Indian was silenced. Bakha was too much under the spell of Gandhi to listen intently to anyone else, and he did not follow all that the poet
said although he strained to catch his words. "Who is he? someone in the crowd queried.
'Iqbal Nath Sarshar, the young poet who edits the Nawan Jug (New Era), and his companion is Mr. R. N. Bashir, B.A. (Oxon.), Barrister-at-Law,' someone volunteered the information. There were whispers of consent and appreciation, but Mr. Bashir's voice rose above the others in a derisive little chuckle.
'Ha, ha, ho ho! but what has all this got to do with un- touchability? Gandhi's plea is an expression of his inferiority: complex. I think...
I know what you think," pat in the poet fiercely, exciting some amusement with his brisk retort. 'Let me tell you that with regard to untouchability the Mahatma is more sound than he is in his political and economic views. You have swallowed all those cheap phrases about inferiority complex and superiority complex at Oxford without understanding what they mean. You slavishly copy the English in everything....
That's right!" shouted a Congress volunteer. 'Look at his silk necktie and the suit of foreign cloth that he is wearing! Shame!"
"The heredity and the environment of different people varies," continued the poet, with a flourish of his hand to still the rude, Congress wallah. Some of us are born with big heads, some with small, some with more potential physical strength, some with less. There is one saint to a hundred million people perhaps, one great man to a whole lot of mediocrities. But essentially, that is to say humanly, all men are equal. "Take a ploughman from the plough, wash off his dirt, and he is fit to rule a kingdom" is an old Indian proverb. The civility, the understanding and the gravity of the poorest of our peasants is a proof of that. Go and talk to a yokel and see how kind he is, how full of compliment, and how elegantly he speaks. And the equality of man is no new notion for him. If it had not been for the wily Brahmins, the priesteraft, who came in the pride of their white skin, lifted the pure philosophical idea of Karma, that deeds and acts are dynamic, that all is in a flux, everything changes, from the Dravidians, and misinterpreted it vulgarly to mean that birth and rebirth in this universe is governed by good or bad deeds in the past life, India would have offered the best instance of a democracy. As it is, caste is an intellectual aristocracy, based on the conceit of the pundits, being otherwise wholly democratic. The high- caste High Court Judge eats freely with the coolie of his caste. So we can destroy our inequalities easily. The old mechanical formulas of our lives must go, the old stereotyped forms must give place to a new dynamism. We Indians live so deeply in our
contacts; we are so acutely aware of our blood-stream- I can't understand what you mean,' interrupted Bashir irritatedly.
"Well, we must destroy caste, we must destroy the inequalities of birth and unalterable vocations. We must recognize an equality of rights, privileges and opportunities for everyone. The Mahatma didn't say so, but the legal and sociological basis of caste having been broken down by the British-Indian penal code, which recognizes the rights of every man before a court, caste is now mainly governed by profession. When the sweepers. change their profession, they will no longer remain Untouchables. And they can do that soon, for the first thing we will do when we accept the machine, will be to introduce the machine which clears dung without anyone having to handle it-the flush system. Then the sweepers can be free from the stigma of untouch- ability and assume the dignity of status that is their right as useful members of a casteless and classless society."
In fact, mocked Bashir, 'greater efficiency, better salesman- ship, more mass-production, standardization, dictatorship of the sweepers, Marxian materialism and all that!"
Yes, yes, all that, but no catch-words and cheap phrases. The change will be organic and not mechanical.'
'All right, all right, come, don't let us stand here, I feel. suffocated, said Mr. Bashir, pulling out a silken handkerchief to wipe his face.
The crowd looked, ogled, stared with wonder at the celebrities and followed them at a little distance, till they disappeared in the unending throng of people going out of the golbagh.
Bakha had stood aside, beyond polluting distance, thinking vaguely of the few things he had understood from the poet's outburst. He felt that the poet would have been answering the most intimate questions in his (Bakha's) soul, if he had not used such big words. "That machine,' he thought, 'which can remove dung without anyone having to handle it, I wonder what it is like? If only that "gentreman" hadn't dragged the poet away, I could have asked him."
The fires of sunset were blazing on the western horizon. As Bakha looked at the magnificent orb of terrible brightness glowing on the margin of the sky, he felt a burning sensation within him. His face, which had paled and contracted with thoughts a moment ago, reddened in a curious conflict of despair. He didn't know what to do, where to go. He seemed to have been smothered by the misery, the anguish of the morning's memories. He stood for a while where he had landed from the tree, his head bent, as if he were tired and broken. Then the last words of the Mahatma's speech seemed to resound in his ears: 'May God give you the strength to work out your soul's salvation to the end." "What did that mean? Bakha asked himself. The Mahatma's face appeared before him enigmatic, ubiquitous. There was no answer to be found in it. Yet there was a queer kind of strength to be derived from it. Bakha recollected the words of his speech. It all seemed to stand out in his mind, every bit of it. Specially did the story of Uka come back. The Mahatma had talked of a Brahmin who did
the scavenging in his ashram. 'Did he mean, then, that I should go on scavenging?" Bakha asked himself, 'Yes,' came the forceful answer. "Yes," said Bakha, 'I shall go on doing what Gandhi says. But shall I never be able to leave the latrines ?" came the disturbing thought. 'But I can. Did not that poet say there is a machine which can do my work? The prospect of never being able to wear the clothes that the sahibs wore, of never being able to become a sahib, was horrible. But it doesn't matter," he said, to console himself, and pictured in his mind the English policeman, whom he had seen before the meeting, standing there, ignored by everybody.
He began to move. His virtues lay in his close-knit sinews and in his long-breathed sense. He was thinking of everything he had heard, though he could not understand it all. He was calm as he walked along, though the conflict in his soul was not over, though he was torn between his enthusiasm for Gandhi and the difficulties in his own awkward, naïve self.
The sun descended. The pale, the purple, the mauve of the horizon blended into darkest blue. A handful of stars throbbed in the heart of the sky.
He emerged from the green of the garden into the slight haze of dust that rose from the roads and the paths..
As the brief Indian twilight came and went, a sudden impulse shot through the transformations of space and time, and gathered all the elements that were dispersed in the stream of his soul into a tentative decision: 'I shall go and tell father all that Gandhi said about us,' he whispered to himself, and all that that poet said. Perhaps I can find the poet some day and ask him about his machine.' And he proceeded homewards.
