Free Writing on Untouchable

The character of Bahka is complex for a couple reasons. On the one hand, you have a young man from the "untouchable" caste system, who's cleaning toilets, sweeping up after his higher-caste betters, trying to please his father. He resents the system he's in, at least at times, but doesn't really question it...at least not at first. Through a series of confrontations, though, he does come to question it - I guess that's the "on the other hand" part of this. The emotions he feels during these confrontations set off how he questions the paradigm of caste difference that he's living in. What feels unfair is what produces ideas about unfairness.

It's notable that those feelings are the agents of his resistance, so to speak, but it's also interesting that he doesn't turn to a deconstruction of the culture, or start to question why the caste works the way it does, or question the "religion" of Hindu-caste difference. Instead, he gravitates towards the English, the sahibs that wander around at the fringes of the novel, never quite becoming characters until we see Colonel Hutchinson. It reads as if the "answer" to the injustice of the untouchable is some kind of fantasy of becoming British. It's as if people react to oppression - Bakha for sure - by producing a fantasy of escape rather than a plan for confrontation. Perhaps this is how ideology and hegemony works...maybe this is how power functions...the answer to feelings of anger, sadness, and disappointment is the creation of fantasies that allow one an "escape" from those feelings...it's easier to "become" a fantasy of yourself than to confront the real people who keep you down. Note that Bahka runs from the crowds in the cities as they grow angry he didn't call out of ahead of himself...he runs from the mother of the boy who gets injured in the stone-throwing after the hockey game. He runs from them straight into his dreams of being British, of dressing British, of having English clothes...and maybe, then, this "colonial" mindset that he has - for it's clear that he's been colonized, right? - works both ways: as a system, a real system, it keeps him down, by keeping the Hindu-caste system in place, by breaking down Indian society into competing classes that keep the boot on the face of those below, as it were. But on the other hand, the power of the English example - their clothes, their "ornamentalism," their speaking - provide Bahka with an alternative - a way "out," at least mentally, from that very same caste system.

So what becomes of the individual, and his dreaming, when the fantasy takes the place of direct confrontation? When we use dreams to escape forms of social domination?