Bakha Character Analysis

[Bakha] had had glimpses, during his sojourn there, of the life the Tommies lived, sleeping on strange, low canvas beds covered tightly with blankets, eating eggs, drinking tea and wine in tin mugs, going to parade and then walking down to the bazaar with cigarettes in their mouths and small silver-mounted canes in their hands. And he had soon become possessed with an overwhelming desire to live their life. He had been told they were sahibs, superior people. He had felt that to put on their clothes made one a sahib too. So he tried to copy them in everything, to copy them as well as he could in the exigencies of his peculiarly Indian circumstances.

Where the lane finished, the heat of the sun seemed to spread as from a bonfire out into the empty space of the grounds beyond the outcastes colony. [Bakha] sniffed at the clean, fresh air around the flat stretch of land before him and vaguely sensed a difference between the odorous, smoky world of refuse and the open, radiant world of the sun. He wanted to warm his flesh; we wanted the warmth to get behind the scales of the dry, powdery surface that had formed on his fingers; we wanted the blood in the blue veins that stood out on the back of his hand to melt. He lifted his face to the sun, open eyed for a moment, then with the pupils of his eyes half closed, half open. And he lifted his chin upright.

[Bakha] had wept and cried to be allowed to go to school. But then his father had told him that schools were meant for the babus, not for the lowly sweepers. He hadn’t quite understood the reason for that then. Later at the British barracks he realized why his father had not sent him to school. He was a sweeper’s son and could never be a babu. Later still he realized that there was no school which would admit him because the parents of the other children would not allow their sons to be contaminated by the touch of the low-caste man’s sons. How absurd, he thought, that was, since most of the Hindu children touched him willingly at hockey and wouldn’t mind having him at school with them. […] These old Hindus were cruel. He was a sweeper, he knew, but he could not consciously accept that fact.

“Why are we always abused? The santry inspictor and the sahib that day abused my father. They always abuse us. Because we are sweepers. Because we touch dung. They hate dung. I hate it too. That's why I came here. I was tired of working on the latrines every day. That's why they don't touch us, the high castes. […] For them I am a sweeper, sweeper - untouchable! Untouchable! Untouchable! That's the word! Untouchable! I am an untouchable!”

As a child, Bakha had often expressed a desire to wear rings on his fingers, and liked to look at his mother adorned with silver ornaments. Now that he had been to the British barracks and known that the English didn’t like jewelry, he was full of disgust for the florid, minutely-studded designs of the native ornaments. So he walked along without noticing the big earrings and nose-rings and hair-flowers and other gold-plated ornaments which shone out from the background of green paper against which the smiths had ingeniously set them.

[Bakha] lifted his head and looked round. The scales fell from his eyes. He could see the little man with a drooping mustache whom he knew to be a priest of the temple, racing up the courtyard, trembling, stumbling, tottering, falling, with his arms lifted in the air, and in his mouth the hushed cry ‘polluted, polluted, polluted.’

‘I have been seen, undone,’ the sentence quickly flashed across Bakha’s mind.

A superb specimen of humanity [Bakha] seemed whenever he made the high resolve to say something, to go and do something, his fine form rising like a tiger at bay. And yet […] he could not overstep the barriers which the conventions of his superiors had built up to protect their weakness against him. He could not invade the magic circle which protects a priest from attack by anybody, especially by a low-caste man. So, in the highest moment of his strength, the slave in him asserted himself, and he lapsed back, wild with torture, biting his lips, ruminating his grievances […].

He contemplated his experience now in the spirit of resignation which he had inherited through the long centuries down through his countless outcaste ancestors, fixed, yet flowing like a wave, confirmed at the beginning of each generation by the discipline of the caste ideal.

Men get used to a place, become familiar with it, and then comes a stage when the fascination of the unknown, the exotic, dominates them. It is the impulse which tries to create a new harmony, frowning upon the familiar which has grown stale and dreary with too much use. The mind which has once peeped into the wonderland of the new, contemplated various aspects of it with longing and desire, is shocked and disappointed when living reality pulls in the reins of the wild horse of fancy. But how pleasant men find it to look at the world with the open, hopeful, astonished eyes of the child! The vagaries of Bakha’s naive taste can be both explained and excused. He didn’t like his home, his street, his town, because he had been to work at the Tommies’ barracks, and obtained glimpses of another world, strange and beautiful.

‘But, father, what is the use?’ Bakha shouted. ‘They would ill-treat us even if we shouted. They think we are mere dirt because we clean their dirt. That pundit in the temple tried to molest Sohini and then came shouting: “Polluted, polluted.”’

‘In a little while there was a knock at the door. And what do you think? Your uncle goes out and finds the Hakim ji himself, come to grace our house. He was a good man. He felt your pulse and saved your life.’

‘He might have killed me,’ Bakha commented.

‘No, no,’ said Lakha. ‘They are really kind. We must realize that it is religion which prevents them from touching us.’ He had never throughout his narrative renounced his deep-rooted sense of inferiority and the docile acceptance of the laws of fate.

The hand of nature was stretching itself out towards [Bakha], for the tall grass on the slopes of Bulashah Hills was in sight, and he had opened his heart to it, lifted by the cool breeze that wafted him away from the crowds, the ugliness and the noise of the outcastes’ street. He looked across at the swaying loveliness before him and the little hillocks over which it spread under a sunny sky, so transcendently blue and beautiful that he felt like standing dumb and motionless before it. He listened to the incoherent whistling of the shrubs. They were the voices he knew so well.

It was a discord between person and circumstance by which a lion like [Bakha] lay enmeshed in a net while many a common criminal wore a rajah’s crown. His wealth of unconscious experience, however, was extraordinary. It was a kind of crude sense of the world, in the round, such as the peasant has who can do the job while the laboratory agriculturalist is scratching his head, or like the Arab seamen who sails the seas in a small boat and casually determines his direction by the position of the sun, or like the beggar singer who recites an epic from door to door. […]

As he sauntered along a spark of some intuition suddenly set him ablaze. He was fired with a desire to burst out from the shadow of silence and obscurity in which he lay enshrouded.

There wasn’t a child about the 38th Dogras who hadn't cast lingering eyes at this hat. The spirit of modernity had worked havoc among the youth of the regiment. The consciousness of every child was full of a desire to wear Western dress, and since most of the boys about the place were the sons of babus, bandsmen, sea poise, sweepers, washermen and shopkeepers, all too poor to afford the luxury of a complete European outfit, they eagerly stretched their hands to seize any particular article they could see anywhere, feeling that the possession of something European was better than the possession of nothing European.

[Bakha] walked away without looking back, lest he should prove unequal to the unique honor that the Hindu had done him by entrusting him with so intimate a job as fetching coal in his clay basin. For a moment he doubted whether Charat Singh was conscious and in his senses when he entrusted him with the job. ‘He might be forgetful and suddenly realize what he had done. Did he forget that I am a sweeper?’ […] He was grateful to God that such men as Charat Singh existed. He walked with a steady step, with a happy step, deliberately controlled […]. It was with difficulty, however that he prevented himself from stumbling, for his soul was full of love and adoration and worship for the man who had thought it fit to entrust him, an unclean menial, with the job.

What had [Bakha] done to deserve such treatment? He loved the child. He had been very sorry when Chota refused to let him join the game. Then why should the boy's mother abuse him when he had tried to be kind? […] ‘Of course, I polluted the child. I couldn't help doing so. I knew my touch would pollute. But it was impossible not to pick him up. He was dazed, the poor little thing. And she abused me. I only get abuse and derision wherever I go. Pollution, pollution, I do nothing else but pollute people. They all say that: “Polluted, polluted!” She was perhaps justified though. Her son was injured. She could have said anything. It was my fault and of the other boys too. Why did we start that quarrel? It started on account of the goal I scored. Cursed me! The poor child!’

How [Bakha] had smarted under the pain of that callousness and cruelty. Could [Lakha] be the same father who, according to his own version, had gone praying to the doctor for medicine? Bakha recalled he had not spoken to his father for days after that incident. Then his grief about his unhappy position had become less violent, less rebellious. He had begun to work very hard. It had seemed to him that the punishment was good for him. For he felt he had learned through it to put his heart into his work. He had matured. He had learned to scrub floors, cook, fetch water […]. And in spite of the poor nourishment he got, he had developed into a big strong man, broad shouldered, heavy hipped, supple armed, as near the Indian ideal of the wrestler as he wished to be.

‘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 haughtiness 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.

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 achievement of all that Gandhi stood for. It was as if they knew, by an instinct sure 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.

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 consciousness 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.

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 breaches, polished leather gators 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 enthusiasm for their leader, the foreigners seemed out of place, insignificant, the representative of an order which seemed to have nothing to do with the natives.

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.

‘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. […] We can see through the idiocy of these Europeans who defied money. They were barbarians and lost their heads in the worship of gold. We know life. We know it's secret flow. We have danced to its rhythms. […] We can learn to be aware with a new awareness. We are still eager to learn. We cannot go wrong. Our enslavers muddle through things. We can see things clearly.’

‘When the sweepers changed 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 untouchability and assume the dignity of status that is their right as useful members of a casteless and classless society.’

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 [Bakha’s] 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.

[Bakha] had had glimpses, during his sojourn there, of the life the Tommies lived, sleeping on strange, low canvas beds covered tightly with blankets, eating eggs, drinking tea and wine in tin mugs, going to parade and then walking down to the bazaar with cigarettes in their mouths and small silver-mounted canes in their hands. And he had soon become possessed with an overwhelming desire to live their life. He had been told they were sahibs, superior people. He had felt that to put on their clothes made one a sahib too. So he tried to copy them in everything, to copy them as well as he could in the exigencies of his peculiarly Indian circumstances.

Where the lane finished, the heat of the sun seemed to spread as from a bonfire out into the empty space of the grounds beyond the outcastes colony. [Bakha] sniffed at the clean, fresh air around the flat stretch of land before him and vaguely sensed a difference between the odorous, smoky world of refuse and the open, radiant world of the sun. He wanted to warm his flesh; we wanted the warmth to get behind the scales of the dry, powdery surface that had formed on his fingers; we wanted the blood in the blue veins that stood out on the back of his hand to melt. He lifted his face to the sun, open eyed for a moment, then with the pupils of his eyes half closed, half open. And he lifted his chin upright.

[Bakha] had wept and cried to be allowed to go to school. But then his father had told him that schools were meant for the babus, not for the lowly sweepers. He hadn’t quite understood the reason for that then. Later at the British barracks he realized why his father had not sent him to school. He was a sweeper’s son and could never be a babu. Later still he realized that there was no school which would admit him because the parents of the other children would not allow their sons to be contaminated by the touch of the low-caste man’s sons. How absurd, he thought, that was, since most of the Hindu children touched him willingly at hockey and wouldn’t mind having him at school with them. […] These old Hindus were cruel. He was a sweeper, he knew, but he could not consciously accept that fact.

“Why are we always abused? The santry inspictor and the sahib that day abused my father. They always abuse us. Because we are sweepers. Because we touch dung. They hate dung. I hate it too. That's why I came here. I was tired of working on the latrines every day. That's why they don't touch us, the high castes. […] For them I am a sweeper, sweeper - untouchable! Untouchable! Untouchable! That's the word! Untouchable! I am an untouchable!”

As a child, Bakha had often expressed a desire to wear rings on his fingers, and liked to look at his mother adorned with silver ornaments. Now that he had been to the British barracks and known that the English didn’t like jewelry, he was full of disgust for the florid, minutely-studded designs of the native ornaments. So he walked along without noticing the big earrings and nose-rings and hair-flowers and other gold-plated ornaments which shone out from the background of green paper against which the smiths had ingeniously set them.

[Bakha] lifted his head and looked round. The scales fell from his eyes. He could see the little man with a drooping mustache whom he knew to be a priest of the temple, racing up the courtyard, trembling, stumbling, tottering, falling, with his arms lifted in the air, and in his mouth the hushed cry ‘polluted, polluted, polluted.’

‘I have been seen, undone,’ the sentence quickly flashed across Bakha’s mind.

A superb specimen of humanity [Bakha] seemed whenever he made the high resolve to say something, to go and do something, his fine form rising like a tiger at bay. And yet […] he could not overstep the barriers which the conventions of his superiors had built up to protect their weakness against him. He could not invade the magic circle which protects a priest from attack by anybody, especially by a low-caste man. So, in the highest moment of his strength, the slave in him asserted himself, and he lapsed back, wild with torture, biting his lips, ruminating his grievances […].

He contemplated his experience now in the spirit of resignation which he had inherited through the long centuries down through his countless outcaste ancestors, fixed, yet flowing like a wave, confirmed at the beginning of each generation by the discipline of the caste ideal.

Men get used to a place, become familiar with it, and then comes a stage when the fascination of the unknown, the exotic, dominates them. It is the impulse which tries to create a new harmony, frowning upon the familiar which has grown stale and dreary with too much use. The mind which has once peeped into the wonderland of the new, contemplated various aspects of it with longing and desire, is shocked and disappointed when living reality pulls in the reins of the wild horse of fancy. But how pleasant men find it to look at the world with the open, hopeful, astonished eyes of the child! The vagaries of Bakha’s naive taste can be both explained and excused. He didn’t like his home, his street, his town, because he had been to work at the Tommies’ barracks, and obtained glimpses of another world, strange and beautiful.

‘But, father, what is the use?’ Bakha shouted. ‘They would ill-treat us even if we shouted. They think we are mere dirt because we clean their dirt. That pundit in the temple tried to molest Sohini and then came shouting: “Polluted, polluted.”’

‘In a little while there was a knock at the door. And what do you think? Your uncle goes out and finds the Hakim ji himself, come to grace our house. He was a good man. He felt your pulse and saved your life.’

‘He might have killed me,’ Bakha commented.

‘No, no,’ said Lakha. ‘They are really kind. We must realize that it is religion which prevents them from touching us.’ He had never throughout his narrative renounced his deep-rooted sense of inferiority and the docile acceptance of the laws of fate.

The hand of nature was stretching itself out towards [Bakha], for the tall grass on the slopes of Bulashah Hills was in sight, and he had opened his heart to it, lifted by the cool breeze that wafted him away from the crowds, the ugliness and the noise of the outcastes’ street. He looked across at the swaying loveliness before him and the little hillocks over which it spread under a sunny sky, so transcendently blue and beautiful that he felt like standing dumb and motionless before it. He listened to the incoherent whistling of the shrubs. They were the voices he knew so well.

It was a discord between person and circumstance by which a lion like [Bakha] lay enmeshed in a net while many a common criminal wore a rajah’s crown. His wealth of unconscious experience, however, was extraordinary. It was a kind of crude sense of the world, in the round, such as the peasant has who can do the job while the laboratory agriculturalist is scratching his head, or like the Arab seamen who sails the seas in a small boat and casually determines his direction by the position of the sun, or like the beggar singer who recites an epic from door to door. […]

As he sauntered along a spark of some intuition suddenly set him ablaze. He was fired with a desire to burst out from the shadow of silence and obscurity in which he lay enshrouded.

There wasn’t a child about the 38th Dogras who hadn't cast lingering eyes at this hat. The spirit of modernity had worked havoc among the youth of the regiment. The consciousness of every child was full of a desire to wear Western dress, and since most of the boys about the place were the sons of babus, bandsmen, sea poise, sweepers, washermen and shopkeepers, all too poor to afford the luxury of a complete European outfit, they eagerly stretched their hands to seize any particular article they could see anywhere, feeling that the possession of something European was better than the possession of nothing European.

[Bakha] walked away without looking back, lest he should prove unequal to the unique honor that the Hindu had done him by entrusting him with so intimate a job as fetching coal in his clay basin. For a moment he doubted whether Charat Singh was conscious and in his senses when he entrusted him with the job. ‘He might be forgetful and suddenly realize what he had done. Did he forget that I am a sweeper?’ […] He was grateful to God that such men as Charat Singh existed. He walked with a steady step, with a happy step, deliberately controlled […]. It was with difficulty, however that he prevented himself from stumbling, for his soul was full of love and adoration and worship for the man who had thought it fit to entrust him, an unclean menial, with the job.

What had [Bakha] done to deserve such treatment? He loved the child. He had been very sorry when Chota refused to let him join the game. Then why should the boy's mother abuse him when he had tried to be kind? […] ‘Of course, I polluted the child. I couldn't help doing so. I knew my touch would pollute. But it was impossible not to pick him up. He was dazed, the poor little thing. And she abused me. I only get abuse and derision wherever I go. Pollution, pollution, I do nothing else but pollute people. They all say that: “Polluted, polluted!” She was perhaps justified though. Her son was injured. She could have said anything. It was my fault and of the other boys too. Why did we start that quarrel? It started on account of the goal I scored. Cursed me! The poor child!’

How [Bakha] had smarted under the pain of that callousness and cruelty. Could [Lakha] be the same father who, according to his own version, had gone praying to the doctor for medicine? Bakha recalled he had not spoken to his father for days after that incident. Then his grief about his unhappy position had become less violent, less rebellious. He had begun to work very hard. It had seemed to him that the punishment was good for him. For he felt he had learned through it to put his heart into his work. He had matured. He had learned to scrub floors, cook, fetch water […]. And in spite of the poor nourishment he got, he had developed into a big strong man, broad shouldered, heavy hipped, supple armed, as near the Indian ideal of the wrestler as he wished to be.

‘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 haughtiness 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.

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 achievement of all that Gandhi stood for. It was as if they knew, by an instinct sure 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.

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 consciousness 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.

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 breaches, polished leather gators 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 enthusiasm for their leader, the foreigners seemed out of place, insignificant, the representative of an order which seemed to have nothing to do with the natives.

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.

‘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. […] We can see through the idiocy of these Europeans who defied money. They were barbarians and lost their heads in the worship of gold. We know life. We know it's secret flow. We have danced to its rhythms. […] We can learn to be aware with a new awareness. We are still eager to learn. We cannot go wrong. Our enslavers muddle through things. We can see things clearly.’

‘When the sweepers changed 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 untouchability and assume the dignity of status that is their right as useful members of a casteless and classless society.’

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 [Bakha’s] 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.