Contesting Voices of Gandhi and Ambedkar in Dalit Representations: Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable and Amitabh’s “Harijan Mastar”

The chapter shows how Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable sets the tradition of representing and stereotyping the identity of Dalit protagonists with certain literary tropes and popular images foregrounding a sympathetic attitude. It highlights how the novel depicts Bakha as passive, incapable of fighting the systematic and structured caste exploitation in relation to his metaphoric presence in the Swadeshi campaign in the Gandhi-dominated Congress’s phase of nationalism. Bakha’s “destitute” metaphoric presence is elucidated with Aniket Jaaware’s concept of the “positive aspects of the processes of destitutionalization” of Dalit identity as he explicates it in his Destitute Literature. This method of representing Dalit identity in destitution is then illustrated through a Marathi Dalit short story “Harijan Mastar” (A Dalit Teacher) by Amitabh from his collection of short stories Pad. This analysis underlines how the processes of destitutionalization enable the Dalit teacher to take an ethical stand in the “destitution of ethics,” and how Dalit society offers the teacher an opportunity to revaluate himself and thus, imbibe Ambedkarite consciousness which never happens in case of Bakha.