A For journalists in the 21st century the scourge of poverty, and scourge it is, is illustrated with photographs or footage of thin faces, empty cooking pots, abysmally poor food, often with chilli to give the hit that distracts the empty stomach. But one report that played on the BBC after 2010's floods in Pakistan showed a husband chuckling aloud about his wife. They were horrifically poor and their home had been swept away, but "Oh she never does anything," he said in reply to the journalist's question through an interpreter. Laughter in poverty? Love in poverty? Poverty, that is fiscal and economic poverty, in the western consciousness is too often conflated with poverty of being.

The issue of poverty and its social consequences re-emerged recently in the media coverage from India of the brutal gang rape and subsequent death of a young woman in Delhi. The international press, in particular, searched around for definitive reasons: the primitive world of the village meeting modern India and its women who might dress immodestly; India's titanic poverty; the infanticide that has taken the girls but left too many boys; the lucrative trades in trafficking girls for sex.

For this torture and murder, matched by the crime against Muktharan Mai in 2002 (she has yet to receive justice), the reasons are horribly ordinary: crime, long-term discrimination against women, lack of policing, lack of justice within the courts and the backlog of cases.

Turning the reality of poverty into fiction is part of the work of writers. In India, Aravind Adiga's 'The White Tiger' spun it out beyond the edge with his tale of brutal Delhi life. More successful is Katherine Boo's non-fictionalised depiction of the Mumbai slum. Her prize-winning 'Behind the Beautiful Forevers' shows a society where practicality, harshness of surroundings, but also intelligence and grace flourish. In the combination of stark realism and humanism a progenitor of both these works is Mulk Raj Anand's 'Untouchable'.

Anand was born in Peshawar in 1905, the son of a coppersmith and subedar in the Indian army and a Hindu-Sikh mother. Growing up he spent a lot of time with the children of sweepers. One caught his imagination "because he was physically like a God, played all the games superbly and could recite all cantos from the epic poem Heer Ranjha of Waris Shah." But the boy, who would become Bakha, couldn't go to school because he would defile his classmates.

Anand's family wasn't wealthy but the education system worked for him, as it worked for B R Ambedkar, whose father was also in army employ. Anand attended Khalsa College, Amritsar, and then the University of Punjab in 1921. He did a second undergraduate degree at London University and his PhD at Cambridge completed in 1929. There was something fermenting in his mind, something other than "the inhuman steel frame of officialdom" of British society: the suicide of an aunt who had been excommunicated for dining with a Muslim woman.

This was an entirely mad world: hemmed in on one side by the harsh clinicality of British rule; on the other by a society anciently obsessed with purification. (In Pakistan today, and in a time of persecution of "low-caste" Christians, it still is.) Anand's book Untouchable somehow steers between the two worlds. We duck and dive with Bakha. The Tommies at the barracks (the hilly town of Bulashah is on GT Road) do not care about Bakha's untouchability and treat him just as a boy. So his daydream is to play hockey in a solar topee, "a hat with its curious distinction of shape and form, with the peculiar quality of honour that it presents to the Indian eye because it adorns the noblest part of the body". But the young man inhabits a world shorn of affection and his father addresses him as "illegally begotten", "son of a pig"; the man in the street who bumps into him "you swine, you dog", "you low-caste vermin", "you cockeyed son of a bow-legged scorpion... you have defiled me".

In the course of a wretched day, 18-year-old Bakha must clean the latrines, witness his sister Sohini being humiliated and molested after she waits for the priest to collect water for her from a well, be abused in the street himself, have his one moment of bliss - eating the cheapest jalebis and having his attention caught by a girl in the window - turn into a nightmare as someone bumps into him and blames him for defilement, be abused by the mother of the little boy he is trying to help, be threatened by his father, and be tormented at every turn he takes. He is cheated by the confectioner on his four annas' worth of jalebis; and the coins he offers the jalebi seller have to be placed on a board and sprinkled with water.

One man, however, keeps his word. Halvildar Charat Singh, hockey player of the 38th Dogras regiment, uses Bakha's latrines, and says to the boy: "Come this afternoon, Bakhe, I shall give you a hockey stick." Bakha turns up in the afternoon, unable to ask, but the hockey stick is made his. And there are three symbols of hope - a missionary who says there is no caste, Gandhi's meeting at the golbagh which the boy witnesses from a tree (but even here it is fraught, "he might touch somebody and then there would be a scene"), and the editor-poet of a magazine of the left who advocates development and the elimination of latrines to lift people out of caste.

Bakha's misery is off-set by his temperament: he is in the Katherine Boo camp. Curious and made happy by his daydreams. That Bakha's spirit stays intact may or may not be a fiction. A newer novelist like Aravind Adiga has shown that no one can survive the pressures of poverty, abuse and betrayal without becoming feral. Katherine Boo, on the other hand, has shown that humour and love and ingenuity and luck exist in poverty as they do everywhere else.

Comments (1 comments)

I have no doubt,the problem of sub-continent all springs from unemployment,that leads to poverty,this is a unending cycle,one generation to the next.It is not religon,extremism or terrorism,they are all extension and by product of poverty,with unemployment comes poverty.It is mind boggling,why this basic truth has escaped not only political leaders but all thinking people.If I had any say,in 1947,at the onset of self rule,we should have done---1) clean water 2) made sewage system all over the land,every nook and corner.3) connect all country by net work of road,it would have taken 30 years to do,as it took US,after the end of second world war,would have employed every one in the country.What did we do?We got bogged down in big project like Dams,HAL,Steel plant,we neither succeeded there nor any where else.I have been in USa for 47 years,they first plan housing,then they connect that housing with water and sewer system,every one who uses them pays for water,sewer and garbage collection.It is not rocket science,it is self perpatuating self lubricating,continous engine for employment,everything else springs from there.Alas,we had copied that instead their violence,spaggati string tops and American slangs and wearing baseball cap backword .Just think about it.Nice day no malice.H.Mani

Posted: Friday, February 01, 2013 by H.Mani from njusa