Shit Writing: Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable, the Image of Gandhi, and the Progressive Writers’ Association

Between Colony and Metropolis

The final page of Untouchable, the breakthrough 1935 novel by Indo-Anglian author Mulk Raj Anand, contains a two-line paraph: “Simla—S.S. Viceroy of India—Bloomsbury” reads the first of these lines. “September–October 1933” reads the second.¹ A flourish below the novel’s main text, these lines inscribe place and date on its outer threshold in the place of the author’s signature. The novel’s placing describes the arc of a hyphenated international trajectory. It is a novel on the move. Simla: Himalayan summer capital of the British empire; S.S. Viceroy of India: Peninsula and Oriental’s ultra-modern flagship ocean liner of the 1920s and 30s on the Bombay to London line; Bloomsbury: heart of the British literary avant-garde, and a milieu to which Anand was, more or less ambivalently, attached.² The itinerary moves from the clubbish leisure-spaces of the colony’s center to the artistic heart of the metropolis, via a vehicle appropriately carrying the title of the representative of sovereign power in the subcontinent.

The date puts the book in relation to the notorious White Paper on proposals for Indian constitutional reform of 1933, which was to become the basis of the 1935 Government of India Act. The White Paper was regarded in India as a continuation of autocratic British rule in the guise of a concession of (semi-) autonomous federated democratic structures for India.³ In Letters on India (1942), his epistolary critique of the imperial regime, Anand himself gave a ferocious account of the semblance of “democracy” inaugurated by the 1935 Act.⁴ Anand tabulates the “checks against the intrusion of democracy” incorporated into an Act that claimed to introduce constitutionality.⁵ The White Paper and the India Act came in the wake of the Gandhi-Irwin pact, the mysterious compromise made by Gandhi in 1931 during the Round Table negotiations with representatives of the British government. In 1931, Gandhi called off the powerful Civil Disobedience campaign which had held the promise of wresting real concessions from the British. “Towards the end of 1930,” writes Sumit Sarkar,

A contradiction was emerging at the heart of Civil Disobedience: certain forms of struggle more definitely in the control of the bourgeoisie or its dependent allies . . . were definitely weakening, while there was a possibility that other, less manageable forms (like no-rent, or tribal outbursts) might gather strength. It was at this point that bourgeois pressures for a compromise became insistent.⁶

Sarkar goes on to detail what may have determined these “bourgeois pressures,” including the Indian middle class’ international economic ties with the metropolis, and suggests the extent to which a whole series of alternative possibilities (“like no-rent or tribal outbursts”) was thereby closed off.

Although Anand had completed a manuscript of Untouchable well before 1933, he chose to inscribe that date on the last page.⁷ The wager of this gesture is not merely that of tying the novel to a specific year. The paraph rather lifts the novel out of an empirically indeterminate earlier time of writing, reflecting also a desired trajectory (not “homewards,” as in the novel’s final line, but rather colony-to-metropolis), as well as the necessity of that trajectory’s errancy.⁸ The novel’s journey can never be contained by place and date; it will not necessarily “arrive” in Bloomsbury. Moreover, the printed text of Untouchable is framed by two dates: 1935, the date of publication at the beginning, and the 1933 of the paraph at the end.⁹ This possibly inadvertent framing emblematizes the errancy of the novel’s travels, allowing us to read Untouchable as an alternative narrative filling-out of the time it took for the 1933 White Paper to become the 1935 Act. While this was the time it took for the strange compromise of Gandhi-Irwin to become institutionalized as law, the timing of Untouchable tells a different story of those years. Anand, in trying to establish a counter-connection between colony and metropolis, charts a route...