Notes on

"Decoding Anand's Humanism"

By Susie Tharu

Susie Tharu makes a post-colonial reading of the novel.

Anand's contribution to literature.

● Anand stands out from the mainstream.

● One of the first Indian English novelists to represent untouchables, workers and
peasants.
● Did not go with the nationalist revivalist sentiments or with the tendency to escape into
the formal composure of myths, or to re-assert the Indian.
● An attempt to present the unaesthetic present, unlike Raja Rao, Aurobindo, R K
Narayan.

Limitations of the novel

● Schematic and limited because of a hidden ideology that restricts it's scope of its vision.
Anand's humanism draws from certain progressive aspects of the colonial presence in India.
A liberal concern for the ones rejected and deprived of a "human" life.
● But his literalism was transmuted by the biases of British racism.
Subtle way of reaffirming the tenets of British racism by the narrative.
The novel slips back into the colonial diagnosis of the Indian question and it's prescription for
progress and change.
● Sensory details meticulously recorded in the novel. Munoos first impression of the town,
the way in which sight, smell, touch and sound are recreated, as if for the excitement
and revulsion of the European in an Indian bazaar. The absence of Munoos gaze in
Coolie.
● Narrator too close to the subject, not objective but mechanical
● Sentimentalisation of labour. "Dancing through his work", " Work was an intoxication that
gave him glowing health and plenty of sleep"
Bakha described like a large mechanical doll. Aesthetic appreciation of the orient.
Not Bakha's perspective, but a stranger's (a curious white man).
● Narrative voice too distant, too clinical in recording of item and detail.
● The beginning of the novel that introduces the dalit colony - not a sociologist studying
the complexity of his/her society but an anthropologist studying an alien, primitive
society.
● Bakha establishes his real humanity against the subhuman other characters, by being
different from them, and more like the white human being. "A thorough bred animal",
referred to as tiger, lion, bear, horse. Instinctive manliness.
● Who is the reader? Who is the work written for? And what was the British attitude
towards Dalits and adivasis. They were "childlike, innocent, instinctive, uncorrupted by
the evil religion and culture of the upper classes, from whom they had more to fear, and
who were consequently regarded as wily, degenerate and lazy.
● Similarly the representation of women. Sohini as sculpted Khajhurao figure, Indian
goddess, temptress, the alluring oriental beauty guilty of the fall of so many white men.
● The experience for the Indian reader is distorting. "Reincarnating an ideology meant to
destroy us, by manipulating us to accept it's designs uncritically."