Do people still read the novels of Mulk Raj Anand? I’ve just come upon his first, an uneven but powerful work published in 1935 and set in that period: Untouchable.
Covering one day in the life of a sweeper, the book reflects a society way beyond my experience or understanding. I trust it’s pretty far from those of any reader of The Telegraph in 2011. But forget the story, help me with the word. Is untouchable still usable in Indian English?
Usable at all, I mean, not just in its caste sense. Even in my Mumbai days, 50 years ago, that sense had long been transferred to Harijan; and even the British press, not always insensitive to other nations’ linguistic niceties, used Gandhi’s word. Then came Dalit, and now it too, I read, is under fire.
But untouchable has a simple, far wider meaning: that can’t or mayn’t be touched. In that, usually metaphorical, sense, the word is common enough outside India: Britons use it of the right to strike, say, or of banker’s bonuses, depending on their points of view. I hope that’s equally possible in India.
Not that untouchable is notably valuable or elegant. But banning any word in one sense because it is unseemly in another is a slippery slope. In English, like most languages, men have umpteen slang words for women. Most are coarse, some rightly unprintable. But would English be improved if one couldn’t call a female dog a bitch, or a fruit pastry a tart?
Americans have gone far down this road. Four weeks ago here, I spelt out the phrase nigger in the woodpile. I wouldn’t use it. But to cite it as an example of language, fair enough, I’d say. Many Americans would not.
Let’s hope
As long ago as in 1940, an American edition of Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Niggers became And Then There Were None, and was later filmed as Ten Little Indians (the Red sort, an acceptable phrase in those days). By now, except when one black American addresses others, nigger is simply taboo for almost any purpose.
To many, that’s right even if the offensive N-word, as it’s called, figures in a past work of real literature, not some run-of-the-mill detective novel. One American publisher is about to reprint Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn with every nigger turned into slave, even though the book is plainly on the oppressed blacks’ side (except to those determined nitpickers who condemn Twain for having the sensibilities of his time, the 1880s, and not of ours). Likewise every — it seems, offensive — injun has become Indian; and some zealous editor probably argued for turning even that into Native American.
This process can reach absurdity. The United States of America once achieved a row over the word niggardly, which has no more, in etymology or meaning, to do with nigger than overtly has with over.
Dictionary-makers can suffer as a result. My aged Merriam-Webster dictionary includes nigger and 17 other headwords that start with those six letters. I wonder how many its latest version has. In my schooldays, one small boy, quite unaware of any offence, might readily complain that in some swap of toys he’d been jewed by another; cheated, that is. For decades now, some Jews have been demanding that dictionaries omit that ugly and now dead sense of the word. Some Welshmen, I’m sorry to say, want the verb welch banished (and my own laptop, unasked, insisted on a capital W there till I overruled it).
I understand all these objections. But I think they’re wrong. Let’s hope no Indian publisher ever plans to reprint Mulk Raj Anand’s novel as Future Scheduled-Caste Member.
