Untouchable- Essay #2 (Rough Draft)

Well, it's not organized yet, but I'm getting there.

Tentative Thesis:

In Untouchable, Anand describes how Bakha adopts a false consciousness, trying to live up to the life of the Englishmen instead of identifying with his own Hindu culture. He adopts a false consciousness by wanting to learn how to read and write as the English do (since his low place in the caste system didn't allow him to do so), by trying to play hockey (an english sport) and by being exposed to the English culture and religion as he lives with Colonel Hutchinson (pg 130, quote sandwich could be made on this point) . The ideology of the caste system reflects upon race and class (key term?) in India.

Supporting claims (paragraphs that should follow the thesis):

How each of the following:

1. learning how to write
2. playing hockey
3. being exposed to a different religion (pg 130)

magnify and affect false consciousness in Bahka. Expand and clarify and I can use key terms from racial formation here

Other thoughts:

In various points of the novel, we also see how Bakha's false consciousness evolves and changes throughout. We see how significant it is to Bakha to want to escape the unfairness of his own culture by trying to adopt the English culture, and we see how trying to adopt a new culture and neglect affects his own identity.

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Intersectionality can be used to analyze how the ideology of the caste system works. We see that in the novel, Bakha is a sweeper and is looked upon as a filthy person but when he accidentally bumps into someone above him in the caste system, he is bemoaned and insulted for not announcing that he was passing by. We also see that Bakha steps into a temple/shrine and when he is seen, he is insulted over and over for desecrating the temple, but when he realizes that the priest of the temple molested his sister, we see that Bakha cannot do anything about it, simply because the priest is higher than him in the caste system. Bakha experiences intense discrimination, and his own people, people who live in the same country and who are Hindu like he is, still discriminate him, simply for being different than him.