Into the biased bylanes of uncivil services

Raja Sekhar Vundru

In 1935, Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable published by Wishart, a liberal and anti-fascist publisher, entered the British-India literary world, with its stark account of Bakha, an untouchable manual scavenger. EM Forster described the book: “It is a way down which no novelist has yet taken me.” 

Bakha's story was enlaced with sexual assault of his sister by a temple priest, hunger, discrimination. It, however, ended on a note of hope with Gandhi's call of Harijan tour (1933-34). Stories of untouchables as protagonists in English novel faded away after this. However, vernacular literature, especially Marathi Dalit autobiographies in 1960s, followed by Hindi, Telugu, Tamil and Gujarati languages brought back the untouchables' story. English translations followed after the millennium. 

Like Untouchable, Shanta Rameshwar Rao's novella Children of God (1976) had Lakshmi, an untouchable sweeper, as the central character. Velutha, an untouchable servant, appears briefly in Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things (1997). Gita Hariharan's I Have Become the Tide (2019) embraces caste through an untouchable skinner Chikka and some Dalit students. 

Anand, Rao, Roy and Hariharan, along with Chandra, are those rare non-Dalit writers who ventured to place Dalit characters in the English novel. In Kali's Daughter, Chandra comes up with an English novel, probably since Anand and Rao, where the central character is a Dalit in today's times.

Chandra's second novel, it visualises the nascent career of a Dalit civil servant, Deepika Thakur. The author weaves his story around Deepika and unravels her past, scrutinises her present and presents her future in a strong and unforgiving narrative. It dives into the minds of those around Deepika. Deepika's father, a state government employee, changes his surname to Thakur after advice from a savarna superior who tells him that he won't progress professionally unless he sheds his Dalit surname of Chamar. These kind of biased minds laughed at Deepika in school every time her name, Deepika Chamar, was called out in class. She faces discrimination from teachers and ostracism from classmates. 

The story unravels in the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration (LBSNAA) in Mussoorie where the officers of the Indian Foreign Service and Indian Administrative Service complete their foundation course. The book is replete with characters that embody a certain way of thinking, based on their socio-economic backgrounds. 

There is a group of people at the academy — Aman, a Cambridge-educated Brahmin and a third-generation civil servant, Rajiv, a Rajput and a Manuwadi and Arundhati, a mix of Brahmin and Shudra, and a foreign-educated writer who has joined the civil service to live a life of colonial grandeur. And finally, there is Vijay, an outspoken JNU-educated Dalit from Andhra Pradesh, who is often at odds with colleagues and instructors alike because of his radical ideas. 

The author constructs characters in such a way that the reader is always in close proximity of biased minds of those having clout. The narrative showcases an interesting scenario — how key secretarial positions in various Central government ministries go to certain people, how there is an intra-community solidarity within the upper castes and how the bonhomie within the branches of the government not only stems from education in elite institutions but also from an antiquated anthropological social marker which differentiates them from the rest of the population. 

In writing descriptively and accurately about life at LBSNAA, the author has shown the reader the making of the future administrators and diplomats of India. As the book progresses, the described group leaves the academy and moves on to its respective postings across India. The administrative insight the author provides while at the same time maintaining the meta-narrative of the story, is perhaps a major force in this work. The blurring of inner-outer distinction of the Brahminical mindset in personal overreaching into the administrative is blended quite organically into the story. 

The distinctiveness of Kali's Daughter is that it fictionalises with accuracy the presence of a social reality that society chooses to conveniently ignore. This difficult-to-internalise tale presents with clarity how the brightest minds of the country are forced into primitive non-secular associations that prevent their vertical growth and that of the nation itself. He also weaves an enchanting love triangle featuring Deepika, Aman and Vijay. Raghav Chandra has taken the reader into the bylanes of administrative echelons laced with caste, untouchability and discrimination where no one has gone before.