Bakha’s Identity as an Anglophilic Assimilado in the Context of a Colonized India: A Postcolonial Reading of Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable

Abstract

This study aimed to illustrate how Bakha's Subalternity is intricately woven with the establishment of his identity as an assimilado as well as Anglophilic in the context of a colonized India, and also exhibit how this Anglophilia and assimilation of Bakha have been illustrated by Mulk Raj Anand within his literary production titled Untouchable by conducting a postcolonial investigation of the selected text. It followed the unstructured mode of inquiry that is the Qualitative approach of research. The style used to design this paper is exploratory and descriptive. The findings of the paper revealed the way Bakha gets succumbed into the spiral of the culture and tradition of the British imperialists and starts to identify himself as an Anglophilic assimilado as a result of his failure to realize the oppressive, autocratic, and dominating natures of the British authoritative figures and the effects of colonization in India due to his subaltern status within the society, which is the outcome of the Repressive Ideology practiced by the Indian Hindu community promoting class discriminations and caste-conflicts. The study further revealed how Bakha's Anglophilia and assimilation have found their outlets within the selected text through the employment of numerous significant postcolonial terms and concepts including ‘mimicry’, ‘mimic men’, and the psychopathological concept associated with colonialism that reveals the psychological effects of colonialism, which results in psychological inadequacy that eventually causes Anglophilia and makes a colonized person an assimilado. Lastly, this particular paper is helpful for academicians willing to gather more knowledge about the postcolonial notions like subalternity, Anglophilia, and assimilation and study how they are related to one another.