this is only the external appearance, not to be confused with the total reality. With consummate skill Satinath reproduces the Tatma-Dhangar milieu before our eyes. Aphorisms and echoes from Tulsidas abound in the novel, even as they do in the daily lives of these illiterate people; local turns and idiosyncrasies of speech are made use of liberally. The religious practices and social norms are described in detail. The community is ruled by ihepanchayat with the Mahato as its head, while the witch-doctor is another powerful influence. Even quaint beliefs and superstitions are taken for granted by the novelist Thus we learn, that the Tatmas do not eat masoor dal because it heats the body and may bring on leprosy, although the nursing mother needs it after childbirth. Every Tatma knows that if one has fever after the month ofAshwin (mid-September to mid-October), it is because of eating grape-fruit, but before Ashwin the fever is brought on by eating guavas. Their sexual morality is also different from that of the middle class. The community is strict with girls before marriage, but husbands are not deeply perturbed if their wives cater to the lust of the 'babubhaiyas'; after all, that means a slight improvement in standards of living. Their attitude towards death, which is endemic to their lives, is one of stark acceptance. As they see it, the difference between the death of a man and that of an animal is that in the case of a dog, the corpse will be taken away by the low-caste undertakers fdohms'); in the case of a cow, the corpse will not be skinned inside the colony; and in the case of a man, there will have to be a feast in his memory. Satinath neither glorifies their poverty nor swaddles it in mawkish sentiment; he presents their lot as it really is and tries to show what they feel about it When DhoraFs adoptive father Bouka Bawa discovers that the child is ill and needs milk, he instantly realises without envy or bitterness that milk is for the consumption of the rich: after all. God has given them the means to drink milk-In this kind of society, abject poverty becomes a seemingly immutable feature of existence. When Gandhiji appears to the Tatmas in the miraculous image on the pumpkin (once again, this naive belief is not intruded upon by rational scepticism), they are unable to give shelter to the saint, because they do not have the money to build a shrine for him. This is the point at which suddenly and significantly, Tulsi's words, that there is no sorrow in the world greater than poverty become comprehensible to Bouka Bawa. Like every other Tatma, he has barely managed to scrape one meal a day all through his life, but the awareness comes not over the struggle for a bowl of rice, but at this specific moment This static society is, however, changing rapidly and its age-old structure of values and beliefs shows clear signs of collapse rather early in the novel. Satinath himself recognised in his essay, 'Dhoraf, the evolving consciousness of these people groping towards a sense of their innate worth, and wanted to write a novel about it Choosing the broad and apparently timeless canvas of rural society, he endeavoured to show how men and environment moulded each other. The background to this change, this 'tension of social alignments in 50 Number 9