Gunga Ram Short Summary

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------------------------------------------------- THE MARK OF VISHNU 1. Gunga Ram is a Hindu in the Brahmin caste (the highest caste, though he’s a servant in a household). He believes that if he pours milk into a saucer every night, it will be gone in the morning, and the snake won’t harm anyone in the house (the snake lives beneath the house). “As long as I give him milk, he will not bite anyone in this house. You can all go about with bare feet and play where you like”. P. 78 2. The boys from the household thinks of the snake as a scientific object for school experiments. They got no respect to the snake. They end up “killing” it (but it doesn’t die). “We will kill your Kala Nag (the snake) if we see him!” p. 78 3. The boys tells Gunga Ram that he’s a “stupid old Brahmin” because they don’t believe his stories and have a scientific approach to things/life and keeps pointing to the flaws in his stories. Gunga Ram says that the snake (Kala Nag) has a hundred eggs – the boys deny this because the snake is a male. P. 79. The fact that they call him a stupid Brahmin, makes us believe that the boys thinks of Hinduism as an…show more content…
Gunga Ram feels humiliated by the boys. They keep telling their “new-fangled ideas” from school etc. and they keep proving him wrong. “Here’s your Kala Nag. Safe in this box. We are going to put him in spirits”. P. 80. 6. That Gunga Ram dies in the ending doesn’t mean that he was wrong all along, but rather that he dies with good karma. He will be reincarnated as an even better Hindu. – According to Hinduism. “He picked up wasps we battered with our badminton rackets and tended their damaged wings. Sometimes he got stung. It never seemed to shake his faith. The more dangerous the animal, the more devoted Gunga Ram was to its existence”. P. 78. 7. The boys have a scientific approach while Gunga Ram has a more religious approach. The theme is the clash between modern age, new-fangled ideas, science and

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