Untouchable
SynopsisPlot
Bakha, an attractive, proud, and strong young man, is also an Untouchable, the lowest of the low in India’s caste system. A sweeper and a toilet-cleaner, he must warn others on the street of his status so that he will not pollute them with his presence. In this urgent 1935 re-creation of one day in the life of an outcast, a violent encounter leads Bakha to question his fate—and to find an answer in the unlikeliest of places.
Story
About this book
Untouchable, first published in 1935, follows a single day in the life of Bakha, a young man born into the lowest rung of India's caste system. As a sweeper and cleaner of latrines, Bakha is expected to announce his presence on the street so that higher-caste people can avoid contact with him. Despite his physical strength and quiet pride, he occupies a position that the social order treats as a source of contamination. Mulk Raj Anand sets the story in pre-independence India and compresses the narrative into a few hours, giving it an almost real-time intensity.
During this single day, a violent incident forces Bakha to confront the rules that define his existence. He moves through a town where every interaction, from buying bread to walking on a road, is shaped by the restrictions placed on people classified as untouchable. The novel does not offer a distant historical survey but instead stays close to Bakha's immediate experience, recording small humiliations alongside larger questions about whether change is possible.
Anand wrote the book while living in London, and E.M. Forster contributed a preface to the original edition. The story's compressed timeframe and plain, direct prose keep the focus tightly on one person's ordinary reality within a rigid social hierarchy.
