When was untouchable written

Published July 3rd by Penguin Books first published More Details Original Title. Other Editions Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Untouchable , please sign up. Orinoco Womble tidy bag and all Read it yourself. It's easy, and short. Get it from the library if you don't want to buy it. This is not a homework website.

This question contains spoilers Antonia pages! Get the book and read it! Read slowly and open your mind to a world few of us know. See all 3 questions about Untouchable…. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. Sort order. Start your review of Untouchable. Jun 16, Samadrita rated it liked it Shelves: social-justice , pg-woes , india , real-issues-fake-people , don-t-melt-my-melting-pot , my-god-is-better-than-yours , sociology , bygones-are-never-bygones , human-drama , asian-literature.

It amuses me to no end how there has been no perceivable ebb in the flow of Holocaust-World War II novels and yet every time a Toni Morrison and an Alice Walker and a Richard Wright and a Ralph Ellison have tried to address the elephant in the room or America's endemic race problem which like a many-headed monster continues to rampage on unvanquished, they have been accused of betraying an overt political mindedness and a violation of that much harped upon maxim of 'art for art's sake.

Unaccounted for anonymous millions, 4 centuries. But alas like every other literary theme on the planet, brutalization of human beings, too, has its color-coded hierarchical positions within the canon.

The sweeper is worse off than a slave, for the slave may change his master and his duties and may even become free, but the sweeper is bound forever, born into a state from which he cannot escape and where he is excluded from social intercourse and the consolations of his religion. So slavery. A word which no longer evokes the kind of knee-jerk instinctual horror or pathos that it should and has descended into the realms of banality through repeated use over the years.

And yet the word refuses to become just another obsolete dictionary entry with its persistent reappearances before us in myriad new grotesque avatars. Forced prostitution, human trafficking, slavery of illegal immigrant workers, bonded labor and so on and so forth. Our own home-made brand of slavery-segregation went by the label of 'untouchability', another convenient, religion-sanctioned writ flagrantly upheld by authorities. Quote obscure mumbo jumbo from scriptures, invent excuses to justify your irrational bias and manipulate the system into giving 'religion' free reign and tada your status quo has been manufactured.

He realised he couldn't rush even though the Mahatma had abolished all caste distinctions for the day. He might touch someone and then there would be a scene. The Mahatma would be too far away to come and help him. One can call this work a thinly disguised attempt at political pamphleteering because there is very little literary merit to be found here.

No linguistic shenanigans to express apoplectic joy over. No dazzling imagery to wax eloquent about. A book named 'Untouchable' on an untouchable latrine-cleaner can boast of no thematic subtlety either. To add to these causes of botheration, Anand devotes a portion to the exaltation of Gandhi who had initially felt the necessity of vindicating the caste system probably to forestall criticism of Hinduism despite championing the cause of the harijan 'untouchable'. If you have read enough Arundhati Roy or are aware of her political views, you probably know what I am talking about.

So yes this novel is a product of a time and the awakening collective consciousness of an emerging nation-state. It is unable to reconcile an essentially hostile social milieu to the aspirations of an enlightened new generation and merely musters up a robust optimism for the foreseeable future. But it added to a much needed discourse at a time when it was in short supply.

So there. But the normalization of the relentless verbal and physical abuse that Bakha, our 'untouchable' protagonist, is subjected to in the book has long been discontinued. Unable to love it whole-heartedly as I was, I am still painfully aware of this book's relevance. May we be forgiven for passive participation in the ritual dehumanization of a section of society but may we never forget.

View all 48 comments. Mar 03, William2 rated it really liked it Shelves: empire-post-colonial , fiction , ce , india. Soul crushing. We in the West know nothing about degradation. The strife and misery of this narrative!

And yet the writing is captivating, the modulation of emotion through action and image masterful. I must read more on caste and how it came to be. Bakha, a strong young man, a sweeper of latrines, has spent time at the British barracks, where he was treated a Soul crushing.

Bakha, a strong young man, a sweeper of latrines, has spent time at the British barracks, where he was treated as if he possessed no taint. This has broadened his thinking, shown him the imbecility of the millennia-old system he lived under, and made him feel things could be different than they are.

Bakha and his kind are, among other indecencies, deprived of education, fed like swine, denied participation in community, and consigned to wretched quarters.

He was part of a consciousness which he could share and yet not understand. He had been lifted from the gutter, through the barriers of space, to partake of life which was his, and yet not his.

He was in the midst of a humanity which included him in its folds and yet debarred him from entering into a sentient, living, quivering contact with it. Untouchability was prohibited by law some 65 years ago. But it is said that Indian elections still reflect a caste consciousness. How could they not, after millennia under such a system? The book, scatological in the extreme, is deeply moving, mainly due to the rage it evokes in the reader.

It is also utterly without parallel in my reading experience. PS Guess who helped Anand with his novel? His initials are M. View all 12 comments. Mar 28, Praveen rated it really liked it. He wanted to warm his flesh; he wanted the warmth to get behind the scales of the dry, powdery surface that had formed on his fingers; he wanted the blood in the blue veins that stood out on the back of his hand to melt.

She asked him to read it out in her next home party. During that time, in one of her pamphlets, Virginia Woolf attacked many novelists like Arnold Bennet, H G Wells, John Galsworthy, for writing about the characters of sub- world.

This shocked Mulkraj because he was planning to write this novel about the untouchable people. He was further demotivated when one of the young poets, after knowing that Mulkraj was going to write about his growing up years among tough boys, sons of bandsmen, washer men and sweepers, said, leave your Cockneys in their sordid world….

Then coming back to India, Mulkraj wrote this novel under the guidance of Gandhi. Gandhi advised him not to use big english words and to use the local language. This is story of a sweeper named Bakha, a young and intelligent character.

Through the ordeals and activities of life of Bakha, his family, his friends and other characters writer has given a wonderful but tyrannical imagery of those days when the untouchability was a great challenge in Indian society. He has depicted very artfully the conflicts between the high caste and lower caste people in the society and has finally reached to the argument that the untouchability was inhumane. Bakha is a representative of down trodden in the pre-independent era of India.

He suffers because of his caste and all the lower castes people are suffering because they are by birth outcaste. Writer has depicted the hypocrisy of the upper caste people that men like Pt. Kali Nath enjoy the touch of the lower caste girls, but do not treat lower caste people equally in other matters.

He has exposed all this hypocrisy and double standards. Bakha has been portrayed as a universal figure to show the oppression, injustice, humiliation to the whole community of the outcastes in India in this book. An attractively written story by Anand, proving a fact that social exclusion and exploitation of the subaltern is well rooted in the caste system of India! An outcast was not allowed to enter into the house of higher caste, even when food was required in utmost urgency… "For being an outcaste he could not insult the sanctity of the house by climbing on the house on the top floors where the kitchens were, but had to shout and announce his arrival from below.

But it was of no avail. Nov 30, Petra is looking forward to getting off the rock rated it it was ok Shelves: popculture-anthropology , travel-adventure-countries , philosophy-religion , reviews.

This is only a short book and the first two-thirds are quite interesting - a day in the life of a downtrodden Untouchable latrine cleaner and his rat-eating family. The preaching of the last third rather spoiled it though. It is true that flush lavatories would solve the problem for the toilet-cleaning caste, but it is hardly a solution for the Untouchables, no matter what name Gandhi gave them.

Part of the problem of the Untouchable caste is that it isn't actually a problem at all for anyone who This is only a short book and the first two-thirds are quite interesting - a day in the life of a downtrodden Untouchable latrine cleaner and his rat-eating family.

Part of the problem of the Untouchable caste is that it isn't actually a problem at all for anyone who isn't Untouchable, in fact it's desirable to have them. Since they, the pariahs of society, do all the work that no one else wants to do, and at minimum wage, and all this exploitation can be justified as being in the name of religion, in the name of not interfering with the Infinite plan there is no impetus from society to improve these people's lives. It's not so far from the way the US treats illegal Mexican immigrants.

It allows them to stay to do the work that no one else wants to do for those wages in those conditions. They live in fear of everything and everyone.

If they are beaten, robbed or raped they have no redress. They daren't complain. So just as with the Untouchables not being a problem if you aren't one, neither are the illegal immigrants. An illegal immigrant can either 'disappear' as in the US or claim asylum and is immediately housed and given an allowance for years while his case is 'considered'. If he loses but by then has a child here or would face discrimination in his own country, he can claim that deportation would breach his human rights.

The gvt. If he wins, he can then bring in his family. Either they must have done something pretty dreadful in their previous lives to get born an Untouchable and this is Divine punishment, or alternatively, these people must have been really good dogs, cockroaches or whathaveyou to have become human in this life and who are mere humans to interfere with this great Cycle?

When looked at in this way, it's a pretty clever organising of society, of religion, to get the work done. Another way of putting it, one more familiar to us, is the richer get richer and the poor live in ghettos and clean the houses, shops, subways and streets for them. One of the solutions proposed is Christianity, which has the great advantage of not having a rebirth system so a lowly caste becomes a class problem for which education can provide a ladder up and out.

Another solution, one partly in effect now, was Gandhi's renaming the caste Harijan, or Children of God, and his movement to include rather exclude them from society. The third solution isn't sadly as widespread as it ought to be, the flush toilet. The poor who live and sleep on the pavements still shit in the gutter, those living in slums and tenements crap into plastic bags which they launch far into the air earning them the nickname of parachutes and those slightly less poor than that have flush toilets but no running water.

So whether its cleaning latrines or cleaning un flushed toilets, or sweeping the streets clean of 'parachute' bags, this caste of Untouchables, these Children of God, are still plying their traditional trade. Sometimes I wonder if everything evil under the sun couldn't find its justification in one religion or another?

I don't like being lectured to, and I don't care what literary device is used to pretend that it's just the story not a didactic excursion by the author, I just don't like it. I would probably never have finished the book but my computer broke down and it took an hour to fix with all the endless waits while it checked files and rebooted.

Lucky aren't I, to have a bookshop and only a slightly iffy computer to annoy me rather than having to live with broken flush toilets and crap to clean from the streets? Heavily revised 24th April, Originally reviewed Dec. Untouchable essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Untouchable by Mulk Raj Anand. Remember me. Forgot your password? Buy Study Guide.

Bakha makes his way to a train station where he hears a rumor that Mahatma Gandhi is coming there to give a speech. Bakha stays until Gandhi arrives. Gandhi's speech condemns the caste system and urges the people to follow his example of non-violent protest. After the speech, Bakha overhears two educated men, a poet and a lawyer, debating the merits of Gandhi's speech.

The lawyer believes that Gandhi's aims are childish and irrational. Longstanding traditions are rarely overturned, and he believes that the caste system will endure despite protests for reform.

The poet believes that the barbarism of the caste system will be eliminated, particularly in light of the fact that the flushing toilet is rumored to be coming to their town.

Once the people have flushing toilets, there will be no need for the Untouchables to dispose of the town's refuse, which would require a rethinking of their role and duty to society. The author's experience as an Indian, and the fact that Untouchable was written while the caste system was firmly in place, give the novel an authenticity and accuracy that make it easy to empathize with Bakha and his family.

Untouchable is a unique opportunity for readers to experience the plight of the victims of the caste system. At the same time, the story identifies the complexities of Indian identity after the Great War as India emerges from postcolonialism to globalism.

The guide themes, chapter outlines and character summaries are more detailed than other sites. The information is chapter specific and so it's easy to target certain things.

Untouchable Mulk Raj Anand. Access Full Guide Download Save. Featured Collections. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves. This is a preview of subscription content, log in to check access. Google Scholar. Brewer: Cambridge, , p. Sharma, ed.