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Untouchable Classic 20thCentury Penguin Mulk Raj Anand E M Forster Books

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Untouchable Classic 20thCentury Penguin Mulk Raj Anand E M Forster Books

This is a well written book about what it was/is like to live under the "rules" of a caste system. I find it is important for me to learn about the lives of others but i do not like dry material. I prefer to read "stories' about what it feels like to be another person in a different life than the one I have lived. This book does an excellent job showing us the experiences and feelings of a young man who is trapped into being someone he is not, simply by birth and the expectations attached to his genetic history. I also found that this book was an excellent way to introduce the historical significance of the movement in India to do away with the caste system. A perfect book to read in a high school classroom. This book will bring about thought provoking ideas for any reader, and is especially valuable for young minds that need to be exposed to the life experience of others their age who live in vastly different circumstances.


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Untouchable Classic 20thCentury Penguin Mulk Raj Anand E M Forster Books Reviews

This short novel was intensely moving. Written in 1935, it chronicles a day in the life of an Untouchable, a member of the lowest caste in India. As we travel through the main character Bakha's day, we share with him the humiliations he suffers from the upper castes and yearn with him for a different, happier life. Bakha's caste excludes him from both the broad spectrum of humanity in his country and from opportunities to do anything more than clean latrines and sweep streets. His greatest wish is to become a part of a larger world, one which sees him as more than impure and untouchable. We are witnesses to all that he endures, feels, and observes, and fellow travellers on an inner journey, too, to make meaning of the misery his caste has foisted upon him.
Bakha is eighteen. He is intelligent and industrious, and he wants to be, as much as possible, like the British sahibs whom he admires. But life stacked the deck against Bakha. He is Hindu and he was born into the caste that cleans the filth of the rest of humanity. It is the lowest rung on the caste ladder, beneath even the washerwomen. Since he was six, Bakha has cleaned latrines. His father Lakha has risen to the pinnacle of his profession Lakha gets to sweep public streets, which is the most that Bakha can aspire to.

UNTOUCHABLE is the story of one day in Bakha's life. The novel is set in the early 1930's in a town in India. It dramatizes the plight of the lower castes and serves as a rebuke to Hindu society. When Bakha wants to buy cigarettes, he must put his coin on a particular board in the shop, so that the shopkeeper can splash it with water before picking it up and putting it in the till. When Bakha or his sister want water from the village well, they cannot draw it on their own but instead must wait for someone from one of the three highest castes to come along and, out of a spirit of charity, draw the water and then pour it into their pitcher. And lest someone of higher caste should inadvertently bump into the untouchable Bakha in the streets, he must walk constantly calling out the warning, "Posh, keep away, posh, posh, sweeper coming".

Early in UNTOUCHABLE, after completing his morning duties of cleaning out three rows of public toilets four separate times, Bakha becomes absorbed in daydreams and a sweet jalebi candy with which he rewarded himself and he forgets to call out the requisite warning. He bumps into a higher-caste Hindu who unleashes a torrent of abuse on him "Keep to the side of the road, you low-caste vermin! * * * Do you know you have touched me and defiled me, you cock-eyed son of a bow-legged scorpion!" Etc., etc. A crowd gathers; violence is threatened; fortunately for Bakha, a Muhammadan comes along and rescues him from his fellow Hindus. But Bakha's day only gets worse.

Mulk Raj Anand (b. 1905, d. 2004) was born in Peshawar. He attended university in Great Britain and he obtained a Ph.D. from Cambridge University in 1929. As a writer, he was known for his criticisms of the Hindu social structure. UNTOUCHABLE was his first major novel and it is his best-known work. It undoubtedly was instrumental in publicizing the situation of the lower castes of India, who in some ways led lives more oppressive than Negro slaves in the antebellum American South. But in truth, the book is more important as a social statement than it is as a work of literature. It is not very nuanced (somewhat like "Uncle Tom's Cabin"), and I cannot recommend it for its literary merits.

Near the end of UNTOUCHABLE, Mahatma Gandhi makes an appearance in Bakha's town and gives a speech "As you all know, while we are asking for freedom from the grip of a foreign nation, we have ourselves, for centuries, trampled underfoot millions of human beings without feeling the slightest remorse for our iniquity. For me the question of these people is moral and religious. * * * I regard untouchability as the greatest blot on Hinduism." Interesting.
This short novel consists of one day in the life of a sweeper, the lowest of the lows, the caste-less untouchables of India. From the degrading to the sublime, his day unfolds to a surprising conclusion. I don't want to say too much about the story. There is some amazing and lyrical writing about the natural world. I am a fan of modern Indian literature. Anand was writing a bit earlier ( pre- partition) and I was not familiar with his work. The writing is wonderful, the story compelling. A must read.
This book gives an insight of a section of society which is facing humiliation for centuries in India and couping with such conditions. Though there are remarkable developments in various sectors but the differences between the underprivileged and the privilaged. The struggle between these sections is getting wider. The young generation should read this book and understand the importance of equality of human race and wipe out the indiscrimination in the society so that a progressive nation can be built up.
Mulk Raj Anand has contributed a timeless and poignant account of the plight of the untouchable of India. Although this is a novelization of untouchable life, it reads like real life. For those beginning their education about the untouchable outcasts of India, this book will give them an immediate, up-close and personal look into the hellish world that was untouchability. The lead character Bakha (a street sweeper) experiences the furious oppression and scorn of being a polluted untouchable, and at the end of the book witnesses the arrival of Mohandas Gandhi, who preached the abolition of untouchability, and wanted to uplift the "harijan", as he called them. Inspired by Gandhi, he hopes to lead a better life, and to escape a life of torment and squalor. This short book is a quick and engaging read for those who wish to have an inside look at what life was like for the untouchables.
This is a well written book about what it was/is like to live under the "rules" of a caste system. I find it is important for me to learn about the lives of others but i do not like dry material. I prefer to read "stories' about what it feels like to be another person in a different life than the one I have lived. This book does an excellent job showing us the experiences and feelings of a young man who is trapped into being someone he is not, simply by birth and the expectations attached to his genetic history. I also found that this book was an excellent way to introduce the historical significance of the movement in India to do away with the caste system. A perfect book to read in a high school classroom. This book will bring about thought provoking ideas for any reader, and is especially valuable for young minds that need to be exposed to the life experience of others their age who live in vastly different circumstances.