"He was feeling quite detached from the human world, swathed in a sort of unadulterated melancholy."

I've read books on wars and injustice and my eyes have welled up with tears. Some writers have that magic in their writing where they can make you feel the pain through their words. But sadly, I cannot put Anand into that category.

Untouchables have been a very sensitive topic of the Hindu caste system. And I was prepared with tissue papers before I got into the book. Unfortunately, the writing failed to raise any kind of emotion.

But, to its credit, the book details out everything that the Harijans went through, not leaving out any of the disturbing details; be it their daily profession of cleaning latrines or their uncontrolled humility and gratitude at the face of basic human kindness from the upper castes. Anand did not just limit himself to the upper caste - Harijan dynamics, but also spoke about their relationship with Englishmen, the Muhamedden, and the afflictions of a Young Indian Man.

Overall, the book was quite informative and doesn't gloss over the truth. You can pick this book up if you've ever heard the term Harijans, and are curious to know what it feels like to be one.

One of the most difficult reads ever!!!


No doubt it's one of the first and one of the best Indian novels written in English.

The thick descriptions of the lives of the Untouchables really made it a tough read for me.

I definitely recommend this book to you if you are interested in knowing about the so called “Untouchables” in Indian society during the early decades of twentieth century. The novel gives an account of the life of Bakha, the central character. To be precise, the novels pictures a day in Bakha's life as a sweeper, an Untouchable.

The book touches the psychological depth of the character's mind very accurately. Anand's dealing of the characters in the novel really shows how deeply he had observed and understood the contemporary Indian society.
This book has a philosophical undertone. The existential questions that keep haunting Bakha are universal in nature.

However, the readers who aren't aware of Indian expression can have some difficulties in understanding the exact meaning of some phrases and this is owing to of the indianness of Anand's writing style.

This definitely deserves a reading.

Untouchable by Mulk Raj Anand is a living epitome which tells us that very little has changed in India when it comes to Untouchability.

Although, this novel was first published in 1935 but you will find the same casteist mindset which was prevalent back then can be easily seen even in today's modern India. An irony in itself.


For the detailed article you can visit my website - https://dontbignorant.in/untouchable-...

Boring. Not relevant, in present day India.

One of the strongest binding agents of human life is its ability to live in denial. The bubble becomes larger when it is coupled with oblivion. Caste discrimination has been a sad reality for centuries now. You really cannot dry clean the fabric of the society when it is blemished with the blood and sweat of the underprivileged.

The book 'Untouchable' holds nothing back and makes you eat the frog in the first few pages itself. The graphic description of the day in the life of a sweeper hits you a punch in the gut and makes your eyes pop out to reality. The narrative from the eyes of the protagonist is a tale that breaks you down from inside. The question he plays on his mind of 'Why him?' passes the baton of helplessness to the readers as well.

The description breaks the mirage created in our society and slaps the reality that the survival kit of an oasis are far and few.

The most disturbing part about the book is its relevance even today. It saddens to call out some works of art 'Timeless classics'( There are still 1.3 manual scavengers in India)

This book aptly shows the discrimination that existed and continues to exist even today in India. Discriminating other is the human nature. It is deep and discrimination of every form exists in every society. India too has its system of discrimination which we call caste for giving status to every individual and this system assigns specific caste to individual based on his/her birth(hereditary system).
In the name of caste system india remained a country of many smaller countries for past many centuries. This division on the basis of caste exists today also. And author has shown its true color in this book.Its a good short read.
Those who are expecting that in end Bakha will become angry young man and will change the system and misery in one strock- for them i say this book is not about drastic changes.. Infact this book shows that people like Bakha have hope in the discriminating system to change some aspects of their life.. Self determination and knowledge is the only key for them...
But today inspite of education I see people tend to do caste based discrimination. It will take some more time when people will rise above caste based discrimination. Till then people like Bakha have to endure misery!

A bleak tale of caste discrimination and one of the first books attempting to address the issue. It warrants 5 stars for trying to give a voice to the voiceless.

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 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.

In the UK, it is different. 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. will then pay for a lawyer to fight for him. If he wins, he can then bring in his family.

There are two ways, from a religious point of view, of looking at them. 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, 2016. Originally reviewed Dec. 1, 2011

Will let you feel the pain of fellow humans, so called ‘Untouchables’ in the Indian society. The past of our society is filled with crime against this class and even after many efforts to emancipate their condition, the word ‘chamar’ is still used as an abuse!! Unfortunate!

Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable is a difficult book to read. At every point of the narrative, I felt a little more guilty about the privilege I have and how little we are doing as a society. This evocation is a testament of Anand’s deft writing. The writer takes us through the life of Bakha from a third person point of view and keeps our eyes wide open till we start seeing his world through his eyes. Anand makes us touch the life experience of an untouchable. This book should be taught as a textbook in every school.

Untouchable tells the story of Bakha, a young untouchable, who is an outcast in India’s caste system. I went into this extremely uneducated, largely due to the British education system’s whitewashed and selective history topics but also my ignorance, so if like me, you are not aware of what the caste system is, it is a system as debilitating as an apartheid. This led to untouchability.

This novel is short but impactful. I am not sure of the intentions beyond raising an issue that very few, if any, individuals were largely discussing at a distressing and controversial time but it does the job indeed. However, perhaps due to ignorance again, it is quite difficult to follow if you do not have an understanding of or even experience of India and its culture. I think for any reader who is perhaps not as educated as they could be, this will be a very middling read. It is incredibly interesting and emotive but the lack of description and narration that offers deeper insight meant that I could not love it as much as I would have liked due to this - which was a huge shame.

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.'
"Oh Toni Morrison won the Nobel because she wrote about slavery you know!"
Before you scoff at the above declamation let me mention that I have quoted that statement verbatim.
6 million Jews, 7 years. 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.

n  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.n

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.

n  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.n

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.
Of course, caste-based violence is still a regularly resurfacing news item and stigmatization of crematorium/graveyard workers, garbage-collectors and assorted dregs of society has not been completely obliterated. 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.