A wonderfully written insight into the hindu caste system

Yet another example of the postcolonial novel about what is to be done, this time dealing with the untouchables of India, which I tend to read more as a way of understanding a time and a place in an intuitive fashion than for literary merit. And I mean Mulk Raj Anand isn't a terrible writer, he's just very much of a time and a place, and very much in debt to 19th Century English and Russian fiction, what with the journey of the individual as he learns the world within a day, complete with a long dialogue at the end between various intellectuals that kinda smacks you over the head with its message. If you have a strong interest in India, it's probably worth your time, but I'm a bit hesitant to recommend it across the board.

4.3*
The story Mulk Raj Anand weaved 86 years ago, continues to speak to the India today.
The writing is wonderful and the way the author has occasionally peppered it with humour is brilliant. Otherwise, it would have been thoroughly painful to read a book with such a depressing theme. The protagonist Bakha was also a likeable creation.
Whether an indian or not, I think everyone should read this book atleast once. It shall let you know how ignorance can turn humans into heartless fanatics and show you a picture of Indian society which hasn't really undergone much improvement.

Written in 1935, this novel is told from the perspective of Bakha, a sweeper, of the lowest level of the outcaste Untouchables. It has a message that gets presented through a sensitive and nuanced portrayal of Bakha as a complex human being with limits and aspirations. He clearly strives to attain a life beyond his station, adopting Western dress from the second-hand and discarded motley of British military clothing that he wears and even his style of sleeping. Still, the attitudes and behaviors of his position are woven into his everyday thoughts and actions. The humiliation and physical abuse that come when forgetting his place or seeking to take liberties beyond it are always imminent, there to remind him. Several such episodes of this are dramatized in the plot of the book, set in a single day: Bakha absent-mindedly brushes against a man who makes a spectacle of berating him and later causes a commotion when he approaches too close to a Hindu temple to observe the liturgy taking place. Mulk Raj Anand depicts him experiencing a wide range of emotions - exalted upon receiving a used field hockey stick, resentful at the favoritism his father shows his younger brother, curious but confused in an encounter with a Salvation Army colonel - in an unsentimental way that reinforces how much Bakha is like anyone else, if not for the plight that keeps him from being as full a person as he might be. The end of the novel features an interesting succession of figures - including an appearance by Gandhi himself - who offer reflections about the problem of untouchability and the future of India, slipping politics in explicitly but not obtrusively. I hadn't known anything about this author before but now am inclined to check out his novel "Private Life of an Indian Prince" and the autobiographical novels mentioned in the author bio.

Book traces life of Bakha, who is struggling as a latrine cleaner and sweeper. A profession that places him among the lower most rung of Hindu hierarchy. On this eventful day everything that could go wrong goes wrong for Bakha. He has to face many situations where he is humiliated and exposed to various injustices due to his status as lowest caste member. Despite a tough morning at the latrines, he gets slapped for touching a high caste Hindu. He receives no food for his work. He is blamed for things he is not responsible. Just as he wonders about his life’s condition he encounters three different personalities and their remedies for untouchability. A Christian missionary that cannot convince him about who Christ is, Mahatma Gandhi who says all Indians are equal,and a modernist poet who feels all that is needed to solve untouchability is a mere flush-system,Just as dusk falls he returns home with a hope that a change of times is ahead.
Well, surely, nothing can be said about the construction of the protagonist's psychology. We live a day in the life of Bakha, a teenager who belongs to a family of scavengers, and for this reason a pariah in the Hindu caste society, and we follow all his thoughts, thoughts of an intelligent boy who is close to the role he has given him. destiny, but that does not have the maturity or self-awareness that would give him a balance, whether in one sense or another: Bakha continually oscillates between the rejection of the concept of the Untouchable and the respect for traditions rooted in him, he is indignant at the treatment reserved for him by the men of the highest castes and at the same time he is careful not to contaminate them with his presence. The transition between the two states of soul is always smooth and harmonious and only in retrospect does one realize the contradiction inherent in Bakha, the struggle between the weight of tradition and the desire for something different, other than a miserable pariah life. By force of circumstances, the book does not end and what begins as a glimpse into the life and thoughts of an Untouchable remains so, without giving us the hope of real change. Successful denunciation of the caste.

One of the most depressing novels that I have read in my life. You think class conflicts in Steinbeck novels are depressing? You have not read a Mulk Raj Anand novel.

I read some other reviews saying this novel is about an interesting topic but it is not written in the right way. Well, there is nothing sexy about Indian poverty. It is the most desperate poverty in the world, full of squalor. It is insufferable. It is everywhere. No Bruce Springsteen songs to romanticize it. No Charles Bukowski novels filled with crazy individualists. Danny Boyle did his bit for the urban Indian poor. But Indian poverty goes on and on. Even the richest of Indians have felt like Bakha, every once in a while. You could be the most privileged Indian. But you might find yourself in situations Bakha finds himself in.

That scene in the novel in which Bakha is sexually attracted to his own sister, while feeling offended that the upper caste men in the village are also eyeing her ..... I don't know what to say. Not many writers can be that honest and devastating. Decades later, the situations in this novel still exist all around me.

Written in 1935, and set around the same time, this book seeks to demonstrate the plight of the untouchables of India. This story follows just one day in the life of Bakha, a young man in the sweeper caste. He lives with his father, his younger brother and younger sister, and cleans the latrines, while his father sweeps streets and the temple courtyard.

The day we follow, begins positively enough for Bakha when, after having cleaned the latrines fo the fourth time, he is promised a second hand hockey stick from Havildar Charat Singh. From there it is all downhill. His father feigns an injury and sends Bakha to perform his own sweeping duties, and events unfold from there.

I enjoyed this book while it was following Bakha's day, but I thought it lost form at the end where Gandhi makes an appearance to give a public lecture. Here it becomes a lecture to the reader, one that the main character himself only understands a small amount of.

For me the end of the book didn't give closure - I won't go into detail, as there would be spoilers, but the story just sort of ran out of steam.

3 stars.

So worth it!

I like this book for it made me feel the actual anger of the young main character and the different range of emotions which went high and low as he wanted me to experience while he was going through all the abuse, assualt and insults.

This is the story of Bakha, who is an eighteen year old, belonging to a lower caste whose family of sweepers and latrine cleaners.

Brought up by his neglectful and violent father alongwith his two other siblings, Bakha works hard from dawn facing all kinds of harrassment and abusive people belonging to other caste. He had to go through hunger, shame and pain most days.

What was most striking about the story is the way how rational and realistic the young character is inspite of the events that happened to him and the situation he was in, both outside and inside his home.

The story is what you would expect: how the 'untouchables' belonging to lower caste suffered and struggled during those days, facing humiliation all their lives for no fault of theirs.

However, it is not an easy read for me. The writing is easy to follow but it has layers of emotions and expressions that would be subjected to different kinds of reaction from different readers.

The second half became intense as compared to the first half as it turned into political speeches, talks about Gandhi's thoughts on several issues of inequality and destroying caste. It was eye-opening for me and I enjoyed it.

But I wanted a better ending.

Worth the read.

I would say it would be a bit difficult for beginners otherwise give it a try.

Warnings for SA, domestic violence and abuse.

A single event in the life of an untouchable toilet-cleaner, pressed into child labour due to illness in the family. It is stretched into a book, with every detail etched out. Why is it so poignant? Because we know, without it being explicitly told to us, that this is it, this is his life - it is going to be a life of repetitions, of insults piled on insults, of gradual deadening of the senses, of childhood worn away into an early old age, of bitterness and submission, of daily degradation. Until nothing remains other than another faceless untouchable, to be ignored and despised.

Bakha tries hard to rise above his social standing, Mulk Raj Anand exhibiting his trademark humanism, by showcasing the essential dignity of even such a depraved condition. How? By showing us the mind - the human mind in almost any depravity retains its nobility, but only to an extent, it is perhaps hinted... In naive child-like enthusiasm, Bakha dares to dream, but we see how he is going to be worn down every day. We experience a very small bit of his life, and even though he doesn't know it, we can see that the many indignities and outrages he suffer are things he will soon grow immune to and learn to take as his lot. We know that is the problem.

The ironical highpoint of the book is when Mahatma comes to Bakha's village. Mahatma comes to inspire, to uplift. Bakha was even able to catch a glimpse and hear his words. But nothing happens because of this climactic moment. Life continues, and this has been the case - despite much upliftment, the lot of the lower caste has not seen much change over the centuries. They still struggle on, noble in mind or not.

This is a novella with the punch of a compact short story. It hits hard without even taking a swing.

A note on the translation: When"oye, saale!" is translated as "oye, brother-in-law!" no sane Indian reader can avoid a barf. It grows very tiring to keep hearing everyone addressed as "brother-in-law" every few lines. I hope a new edition of the book will just substitute this jarring usage with "saala" and maybe add a footnote to explain the meaning and significance of the word.

Forget about Batman, Superman or the Hulk. They are all just comic book super heroes. This is the real deal. Enlarge the picture in the book's cover so you can get a good look at him, the photo courtesy of the India Office Library and Records. A flesh and blood Untouchable with god-given superhuman powers. Here are some amazing things he is capable of:

1. He can part a throng of people with just the words: "Posh, posh, sweeper coming!" as he comes carrying his broom (cf. Moses with his stick, parting the Red Sea);

2. Just by his touch, whether done intentionally or accidentally, another person would become very angry and will call him a dog, a swine, a cock-eyed son of a bow-legged scorpion, an offspring of a pig, and so on;

3. With the same touch, even with his smallest finger, he can defile another person so that even if the latter is on his way to an important appointment and is running late, for example, he'll have to go back home to wash and purify himself;

4. His powers are carried over also by the inanimate objects he touches. If he's buying something from a store, for example, the vendor will first ask him to put his money on a bowl, which shall then be purified by washing it with water, before the vendor shall handle it;

5. He passes on his magical powers to his children; and

6. He can live without hope, be dead inside yet do his predestined chores. Look at him: his bare feet, his shapeless pants, the rags he wears, his cheap turban, his basket where he puts in the dung and dirt he sweeps from the street and collects from latrines. He is not bad-looking, physically, with his athletic built, his height, his finely-shaped nose, full lips--but look at his eyes. A lifeless pair, turned into stone by the misery of his fate. He is the lowest of the low-caste Untouchables of India; street-sweeper, latrine-cleaner, collector of human and animal waste.

This is a novel about this superhero named Bakha (quite appropriate: "Baka" in Tagalog is cow, and cows are the holiest of animals in India). But this is more than just a story of a day in his life. This is a novel about a superhero written by another superhero:, Mulk Raj Anand--he who has this other super power called Compassion. He could not have seen Bakha for what he really was, and write about him with controlled fury, if he did not have this divine gift.

The most extraordinary feats in human history are achieved not by the strong but by those with Compassion.

Many years ago I came across the author's name on a Thai paperback entitled จัณฑาล [presumably transliterated from Chandal (p. 92)] on some occasions in those Bangkok Book Fairs but I hadn't read and rarely heard of him. Later I have eventually known him as an eminent Indian fiction writer in English, a contemporary of R. K. Narayan, Ahmad Ali (Pakistani) and Raja Rao (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulk_Ra...) whose pioneering English novels based on Indian rural life and plight started to gain international readership around 1930s-1960s. As for me, I have long known and read only R. K. Narayan due to probably his literary popularity and availability of his new reprints or second-hand books in Thailand. Coming to think of giving the others more credit and attention, I think I would read him more as well as Ahmad Ali and Raja Rao whenever I can find their interesting works.

I found reading this fiction illuminatingly entertaining and objectively narrated since it has explored the life of an 18-year-old Indian outcaste named Bakha, an Untouchable in the Indian caste system, who works as a sweeper and latrine-cleaner. We can see that such menial toil is bitterly despised due to its filthiness, disgrace and dishonor, in other words, people tend to look down upon them as those in the low society or the lower class; they thinking they are in the high society or in the upper class. However, the author has amazingly revealed his literary expertise by means of his narratives tinged with his sense of humor in which we can enjoy reading with some tongue-in-cheek words in the extracts that follow:

He shivered as he turned on his side. But he didn't mind the cold very much, suffering it willingly because he could sacrifice a good many comforts for the sake of what he called 'fashun', by which he understood the art of wearing trousers, breeches, coat, puttees, boots, etc. as worn by the British and Indian soldiers in India. (p. 12)

Almost a model 'gentreman', Bakha thought him, the kind of person he admired and wanted to imitate. (p. 39)

And he had felt a burning desire, while he was in the British barracks, to speak the tish-mish, tish-mish which the Tommies spoke. (p. 44)

Moreover, his text also include an unexpected usage of word like 'attack' denoting Bakha's action in the context, rather than an attempt to cause damage to enemy (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/attack... such a usage surprisingly being rarely found in other novels, especially the third excerpt in which I couldn't help wondering at first reading how he 'attacked' the package in question or if it's Dr. Anand's satire-like sense of humor, for instance:

He hardly realized that he had lapsed into activity, so vigorously did he attack his job. (p. 23)

He was a bit scared by the sudden unwinding of the wheel. Then he pulled himself together and renewed his attack. (p. 32)

His mouth was watering. He unfolded the paper in which the jalebis were wrapped and put a piece hastily in his mouth. The taste of the warm and sweet syrup was satisfying and delightful. He attacked the package again. (p. 52)

In conclusion, this novel is arguably worth reading due to its exceptional writing style, seemingly realistic plot as well as amazingly appropriate word choices in which you can enjoy and enrich your lexicons while reading on and on. Decidedly, I would find his other books and look forward to reading them more.

"He sniffed at the clean, fresh air around the flat stretch of land and vaguely sensed a difference between the odorous, smoky world of refuse, and the open, radiant world of sun. 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."

You know, in a memoir of his first story “Lost child”, Mulkraj Anand mentioned that he dared to show his story to Virginia Woolf. She asked him to read it out in her next home party. Desmond Macarthy, Victoria Sackill West, Edward Garnet, clapped after he read his story.

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….As we ignore the Russian writer Gorky’s ‘Lower depths’; write like Laurence Hope about flowers in garden Shalimar!

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.

‘Bread for the sweeper mother bread for the sweeper,’ He called standing in the door of the first house. His voice died down to the echo of ‘thak, thak, thak’, which stole into the alley.

‘The sweeper has come for the bread, mother!” he shouted a little louder.

But it was of no avail.

He penetrated further into the alley and standing near a point where the doors of four houses were near each other, He shouted his call: ‘Bread for the sweeper, mother; bread for the sweeper.’

Yet no one seemed to hear him on the tops of the house."