Untouchable

Author: Anand, Mulk Raj

Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)

Published on 2 January 2014 by Penguin Books Ltd (Penguin Classics) in the United Kingdom.

Mulk Raj Anand's extraordinarily powerful story of an Untouchable in India's caste system, with a new introduction by Ramachandra Guha, author of GandhiBakha is a proud and attractive young man, yet none the less he is an Untouchable - an outcast in India's caste system. It is a system that is even now only slowly changing and was then as cruel and debilitating as that of apartheid. Into this vivid re-creation of one day in the life of Bakha, sweeper and toilet-cleaner, Anand pours a vitality, fire and richness of detail that earn his place as one of the twentieth century's most important Indian writers.

'One of the most eloquent and imaginative works to deal with this difficult and emotive subject' Martin Seymour-Smith'It recalled to me very vividly the occasions I have walked 'the wrong way' in an Indian city, and it is a way down which no novelist has yet taken me' E. M. Forster