About the Book: Untouchable
With precision, vitality, and a fury that earned him praise as Indias Charles
Dickens, Mulk Raj Anand recreates in Untouchable what it was like to live on the
fringes of society in pre-independence India. Bakha, an attractive, proud, and
strong young man, is also an Untouchable, the lowest of the low in Indias caste
system. A sweeper and a toilet-cleaner, he must warn others on the street of his
status so that he will not pollute them with his presence. In this urgent 1935
re-creation of one day in the life of an outcast, a violent encounter leads
Bakha to question his fate—and