Untouchable [by] Mulk Raj Anand

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First Sentence

"THE outcastes' colony was a group of mud-wallet houses that clustered together in two rows, under the shadow both of the town and the cantonment, but outside their boundaries and separate from them."

Description

With precision, vitality, and a fury that earned him praise as India's 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 India's 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 to find an answer in the unlikeliest of places.