Untouchable Themes

Every character, interaction, and circumstance in Mulk Raj Anand’s 1935 novel Untouchable is shaped by the rigid hierarchies of the Indian caste system. For Bakha and his family, labeled outcastes for their work as latrine sweepers, this hierarchy makes itself felt in a host of tangible challenges: the sweepers are not allowed to draw water from their village’s well, to attend temple services, to read, or even to walk down the street unannounced. And…

The 1935 novel Untouchable, written by Mulk Raj Anand, follows a day in the life of 18-year-old Bakha, a sweeper at the bottom of his Himalayan village’s social hierarchy. Over the course of this single day, Bakha alternates between taking over his father Lakha’s professional duties and playing hockey with much younger boys, or between defending his little sister Sohini with grown-up grace and chasing after donuts and sugarplums with childlike delight…

Over the course of the single day depicted in Untouchable, outcaste teenager Bakha is accused dozens of times of being a “polluter.” Because Bakha is a sweeper who has been assigned to clean latrines and dispose of animal excrement, higher-caste villagers deny him access to their schools and sacred spaces, to their food, and even to their water. But while the townspeople try to outsource all of their own dirty work to Bakha…