Untouchable (novel)

Untouchable is a 1935 novel by the Indian writer Mulk Raj Anand, written in English and one of the works that established him as a major English-language author from India. Set in the northern Indian town of Bulandshahr, it follows a single day in the life of Bakha, a young sweeper whose work cleaning latrines marks him as ritually polluted under the caste system, and uses his humiliations across that day to build an argument against the practice of untouchability. Anand drew on a family experience, an aunt ostracized for sharing a meal with a Muslim woman, and the novel closes with hints of change through references to modern sanitation and to Mahatma Gandhi's message of emancipation. Published with a foreword by E.M. Forster, it is noted for centering a Dalit protagonist against the conventions of earlier colonial-era fiction, though critics continue to debate its treatment of caste and its relationship to Gandhian reform.