It amuses me to no end how there has been no perceivable ebb in the flow of Holocaust-World War II novels and yet every time a Toni Morrison and an Alice Walker and a Richard Wright and a Ralph Ellison have tried to address the elephant in the room or America's endemic race problem which like a many-headed monster continues to rampage on unvanquished, they have been accused of betraying an overt political mindedness and a violation of that much harped upon maxim of 'art for art's sake.'"Oh Toni

Soul crushing. We in the West know nothing about degradation. The strife and misery of this narrative! And yet the writing is captivating, the modulation of emotion through action and image masterful. A novel of people whose very essence, they’ve been told for thousands of years, is defilement. I must read more on caste and how it came to be. It’s incomprehensible to the Western mind. Bakha, a strong young man, a sweeper of latrines, has spent time at the British barracks, where he was treated a...

"He sniffed at the clean, fresh air around the flat stretch of land and vaguely sensed a difference between the odorous, smoky world of refuse, and the open, radiant world of sun. He wanted to warm his flesh; he wanted the warmth to get behind the scales of the dry, powdery surface that had formed on his fingers; he wanted the blood in the blue veins that stood out on the back of his hand to melt." You know, in a memoir of his first story “Lost child”, Mulkraj Anand mentioned that he dared to

This is only a short book and the first two-thirds are quite interesting - a day in the life of a downtrodden Untouchable latrine cleaner and his rat-eating family. The preaching of the last third rather spoiled it though. It is true that flush lavatories would solve the problem for the toilet-cleaning caste, but it is hardly a solution for the Untouchables, no matter what name Gandhi gave them.Part of the problem of the Untouchable caste is that it isn't actually a problem at all for anyone who...

A single event in the life of an untouchable toilet-cleaner, pressed into child labour due to illness in the family. It is stretched into a book, with every detail etched out. Why is it so poignant? Because we know, without it being explicitly told to us, that this is it, this is his life - it is going to be a life of repetitions, of insults piled on insults, of gradual deadening of the senses, of childhood worn away into an early old age, of bitterness and submission, of daily degradation. Unti...

Forget about Batman, Superman or the Hulk. They are all just comic book super heroes. This is the real deal. Enlarge the picture in the book's cover so you can get a good look at him, the photo courtesy of the India Office Library and Records. A flesh and blood Untouchable with god-given superhuman powers. Here are some amazing things he is capable of:1. He can part a throng of people with just the words: "Posh, posh, sweeper coming!" as he comes carrying his broom (cf. Moses with his stick, par...

So worth it! Happy World Book day!(23rd Aril, 2021)I like this book for it made me feel the actual anger of the young main character and the different range of emotions which went high and low as he wanted me to experience while he was going through all the abuse, assualt and insults.This is the story of Bakha, who is an eighteen year old, belonging to a lower caste whose family of sweepers and latrine cleaners. Brought up by his neglectful and violent father alongwith his two other siblings, Ba...

I almost feel guilty for not liking this book.It's about my country and one of the gravest problems it has faced (and continues to), the atrocious caste system and from which arose the worst possible outcome - untouchability. I did feel pitiful and sympathetic towards the character but I did not like the book which is mostly because I didn't like the narration so much. The writing, at best, is average and the story just tumbles down somewhere in the last 20 pages.This book does its job of rousin...

It is comfortably easy to argue against the practice of untouchability when one isn't at the receiving end. Mulk Raj Anand erases that gulf and puts the reader right into the uncomfortable and worn down ammunition shoes of Bakha, an eighteen year old manual scavenger. The book is relatively short, accounting for only a day in Bakha's life. And Anand ensures that a single day is enough.The arguments against the practice normally revolve around the socio-economic (and sometimes, political) aspect

A day in the life of Bakha the Jemadar (sweeper), and an untouchable. The heart of the book is about the social stigma of untouchability affecting India during the 1930s - the period when this book was written and also the time setting for the story as well. I only remember hearing and reading about the phenomenon of untouchability in Hindu society, when growing up in India during the 70s and early 80s. It still exists to a certain extent in parts of India, or at least spoken about, as I have he...

My first book of 2K17 & first from Mr. Mulk Raj Anand.His Thoughts were far high and beyond than his time. Realizing the truth about the Harijans in that era of British Raj seems to be as the worse among whole period. The Brahmans were actually the root cause of such conditions in Indian Society. Discrimination among the humans in regard of the castes started with them only. No shudra can enter the temple, can't touch anybody. From the perspective of Dalits at that time, it seems to be very irri...

Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable is a novel about a day in the life of one of India's lowest untouchables, sweepers who clean up the excreta left by the poor who do not have access to toilets or even outhouses. From the point of view of a sweeper, contact with Brahmins and other higher cast Hindus is fraught with peril, as accidentally touching a Brahmin can cause a riot, and in this book almost does at two points, once involving the hero, Bakha, and once involving his sister.Untouchable was written...

It's a great book. It is about a day in the life of an untouchable - Bakha. Halfway through the book the story seems ordinary, but the unthinkable ending takes it to another level.Although, for the ones who are reading Mulkh Raj Anand’s book for the first time will be sort of disappointed. The author is known to use Hindustani words in his novels. But in this novel he has translated literal meanings of some words. So while reading, you will come across characters calling 'brother-in-law' to othe...

Written in 1935, this novel is told from the perspective of Bakha, a sweeper, of the lowest level of the outcaste Untouchables. It has a message that gets presented through a sensitive and nuanced portrayal of Bakha as a complex human being with limits and aspirations. He clearly strives to attain a life beyond his station, adopting Western dress from the second-hand and discarded motley of British military clothing that he wears and even his style of sleeping. Still, the attitudes and behaviors...

I have been reading this book for past one year and finished it only today. Reading in between the time when I finished other books and was getting a new one, I had to recall whatever happened till the pages I had read. so we can conclude that this book didn't leave much of an impression on my mind or memory. anyways I read it because I wanted to read a book by Mulk raj Anand and moreover the topic seemed quite a different one than the usual ones. It talks about a day in the life of an untouchab...

I give you two ideas of dystopias. In the first, there is a world most of humanity is scared of touching even by accident some people - there is no visible reason for it, but the fear is real. Not only you can't touch the person, but you also can't touch things they have touched And this is a source of humiliation for those that can't be touched. In the second, half the population of the world is raised with the idea that the mere sight of their body is an offense to decency. I could go on - and...

4.3*The story Mulk Raj Anand weaved 86 years ago, continues to speak to the India today. The writing is wonderful and the way the author has occasionally peppered it with humour is brilliant. Otherwise, it would have been thoroughly painful to read a book with such a depressing theme. The protagonist Bakha was also a likeable creation. Whether an indian or not, I think everyone should read this book atleast once. It shall let you know how ignorance can turn humans into heartless fanatics and sho...

Just 157 pages and one day in the life of eighteen year old Bakha, a "sweeper" in charge of cleaning three rows of public latrines on the edge of his town. He is an Untouchable.Bakha starts his day working "earnestly, quickly, without loss of effort". He dreams of the day he will be able to do the work of his father, the head of all the local sweepers and who is responsible for cleaning the streets of the town and the temple courtyard. His wish is fulfilled that very day when his father becomes

Excellent book!The book is an account of a boy named Bakha, son of lakha, being a sweeper he was not allowed to be entered into the temples and other Hindu religious places as well as the homes of upper caste Hindus. Bakha liked to play hokey and dress like Sahibs and white people of the England, in suit and pants, but he wasn’t allowed to do such things. His father abused him a lot and the family of four people used to fed over the left-overs of the weddings or the breads lying near the filthy

Yet another example of the postcolonial novel about what is to be done, this time dealing with the untouchables of India, which I tend to read more as a way of understanding a time and a place in an intuitive fashion than for literary merit. And I mean Mulk Raj Anand isn't a terrible writer, he's just very much of a time and a place, and very much in debt to 19th Century English and Russian fiction, what with the journey of the individual as he learns the world within a day, complete with a long...

Many years ago I came across the author's name on a Thai paperback entitled จัณฑาล [presumably transliterated from Chandal (p. 92)] on some occasions in those Bangkok Book Fairs but I hadn't read and rarely heard of him. Later I have eventually known him as an eminent Indian fiction writer in English, a contemporary of R. K. Narayan, Ahmad Ali (Pakistani) and Raja Rao (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulk_Ra...) whose pioneering English novels based on Indian rural life and plight started to gain

Untouchable by Mulk Raj Anand, story about Indian caste system and Untouchability. Story about plight of the lower caste, how people drowned themselves in ignorance on the basis of castes and how Untouchability has been onus on Hinduism.An account of one day in Bakha's life who belongs to the lowest caste, was a street sweeper and latrine cleaner. Story about him and his gloomy circumstances which were engulfing his aspirations of being a 'Sahib' slowly. The story ends which a inspiring note whe...

Written in 1935, and set around the same time, this book seeks to demonstrate the plight of the untouchables of India. This story follows just one day in the life of Bakha, a young man in the sweeper caste. He lives with his father, his younger brother and younger sister, and cleans the latrines, while his father sweeps streets and the temple courtyard.The day we follow, begins positively enough for Bakha when, after having cleaned the latrines fo the fourth time, he is promised a second hand ho...

First of all, I have to say it's pretty awesome to have E. M. Forster write the preface for your book.Briefly, this is the story of one day in the life of a young untouchable (latrine-cleaner, lowest caste of Hindu society). We experience all his emotions and all the abuse that is heaped on him and clearly see the horrors of the caste society, but it is much more interesting than that. We experience the teeming vibrancy of Indian life and the convoluted thoughts and feelings of a frustrated teen...

Mulk Raj Anand has used simple english to ask an effective question through the narration of a story. The text probes the readers to question as who were the actual tyrants, the British or our very own people who were socalled 'upper-caste'? The protagonist, Baku encounters various injustuce done to him and he is the depiction of the whole race of the then called 'lower-caste' people. It was a nice read overall!

An interesting, clearly described, memorable, sad story of the day in the life of a young Indian sweeper in India in the 1930s. Bakha is a sweeper who collects human excrement. He belongs to the ‘untouchable’ lowest Hindu caste. He must continually call out ‘sweeper coming through’ when walking the streets so that people of higher Hindu castes can avoid touching him. At that time untouchables were not able to directly draw water from a well, having to wait for a person of higher caste to draw th...

I have written a book review on this book.Can find it on my blog- silentlywescream.blogspot.comHope that helps :)

In 1935, Dr. B.R Ambedkar announced in Yeola his decision to convert from Hinduism. He declared that he would convert to some other religion that would treat him as a dignified human being. To thundering applause, he said, “I was born a Hindu but I will not die one.”Ambedkar’s Yeola Declaration sealed his rift with Mahatma Gandhi, Indian National Congress and Hindu reformism that promised a more equal future for Dalits within Hinduism. It came as the culmination of a series of a political gestur...

Really liked most of it. Didn't like the end soooo much. Would definitely still recommend.Spoke more about the book and my thoughts here: https://youtu.be/Kdt-hvhYs8U?t=749

My To-Read books:1. Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand2. The Shining by Stephen King3. The Notebook by Nicolas Sparks4. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak5. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky6. Perfume by Patrick Suskind7. The boy in Striped Pajamas by John Boyne8. Wild by Cheryl Strayed 9. The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris10. Carrie by Stephen King My first book love book this year was "Untouchable", written by Mulk Raj Anand. I choose this novel to help me better understand our