Untouchable

The extraordinarily powerful story of an Untouchable in India’s caste system, with a new introduction by Ramachandra Guha, author of Gandhi Before IndiaBakha is a proud and attractive young man, yet none the less he is an Untouchable – an outcast in India’s caste system. It is a system that is even now only slowly changing and was then as cruel and debilitating as that of apartheid. Into this vivid re-creation of one day in the life of Bakha, sweeper and toilet-cleaner, Anand pours a vitality, fire and richness of detail that earn his place as one of the twentieth century’s most important Indian writers.

Mulk Raj Anand, one of the most highly regarded Indian novelists writing in English, was born in Peshawar in 1905. He was educated at the universities of Lahore, London and Cambridge, and lived in England for many years, finally settling in a village in Western India after the war. His novels on humanism have been translated into several world languages. He died in 2004.