Untouchable

In Mulk Raj Anand's controversial novel, he conveys precisely, with urgency and barely disguised fury, what it might feel like to be one of India's Untouchables.

Bakha is a young man, a proud and even an attractive young man, but none the less he is an outcast in a system that is now only slowly changing and was then as cruel and debilitating as that of apartheid.

Into this re-creation of one day in the life of Bakha, sweeper and latrine-cleaner, Anand poured a vitality, fire and richness of detail that have caused him to be acclaimed as his country's Charles Dickens as well as this century's greatest revealer of the 'other' India.