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Untouchable

Untouchable

About the Book

The powerful story of an Untouchable in India’s caste system, now with a new introduction

With precision, vitality, and a fury that earned him praise as India’s Charles Dickens, Mulk Raj Anand recreates in Untouchable what it was like to live on the fringes of society in pre-independence India. Bakha, an attractive, proud, and strong young man, is also an Untouchable, the lowest of the low in India’s caste system. A sweeper and a toilet-cleaner, he must warn others on the street of his status so that he will not pollute them with his presence. In this urgent 1935 re-creation of one day in the life of an outcast, a violent encounter leads Bakha to question his fate—and to find an answer in the unlikeliest of places.

For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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About the Author

Mulk Raj Anand
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 main concern has always been for "the creatures in the lower depths of Indian society who once were men and women: the rejected, who had no way to articulate their anguish against the opressors." His novels of humanism have been trabnslated into several world languages.

The fiction-factions include Untouchable (1935), described by Martin Seymour-Smith as "one of the most eloquent and imaginative works to deal with this difficult and emotive subject," Coolie (1936), Two Leaves and a Bud (1937), The Village (1939), Across the Black Waters (1940), The Sword and the Sickle (1942), and the much-acclaimed Private Life of an Indian Prince (1953). His autobiographical novels, Seven Summers (1950), Morning Face (1968), which won the National Academy Award, Confession of a Lover (1972) and The Bubble (1988), reveal the story of his experiments with truth and the struggle of his various egos to attain a possible higher self.

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About the Author

Ramachandra Guha
RAMACHANDRA GUHA has taught at Yale and Stanford universities, the University of Oslo, the Indian Institute of Science, and the London School of Economics. His books include Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914-1948, Gandhi Before India (a 2014 New York Times Notable Book and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year), and the award-winning India After Gandhi. He has written on social and political issues for The New York Times, and for the British and Indian press, including columns in the Daily Telegraph and the Hindustan Times. He lives in Bangalore, India. More by Ramachandra Guha
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About the Author

E. M. Forster
E. M. Forster (1879–1970) was born Edward Morgan Forster in London. He attended Tonbridge School as a day boy and went on to King's College, Cambridge, in 1897. With King's he had a lifelong connection and was elected to an Honorary Fellowship in 1946. Forster wrote six novels, four of which appeared before World War I: Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908), and Howard's End (1910).   An interval of fourteen years elapsed before he published A Passage to India. It won both the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Finished in 1914, his novel on homosexual themes, Maurice, was published in posthumously in 1971.   He also published two volumes of short stories; two collections of essays; a critical work, Aspects of the Novel; The Hill of Devi, a fascinating record of two visits Forster made to the Indian state of Dewas Senior; two biographies; two books about Alexandria (where he worked for the Red Cross during World War I); and, with Eric Crozier, the libretto for Benjamin Britten's opera Billy Budd. The Times called him "one of the most esteemed English novelists of his time." More by E. M. Forster
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