Untouchable

Bakha is a young man, proud and strong; even attractive. He is also an Untouchable in India's caste system. Sweeper and toilet-cleaner, the lowest of the low, he must warn others on the street so that he will not pollute them with his presence.

Mulk Raj Anand's extraordinarily powerful story of an Untouchable in India's caste system, with a new introduction by Ramachandra Guha, author of Gandhi.

Bakha 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.