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Untouchable

Author Mulk Raj Anand
Introduction by Ramachandra Guha
Afterword by E. M. Forster
Paperback
$16.00 US
Penguin Adult HC/TR | Penguin Classics
On sale Jun 24, 2014 | 176 Pages | 9780141393605
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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.
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.

View titles by Mulk Raj Anand

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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.

Author

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.

View titles by Mulk Raj Anand

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