Untouchable (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit

Write a ridiculously simplified synopsis.

Characters/People edit see section history

• Bakha: The main character
• Mahatma Gandhi: Spearheaded the freedom struggle in India and played the major role in gaining independence from colonial rule. He is known as India's "Father of the Nation". He was just released from prison when the story of this book was set. He worked for the upliftment of outcaste people also along with his freedom struggle.
• Lakha: Bakha's father and head of the sweepers
• Balcha: Add a description of this character.
• Gulabo: Washerwoman in the outcaste colony and she dislikes Bakha
• Ram Charan: Bakha's friend.. and Gulabo's son...
• Sohini: Bakha's sister
• Hakim: A doctor who diagnosed and saved Bakha's life when he was a child.
• Hutchinson: British national and Christian Missionary in Bakha's village
• Havildar Charat Singh: An excellent hockey player in the army barracks. He was very kind to Bakha.
• Sahib
• Singh
• Rakha: Bakha's younger brother
• Chota: Leather worker's son and Bakha's friend

Quotes edit see section history

• “"We must realize that it is religion which prevents them from touching us."”

  Lakha

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• He was a sweeper, he knew, but he could not consciously accept that fact.

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• The outcastes were not allowed to mount the platform surrounding the well, because if they were ever to draw water from it, the Hindus of the three upper castes would consider the water polluted. Nor were they allowed access to the near-by brook as their use of it would contaminate the stream.

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• So in the highest moment of his strength, the slave in him asserted itself, and he lapsed back, wild with torture, biting his lips, ruminating his grievances.

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• He was so much in a hurry that he didn’t even remember the fact of his being an Untouchable, and actually touched a few people. But not having his broom and basket with him, and the people being all in a flurry, no one noticed that a sweeper-boy had brushed past him. They hurried by.

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• His uncle at the British barracks had told him when he first expressed the wish to be a sahib that he would have to go to school if he wanted to be one. And he had wept and cried to be allowed to go to school. But then his father had told him that schools were meant for the babus, not for the lowly sweepers.

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• He didn’t know that with the growth of years he had lost the freedom, the wild, careless, dauntless freedom of the child, that he had lost his courage, that he was afraid.

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• It was as if the crowd had determined to crush everything, however ancient or beautiful, that lay in the way of their achievement of all that Gandhi stood for. It was as if they knew, by an instinct surer than that of conscious knowledge, that the things of the old civilisation must be destroyed in order to make room for those of the new. It seemed as if, in trampling on the blades of green grass, they were deliberately, brutally trampling on a part of themselves which they had begun to abhor, and from which they wanted to escape to Gandhi.

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• Bakha felt a queer sadistic delight staring at the beggars moaning for alms but not receiving any. They seemed to him despicable. And the noise they made through their wailings and moanings and blessings oppressed him.

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• What a dexterous workman ! ’ the onlooker would have said. And though his job was dirty he remained comparatively clean. He didn’t even soil his sleeves, handling the commodes, sweeping and scrubbing them. ‘ A bit superior to his job,’ they always said, ‘ not the kind of man who ought to be doing this.’ For he looked intelligent, even sensitive, with a sort of dignity that does not belong to the ordinary scavenger, who is as a rule uncouth and unclean.

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• The blood in Bakha’s veins tingled with the heat as he stood before it. His dark face, round and solid and exquisitely well defined, lit with a queer sort of beauty. The toil of the body had built up for him a very fine physique. It seemed to suit him, to give a homogeneity, a wonderful wholeness to his body, so that you could turn round and say : ‘ Here is a man.’ And it seemed to give him a nobility, strangely in contrast with his filthy profession and with the sub-human status to which he was condemned from birth.

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Setting & Locations edit see section history

• India
• Bulashah

First Sentence edit see section history

Series & Lists edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Mulk Raj Anand (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 823

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Literature & Fiction › World Literature › Australia & New Zealand
• Books › Literature & Fiction › World Literature › Indian
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Literary
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Classics
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Classics