Book Review: The Untoucable by Mulk Raj Anand

Untouchable by Mulk Raj Anand
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The practice of cleaning mephitic dry latrines and carrying away the shit (faeces, if you will) is euphemistically called “manual scavenging”. Can scavenging be done non-manually? dictionary.com defines a scavenger as 1. An animal or other organism that feeds on dead organic matter, 2. A person who searches through and collects items from discarded material, 3. A street cleaner. There is no mention of scraping off the turds and other consistencies of anal excrement into leaky baskets and carting off the load on the head to dispose it elsewhere.
Reading this book made me want to shrivel up and disappear from this unjust Universe. I am ashamed of our caste-ridden society. Sadly, the abhorrent practice of “manual scavenging” and the attendant boycotting a section of people prevails in some villages, notwithstanding Modi’s best efforts. The bureaucratic inertia will take some more decades to crawl out of its lethargy. This is the protagonist’s younger brother:

He seemed a true child of the outcaste colony, where there are no drains, no light no water; of the marshland where people live among latrines of the townsmen, and in the stink of their own ding scattered about here, there and everywhere; of the world where the day is dark as the night and the night pitch-dark. He had wallowed in its mire, bathed in its marshes, played among its rubbish-heaps; his listless, lazy, lousy manner was a result of his surroundings, He was the vehicle of a life-force, the culminating point in the destiny of which would never come, because malaria lingered in his bones, and that disease does not kill but merely dissipates the energy. He was friend of the flies and the mosquitoes, their boon companion since his childhood… his dirty face on which the flies congregated in abundance to taste-of the sweet delights of the saliva on the corners of his lips.

What a malodourous, soul wrenching, humiliating and psyche-crushing existence of this unfortunate section of society, not even included with in the ambit of humanity.
I did not like this book for its verbiage and quaint style of writing.

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