Anand’s Genuineness and Indigenous Novelists

The Hindu caste system is a well planned scheme of discriminating people which persisted in India for about three thousand years and it still continues its hold in Indian Hindu society. Untouchability, the worst byproduct of this system grasps the Indian Hindu society in its clutches even in the modern democratic India. In the milieu of discrimination on the basis of caste, everyone acts as if they do not discriminate Bakha is an untouchable boy who is healthy, well built and energetic. But he is an outcast in the Hindu Indian caste society: an untouchable. Anand’s novel Untouchable acts as an evidence for the cruelty imparted on untouchables by depicting Bakha’s life story. His other novel The Road also brings out the picture of Bikhu, the untouchable and his sufferings in the setting of democratic India. Bakha’s search to find the meaning in his life and Bikhu’s striving for the escape from the malice of the caste order finally ends up with no much result. Both the protagonists were forced to realize and accept their unalterable fate as untouchables. . Mulk Raj Anand in his first novel Untouchable (1935) has shown that none of the western theoretical models of attaining social justice is successful in the Hindu Indian social context. Munno, the ‘hero-anti-hero’ of Coolie (1936), being a ‘Kshathriya’ by birth is not enslaved by caste, can at least choose to fight back. The fact is that both Bakha and Munoo are helpless laborers. Their service for the society was not valued at all. However, Anand was capable of stretching the metaphors of ‘untouchable’ and ‘coolie’ to a universal scenario suggesting that discrimination based on one’s work existed universally.The two metaphors can undoubtedly be considered as collective metaphors of sociology, history and metaphysics of human suffering. Man’s inhumanity to fellow man and discrimination on the basis of work, class and caste is also a universal reality