Mulk Raj Anand’s half a dozen novels deal with the social issues in pre-independent India. Unlike the other Indian Social novelists, Anand dealt with the theme of lowest strata of Indian Society – the untouchables., M. R. Anand‘s special quality is that he had the first hand experience of all that he wrote. Anand elevates the level of discourse to a moral essay on humanism where art is concerned with the truth of the human condition. In the present article I am going to focus on the practice of the untouchability popular in pre-independent India.
Mulk Raj Anand was a prominent Indian writer in English. He was a socially committed novelist, who was born in Peshawar in 1905. His father was a coppersmith and his mother come from peasant family. His literary career was launched by family tragedy. He had a good deal of literature on his behalf. He has written more than a dozen novels and about seventy short stories and essays also. His attitude and views as a novelist had many influenas. His social condition, his parents, his education, and the books he read and the people he met all have a share in making Anand a novelist. Anand was aware about the sufferings, poverty, hunger and humiliations of Indian people. That’s why it became Anand’s aim as a novelist to focus attention on the sufferings and problems of the outcaste. No one in India had yet dealt with these subjects because of there crude realities. Thus Anand writes on what may be called “Epics of sufferings and humiliations”. He has also made Indian novel a novel of socialism and realism. He has introduced new type of characters. As Shrinivasa Iyenger observes, “Anand is often undistingaished and seems to be too much in hurry; but the vitality of his creations, the variegate...
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...y. Through the character of Sohini & Pandit, Anand depicted the irony of high caste Hindus who blams the lower caste on the one hand & on the other wanted to use them. Anand’s ‘Untouchable’ is the best example of socialism popular in the contemporary society of India.
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From beginning to end, the novel, “The God of Small Things”, authored by Arundhati Roy, makes you very aware of a class system (caste) that separates people of India in many ways. This separation among each other is surprisingly so indoctrinated in everyone that many who are even disadvantaged by this way of thinking uphold its traditions, perhaps for fear of losing even more than they already have, or simply because they do not know any other way. What’s worse, people seen as the lowest of the low in a caste system are literally called “untouchable”, as described in Roy’s novel, allowing, according to Human Rights Watch:
English Literature. By Stephen Greenblatt and M. H. Abrams. 8th ed. Vol. 2. New York:
Mahasweta Devi, always writes for deprived section of people. She is a loving daughter, a clerk, a lecturer, a journalist, an editor, a novelist, a dramatist and above all an ardent social activist. Her stories bring to the surface not only the misery of the completely ignored tribal people, but also articulate the oppression of w...