Mulk Raj Anand

“The outcastes’ colony was a group of mud-walled houses that clustered together in two rows, under the shadow both of the town and the cantonment, but outside their boundaries and separate from them. There lived the scavengers, the leather-workers, the washermen, the barbers, the water-carriers, the grass-cutters and other outcastes from Hindu society.”

Mulk Raj, Untouchable

• MULK Raj Anand

• 1905 (Peshawar, Pakistan) – 2004 (Pune, Inde)

• Langue d’écriture : Anglais

Auteur indien anglophone, il commence à écrire dans les années 1930 sur les conditions de vie des castes les plus pauvres de la société indienne, dans une langue simple qui utilise le plurilinguisme pour faire entendre les dialectes de certaines régions ou castes (comme le hindi ou le pendjabi). Son premier roman, Untouchable (1935), décrit les effroyables conditions de travail et d’existence d’un dalit, un intouchable. Auteur engagé, il participe au Mouvement pour l’Indépendance de l’Inde et soutient la Guerre civile Espagnole.

• Untouchable (1935) ;
• Coolie (1936) ;
• Two Leaves and a Bud (1937) ;
• The Village (1939) ;
• Across the Black Waters (1939) ;
• The Sword and the Sickle (1942).

« Well, we must destroy caste, we must destroy the inequalities of birth and unalterable vocations. We must recognize an equality of rights, privileges and. opportunities for everyone. The Mahatma didn’t say so, but the legal and. sociological. Basis of caste having been broken down by the British-Indian penal code, which recognizes the rights of every man before a court, caste is now mainly governed by profession. When the sweepers change their profession, they will no longer remain Untouchables. And they can do that soon, for the first thing we will do when we accept the machine, will be to introduce the machine, which, clears dung without anyone having to handle it-the flush system. Then the sweepers can be free from the stigma of untouchability and assume the dignity of status that is their right as useful members of a casteless and classless society. »
« In fact, » mocked Bashir, « greater efficiency, better salesmanship, more mass-production, standardization, dictatorship of the sweepers, Marxian materialism and all that ! »

Mulk Raj, Untouchable