Untouchable by Mulk Raj Anand
Published 1935 · 153 pages · 42,000 words · about 3 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Social Realism
How hard is Untouchable to read?
Untouchable scores 50 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 48 out of 100
- Anand transliterates Punjabi abuse and idiom directly into English, and the latrine trade has a vocabulary of its own.
- Sentence structure: 44 out of 100
- Plain declarative prose broken by Bakha's interior monologue, which was radical for Indian fiction in 1935.
- Abstraction: 48 out of 100
- Caste is argued through the physical—sweat, dust, the touch of a hand—with three explicit solutions debated in the closing pages.
- Information density: 52 out of 100
- The mechanics of untouchability in a cantonment town, from water-well rules to temple access, are laid out precisely.
- Narrative indirection: 42 out of 100
- Close third person stays with Bakha throughout; his own confusion is the only distortion.
- Symbolic density: 56 out of 100
- The English hockey stick, the borrowed Tommy's clothes, and the flush toilet each stand for a different escape route from caste.
- Ironic distance: 58 out of 100
- A Brahmin who screams at Bakha for polluting him has just tried to molest Bakha's sister, and Anand lets the sequence do the arguing.
- Resolution withholding: 62 out of 100
- Three cures are offered—Christianity, Gandhi, the flush toilet—and Bakha walks home without choosing one.
- Structural complexity: 38 out of 100
- A single day, dawn to dusk, in one continuous movement modelled on Ulysses.
How Untouchable is regarded
Untouchable holds a literary regard score of 76 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.