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ISSN 2278-2540 | DOI: 10.51583/IJLTEMAS | Volume XV, Issue VI, June 2026

Caste and Community in the Novels of Mulk Raj Anand: A Critical

Rereading of Untouchable and Coolie

Chandra Mukesh Swami

Assistant Professor, Department of English Jagannath University, Jaipur, Rajasthan, India

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.51583/IJLTEMAS.2026.150600177

Received: 29 June 2026; Accepted: 04 July 2026; Published: 20 July 2026

ABSTRACT

This paper undertakes a close critical rereading of caste and community in two of Mulk Raj Anand's early novels,

Untouchable (1935) and Coolie (1936), read together as a diptych on the structural production of human waste

under colonial modernity. Rather than treating caste and class as parallel or interchangeable systems of

exclusion, the paper argues that Anand's fiction traces a specific historical hinge: the moment at which a ritual

hierarchy of purity and pollution, inherited from pre-colonial social organisation, is absorbed into and partially

reconfigured by an emerging colonial-capitalist economy of wage labour. Untouchable compresses this

argument into the single day of Bakha, a young sweeper in the fictional cantonment town of Bulashah, whose

body is marked as permanently polluting regardless of his conduct or intention; Coolie extends it across the

itinerant, multi-year odyssey of Munoo, an orphaned hill boy whose successive employments in Sham Nagar,

Daulatpur, Bombay and Simla show caste stigma mutating into, without ever being replaced by, the disposability

of the unskilled worker. Drawing on close reading, postcolonial theory, and the historical record of colonial

governmentality, the paper contends that Anand's much-discussed 'solutions'--conversion, Gandhian reform, and

the machine, on the one hand, and trade-union solidarity, on the other--are staged not as answers but as

unresolved provocations, and that this formal irresolution is itself the novels' most enduring political argument.

The paper closes by situating this reading against more recent Dalit-critical scholarship that has questioned the

adequacy of a non-Dalit, upper-caste author's authorial voice to represent Dalit interiority, arguing that Anand's

fiction is best read today as a historically significant but structurally limited intervention rather than a final or

sufficient account of caste.

Keywords: Mulk Raj Anand; Untouchable; Coolie; Caste; Dalit Literature; Colonial India; Social Realism;

Class and Labour; Postcolonial Narrative; Gandhian Reform; Literary Representation of Marginality.

INTRODUCTION

Mulk Raj Anand occupies a founding position in Indian writing in English, conventionally grouped with R. K.

Narayan and Raja Rao as one of the genre's first internationally read practitioners. What distinguishes Anand

within this trio is the deliberateness with which his early fiction turns the novel into an instrument of social

indictment. Untouchable and Coolie, published within a year of each other in the mid-1930s, are not incidentally

about poverty and caste; they are organised, at the level of plot, structure, and voice, around the specific project

of making an English-reading audience -- colonial and metropolitan alike -- confront the mechanisms by which

Indian society renders certain bodies permanently unclean or permanently disposable.

This paper argues that the two novels are best read together, not as a pair of thematically similar case studies but

as complementary halves of a single argument about how hierarchy is reproduced under colonial conditions.

Untouchable isolates caste in its most concentrated ritual form: pollution by touch, in a single provincial town,

over a single day. Coolie dilutes and disperses that same logic of exclusion across geography, time, and economic

sector, following Munoo from a domestic household to a small-town factory to a Bombay cotton mill to a hill-

station rickshaw stand, and in doing so shows caste stigma shading into, and partially displaced by, the naked

disposability of wage labour under industrial capitalism. Read in sequence, the novels trace a historical transition

-- one in which the vocabulary of purity and pollution persists even as new economic hierarchies of employer

and coolie, mill-owner and hand, memsahib and servant, take on much of caste's structural work.

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The following sections proceed in five stages. Section 2 sets out the paper's method. Section 3 situates the novels

within the colonial reorganisation of caste identity. Section 4 offers close readings of Untouchable and Coolie

in turn, attending to narrative technique as well as theme. Section 5 examines the two novels' treatment of

community, solidarity, and the limits of individual and collective agency. Section 6 considers the reception and

disputed legacy of Anand's work, including the important challenge posed by later Dalit-critical scholarship to

the adequacy of an upper-caste author's representation of Dalit experience. The conclusion draws these threads

together and reflects on what, if anything, remains useful in Anand's diptych for readers encountering caste in

twenty-first-century India.

AIMS AND METHOD

The paper has two related aims: first, to offer a textually grounded account of how caste and emergent class

hierarchy operate in Untouchable and Coolie, correcting several factual imprecisions that have circulated in

secondary commentary on these novels; and second, to use that close reading as the basis for an evaluative

argument about the novels' politics and limits, rather than treating them as settled, self-evidently progressive

texts.

Methodologically, the paper combines close reading of the primary texts with reference to the historical

scholarship on caste under colonial rule (particularly the codification effects of census-taking and legal reform)

and to postcolonial and Dalit-critical frameworks that have interrogated the politics of representation in Indo-

Anglian social-realist fiction. Where the paper cites biographical or textual detail -- character names, place

names, plot sequence -- these have been checked against the novels themselves and against standard scholarly

and reference sources, since a surprising number of secondary accounts of Untouchable and Coolie circulating

online contain avoidable errors of this kind (for instance, misnaming the fictional town in which Untouchable is

set, or conflating Munoo's varied employments with a single occupation). Where a source could not be

independently verified, this is noted rather than silently incorporated.

Caste, Colonial Governmentality, and the Historical Background

The caste system that Anand's fiction anatomises was not a static survival of pre-colonial India carried unchanged

into the twentieth century; it was, by the 1930s, a hierarchy that colonial administration had itself helped to

harden into its modern form. The decennial census, introduced in British India from 1871 onward, required caste

to be recorded as a fixed, singular attribute of every individual, converting what had often been a locally variable

and negotiable set of practices into an official, bureaucratically legible category. Colonial courts, land-revenue

settlements, and recruitment policies for the army and police further entrenched particular caste groups in

particular occupational and social positions, frequently in alliance with the same dominant local elites whose

authority the caste hierarchy had traditionally underwritten. The effect, as historians of the period have argued,

was not simply the perpetuation of an existing hierarchy but its partial reinvention as an object of modern

governance.

Anand wrote his two novels against this backdrop, and also against the backdrop of the intensifying nationalist

debate over caste reform in the 1930s, in which M. K. Gandhi's Harijan movement and his qualified, paternalistic

language of upliftment stood in uneasy tension with B. R. Ambedkar's more structural critique of Hinduism itself

as the source of untouchability. It is worth noting -- because Untouchable stages this tension directly, through

Bakha's ambivalent response to Gandhi's speech -- that Anand does not simply endorse the Gandhian position

his narrative dramatises. The novel gives real interpretive weight to the sceptical voices of the lawyer Bashir,

who doubts Gandhi's programme, and to the poet Sarshar, who admires Gandhi's ethical seriousness while

insisting that the mechanical flush toilet, by eliminating the sweeper's occupation itself, would do more than any

amount of moral exhortation to end untouchability. The novel's famous refusal to resolve these three proposed

remedies -- conversion, reform, the machine -- should therefore be read less as authorial indecision than as a

considered structural choice: Anand dramatises the reform debates of his moment without pretending that fiction

can adjudicate them.

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LITERARY ANALYSIS OF THE SELECTED NOVELS

Untouchable: The Single Day as Formal Argument

Untouchable's most significant formal decision is temporal: the entire novel unfolds over a single day in the life

of its eighteen-year-old protagonist, Bakha, a sweeper and latrine-cleaner in the fictional cantonment town of

Bulashah. This compression is not merely economical; it is argumentative. By refusing Bakha a narrative that

develops or resolves over months or years, Anand insists that the indignities Bakha suffers -- being struck for

accidentally brushing against a high-caste man in the bazaar, being barred from the temple, watching his sister

Sohini falsely accused of 'polluting' the priest Pundit Kali Nath after he has in fact assaulted her -- are not

exceptional events within an otherwise ordinary life but the recurring structure of every day Bakha will ever live.

The final lines of the novel, in which Bakha trudges home no wiser about which of the day's proposed solutions

will save him, make the same point formally: tomorrow will, in all likelihood, look exactly like today.

Anand's narrative technique reinforces this argument. The novel moves fluidly between an external, almost

documentary description of Bulashah's outcastes' colony and Bakha's own interior consciousness, rendered in a

style influenced by contemporary modernist experiments with stream of consciousness. This interior access

matters: it is precisely because readers are given Bakha's private shame, resentment, and flickers of desire for

the Tommies' clothes and manners that his degradation cannot be dismissed as a merely sociological fact

belonging to a distant 'them.' The technique produces what might be called an ethics of proximity -- a formal

strategy for closing the gap between an English-reading audience and a figure that colonial and caste ideology

alike had rendered unreadable, indeed untouchable, as a subject of ordinary sympathy.

At the same time, the novel is unsentimental about the limits of individual sympathy as a solution. The Christian

missionary who might be expected to offer Bakha genuine consolation instead reduces him to an object of

evangelical interest, more concerned with converting a soul than attending to a person; even Havildar Charat

Singh's kindness, in promising Bakha a hockey stick, is a small, personal gesture that leaves the structure

producing Bakha's humiliation entirely intact. Anand's critique, in other words, operates simultaneously on two

levels: an emotional appeal to individual conscience, and a structural argument that individual conscience,

however genuine, cannot by itself dismantle an institution as thoroughly embedded in economy, religion, and

bureaucracy as untouchability.

Coolie: The Picaresque as Diagnosis of Class

Where Untouchable concentrates its argument in time, Coolie disperses it across space. The novel follows

Munoo, a fourteen-year-old orphan from the village of Bilaspur in the Kangra hills, through a succession of

employments that together compose a kind of inverted bildungsroman: rather than maturing into social

integration, Munoo is driven from position to position by exploitation, each new employer replacing the last

without ever offering him security. He is first placed as a domestic servant in the household of Babu Nathoo

Ram in Sham Nagar, where the household's mistress subjects him to casual cruelty disproportionate to his age

and his errors; he flees by train to Daulatpur, where he finds a rare interval of something like family warmth in

the household of the pickle-factory owner Prabha Dayal, before Prabha's business partner Ganpat's fraud ruins

the factory and again turns Munoo out; he travels with a passing circus to Bombay, where he becomes a hand at

the Sir George White cotton mill, befriends the wrestler and labour agitator Ratan, and is caught up in a

communal riot precipitated, the novel strongly implies, by the mill management's manipulation of Hindu-Muslim

tension to break an incipient strike; and he is finally struck by the car of the Anglo-Indian Mrs Mainwaring, who

takes him to Simla as a household servant and rickshaw-puller, where overwork and untreated illness culminate

in his death from tuberculosis while still in his teens.

It is important to correct a description that recurs, inaccurately, in some secondary summaries of the novel:

Munoo is not principally a railway labourer in Amritsar. His single, unsuccessful attempt to find casual work as

a station coolie occurs only briefly, during his period of destitution in Daulatpur, and the novel's substantive

geography runs instead through Sham Nagar, Daulatpur, Bombay, and Simla. This distinction matters for the

novel's argument, because the variety of Munoo's employments -- domestic service, factory labour, and finally

personal service in a colonial hill station -- is precisely the point: Anand is not documenting a single occupational

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grievance but tracing how the same underlying disposability of the poor recurs across radically different sectors

of the colonial economy.

Coolie's picaresque structure -- Munoo's episodic movement from place to place, encountering and then losing

a fresh cast of characters at each stage -- has sometimes been read as a structural weakness, a sign of loose

plotting. Read against its thematic argument, however, the episodic form does real work: it enacts, at the level

of narrative structure, the very absence of continuity and security that defines Munoo's material existence. No

relationship Munoo forms is permitted to become a lasting attachment, because it is precisely the poor's lack of

durable social ties -- their permanent availability for extraction and dismissal -- that constitutes their

vulnerability. In this sense, Coolie's apparent formlessness is not a lapse from novelistic coherence but a

deliberate mimicking of the coolie's own condition.

Where Untouchable is anchored in the ritual vocabulary of pollution, Coolie is anchored in the vocabulary of

ownership and use: Munoo is repeatedly described, by employers and by the narrative voice reporting their

perceptions, in terms that liken him to an animal or an implement rather than a person, most explicitly in the

recurring 'monkey dance' with which he entertains and disarms adults who might otherwise punish him. This is

Anand's clearest illustration of how caste-inflected dehumanisation, once loosed from its ritual moorings, does

not disappear under colonial capitalism but is repurposed by a new vocabulary of class and utility. Both novels,

that is, are about the same underlying phenomenon -- the production of a class of persons who may be used

without being fully recognised -- but Coolie shows that phenomenon persisting after its explicitly religious

justification has receded.

Community, Solidarity, and the Limits of Collective Agency

Both novels stage moments in which solidarity among the marginalised offers, briefly, an alternative to the

isolating logic of caste and class. In Untouchable, this solidarity is thin and largely familial or occupational --

Bakha's bonds with his sister Sohini, his friends Chota and Ram Charan, and his cautious, transactional

relationship with Havildar Charat Singh -- rather than organised or political; the novel does not show Bakha's

community mounting any collective challenge to the caste hierarchy, and this absence is itself significant. Bakha

experiences Gandhi's arrival in Bulashah as a spectacle he witnesses rather than a movement he joins, and the

novel is careful not to overstate the transformative reach of that speech: Bakha is moved, briefly hopeful, and

then walks home to a life that the narrative gives no reason to expect will change.

Coolie goes further in dramatising organised resistance, through the figure of Ratan and the strike ferment at the

Bombay cotton mill, but here too Anand withholds triumphalism. The strike is derailed by a communal riot that

the narrative suggests was deliberately provoked by the mill's management, precisely in order to fracture worker

solidarity along religious lines before it could consolidate along class lines -- an early and pointed literary

treatment of a strategy of divide-and-rule that recurs throughout the industrial history of colonial India. Munoo,

separated from Ratan in the chaos, ends the episode more isolated than before, not less. Anand's fiction is thus

considerably more sceptical about the imminent availability of collective agency to his protagonists than the

more celebratory readings of these novels sometimes suggest: solidarity is shown as a real and valuable

possibility, but one that the novels' plots consistently frustrate rather than reward, a choice that keeps faith with

the historical difficulty of organising labour and caste resistance under colonial conditions in the 1930s, rather

than offering readers a consoling fantasy of easy emancipation.

Reception and Contested Legacy

On publication, Untouchable and Coolie were received -- helped by E. M. Forster's foreword to the former -- as

bold interventions into subject matter that mainstream Indian and British fiction had largely avoided, and Anand's

reputation as a founding figure of socially engaged Indian writing in English has proved durable; both novels

remain standard texts in undergraduate and postgraduate syllabi on Indian literature in English.

That durability, however, has not gone unquestioned. A significant strand of later Dalit-critical scholarship has

challenged the adequacy of Anand's authorial position -- that of an upper-caste, England-educated writer -- to

represent Dalit interiority and experience from the inside. Critics working in this tradition have argued that

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Untouchable's sympathetic but externally observed portrait of Bakha risks what has been described as a

'homogenising' effect, in which the specificity of Dalit self-understanding and agency is subordinated to the

narrative requirements of an upper-caste reformist argument addressed, ultimately, to an upper-caste and colonial

readership. This is a serious and, in this paper's assessment, largely persuasive line of critique, and it complicates

any reading of Anand as simply and sufficiently a champion of the marginalised. It does not, however, fully

displace the novels' historical significance: Untouchable and Coolie remain among the earliest sustained attempts

within Indian fiction in English to make caste and labour exploitation the explicit, organising subject of a novel,

and their limitations are themselves instructive for understanding the conditions under which even well-

intentioned social-realist writing can reproduce the very hierarchies of voice it sets out to contest. Reading Anand

today, in other words, is well served less by uncritical celebration than by holding these two evaluations together:

acknowledging the historical importance of the intervention while attending seriously to the critique of its

standpoint.

CONCLUSION

Read together, Untouchable and Coolie compose a two-part argument about the persistence and mutation of

hierarchy under colonial conditions. Untouchable isolates the ritual logic of caste pollution in its most

concentrated form, compressing an entire argument about the structural, non-individual nature of untouchability

into a single day. Coolie extends that argument across an itinerant, multi-sited working life, showing how the

same underlying disposability of the poor migrates from an explicitly religious vocabulary of purity and pollution

into the ostensibly secular vocabulary of wage labour, ownership, and use. Neither novel offers its protagonist,

or its reader, a resolved political programme; both instead use unresolved endings -- Bakha's uncertain walk

home, Munoo's early death -- to insist that the problem they have staged remains open. That formal refusal of

easy resolution is, this paper has argued, not a weakness in Anand's fiction but its most serious and lasting

contribution, even as later Dalit-critical scholarship rightly presses the further question of who is best positioned

to narrate that unresolved problem, and on whose behalf.

REFERENCES

1. Anand, Mulk Raj. (1935). Untouchable. London: Wishart.

2. Anand, Mulk Raj. (1936). Coolie. London: Lawrence & Wishart.

3. Bhatnagar, Anjana. (2009). Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable: A Critique. The Criterion: An International

Journal in English, 1(2), 1-5. [Verify against original issue.]

4. Chakraborty, Jayita. (2017). The Representation of Untouchables in Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable.

International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences, 2(4), 33-40. [Verify against original issue.]

5. Ghosh, Jyotsna. (2006). Dalit Women: Vanguard of an Alternative Politics in India. New Delhi: Sage

Publications. [Verify edition/ISBN.]

6. Jain, Jasbir. (1992). Mulk Raj Anand: His Art and Concerns. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers &

Distributors. [Could not be independently confirmed; a book of this title is otherwise attributed to C. J.

George (Atlantic, 1994). Please verify authorship before submission.]

7. Kachru, Braj B., Kachru, Yamuna, & Sridhar, S. N. (2008). Language in South Asia. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

8. Kumar, Sanjay. (2003). The Novel in English: A Study of the Indian Novels in English. Indian Literature,

47(4), 233-253. [Verify against original issue.]

9. Mukherjee, Meenakshi. (2002). Realism and Reality: The Novel and Society in India. New Delhi: Oxford

University Press.

10. Niranjana, Tejaswini. (1992). Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism, and the Colonial Context.

Berkeley: University of California Press.

11. Roy, Pinaki. (2003). Mulk Raj Anand's Coolie: A Study in Irony. Indian Literature, 47(6), 99-106. [Could

not be independently confirmed; please verify against the original journal issue before submission.]