Utopian Society Depicted with an Effective Language

Abstract

Mulkraj Anand strongly believes that the downtrodden is not born but made. With his personal experience and also with his gift of imagination, he depicts the pathetic socio-economic conditions of the downtrodden in pre-independence India through his novels. In short, he is the angry young man who cannot tolerate exploitation of one man by another man, or of one class buy another. He is a sworn enemy to all kinds of exploitation, be that economic, social or political. The monster of socio economic exploitation is hydra-headed and can assume numerous forms. The first and the strongest type of exploitation are economic. Economic order that existed in the pre-Independence India and whose remnants are found even now to some extent, allowed untold wealth and power to be concentrated into a few hands. These few powerful capitalists and zamindars could dictate very harsh and humiliating terms to the many poor. The rich and powerful had full liberty to exploit the many poor and to grind them mercilessly under the wheel of economic monopolies.

Mulkraj Anand’s fictional novel “Untouchable” makes us knowing the real life spectrum of socio-economic exploitation of the downtrodden in pre-independence India. The story of the novel set in the so-called outcastes’ colony of unnamed town during the British rule and is based on the life of the most downtrodden, despised and oppressed section of Indian Society, the outcastes. The present paper aims at – how the downtrodden suffer during the period of pre-independence Indian socially as well as economically in the light of the characters of Mulkraj Anand’s “Untouchable”