Subaltern In Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable

17/PELA/034 Bakha as a subaltern in Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable

Mulk Raj Anand’s first novel Untouchable is a unique experiment in the art of fiction by its concentration on a single day’s experience in the life of its hero, Bakha. Anand’s achievement in the novel becomes more striking as the hero is an eighteen year old sweeper boy. He belongs to an untouchable community and lives a life that is nothing but uneventful to an ordinary observer. The novel becomes a great work by drawing into its world the life and culture of a whole village community. This novel concentrates on the issue of untouchability and the protagonist Bakha, the sweeper boy as an untouchable. This novel is a social and powerful criticism of the evil of untouchability that made life more miserable and intolerable to the

Concise Oxford English Dictionary explains the term subaltern as, “an officer in the British army below the rank of Captain, especially a second Lieutenant” (1434). The term subaltern is used to indicate marginalised groups and the lower classes. Rober Young says that a subaltern is “a person rendered without agency by his or her social status” (57). Marxist philosopher and theorist Antonio Gramsci used the term “subaltern” for those groups of society who are victims of the hegemony of the upper and ruling classes. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak explains the subaltern’s emotion in her most famous essay, Can the Subaltern Speak? (1985); the subaltern cannot speak until their conditions may not be historically improved. In literature subaltern is a post-colonial concept which means the term generally used to explain the people who belonging to the lower caste, class, weak sex and economically poor groups in the society. Due to the domination and superiority of upper class communities, the subaltern classes were compelled to do menial jobs like cleaning human excrements, sweeping roads,