Untouchable Summary

2436 Words10 Pages

The reason why Anand’s best known work ‘Untouchable’ was published is due to the fact that the publishers –Wishart were a Left leaning firm. The book was published in 1935. Anand founded the Progressive Writers’ Association so that the likeminded writers could all get a platform to voice their concerns and views. Two other Indian writers who were with him in this association were Ahmed Ali and Sajjad Ali. This Association was formed in London in 1935. During this period of strife Anand associated with many famous Britishers and became friends with George Orwell, Stephen Spender, Bonamy Dobree and T.S. Eliot. He also worked for Leonard and Virginia Woolf as an editor at the Hogarth Press. While he was working in T.S. Elliot’s chronicle ‘Criterion’ he became friends with E,M, Forster who helped him to convince Wishart to publish his book and even wrote the foreword. There are records that he worked as a reviewer in the ‘New Statesman’ and the ‘Life and Letters Today’ magazine. Before ‘Untouchables’ he became well known as a critic with the publication of his book …show more content…

The march through Marseilles had been merely a fleeting expedition, and he was obsessed with something which struggled to burst through all the restraints and the embarrassment of the unfamiliar, to break through the fear of the exalted life that the Europeans lived, the rare high life of which he, like all the sepoys, had only had distant glimpses from the holes and crevices in the thick hedges outside the Sahib’s bungalows in India. And, as he walked under the shadows of mansions with shuttered windows like those on the houses of Marseilles, reading the names of shops on the boards, as he walked past vineyards dappled by the pale sun, past stretches of grassy land…his tongue played with the name of this city, Orleans, and there was an echo in his mind, from the memory of something which had happened here, something which he could not

Open Document