Humanism in Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable

Pages:333-334
Kamal Rani (Department of English, Vaish College, Rohtak, Haryana)

Dr. Anand is known all over the world for his robust humanism, peasant sensibility, compassion and forthright outlook. It is his keen awareness of human predicament and empathy for the sufferers that propelled him into creative writing. Thus the themes Anand has chosen for his fiction are based on such problems as casteism, poverty exploitation and human suffering caused by a variety of factors:- political, economic, social and cultural. He refuses to accept the traditional approach to interpret suffering. He asserts: “I would no longer live by the dead ideas of traditional philosophies, the ritual of the old regions or by the tame words of the classics” Thus, he always tries to generate in the readers an urgent awareness of the dehumanizing social evils. Anand forcefully attacks evil of all sorts. In ‘Untouchable’, casteism is the evil. Anand seeks to arouse consciousness and incorporate the philosophy of humanism in his writing. He treats characters with ample compassion and sympathy. His philosophy is akin to European Hellenism. He examines human predicament and suggests “return to natural man” as the solution.