Untouchables: A Novel

What it feels like to be an untouchable? The self-deceptive Indian society, proud of its glorious heritage and ancient wisdom, looks on with a strange callousness while the untouchables’ happy homes are burnt to ashes simply because of their having been born as untouchables! Untouchables is a disturbing, gripping tale of agony and inhuman sufferings of a vast section of India’s population. This heart moving narrative begins with the thoughtless killing of a little girl who had the audacity to quench her thirst with the water meant for cattle. The resultant agitation culminates in the usual, familiar pattern of arson, looting and murders of the innocent. It is an exceedingly absorbing story of an accursed people which has eluded the story-tellers of India – may be out of a sense of fear, or repugnance, or God knows what. All one has to do is to read this widely known but untold story of misery and shame and wonder with a sigh: What man has made of man in this holy land of genius and wisdom. Man does never learn from history and as a natural consequence of the limitless torture and oppression, the insulted and injured souls at long last time their voice of protest and…