Anand’s use of imagery in his novel Untouchable.

MEG – 07: INDIAN ENGLISH LITERATURE

ASSIGNMENT 2019 - 2020

                                                                                                               Max. Marks: 100

2. Examine Anand’s use of imagery in his novel Untouchable. 

Answer.: Untouchable opens with a shot of the outcaste’s colony. Anand gives us a thick description of the home of Bulashah’s outcastes by describing not only the visual appearance of the colony, but also the types of people that live there and their living conditions. For example, besides the sweepers, the colony is also home to “the scavengers, the leather-workers, the washermen, the barbers,” etc. They live in “mud-walled” houses near a fetid, rank brook filled with the filth of the public latrines.

The smells of the colony are also described in explicit details. The air is polluted by “the odour of the hides and skins of dead carcasses left to dry,” the dung of various livestock “heaped up to be made into fuel cakes,” and human waste. As the reader reads on it's as if the “biting, choking, pungent fumes ooz[ing]” from the colony is constricting their breathing in addition to the characters'.

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