Thresholds of caste and nation: Mulk Raj Anand’s spatial aesthetics in Untouchable

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article argues that Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable employs a spatial aesthetics – premised on the politics of social spaces and the disruptive potential they hold – to illustrate the active contestations that constituted the social formations of caste and nation in late colonial India. In particular, it suggests that the novel highlights the political potency of thresholds by constructing “formal thresholds” that serve as textual corollaries for Bakha’s troubled affective experience of casteized spaces within the emergent nation. Attending to the novel’s spatial aesthetics, which has not yet received the critical consideration it merits, allows us to bridge the realism–modernism binary that has framed recent scholarship on Anand by juxtaposing the novel’s verisimilar spatial descriptions with its innovative spatio-affective structuring. Moreover, it troubles the novel’s popular association with Gandhian nationalism, suggesting that Anand emphasizes the sociopolitical fissures dividing the nation and questions both sides of the Gandhi-Ambedkar debate regarding Dalit liberation.