Mulk Raj Anand’s first novel Untouchable was published in 1935. Anand, then a Bloomsbury intellectual, had written the first draft in 1929, while living in Sabarmati Ashram with Mahatma Gandhi. He completed the novel in 1930 over a long weekend: ‘the book poured out like hot lava from the valcano of my crazed imagination’. The novel was turned down by nineteen publishers in London. After Anand had despaired and contemplated suicide, the twentieth took it, because E.M. Forster offered to write a preface for it.
July-August 1977, volume 2, No 4