[1] The book was inspired by his aunt's experience of being ostracized for sharing a meal with a Muslim woman.

[4] It depicts a day in the life of Bakha, a young "sweeper", who is "untouchable" due to his work of cleaning latrines.

[2] In 2004, a commemorative edition including this book was launched by then Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

The son of Lakha, head of all of Bulashah's sweepers, Bakha is intelligent but naïve, humble yet vain.

Over Bakha's day, various major and minor tragedies occur, causing him to mature and turn his gaze inward.

It isn’t long before he instructs Bakha to come to see him later in the day so he can gift the young sweeper with a prized hockey stick.

High on his good fortune he quickly finishes his morning shift and hurries home, dying of thirst.

A priest from the town temple named Pundit Kali Nath comes along and helps Sohini get water.

Back at home Lakha fakes an illness and instructs Bakha to clean the town square and the temple courtyard in his stead.

His sweeping duties usually keep him too busy to go into town, and so he takes advantage of the situation by buying cigarettes and candies.

It intrigues Bakha, who eventually musters up the courage to climb up the stairs to the temple door and peer inside.

A furious Bakha tries to go back to confront the priest, but an embarrassed and ashamed Sohini forces him to leave.

Distraught over the day's events, Bakha wanders listlessly before going to a set of homes to beg for his family's daily bread.

Sensing his son's anger, Lakha tells him a story about the kindness of a high-caste doctor that once saved Bakha's life.

This starts an all-out brawl between the two teams that ends when a high caste player's younger brother gets hurt.

The chief of the local Salvation Army, a British man named Colonel Hutchinson, comes up to him.

Flattered by the white man's attention, Bakha agrees, but the Colonel's constant hymn singing quickly bores him.

After the Mahatma departs, a pair of educated Indian men have a lively discussion about the content of the speech.

One man, a lawyer named Bashir, soundly critiques most of Gandhi's opinions and ideas.

However, he does understand when Sarshar mentions the imminent arrival of the flushing toilet in India, a machine that eradicates the need for humans to handle refuse.

With this piece of hope, Bakha hurries home to share news of the Mahatma's speech with his father.

"[7] K. M. Christopher also suggests that, while Anand certainly subverted literary traditions of the era in Untouchable through its mere subject matter, the novel also perpetuates the perceived homogeneity of Gandhian reformism.

Ben Conisbee Baer notes that Anand carefully frames the novel between 1933 and 1935: the former is inscribed at the end of the novel to mark the time in which it was written, while the latter year is the actual publication.

Untouchable is a diasporic anti-colonial novel that aims to contextualize the highly fraught politics of India to an Anglo audience, particularly Bloomsbury: "Anand, in trying to establish a counter-connection between colony and metropolis, charts a route which ultimately seeks to reveal what was left out in the 1931 pact between Gandhi and Irwin.