In Mulk Raj Anand’s novel Untouchable, the sun represents the restorative possibilities of the natural world. The village where Bakha and his family live is “polluted” both literally and metaphorically, filled with the bad smells of human waste and the degrading tensions of class and caste divide. But when Bakha goes outside and feels the sun on his skin, he gains new hope about his future. Rather than obsessing over the invented, artificial distinctions that consume most of his day, Bakha feels that standing in the sun is akin to a “new birth,” marveling that when he stands in the fresh, warm air, there is “nothing but the sun, the sun, the sun, everywhere, in him, on him, before him and behind him.” And in many of his worst moments throughout the narrative, whether he is being shouted at by the touched man or harangued by Pundit Kali Nath, Bakha can only collect himself by taking in the sun’s rays. After all, though caste and colonization have their own harmful power, nothing can match the “magnificent force of the terrible brightness glowing on the margin of the sky.” It is telling, therefore, that by the end of the novel, Bakha has linked his sense of personal strength directly to the sun’s power; as the sun goes down, turning the sky a burnt red, Bakha feels that same “burning sensation” within him. And while Bakha’s life as a sweeper is precarious and constantly under threat, the “glowing,” energizing sun will glow on forever.
The Sun Quotes in Untouchable
Where the lane finished, the heat of the sun seemed to spread as from a bonfire out into the empty space of the grounds beyond the outcastes colony. [Bakha] sniffed at the clean, fresh air around the flat stretch of land before him and vaguely sensed a difference between the odorous, smoky world of refuse and the open, radiant world of the sun. He wanted to warm his flesh; we wanted the warmth to get behind the scales of the dry, powdery surface that had formed on his fingers; we wanted the blood in the blue veins that stood out on the back of his hand to melt. He lifted his face to the sun, open eyed for a moment, then with the pupils of his eyes half closed, half open. And he lifted his chin upright.
It was a discord between person and circumstance by which a lion like [Bakha] lay enmeshed in a net while many a common criminal wore a rajah’s crown. His wealth of unconscious experience, however, was extraordinary. It was a kind of crude sense of the world, in the round, such as the peasant has who can do the job while the laboratory agriculturalist is scratching his head, or like the Arab seamen who sails the seas in a small boat and casually determines his direction by the position of the sun, or like the beggar singer who recites an epic from door to door. […]
As he sauntered along a spark of some intuition suddenly set him ablaze. He was fired with a desire to burst out from the shadow of silence and obscurity in which he lay enshrouded.
Bakha saw a sallow-faced Englishman, whom he knew to be the District Superintendent of Police, standing by the roadside in a khaki uniform of breaches, polished leather gators and blue-puggareed, khaki sun helmet, not as smart as the military officers’, but, of course, possessing for Bakha all the qualities of the sahibs’ clothes. Somehow, however, at this moment Bakha was not interested in sahibs, probably because in the midst of this enormous crowd of Indians, fired with enthusiasm for their leader, the foreigners seemed out of place, insignificant, the representative of an order which seemed to have nothing to do with the natives.
As the brief Indian twilight came and went, a sudden impulse shot through the transformations of space and time, and gathered all the elements that were dispersed in the stream of [Bakha’s] soul into a tentative decision: ‘I shall go and tell father all that Gandhi said about us,’ he whispered to himself, ‘and all that that poet said. Perhaps I can find the poet some day and ask him about his machine.’ And he proceeded homewards.