While he walks in a half-delirious state, we learn: While the untouchable or rather Old Bapu walks towards the Sikh contractor’s house, his head feels woolly, and he is ready to faint because of the hunger and thirst his body was undergoing. One can feel the terrible heat of the Indian urban landscape, especially through the vivid descriptions of Mulk Raj Anand and his use of Punjabi and Hindustani words and idioms in his text. Narayan’s short story ‘A Horse and Two Goats’ has a line which is similar to Mulk Raj Anand’s line in this short story that is the line where the untouchable thinks his age to be fifty years until the Sikh contractor mocks him saying that he looked like he was seventy years old instead of fifty. Narayan was a contemporary writer of Mulk Raj Anand.

As he makes his way towards the contractor’s residence, we notice how the bleak, hot, and searing heated atmosphere burns our own skin through the lyrical quality of Mulk Raj Anand’s prose. He needs work to fill the gnawing pangs in his stomach. The untouchable is elderly and tired but wishes to live and not die. In this short story titled ‘Old Bapu’, an untouchable walks the hot summer road on a hungry stomach to Shikohpur, which was a long seventy miles walk to seek employment from a Sikh contractor. Certain sentences in the story are similar or echo the narration of Anand’s most celebrated work, Untouchable, which stemmed from the writer’s private life. In this short story titled ‘Old Bapu’, Mulk Raj Anand highlights the terrible gnawing hunger and poverty of a fifty-year-old untouchable urban laborer. Mulk Raj Anand was a famous writer and journalist of the twentieth century who, through his ethereal, almost lyrical prose and narrative style, brings out the plight of the untouchables, lower castes, downtrodden women, and the labor classes in India. ‘Old Bapu’ is a realistic short story highlighting the plight of untouchables in early twentieth-century India penned by the well-known Indian writer Mulk Raj Anand. ‘Old Bapu’ by Mulk Raj Anand: Short Story Analysis

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