There is an ongoing debate about the novel's representation of the dalit or "untouchable" community. For Arun P. Mukherjee, for example, the novel has a "homogenizing function" that focuses on the "essentialized native's 'resistance' to 'the colonizer'" and fails to fully develop the "native's own ideological agendas."[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. Following Foucault, Christopher sees Gandhi as "policing the discourse of untouchability", which Anand arguably perpetuates through literary discourse.[8]
Alternatively, Ramachandra Guha argues in the introduction to the Penguin edition of the novel that Anand is ultimately ambivalent about Gandhi's policies, as evidenced by the conversations about public policy at the end of the novel.
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."[9]
Anand himself cites the time he spent at Gandhi's Sabarmati Ashram in 1927 as a source of inspiration for the social protest novel, but he also suggests that by the time he composed Untouchable that he had left "philosophical systems—including humanism" behind.[10]
