Untouchable: An Indian Life History

Reading this book was very satisfying to my curiosity. It only portrays one person's life, and that person is probably fairly unusual in some respects. But, as a transcribed and translated oral narrative from an "outcaste", it includes much authentic detail about the customs of life passages, such as in courtship and marriage, in childbirth, in death, and also the struggles of the village community theater group, as well as descriptions of true "daily life": obtaining food and eating, relationships between parents and children, wives and husbands, the complications of living within earshot of family and neighbors, traveling, finding work, getting paid, and even the activity I, a middle-class mall-culture American, refer to in public as "going to the bathroom". This book remains simultaneously frank and delicate, due to the particular propensities of the man Muli, the informant, and the faithful rendering of the author, James Freeman.Freeman, an academic type, in the course of finding an informant who would be willing, for payment, to spend long hours talking and several months engaged in an activity that might be considered odd or even idle to his peers, came to undertake this work with Muli who turns out to be (in plain language) a pimp. It may be because Muli desires above all other things being connected with people of the highest castes that he cultivates delicacy when speaking of unsavory topics like "professional" sex, unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. He is a very gossipy man so he'll tell you everything he knows about his customers, his employees, and everyone else in his village, and while he excuses himself much, he seems never to cheat us by leaving out bad information about himself.If this book were only about what it is like to be a pimp in rural India, it would not have been so interesting. Muli comes from an otherwise industrious family, who mainly do pick-up work in quarries and farm-fields, and tells much about them and about his own attempts to please his parents and general propriety by doing this work himself.The first section of the book (about a chapter in length) is James Freeman's description of the undertaking itself, and for the remainder of the book, Freeman opens each chapter with a short explanatory synopsis (italicized, giving it a parenthetic feeling) followed by Muli's narrative. Muli is a smooth talker, an idler, a curious man who gets into everybody's business: he makes an unexpectedly perfect informant, resulting in a rich work.