From Despair to Awakening: Maslow’s Theory of Motivation in Untouchable

Abstract

With the world moving into an era of Artificial Intelligence and robotics, human lives are fleeting through significant changes every minute.  Even amidst such path breaking advancements, a part of human populace continue to perish owing to technological poverty. This is the point where the novel Untouchable continues to astonish posterity owing to its relevance in the modern India. The social evils presented by the author remain prevalent across the country making the work all the more contemporary. Appropriately named “a social document” by writer T.M.J Indra Mohan, the discrimination and stigmatization that the central character faces as an individual ought to be analyzed in different realms. American psychologist Abraham Maslow propounds a set of universal needs that is common to every individual in the society. More popularly known as the theory of motivation, Maslow divided his hierarchy of needs into five levels of a pyramid in his 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation”. The needs are categorized into physiological needs, safety and security, belongingness and love, self-esteem and self-actualization needs. According to his theory, needs lower down in the hierarchy must be satisfied to achieve the higher ones. Taking these factors into consideration, Bakha’s life as a manual scavenger can be analyzed.