NEW DELHI, Sept 28: Celebrated Indian novelist Mulk Raj Anand, who chronicled the anguish of the lowest of the low in India's rigid social hierarchy, died on Tuesday at age 98, his family said.

Mr Anand, the son of a coppersmith in Peshawar, died of pneumonia at a hospital in Pune where he had been admitted on Sept 17. Mr Anand was most famous for his 1935 novel 'Untouchable', which narrates a day in the life of an Indian condemned to work as a toilet cleaner because he was born into Hinduism's lowest caste.

The English-language novel's introduction was written by E.M. Forster, the British author of 'A Passage to India', who said 'Untouchable' went "straight to the heart of its subject and purified it".

In later years, however, low-caste activists - who prefer the term 'Dalit', which means 'oppressed', to 'untouchable' - would accuse Mr Anand, who was not a Dalit, of a patronising tone.

He spent much of his youth in Britain, studying at Cambridge and the University of London, and travelled to Spain as a Republican volunteer in the civil war.

He spent World War II as a scriptwriter for the BBC in London, where he grew close to the Indian independence movement, culminating in his return to India in 1946. He settled in Bombay and set up an arts magazine.

Mr Anand's other major novel, published in 1936, was 'Coolie', the story of a 15-year-old child labourer who dies of tuberculosis. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh spoke with Mr Anand's family to mourn his death, the author's personal assistant Ram Gohar told the Press Trust of India news agency. -AFP