If a novel is defined as a bright book of life, then what name should we give to works that deal with gloomy sectional life or the dreary life of a particular class, a kind of narration which is the special strength of Harishankar Jaladas' fiction? Should we say that he has created a sub-category within the genre of novel by choosing to fictionalize the life of the underclass? However, employing the traditional format of the novel-a pyramidal plot spread over a number of chapters, here 21, in Ramgolam, an eponymous work he has tried to depict the life of the Methars (Scavengers and therefore untouchables) of Chattogram by capturing a close picture of Sarder Gurucharan's family over three generations and his associates. Poverty, insecurity, cramming, dirt and squalor stalk them at every step of their life. Its protagonist Ramgolam, the first one in his community to be armed with the basics of education, wages a movement to fight the religious, social and administrative injustices that have enslaved the members of his community for centuries. But in the face of social and bureaucratic engineering, he can make little mark. He resists but his resistance and its defeat augur a future which doesn't promise them any immediate turnaround. The word Ramgolam, a hybrid coinage and a kind postcolonial linguistic prototype, raises many questions about social objectification that decolonization failed to address and rectify. Ram is a Hindu deity but can the conjuncture of his divine status with that of a servant (golam) hold any beacon for the servant's liberation? Deconstructively speaking, can the chief/head servant because of temporary primacy extirpate his slavery? Isn't the message of his ultimate defeat encoded in his newly acquired hybrid which is also enmeshed in contradiction? One might observe,Harishankar Jaladas' Ramgolam not only gives us the sketch of the life and days and trials and tribulations of a social underclass, a community of Bangladeshi untouchables but also shows how such pariahs are tethered to their fate.