49 pages • 1 hour read
Mulk Raj AnandCoolie
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1936A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 4, Pages 145-191Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4, Pages 145-191 Summary
As the circus train pulls out for distant Bombay, Munoo is as excited as he is terrified: “He was going away to a new world, to the new, the wonderful world of a big city where there were […] rich people who just threw money about to the coolies in the street” (145). Wonderful things, he is sure, are about to happen. As he tries to get comfortable on a crumpled sack, he cannot even imagine the city: “Tall buildings appeared before his mind’s eye, like those clean-cut, white stone buildings in […] Daulatpur. Beyond that and the conception of broad streets his mind failed to imagine anything” (148). The train ride is more than a thousand miles west to coastal India. Munoo watches as India rolls past, a world he does not know. The elephant keeper smuggles food to Munoo, fried sweet bread and carrot pickles. As the train finally pulls into Bombay’s cavernous Victoria Station, Munoo whispers quietly to himself, “Come now, heart’s desire” (152).
He heads into Bombay’s crowded streets. The noise and chaos confuse him. To calm himself, he settles down on a bench to eat the fried bread he kept. As soon as he unwraps the bread, crows descend on him and make off with all of it. Munoo walks the streets and notices how many coolies sleep on the sidewalks. Thirsty, he buys soda water from a restaurant at a ridiculously inflated price. As he wanders about the steamy streets, he watches as a family of coolies, a couple and their two children, begin the perilous crossing amid the steady flow of carriages. Munoo notices their smallest child, a girl, freezes as she is crossing. Without thinking, Munoo rushes into the traffic, rescues the girl, and returns her to her grateful parents. The man, Hari, promises to help Munoo find work in the cotton mill where he worked a few months earlier. They will go to the factory first thing in the morning.
That night, Munoo tries to find a safe place to sleep. The pavement stone is still hot from the sun. The city air is heavy with the stench of rotten fruit from the open markets and the pungent odors of urine and sour milk. The street itself is littered with the sleeping coolies. Some of the dark stretched-out figures, Munoo fears, may actually be dead: “He felt dread steal through him, the dread of sleep, the uncanny fear of bodies […] whose souls might suddenly do anything, begin to snore, grunt, groan, or lie still in a ghastly, absolute stillness” (165). Good to his word, Hari, along with his family, appears the next morning to walk Munoo to the cotton factory, a walk of several miles on crushed stones and rubbish. Bombay begins to lose its luster. The city oppresses Munoo: “[The houses] seemed peopled by swarms of men and women, layer upon layer, in a sort of vertical overcrowding, literally on top of each other” (168). They arrive shortly after dawn and join other coolies milling about the gates hoping for work.
The Sir George White Cotton Mill is a sprawling factory complex, the largest, Hari tells Munoo, in all of India. Munoo is impressed and assumes there must be good jobs and good pay. It is then that Jimmie Thomas, the hulking foreman with a curling waxed moustache, opens the factory gates. Munoo is intimidated by the foreman, who berates the coolies looking for work. He twirls his moustache as he barks at them. Hari approaches Jimmie and tells him the two of them are interested in long-term employment. Jimmie tells them the wages. The pay is a pittance, but Jimmie snarls at them to take the offer or he’ll find other coolies. Hari agrees. Jimmie tells him that first he must pay him a commission for giving them employment. Jimmie then tells them they have to arrange for company housing. Hari insists that Munoo live with them at least initially. The straw huts are small. The roof slopes, the dirt floor is mostly mud, and the room stinks of grease and smoke. Munoo is overcome with anxiety and nearly faints. To his surprise, Hari finds out that to secure housing he must put down most of what will be his first paycheck. When he and Munoo head to the company store to purchase provisions, they find prices inflated to the point where they can only afford rice, butter, and flour.
The following morning, both Hari and Munoo are awakened by the factory whistle. They head to work without eating. Munoo is terrified by the size of the factory floor. The low steel ceiling increases the volume of the thundering machines to a deafening roar. Even this early, the factory floor is sweltering. The air is barely breathable, thick with the sooty “crystals of cotton flakes” and saturated with the greasy stench of motor oil (185). As foreman, Jimmie berates the coolies, mocks them as animals, and reminds them how replaceable they are. Jimmie shows Munoo his job, basically moving a handle back and forth to move one of the machine’s massive arms as it combs the cotton. It is mindlessly repetitive work. The perspiration streams down Munoo’s face and his back, but he cannot release the lever as that might cause the cotton threads to snap. By noon, when Munoo collapses in the shade outside the factory doors, he is already bored. He expects lunch, but the company provides only a wafer-thin bread made from ground chickpea and something coated in sugar that Munoo does not recognize.
While Munoo eats glumly, Hari comes up, alarmed. His youngest son working in the spinning shed brushed too close to the belts leading into the jenny and injured his arm. The mill provides no medical help, and the nearest hospital is too far to walk. Munoo despairs over his friend’s helplessness. He wonders if he may be some kind of bad luck figure. First his father, then his uncle, then Sheila, then Prabha—everyone who gets close to him seems to suffer misfortune: “If I am ominous, why don’t I die. My death would rid the world of an unlucky person. I would like to die. It were better to be dead” (189). He imagines he is little more than a tiny boat tossed about a furious river—“the tiny skiff of his soul tossed to and fro on the sun-speckled edges of this foam […] a small point struggling in vain to cross the river” (190).
When the coolies are called back to work, Munoo rallies, determined to run his machine with dedication. As he works, he greets a massive coolie named Ratan who is singlehandedly working a huge machine nearby. The man’s girth, his “frank and open” face (190), and his broad grin give Munoo a tonic rush of confidence. At the end of a grueling 11-hour work day, the great machines are silenced, and a weary Munoo heads home.
Chapter 4, Pages 145-191 Analysis
In Chapter 4, Munoo comes at last to accept the reality of his life, the limits of his dreams, and the inevitability of a life of no expectations. The chapter is set in Bombay, literally and symbolically as far as Munoo gets from the tonic natural world of his childhood. Bombay is everything Kangra is not. Munoo’s initial impressions of the city, its teeming sidewalks, its blasting heat, its dangerous traffic, its hordes of homeless coolies, show him the evident irony of his expectations stirred as he watches, intoxicated and happy, the crazy antics of the circus. The first part of Chapter 4, which follows Munoo through his first brutal day of work in the cotton mill, begins the process of Munoo’s disenchantment.
Much as in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, in which the impoverished Joad family treks from Oklahoma to California believing that California will be the answer to their dreams, Munoo believes Bombay, the “wonderful world of the big city” (145), is the answer to his dreams. He must learn, as the Joads do, the bitter reality that dreams are not for the proletariat. Munoo, newly arrived in the city, prepares to enjoy a quick meal on a bench in the “land of his heart’s desire” and take in the “strange, hybrid, complex, cosmopolitan” city (152). No sooner does he unwrap the sweet cream cakes than menacing crows descend and carry off the cakes. Nature, which had been for the boy a loving friend, now turns against him. It is a frustrating welcome to a city that may not, the confused and hurt Munoo suspects, be the answer to his dreams.
Munoo’s rescue of the girl terrified by the traffic reflects the compassion, the humanity, and the selflessness of the coolie class, the worth and integrity of which India’s caste system dismisses. The rescue of the girl is the sole act in the novel not compelled by selfishness or by personal gain. Munoo bolts into the traffic with no thought of his own welfare and without thought of reward. The heroic action is generated solely by the compassionate and generous heart of a coolie.
In the world of the coolie, there operates no sense of reward. The coolie, however noble the instincts or how generous the heart, is doomed to the hard world of menial labor. Munoo’s reward for this heroic gesture is the hellish job the girl’s father secures for him in the sweat shop. The cotton mill represents the dehumanizing logic of industrialism. India relied on cheap factory labor to move its economy forward. Within the caste system, the country had a readymade underclass of the uneducated, including its children, who could be inserted into the factory like interchangeable cogs. Because of their station in life, the coolies would work for meager pay and never expect the owners to expend the resources necessary to make the factory environment safe.
The cotton factory thus is a scathing indictment of the deplorable conditions in India’s factory system and its dehumanizing of the workers. Under the direction of the malevolent foreman Jimmie Thomas, who twirls his moustache in a menacing gesture that echoes the caricature villains in era melodramas and cinema, the factory emphasizes productivity and quotas, efficiency and bottom-line thinking. The foreman herds the coolies like animals, chastises them for the smallest error, heaps expletives on their work performance, and reminds them incessantly that they are replaceable. Even before Hari and Munoo have worked a day, the company scams them out of their first paycheck. They have to pay a commission fee just for getting a job. They must live in company housing, as squalid as it is, and pay rent ahead of time. The company commissary charges exorbitant prices for necessities. It is one indignity after another. The coolies are, as the narrator intones, “pawns.” Munoo suspects as much when he spends his first night in the city on the sidewalks crowded with coolies, half-naked beggars, and lepers. In what becomes an emerging motif of the novel, Munoo struggles to breathe the “hot blast of air which came loaded with the sickly foetid odour of ghee, sandalwood, urine, sour milk, fish and decaying fruit” (165). Much like the sweltering cotton mill, the world is smothering Munoo, a foreshadowing of his death from consumption.
When Munoo first looks about the tiny hut where he and Hari and his family are supposed to live, an airless and inhospitable lean-to without windows and with mud floors, Munoo swoons, nearly fainting. That is a tipping point moment in Munoo’s emotional evolution, the first time he clearly perceives the real conditions of his life: “His dreams were shattered […] as he smelt the damp, foetid smell that oozed from its sides. […] He suddenly felt a sweat cover his face, and his head seemed to swirl in a black frenzy of movement” (176). He struggles now to comprehend the dimensions of his life. He thinks for a moment the problem must be him. The reflection is heartbreaking because Munoo does not see what Anand understands and what in turn he hopes the reader understands. The problem is not Munoo. Everyone who comes in contact with him, the boy reasons, ends up dead, hurt, or broke. His perception of himself reflects his conditioning by the caste system to dismiss his own value. The caste system destroys a coolie’s sense of self-esteem. Treated like a sub-human, denied compassion, and refused dignity and respect, Munoo naturally blames himself. He still has much to learn.
