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 191-249Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4, Pages 191-249 Summary
The next day, Saturday, is a half day. Munoo explores Bombay. He heads to the beach of the Arabian Sea to get away from the claustrophobic noise and confusion of the city. He is enthralled by the sea breezes until he sees a storm gathering on the horizon. On the way back, a heavy rain starts; the “earth seemed to shake and the elements to reverberate with a weird agitation” (192). By the time he returns to the hut, the rains have collapsed the straw roof. With nowhere else to go, he heads across the courtyard to Ratan’s tenement, a solid three-story home with a courtyard and a small garden. Ratan, with a “deep flush of a broad grin” (194), happily takes in Munoo. The tenement is crowded, but Ratan’s family welcomes Munoo. They give him a bowl of rice and offer him a straw pallet to sleep on.
The following day, Munoo and Hari return to the factory. They are stunned to learn that the company still intends to charge them rent for the destroyed hut and, on top of that, that they expect Hari to cover the cost of repairing it. Hari does not have the money. The factory’s financial director tells him the money will be docked from his pay. In addition, the shift will collectively cover the cost of fabric damaged by the storm. Ratan is outraged. He tells the coolies waiting to head into the factory about a steel plant where he once worked where the workers finally called a work stoppage to improve the dangerous conditions in the factory, the long hours, and the minimal pay. Ratan encourages the workers to take their issues to the local union board. Jimmie Thomas, the foreman, chastises Ratan for wasting time and threatens to dock his pay for starting late. Ratan confronts the factory’s financial director over the immorality of the excessive charges to Hari and Munoo for the hut. The confrontation is testy, but Ratan refuses to back down. He slips Hari some rupees to help cover the charges.
Living now with Ratan, Munoo bonds with the burly, jovial figure. The cramped quarters only make the friendship more profound. Ratan takes a protective interest in the boy. On one Saturday night, Ratan escorts Munoo through the dark, narrow backstreets around the factory to a district Munoo had never seen. He smells musky perfume. Along the streets he sees “gorgeously attired women […] smiling strange smiles and winking at the swarms of men who walked along, leisurely” (210). Munoo is embarrassed although he is not sure why.
Ratan takes him into one building, into a salon heavy with incense with richly padded furniture and a host of women in scanty apparel. Munoo, stirred in ways he does not understand, wants to touch the women but merely watches as they dance to percussive music. Ratan dispatches the boy home, and Ratan stays. When he returns home, Munoo is comforted by Hari’s wife, who soothes his agitation: “We belong to suffering” (215), she coos to him, and she takes him into her arms, against her full breasts, a physical nearness that both comforts and tortures Munoo.
Monday morning Ratan is fired for no cause. The dismissal is a blow to his dignity: “He stood upright, aching to express himself, to express the demon in him, the monster of pain which the actual knowledge of poverty, of the weakness of the people around him and their suffering, had given him” (217). His first instinct is to rally the coolies to a strike, but the men around him waiting to go into the mill are “broken, dispirited, docile and reticent” (219). He heads to the union offices to file a grievance for wrongful termination. On the factory floor, the coolies whisper about a possible work stoppage. The mill administration, all British born, meet to discuss the atmosphere of agitation and the increasing evidence across India of a rise in worker strikes. They see their coolies are restive and decide the coolies need to be reminded of how much they need work. They announce that the mill will run for a while on short time. The coolies, desperate for the work, beg the foreman to reconsider. Now facing wage cuts and slow starvation, they collapse in postures of prayer. The agitated atmosphere is further charged when rumors circulate that a Hindu child has been kidnapped by the hated Muslims.
At the union hall, where Ratan and Munoo head, panicked workers demand the union board call a strike to close the mill and demand better conditions. The rhetoric is heated.
You coolies are the roofless, you are the riceless, spinners of cotton, weavers of thread, sweepers of dust and dirt; you are the workers, the millions who crawl in and out of the factories every day. They are the robbers, the thieves, the brigands who live in palatial bungalows on the money you earn for them (232).
The leadership, however, refuses. A strike would be a disproportionate response to a short-term decision. The rally spills into the streets, and a full-blown riot breaks out. Fearing looting and pillaging, police swarm the streets. Munoo is separated from Ratan and finds himself amid “panting hordes rushing through time and space, convulsed, hysterical and fierce, like the hundred forms of Satan who hounded men to death” (238). He is certain he will die. He thinks to head to the beach for safety.
The next morning, with the factory closed and coolies wandering the streets, Munoo is uncertain where to go. He feels “the essential loneliness of the soul, that apartness which he had succeeded in shattering by his zeal and enthusiasm for work” (244). The police presence among the still-agitated coolies is menacing, and Munoo thinks he hears gunfire. He moves through the throng blindly: “For the first time in his life, he realized the hardness of life” (248). He refuses to curse his life. He realizes that “he was still in love with life, that he was fairly happy when he had food every day” (248). It is then that he is grazed by a touring car trying to push its way through the crowds. The woman in the car, Mrs. Mainwaring, unsettled by the accident but eager to get out of Bombay, instructs her driver to gather the stunned boy and put him in the car. They drive off.
Chapter 4, Pages 191-249 Analysis
The words of Hari’s wife, “We belong to suffering” (2015), are intended to soothe Munoo, to ease him from the whirlwind of emotions generated by his night trip to the brothel. Munoo, after all, is a teenager. The exotic women, the heady cloud of perfume, the percussive music, and the seductive dancing send Munoo into a confusing anxiety. It is understandable that a teenage boy would be excited, confused, fascinated, curious, and aroused by the performance in the brothel. However, the experience leads to where every experience in Munoo’s short life has led: frustration, disappointment, and free-floating anger. When he is comforted by Hari’s wife, the bleak words seem incongruous to providing comfort. Given its life of disappointment and frustration, a life sentenced to suffering, the coolie class is best served by awareness of that dark reality. The moment marks the end of Munoo’s childhood, ended not by sexual initiation in the brothel, the experience he is denied, but rather by the certainty gifted to him by Hari’s well-meaning wife. In “gentle, gentle” words, she kisses his forehead and tells him he can look forward to nothing but suffering. Stop expecting better. Stop hoping. Not surprisingly, Munoo is uncertain how to react, at once eased by the gentle comfort of this maternal figure and tortured by the implication of her words.
In this section of Chapter 3, the tone grows progressively darker. With a half day off, Munoo heads instinctively to the beach. The great open Arabian Sea will comfort him as the hills and trees and the gentle breezes back home comforted him. Nature, however, rages in the form of a monsoon storm. The storm terrifies Munoo. Nature has lost its benevolence. Munoo is terrified “at the wild noise of the rain, the sudden claps of gurgling thunder, the sharp, tearing rents of bright, white-red lightning overhead and the uncertain moving earth beneath his feet” (193). The storm destroys Hari’s hut and leaving Munoo homeless. Like the crows that descend on him as he tries to eat outside Victoria Station, nature here attacks Munoo, stripping him of even the most basic necessities.
In this section, a hero arises to guide young Munoo toward hope. Ratan, with his gargantuan appetites, his imposing muscular bulk, and his hearty laugh and broad grin, fascinates Munoo. He is drawn to the man’s irrepressible joie de vivre. Ratan is that rare coolie—his name is Hindi for “precious gem”—who sees the moral righteousness of demanding that workers be treated with dignity, fairness, and respect. Ratan has suffered, as he makes clear when he addresses the coolies at the union hall. He recounts the hellish conditions in a steel factory where he worked before coming to Bombay. Rather than live with the risks of handling molten steel and the appalling conditions on the factory floor, Ratan led a strike. In a novel where the coolies are passive and broken in spirit, Ratan rallies the dead-eyed coolies in the cotton mill to reanimate the energy of righteous anger and passionate activism. The coolies, however, fear the loss of income a strike would bring.
The rhetoric at the union hall is stirring: “We are human beings,” a union leader exhorts the crowd, reading from the draft of document enumerating workers’ rights, “not soulless machines. We want the right to work without paying bribes. We want clean houses to live in. […] We want shorter hours. We want a good wage” (234). Still, the call to strike fails. Even the union board declines to shut down the mill and demand better conditions, better housing, and better pay. When the factory doors are closed anyway as a strategy for the directors to break the spirit of their own work force, the coolies turn not to striking for their rights but rather to the empty supplications of praying in the streets. The street riot that erupts following Ratan’s wrongful termination is less fueled by workers upset over the factory owners’ actions as by the rumors that a Hindu girl had been snatched by the much-hated Muslims.
With the factory closed indefinitely, Munoo wanders the streets. He has no idea why the streets have erupted or why the factory has been closed. The coolies, his friends, his coworkers, “crept like ghosts through the wasteland of the streets that afternoon” (228). In the confusion, Munoo is separated from Ratan. That severance marks Munoo’s threshold movement into his adulthood. Jobless, homeless, and alone, he acknowledges at last “the hardness of life” (248), what he has resisted since he wandered the hills back in Kangra. He feels the “loneliness of the soul” that he had been able to ignore because of the distraction of employment (244). He sees in a confession that is wrenching in its poignancy how happy he can be with work and food and a place to live, needs so basic that being denied them seems immoral. Although he feels death pressing close, “stalk[ing] the earth in the illusory forms of masses of darkness” (238), he will not surrender to death.
Just seconds before he is struck in the street by a touring car, he decides: “He was in love with life” (248). Indifferent to him and concerned only about getting out of Bombay, the wealthy woman and her chauffeur (a Muslim who thinks that under different circumstances he would have happily killed the little Hindu boy) gather up Munoo like an inconvenience. Thus begins what will be Munoo’s last adventure.
