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 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary
Munoo, in the touring car heading out of Bombay, is not entirely sure where he is going. He feels “mentally and physically broken […] sad and bitter and defeated, like an old man” (250). In the front seat, May Mainwaring directs the driver to head north. The young Mrs. Mainwaring, an Anglo-Indian by birth, has schemed most of her adult life to be accepted as a “pukka,” that is a genuine Brit, despite her darker-colored skin, which she once tried to bleach, and her distinctive Indian hair, which she tries to straighten and dye. She is tormented by her biracial identity and restless in her Indian home. She drinks when she is alone, and she happily uses her family and friends to network with expatriate Brits, desperate to be taken to England. She uses sex, her promiscuity another effort to make the right connections. She married first a German, hoping that the marriage to an Aryan might establish her as white. When Germans were interred in government-run camps during World War I, however, May divorced him to marry Guy Mainwaring, a much younger British Air Force officer. They quickly had a child, whose distinctive dark skin color indicated that May had the child by a lover. Guy, however, gallantly stayed by his new wife. He spends most of the year with his division in England. Mrs. Mainwaring is now on her way to Simla, nearly 2,000 miles north of Bombay near the foothills of the Himalayans, to set up their new home.
Mrs. Mainwaring is weirdly solicitous to Munoo. She cannot stop looking at the olive-skinned young boy with the “Modigliani face and the lithe body” (250). She tells Munoo she will find work for him in their new house as her personal valet. As Munoo approaches the town of Simla, the sweeping mountains in the distance remind him of his childhood. He feels pleased, on “the border of happiness” (255). He fits in right away in the household as Mrs. Mainwaring is just setting up operations. He does basic kitchen chores. Mrs. Mainwaring, for her part, feels a closeness to the young boy that borders on sexual. Apart from her husband now for more than a year, she admires Munoo’s lean, supple physique: “The regular curves of his young body, its quick sudden flashes of movement, stirred the chords of her being in a strangely disturbing manner” (258). When the young woman gives Munoo an impromptu haircut and tenderly works his hair, Munoo is “unable to control the fire in his blood” (259).
Munoo is given a new assignment. He will be one of the four coolies who will pull Mrs. Mainwaring’s rickshaw, the only kind of wheeled vehicles allowed in Simla. The work is taxing. The rickshaw is unwieldy, more than nine feet along and close to 400 pounds, and difficult to maneuver. The hills are steep and the streets winding and narrow. After only one day of pulling Mrs. Mainwaring on her errands, Munoo is feverish and fatigued. Fearing he might be sick, Mrs. Mainwaring quarantines him in his bedroom and ensures he has fresh fruits and clean water. The fever breaks, and Munoo returns to the rickshaw duties. He likes pulling the contraption. Unlike the other coolies, who complain bitterly, Munoo sings as he helps pull the rickshaw along the tight streets. At night, however, when he is alone and struggling to sleep, Munoo feels alone. During one of those long nights when sleep will not come, Munoo begins to cough. In the morning he notices he is coughing up blood: “Am I dying?” (278), he asks himself, bewildered and terrified.
When a monsoon combs Simla, the house coolies have several days off. Munoo stays in bed despite the impromptu celebrations over the beginning of the monsoon season. When he runs a fever, Munoo is segregated by the health officer when he suspects Munoo has contracted consumption, or tuberculosis, a much-feared bacterial infection of the lungs. Mrs. Mainwaring brings the weakened Munoo fresh fruit and even flowers to cheer him up. He struggles to breathe, “vaguely torn between the fear of dying and the hope of living” (281). He grows weaker, “his body feeling the sand run through the hourglass of time” (281). When the fever ebbs, Munoo wants only to return to the rickshaw duties. Every time he coughs, however, his body feels shaken and weak. Then, without fanfare, early the following morning, Munoo dies, “the tide of his life […] reached back to the deeps” (282). Munoo is 15.
Chapter 5 Analysis
Chapter 5 brings Munoo’s short life to its close. His death is neither grand nor emotional. There is no wrenching goodbye, no brave stepping away from life. Munoo dies in a single sentence, a reminder that within the claustrophobic structures of India’s socioeconomic caste culture, the death of one coolie merits little notice.
The lengthy aside on the background of the wealthy woman whose touring car clips Munoo can seem a misdirection as it has little to do with Munoo’s story. Munoo disappears from the novel as the narrator shares the story of May Mainwaring’s troubling emotional backstory. Her story, however, is critical to understanding Anand’s wider critique of his nation in the midst of its struggle for independence after centuries of British occupation. At the center of May Mainwaring’s dysfunctional psychology is her fierce determination to conceal her Indian identity and pass as British, or at least British enough. The story, set against the considerable problems Anand sees with India’s own caste system, makes plain the challenge that India, moving toward the integrity of being its own nation, needs to confront: the enormous challenge of defining its own identity.
Mrs. Mainwaring is biracial, the product of an affair between an Indian woman and a British army officer. Shamed by the affair, her mother’s family dispatched May to be raised by nuns in a Catholic orphanage. The experience convinces May to be ashamed of her Indian identity. The lengths that she goes to conceal her Indian identity—she tries the painful bleaching process to lighten her skin, and later she burns her hair to lose its tight flaxen brush and dye it British blonde—represent the oppression of the Indian people uncertain after centuries of occupation how exactly to be Indian and proud.
To underscore the misdirection of May’s efforts, she finds irresistible the rich caramel coloring of young Munoo’s skin, the sheen of his black hair, and his almond-shaped eyes. May’s efforts to use sex and then marriages of convenience become a cautionary lesson for Anand’s culture: Be what you are, and reject the feelings of inferiority and shame over your Indian heritage and culture. The baby May delivers after she marries the properly British air force officer reveals her lingering fondness for her own people. It is not enough for the Indian people to dismantle their caste system that demeans and destroys their working class and privileges the empty amorality of the wealthy and educated. India needs to embrace India. Thus May Mainwaring, far from being a misdirection, is crucial to understanding the challenge India faces at its historic crossroads. Denied pride in her culture, desperate not to be what she is, May falls victim to immorality, pettiness, and ethical shallowness. She does not save Munoo; she acquires him.
For Munoo, being kidnapped out of Bombay initially promises more confusion and helplessness. As the touring car makes its way north, however, Munoo begins to feel the familiar pull of the freedom and exhilaration of the Himalayan foothills that he left only 15 months earlier. He feels like a tired old man until, as the car heads north, he is reanimated by the cool breezes, the lush greenery, and the open skies of Simla.
Unaware of the implications of May Mainwaring’s inappropriate attentions—she is perhaps thinking about acquiring Munoo as a long-term lover-for-hire—Munoo dares to be what by now will inevitably be ironic: Munoo feels happy. The work in the kitchen is easy. Even the job pulling the rickshaw, despite the hairpin turns of the narrow streets of Simla, is a joy. He pulls the rickshaw “proudly and willingly” (269), even singing as he labors. For him pulling the rickshaw is better than factory work. He is surrounded not by the noise and stench and crowds of the mill but rather by the sights, sounds, and scents of redemptive nature itself: “The endless lengths of the mountains, the far, far stretches pf sky-high peaks covered with snow, the colossal solidity of their shapeless masses, aroused in him the feeling which he always used to have in childhood” (256). He feasts on fresh fruits, sleeps in a bed, and bathes in perfumed waters. He dares to feel at home; he dares to be content.
The hard lesson Hari’s mother whispered to Munoo after his carefree night in the Bombay brothel echoes: The life of the working class is suffering. The first indication that Munoo is still vulnerable, still helpless is the fever that burns through him for two nights, a precursor of the tuberculosis that will kill him. Munoo is delighted with the solicitous care Mrs. Mainwaring gives him. Even Munoo’s quick recovery from the fever, however, disturbs. Then without warning, without logic, the inevitable happens. Happiness ends. Munoo spits blood. His death plays out against the return of the monsoon season, a way to suggest humanity’s helplessness against the natural world that young Munoo so desperately wants to believe is healing and loving. Within days, despite Mrs. Mainwaring’s care, Munoo sinks into the familiar signs of consumption and its ravages. He feels life slipping away. The novel ends in a single sentence: “But in the early hours of one unreal, white night, he passed away, the tide of his life having reached back to the deeps” (282). The white night symbolizes the White Plague of consumption. Munoo is denied a name, reduced to a generic pronoun. His death leaves no impression, no mark, no legacy. He dies as he lived: alone, forgotten, irrelevant.
