Coolie

The Himalayas symbolize the power and wonder of nature against the mean-spirited and crass ugliness of humanity. Munoo’s short life is bookended by time he spends in the foothills of the Himalayas. Growing up, the boy is enthralled by the panoramic majesty of the distant Himalayas. Unaware of the increasing financial problems faced by his uncle, or of the implications of his fast-approaching departure from Kangra, he wanders about the open fields, feeling the healing nearness of the mountains and reveling in the dynamic of open space, content to be a part of such vastness:

Then there was the cool breeze, the snow breeze that was rising even as he sat there now, stirring the acacia trees, while the cicadas rasped in the thickets, the frogs croaked in the shadows, the swamps, the birds sang, the butterflies flitted over the wild flowers and the insects buzzed over the pollen for honey (4).

Munoo embraces without thought “the lavish beauty” into which he is immersed. (4), but he will lose this bucolic, harmonious natural world. When Munoo begins his journey from town to city, he moves into increasingly smaller, noisier, and more dangerous environments. The confusion of the tight grid of streets, the oppressive clutter of the slums, the cloaking curtain of buildings, the tight press of crowds, and the constant cacophonous blare of traffic confuse and alarm Munoo. The two factories where he works, first the chutney plant and then the cotton mill, are hellishly claustrophobic spaces, the air thick with toxic fumes, noisy from huge machines. Compared to the mountains, the factories are gritty and dirty spaces heavy with oppressive heat, unforgiving and terrifying places where one misstep can be fatal.

In the end, Munoo returns to nature and feels once again its healing energies. When Mrs. Mainwaring decides to take in Munoo, Munoo returns to the Himalayas. They drape the horizon beyond Simla. Immediately, he recalls the magnificence of the mountains and the feelings of wonder and freedom that nature gives him: “The endless length if the mountains, the far, far stretches of sky-high peaks covered in snow, the colossal solidity of their shapeless masses, aroused in him the feeling which he always used to have in childhood” (256). It is restorative. Munoo is happy again—happy to slave in the kitchen, happy even to pull Mrs. Mainwaring’s ponderous and unwieldy rickshaw up and along the steep streets of Simla. For the briefest moment, Munoo feels an emotional reunion with nature, ironically just weeks before he will die.

In works of social realism, the factory is a powerful symbol of the depersonalization of commercial industrialism. The factory of the early 20th century reduced workers to cogs in a vast, whirling process of goods production. The factory, noisy, dangerous, and filthy, became a symbol of the soul-numbing, spirit-crushing, identity-destroying new world of the machine. Gone were the skilled craftsmanship of the pre-industrial world, the pride in workmanship, and the individual rewards of creating something. In the pursuit of quicker and cheaper production, factories dismissed as irrelevant the complex needs of their workers as human beings. Now unskilled laborers were treated like things. The conditions were dangerous, the hours long, the pay minimal. When the coolies, outraged over the dismissal of the popular Ratan, meet, their labor agitator regales the workers and has them chant along with him, “We are human beings and not soulless machines” (233).

The Sir George White Cotton Mill where Munoo finds work in Bombay symbolizes this aggressive dehumanizing of the 20th-century worker, the loss of pride and skill in the concept of production, and the exploitation of the undereducated. Anand, however, expands the symbolic value of the factory. In the decade during which Anand published Coolie, India itself was undergoing the first military wave of nationalism, led by the Hindu ascetic Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948), that sought to end centuries of British colonization and exploitation of India’s resources and its work force. As a subjugated nation, India and the Indian people were estranged from their indigenous culture, religion, and customs. The mill is run by the British. The name White underscores the cultural division. The lengthy meeting of the management board of the mill, all white, all British, centers on using wage cuts to diminish the coolies’ enthusiasm for agitating for better working conditions. The policy is uncomplicated by compassion. Rather, it is driven by the racist assumptions of a government that two centuries earlier invaded the country and took over its tremendous reserve of natural resources and de facto enslaved its vast work force. Thus, the miserable treatment of the mill workers reflects how the factory symbolizes not only the greed at the heart of capitalism but also the cold indifference and immoral exploitation at the heart of racism.

Novels of social realism, which date to the mid-19th century, depict the hardships and struggles of a society’s working class. Such novels explore economic exploitation, racism and bigotry, and/or social, cultural, and religious biases that prevent the poor from enjoying the fullest access to economic opportunity. Given its commitment to documentarian realism in recording the lives of the disenfranchised, social realism is a dark and troubling vision, and what little hope these novels encourage is in gifting the reader with awareness that might, in turn, be converted into activism.

Coolie frames the story of Munoo’s short life through the vehicle of an omniscient narrator who is not involved directly in the story. This narrator offers a wider perspective on the implications of the exploitation of Munoo, a perspective that is far beyond the capacity of a 14-year-old boy. When, for instance, the chutney factory where Munoo works is shut down because of the perfidy of the owner’s partner, the narrator frames Munoo’s panic over losing his income much as later the narrator will use Munoo’s first hours in the cotton mill in Bombay to point out the toxic influence of the British in constructing and maintaining the sweat shop. It is the narrator who intervenes to remind the reader of Munoo’s age and how alone the boy is. The narrator never interjects hyperbolic outrage over Munoo’s life. Munoo is treated like a subject in a case study on the injustices of India’s treatment of the coolies. Thus, the narrator modulates anger and uses the plot points to craft a guarded commentary on the reality of Munoo’s life.

Social realism defines a unique relationship between the author and the reader. It assumes its readers will change, not completing the novel with the same assumptions with which they began it. The horrors that Munoo undergoes, from starvation to homelessness, from unsanitary living conditions to dangerous workshop conditions, are delivered with matter-of-fact clarity. There is nothing that can be done for the characters, but the reader can take the gift of awareness and put into motion actions to help alleviate the conditions of the underprivileged. Outrage is the gift the narrator offers. Consider the novel’s succinct single sentence close: “In the early hours of one unreal, white night he passed away—the tide of his life having reached back to the deeps” (282). This is a muted farewell to a novel’s main character. Anand stresses the sheer waste of a young coolie’s life. Outrage and, in turn, action are left to the reader.