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.
Themes
The Role of Chance
The novel explores the harsh role of chance in the lives of the poor. Evaluated as a traditional novel—that is, a plotted, designed construction in which events carefully work to make inevitable the move into the next event—Coolie suffers because Anand elects to reflect the reality of the world of the downtrodden coolies, a dark world ruled by the blind intervention of chance. Coolies are powerless. Munoo, just a boy, exerts no control over what happens to him. His father dies of a broken spirit after he loses the tiny family farm; his mother dies from exhaustion and overwork; Munoo accidentally, even playfully, bites the daughter of the accountant who gives him work; Munoo just happens to meet Prabha and his wife on the train, and they take in Munoo because they just happen to have suffered a miscarriage; Prabha’s business partner schemes to defraud the investors in the chutney factory that in turn costs Munoo his job; Munoo, wandering the streets, happens to see the exotic posters advertising the circus heading to Bombay; the hut where Munoo lives in Bombay happens to be destroyed by a monsoon storm; he happens to be struck by Mrs. Mainwaring’s touring car; and, in the end, he happens to contract the bacterial virus that kills him. As a hero in a novel, Munoo does not actually do that much. Indeed, the only action he makes is more reaction: At pressure points, he runs, terrified and helpless, blindly and without plan. As the omniscient narrator intones, “A whipped dog hides in a corner, a whipped human seeks escape” (59).
Not just Munoo, but all the coolies he meets are victims. They all move helplessly against the play of misfortune; they try to assert purpose in their lives but find their lives are defined by chance. Behavior itself defies explanation or motivation. The meanness of Bibiji, the reptilian cupidity of Ganpat, the masochism of Jimmie Thomas, the soulless pragmatism of the British directors of the cotton mill—nothing here follows the logic of causality. Munoo lives his short life in a world without evident design or the handiwork of any God. Like the swirling waters of the Arabian Sea that a restless Munoo contemplates, the crazy chaos of the streets of Bombay when the boy first steps out of Victoria Station, and the mass confusion of the street riots after the workers strike at the cotton mill, Munoo’s life, indeed the lives of India’s poor, is little more than “the confusion of anarchy” (231).
The Logic of Pessimism
Although the novel is a coming-of-age story, a genre that often encourages a heroic sense of optimism as the child leaves behind the myths and misconceptions of childhood equipped now for the challenges of the world, little in the story of young Munoo encourages optimism. The moments of happiness and contentment Munoo experiences are set against the foreboding inevitability that such moments are fragile and passing, vulnerable to forces beyond the boy’s control. Munoo is no Dickens-type orphan who moves steadily, even inevitably, to the promise of great expectations, good fortune, and success. Helpless to affect significant change to the conditions of his life, born into poverty, destined to a life of back-breaking manual labor, Munoo loses the child’s typical sense of wonder and magic and the anticipation of life as some adventure, full of twists and turns, certainly but pointing ultimately toward the benefits and rewards that conventionally come from hard work: home, financial security, family, dignity, and self-respect.
Pessimism, then, is the only logical response. After the disaster in Bombay and the chaos of the riots ,and after he begins the demanding work of pulling the heavy rickshaw for Mrs. Mainwaring, Munoo, only 15, reflects on what his short life has taught him:
He was mentally and physically broken. And, as he thought of the conditions under which he had lived, of the intensity of the struggle and the futility of the waves of revolt falling upon the hard rock of privilege and possession, as he thought of [his friends now lost to him], and the riots, he felt sad and bitter and defeated, like an old man (250).
The world of the underclass that Anand depicts with unblinking realism is driven by blind, irrational forces, generation after generation of men and women used like pawns for the economic benefit of those whose stunning lives of plenty the poor cannot imagine. What few delights Munoo savors are heartbreakingly passing: the pungent taste of fresh mangos, the glimpse of the sweeping rise of a mountain, a cool morning sea breeze. Given the novel’s abrupt end, the one-sentence death of young Munoo from tuberculosis, Anand does not offer any cohesive strategy for changing the social, cultural, and economic realities. He offers only the troubling gift of awareness to his reader.
The Impact of the Caste System
Understanding the nature of Anand’s scathing indictment of India’s nearly 5,000-year-old Hindu caste system begins by appreciating the logic of the social structure designed to ensure long-term stability and order within Indian culture. Within the logic of the caste system, Hindus were generally ranked into four classifications based on the work they contributed to Indian society. At the top were the educated, teachers, religious, and lawyers; below them were those engaged in protecting the society, trained and disciplined warriors, and royalty; among those below them were the workers in India’s agrarian culture, the farmers and those who sold that produce; and below them were the unskilled, uneducated laborers who performed menial jobs from produce processing to domestic work to factory labor. For thousands of years, India relied on the caste system to provide its society with sustainable direction and each of its classes with purpose and a sense of fulfillment. What it meant in practice was that the sole way India’s social order could be sustained would be if each class stayed within its class—priests produced priests, generals produced generals, farmers produced farmers, and unskilled, uneducated laborers produced unskilled, uneducated laborers.
The system provided no incentive for improvement. Munoo cannot imagine a life for himself other than as a domestic servant or factory worker. Contentment came from accepting the niche into which a person was born. The system provided protocols for marriage as each classification maintained its own integrity. Thus, Munoo, despite being surrounded by the fine houses of the wealthy, cannot aspire to any life greater than the class into which he was born. Locked within that system, Munoo is exposed to discrimination and harassment based on assumptions about the unskilled being the lowest social order, just above domesticated animals. The rigid system locks Munoo into a life of limited expectation and a life of drudgery and hardship. In representing the victimization of Munoo, Anand appeals to his country to reject the caste system. Munoo does not complain about his lot in life, nor does he comprehend the depth of his victimhood. Rather, Anand leaves outrage to the reader. Within 10 years of the publication of Coolie, one of the first acts of India’s newly independent government was to pass sweeping legislation that in effect outlawed discrimination based on the caste system and further used the country’s education system to create opportunities for the country’s lower class after centuries of disenfranchisement.
The Nobility of Survival
The Darwinian imperative—the brute, animal struggle to survive—compels Munoo’s day-to-day life and elevates the boy into something of a hero. There is nothing grand or glorious about the short life of Munoo and little to suggest anything heroic about his character save his relentless search for sustenance and shelter in a world that is indifferent to him. At critical points, Munoo is starving, forced to work long hours “languid with hunger” (188), surviving on dippers of fetid water, crusts of fried bread, rice and flour, and fruit halves, often partially rotten. Shelter is no easier. Anand describes Munoo’s desperate search for a clear space on the hot pavement in Bombay to try to sleep. Other than a few nights when Munoo enjoys the relative comfort of a pallet on the floor, he sleeps where he can find safety, on folded carboard boxes, on a canvas sack between train cars, in the cradle of roots of a shade tree, or curled up in the sand along the Arabian Sea. Perhaps the most heartbreaking experience for Munoo is the night the monsoon rains destroy the straw hut the mill has provided for a home. When Munoo at last finds his way to a comfortable bed and an apparently endless supply of fresh fruit and sticky breads, it is only under the care of Mrs. Mainwaring, when he is just weeks away from death.
In offering such a vivid account of the poor’s raw struggle to survive, the novel elevates that struggle to epic dimensions and Munoo himself to heroic stature. Food and shelter become elements of his grand efforts, sought-after rewards for his diligent and focused desperation. Munoo suffers without food. Munoo fears for his life without shelter. The first night in Bombay, with no place to sleep, Munoo struggles against panic: “His limbs sagged. Before his mind’s eye arose the grim fear of the night coming and finding him alone and friendless in the streets. He tried to forget the oppressive thought. He made his brain a blank and the picture faded” (155). Without food and with no shelter, Munoo at 14 emerges as a kind of everyman figure, representing all coolies. The boy feels the degradation and shame of the poor in any capitalist society that takes such an attitude as a given and neglects to see how so many of its own population must struggle every day just to survive.
