Characterization of Munoo in the novel Coolie
Mulk Raj Anand, who is considered the "Charles Dickens" of India, wrote about the plight of the lowest members of the caste system in India, and the terrible lives they were born to. One of those books is called Coolie. The main character of the book is Munno, a young man who leaves his village at the age of fourteen to go to the city. He is a helpless, unskilled laborer. His employment, and his personage because of that work, is devalued. He holds a number of positions—house servant, factory worker and rickshaw driver. As a coolie, he commanded little respect and worked for low wages. His situation is deplorable due to poverty and exploitation aided by the social and political structures in place. Munno, the 'hero-anti-hero' of Coolie (1936), being a Kshatriya by caste, can at least rebel. Like Blake’s chimney sweeps and Dickens’s orphans, coolies are the rejects, the disinherited and helpless victims whose lives and work have been perman...