CoconutPost

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...

The mere title brings to light how the relationship between the British and the Indians is one of exploitation and domination. Exploitation was the reality that faces both the protagonist and the vast majority of Indians. In the work, Munno leaves his village with hopes of finding financial and emotional success. Yet, such hopes are immediately dashed when he has to work in labor intensive as well as physically demanding jobs that leave him without any dignity and dying of tuberculosis. For Anand, the predicament of the "Coolie" is one where Indians work for the benefit of those in a position of power and have little to show for such toil and struggle. In making the main character of his work such a sympathetic figure who cannot find any hope of redemption because of his exploitation, Anand might be suggesting that Indians will always be seen as Munno in the eyes of the British, always to be a "Coolie" unless there is a call to change what is into what should b...

The main theme of Coolie is the exploitation of the poor by the rich in the early twentieth century India and the human suffering that this brings about. In his descriptions of Munoo’s experiences after leaving his village, Mulk Raj Anand offers the reader a vivid portrayal of the shocking treatment meted out to those who are socio-economically disadvantaged by those in positions of power and privilege. One could also see Anand as offering a critique of the kind of labor that robs a life of all its joy and its dignity. Munoo’s childhood effectively ends when he becomes a servant. Furthermore, “Munoo” is but one of many “Munoos”; he is but one coolie among many coolies — there is a kind of fatalism in that he had few options but to follow this particular path of servitude from the moment he was born. In this book, Anand uses his characteristic realism to expose the stark reality of a country where one’s position at birth guarantees one’s trajectory in life. This arguably makes the suffe...

Coolie, by Mulk Raj Anand, was first published in 1936 and helped to establish Anand as one of the foremost Anglophone Indian writers of his day. Like much of his other work, this novel is concerned with the consequences of British Rule in India and with the rigid caste system that structured Indian society. “Coolie” is a term for an unskilled laborer, though it can also be used as a pejorative. Anand’s novel tells the story of Munoo, a young boy from the Kangra Hills in Bilaspur. He is an orphan who lives with his aunt and uncle; however, early in the novel they reveal they can no longer support Munoo and insist that he get a job. This is the beginning of a journey that will take Munoo to Bombay and beyond, but it also marks the end of his childhood. With his Uncle, Munoo travels to a nearby town where he finds a job as a servant to a bank clerk, Babu Nathoo Ram. Munoo is mistreated by his master’s wife but he admires his master’s younger brother, Prem Chand, who is a doctor. Babu Nat...