Coolie

“And, in his heart, there was a lonely song, a melancholy wail asking, not pointedly, but in a vague, uncertain rhythm, what life in this woman’s house would be like.”

Young Munoo arrives at the home of the accountant Nathoo Ram in Sham Nagar without expectations of anything other than kind treatment. In meeting Ram’s wife, Bibiji, and trying to figure out why she is so angry at the coolies and why she treats them with such hostility and disgust, Munoo learns his first lessons in the hardhearted and compassionless world of the caste system. For the first time since his departure from his mountain home, Munoo feels alone. He feels melancholy, a sadness that is sharp and as sweeping as joy was in the hills.

“The biological expedient, however, which made him want to live, was forcing the multi-colored cells in his body to reach out instinctively to the space about him, even for a breath of the foul air in his master’s dingy little kitchen and for a crust of bread. He was vaguely aware of the need for love in his orphan’s body.”

The novel tests the tension between Munoo’s increasingly difficult life of suffering and hardship and his natural yearning to live. Munoo is 14. As a child, he begins the novel radiant with energy and brimming with joy. The world of industrial capitalism and social stratification slowly destroys this optimism. This passage introduces what will emerge as a controlling motif in the novel: the slow suffocation of Munoo. He has already begun to feel apart from his own body and feels its need for love—that is, for the merest expression of humanity and sympathy.

“In a few days, however, he had recovered his old insouciance, his vigour, his zest for life, his fire—the fire that tingled in the cells of his body at all the sights and sounds about him.” 

When Munoo recovers from his feverish reaction to the unripe mango, he recovers his joy of life. He is a child and as such has a child’s natural curiosity, natural exuberance, and natural optimism. The fever episode foreshadows the closing chapter, when Munoo contracts tuberculosis and then does not recover. Anand explores how India’s harsh and heartless social and economic system slowly extinguishes the life force of its poorest people. Munoo is not born hating his life. The conditions in which coolies and their families must live sap Munoo’s love of living in just months.

“He laughed, danced, shouted, leaped, somersaulted, with the irrepressible impetuosity of life itself, sweeping aside the barriers that separated him from his superiors by the utter humanness of his impulses, by the sheer wantonness of his unconscious life force.” 

It is easy to forget that Munoo is a child, and children, according to conventional wisdom, delight in the raw energy of the moment. Munoo still does not understand the bleakness of his future. In this passage, Munoo, despite his position as a lowly kitchen slave and with no expectations of any opportunity to rise above his circumstances, delights the kitchen staff and the children of his boss by performing a spontaneous and entirely joyous dance. His cavorting captures the primitive freedom of a child.

“For the most part men realize themselves through the force of external necessity, in the varied succession of irrelevant and unconnected circumstances. Munoo soon got used to life in this primitive factory.”

Munoo begins to grow up. He cannot be shaped by the freedoms of nature or by the joy he takes in the sensual delights of the world. It is time for Munoo to see that his identity will be shaped not by who he is but by where he finds himself and how he handles those circumstances. He is just beginning work at the chutney factory. Already he perceives that getting to this point is the result not of any diligent planning but rather of a succession of irrelevant and unconnected circumstance. Munoo begins to see the reality of a world compelled by the play of good luck and misfortune.

“He felt he could neither face nor talk to anyone in the mornings […] that he would break down if anyone said a kind word to him or looked at him tenderly. The only thing that relieved these fits of depression was the silent comradeship which existed between him and the other coolies.”

Much like other social realists such as Dickens, Tolstoy, and Steinbeck, Anand offers camaraderie and community as consolation to the working-class coolies. On mornings when Munoo, after only a few weeks of work, cannot bring himself to head to the pickle factory and to what will be another long day of backbreaking work on a stifling factory floor that stinks of organic waste, it is only the bond he feels for the other coolies that gives him any contentment. It is not just that misery loves company. Anand understands what Munoo will intuit when he is involved in the cotton mill strike later in Bombay: The only hope for the oppressed working class is solidarity.

“He moaned once or twice, as if the curves of his soul were straightening, smothering, from the coils caused by the impact of his experience. When the heat of the night drifted into the cool of the dawn, the fever in Munoo’s flesh abated and he nestled close to the belly of a sack as if it were the body of a warm-blooded woman.”

It is critical to remember that Munoo is 14. The first nights that the boy, alone and terrified, spends trying to sleep in the streets of Daulatpur after Prabha loses his factory and his home reveal how Munoo is beginning to shape his life to suffering. His soul adjusts to the reality of deprivation and exploitation much like his body adjusts itself to the hot and ungiving pavement. He cozens up to the empty sack that serves as his bed like a man in love would reach for the comfort and consolation of his woman. Eroticizing the boy’s yearning only underscores how young Munoo is.

“‘May you live, child,’ sighed Prabha, stroking [Munoo’s] head.”

The best wish Prabha can offer Munoo is to live. He offers no adverb to infuse his wish with optimism. Unlike his departure from Kangra when his uncle escorted him without emotion and unlike when he skipped out of Sham Nagar, here Munoo learns the meaning of a genuine emotional bond destroyed by the socioeconomic system in India. Prabha is ruined first because of his thieving partner and then because of the stupidity of the police. What might have been Munoo’s ticket to a comfortable life is destroyed through no fault of his. Prabha’s giving the boy a coin marks the last moment of compassion Munoo will experience. The irony is that Prabha’s gift is too meager to help Munoo.

“The real India takes everyone for granted, be he a madman looking at the sun or raving profanities, or a naked ascetic, or a frock-coated, striped-trousered European hiding his nudity in the rigid framework of ‘civilized’ dress. Munoo […] was content to be the bare-footed little coolie with a dirty tunic and loincloth and the small strip of a turban on his head.” 

As long as India must exist as a satellite of the British empire, as long as Indians kowtow to a foreign government and allow the occupation of their country to define their value and integrity, Anand warns in voiceover passages such as this, Indians will suffer. Like other social realists, Anand’s harshest criticism is directed not toward the corruption and amorality of individual characters but rather toward a country itself that sanctions, encourages, even makes inevitable the corruption and amorality that Munoo comes to witness.

“He was going away to a new world, to the new, the wonderful world of a big city, where there were ships and motors, big buildings, marvelous gardens, and, he fancied, rich people who just threw money about to the coolies in the street.” 

Munoo is a child, and he reveals his irrepressible optimism and his childlike naivete even after the disaster at the chutney factory and the loss of his home and his surrogate family through the immorality and venality of people. He cannot help but be optimistic. Bombay seems to him to be his salvation, a perfect world of perfect comfort for coolies where generous rich people are everywhere, where money is plentiful, and where coolies are happy and employed. Within hours of his arrival, however, this fragile dream will be shattered.

“With one of those sudden impulses that arose too often in his wild blood, he rushed into the road where the terror-stricken child stood sandwiched between the dangerous streams of traffic and, lifting her under his arm, ran across to where the helpless family fussily muttered curses and prayed to the Lord.” 

In a novel where the principal character has little control, the incident in the traffic in Bombay reveals an unsuspected heroism to Munoo. That moment when Munoo runs out into the chaotic flow of traffic and pulls the girl to safety, momentarily frozen by the confusion and the noise, suggests that coolies, despised within the caste system as the lowest of humanity, can evidence true selfless heroism. Typically, however, the reward Munoo receives for his singular act of heroism is a hot tip on a job at the cotton mill, a job that will reward Munoo with long hours in a hellish sweat shop.

“He tossed about on his stone bed, flinging his elastic haunches from side to side till he felt his hip bones ache with the impact of hardness against hardness. Then he plunged his head on to his hands and lay face downwards. The suffocating darkness descended on him.” 

Munoo, trying to sleep among the unemployed coolies, homeless beggars, and lepers on the sidewalks of Bombay, comes to terms with the reality of his wonder city. Bombay is not the answer to his dreams as he imagined it to be on the train ride. Sleeping on the hot pavement, Munoo spirals into an existential angst, a sense of being trapped within an indifferent world. Here Anand foreshadows Munoo’s death from consumption, a disease that destroys his lungs. The city, with its cloaking vastness and its lack of hope, suffocates the boy.

“The air grew suffocatingly hot, and a queer smell of cotton and oil came heavily up to his nostrils. The sweat covered his face and the shirt was already soaking on his back. He felt alone and isolated. He felt he would go mad with the din.” 

Anand, functioning as narrative authority, describes conditions within the factory through the perception of a 15-year-old who is just beginning what could be a lifetime job. The conditions are brutal, but Munoo does not complain, nor does Anand editorialize. All the reader is provided is the alienation the boy feels in the factory. The threat here is isolation, the pain of being alone. The description is clinical, precise, and observational. Outrage is left to the reader. The closing sentence hints at the depth of the impact of the mill’s hellish conditions. Working just three hours, Munoo already edges toward insanity.

“My death would rid the world of an unlucky person. I would like to die. It were better to be dead, Yes, better to be dead, because this town has turned out wrong.”

This moment, during Munoo’s first lunch break at the factory, marks his lowest point in the novel. The morning in the mill leaves Munoo in despair. He sees himself as a Jonah figure, bringing misfortune to people. At this moment, he gives way to a dark wish to be dead. He feels, because every person who has tried to help him has ended up hurt or dead, that he must be the problem. He has yet to glimpse the magnitude of Anand’s moral universe in which misfortune occurs without cause, without merit, and without logic.

“Come, come, all of you […] You miserable beggars. I know how hard it is to fight for a wage in this cursed world and then to have nowhere to go, nowhere, nowhere but a toddy shop. Ha, ha, ha! Come, you swine […] rust old Ratan!” 

Just when Munoo glimpses the implications of the coolie life and how life in the cotton mill is the best he can hope for, he meets the rowdy, bawdy Ratan. A wrestler by trade, Ratan brings to Munoo a saving sense of energy. From the perspective of the British administrators of the mill, Ratan is a threat because he brings to the coolies the things that their industrial system cannot afford to give its workers: pride, dignity, and a voice. Ratan is welcoming to Munoo and allows the boy to a sense of protection and belonging.

“And to live in a fifteen-by-ten room, cramped on the floor, amid the smoke and smell of cooking and of the food eaten, amid a chaos of pots and pans, old beds and crawling children, in the publicity of the common staircase, the common washing place, the common latrines, and amid the foul smell of sewages that filtered over the pathways, conduces to comradeship.”

As the friendship between Ratan and Munoo grows, Munoo learns this basic reality of the coolie world. The world ignores their humanity, every day is a struggle, and they cannot hope for any release except through death. The sentence loads up with one horror after another, one pain after another, piling on the problems until they suffocate the sentence. Then, in the closing words, Anand extends the only hope the coolie life can offer: the consolation of community.

“He felt a queer movement in his entrails and an affection in his chest which seemed to melt his thoughts and to intoxicate him more beautifully than the bitter liquid he had shared with Ratan.”

The episode in the brothel is poignant and tragic. The scene echoes a familiar comic premise from coming-of-age stories: A boy, comely but naive, introduced to the power of sex. In the scene, Munoo, reeling a bit from a drink Ratan gives him, reacts to the wild scene: dancing woman scantily clad and giving him seductive glances and conversations laced in innuendo he does not entirely understand. The stirrings he feels is normal for an adolescent anticipating the liberating and terrifying experience of sexual initiation. The poignant sense of Munoo coming of age, however, is ironic. A second reading alters the scene. Now, Munoo is within months of dying, destined never to understand fully the experience of sex or love.

“His brain reeled with the agitation of half-conscious desires that rose to his head like dim ghosts of thoughts. ‘What is it I want,’ he asked himself […] and, as he could not get an answer to his query, he walked in jaded indifference.” 

Heading home from the brothel, Munoo here has a tipping point moment of clarity, ironically the clarity of insight that sees clear sight and insight are not the same thing. He experiences an existential dilemma, a feeling that the enormity of what he wants, measured by how little life has given him, beggars language. He is only 15 and asking the wrong question, knowing that his wants do not matter. To this point, Anand has given Munoo two characteristic responses, the happy joy of a child and the uneasy pessimism of the adult. Here Munoo has a third option—indifference—which he sees in the glazed-over eyes of the coolies heading into the mill.

“We belong to suffering.” 

Now back from the brothel with its heartbreaking epiphany, Munoo receives the consolations from Hari’s wife, who senses in Munoo the shattered heart of a child who needs a mother’s consoling love. The moment stirs in Munoo a reminder of how he misses his own mother. In the context of the comforting whispers of a gentle and loving mother, the reader expects a message that will inspire, delight, and calm the tormented child. This is not the case here. What the woman whispers, however, is as bleak as it is honest. Prepare to suffer, she says in all but words—the message Munoo, as a coolie locked into a life without any expectations for betterment, needs to hear.

“But they were broken, dispirited, docile and reticent, and they only stared blankly through dim brown eyes, or mumbled a conventional phrase, in a meek and holy manner: ‘Never mind, brother, this is the will of God,’ or ‘It is sad but in this world the wicked seem to flourish and the good always suffer.’” 

Anand offers a disturbing perspective on how the conditions in factories destroy the humanity of the coolies. The coolies, reeling from the decision by the mill owners to cut their time, guaranteeing many will starve to death, struggle for some consolation. Save for empty cliches, the coolies have no hope save passive endurance and the grind of endless suffering.

“We are human beings and not soulless machines.” 

The union representative, in trying to charge up the workers upset over the news of their cut hours, gets the crowd to chant this simple message. Regarded as little more than machine parts, the coolies work in a sweat shop, voiceless to improve their conditions, dispensable, and interchangeable. The problem with India’s capitalist industrial complex, Anand argues, is that the administrators of the factory need to be reminded of the humanity of their own workers. That the strike is aborted indicates how ingrained is the workers’ conviction that their humanity is not entirely relevant. Voiceless, they accept the conditions of their own enslavement.

“And death stalked the earth in the illusory forms of masses of darkness, as in a nightmare, now slow, sinuous and soft, now sudden, like panting hordes rushing through time and space, convulsed, hysterical and fierce, like the hundred forms of Satan who hounded men to death.” 

This is Anand’s poetic evocation of the street riots following the union meeting during which Munoo is separated from Ratan and left alone and terrified. Munoo is paralyzed as he moves through the surging, fighting crowds. The imagery is surreal, even apocalyptic. The streets boil up into confusion, anger, and chaos that are nothing less than what Satan will do unleashed at the end of the world. Munoo thinks back to his childhood, all of 16 months earlier, when thunder shook the hills around Kangra. Nothing compares to the din of this enraged crowd. To capture the helplessness of the boy, Anand conjures a street that rages without clear control. Denied their humanity for so long, when the coolies finally assert even a small measure of their indignation, the result edges the city into anarchy.

“Now, somehow, the essential loneliness of the soul, that apartness he had succeeded in shattering by his zest and enthusiasm for work and for entering the lives of others, by the natural love he felt for others, that loneliness mingled with the thought of worklessness, foodlessness, aimlessness, hung over his being.” 

Once again homeless, jobless, and alone, Munoo weighs the twin elements of his character, his zeal to live and his soul-crushing loneliness. How, he asks, can he balance the two when he has no place to stay, no food to eat, and no job to work. His love of work, his love of others, and his need for the reward of comradeship and friendship are his only emotional defenses against the loneliness and pointlessness of his life. When they are taken away, Munoo struggles to understand, what now? He is learning the most difficult reality of being locked in the coolie class: helplessness.