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.
Character Analysis
Munoo
Because Coolie is a work of social realism, Munoo is not conceived as a character. He is not rendered as an individual with particular motivation and a defining psychology. He is a type, a lesson intended to draw awareness to the plight of India’s impoverished and exploited working class. Like all of India’s coolies, Munoo does not dream but merely survives; Munoo does not act but reacts. Anand offers no physical description of Munoo, nor does he even give Munoo a last name. Rather, Munoo represents India’s poor, the millions locked by the country’s centuries-old caste system into short and unhappy lives without expectations, without access to meaningful employment or rudimentary education, and given no reason to hope for deliverance. As a type, then, Munoo follows a predictable pattern. He stumbles almost by accident into brief periods of happiness and contentment—as when he frolics amid the water buffalo and the wild birds of Kangra or jumps on the train out of Daulatpur, or when he first meets Ratan, or when he first inspects Mrs. Mainwaring’s spacious home—only to drop suddenly, through no fault of his own, into the dead spiral of misfortune. He is not tragic, as tragedy would assume Munoo plays some role in his own life narrative. He has no control, no power. He is, as the omniscient narrator often intones, a pawn. As such, Munoo elicits not sympathy or pity or even empathy; Anand dismisses those emotions as luxuries the poor cannot afford. Rather, Munoo is a point of instruction, a clarion call to address the problems that create generations of Munoos, the teeming proletariat who live and die without dignity, without purpose, and without hope.
Ratan
Ratan, the broad-shouldered and exuberant coolie whom Munoo meets his first day in the cotton mill in Bombay and who becomes his best and only friend, represents the energy and strength of India’s underclass when it is driven by ideals of social and economic change.
Ratan brings an aura of hope and resiliency for the proletariat. He takes Munoo under his wing. Ratan, with his Gargantuan appetites and his lust for life, underscores how grinding poverty does not destroy the human spirit. Ratan believes conditions in the mill can improve. He believes in the strength of community and the will of the people against the oppressive exploitation of those driven by greed and power. He does not bewail his fate within the caste system; he is a coolie, but he manages to relish the life he has been given. He has a generous heart; he welcomes Munoo to the factory and explains how dangerous the machines can be. Without mocking or condescension, he introduces Munoo to the exotic fantasy world of the Bombay red light district. He takes in Munoo and Hari and his family when the monsoon rains destroy their flimsy company hut.
Ratan stands up to the financial officers at the mill when they exploit the monsoon’s destruction to squeeze money from the destitute coolies. He operates from an interior sense of morality, a clear sight into right and wrong. He is an agitator who rejects the idea that systems cannot be changed, that wrongs cannot be righted, and that humanity, given the chance, will not choose to do right. Ratan calls for the strike and demands the union board act. Ratan, wrongfully terminated, does not despair over his fate or strike out violently and pointlessly. Rather, he seeks to use the example of his plight to inspire widespread reform. As such, Ratan operates as the novel’s moral conscience and the best hope for the working class.
Nathoo Ram; Prabha Dyal and his wife; May Mainwaring
As an episodic, or picaresque, novel, Coolie tracks Munoo’s adventures from the hills in Kangra where he is born to the town of Sham Nagar to the city of Daulatpur to the metropolis of Bombay and, finally, to the mountain town of Simla. In these adventures, Munoo encounters those who, for a variety of different reasons, help him, are kind to him, and see him not as a coolie but as a human, a boy scared and alone. These characters—Nathoo Ram, the accountant in Sham Nagar; Prabha Dyal, the gentle-hearted if doomed owner of the chutney factory in Daulatpur, and his wife, both recovering emotionally from the trauma of a miscarriage; and May Mainwaring, who takes Munoo in after her touring car accidentally runs him over in the confusion of the workers’ riots in Bombay—take in the young Munoo, extending to him the emotional support of sympathy and comfort as well the practical support of securing him work, providing him a safe place to stay, and ensuring he does not starve.
These characters collectively suggest the rare demonstration of kindness extended to the working poor. None is perfect. Babu Nathoo Ram is exposed as a preening, pretentious toady in his dealings with his boss at the bank, but he welcomes the orphan Munoo to his house and to his staff and gently, without threats or nagging, instructs him in the protocols of the house. Prabha and his wife, for their part, take in the boy after finding him sleeping on the train. They become for Munoo surrogate parents and provide Munoo with moments of love, all lost to him only when Prabha’s conniving partner bankrupts their chutney business. May Mainwaring, despite her inappropriate hints of sexual attraction for the strapping Munoo, provides him with a home and even medical care in his final days, giving him a comfortable place to die.
The point of the novel is that these gestures of sympathy and support are lost, even ironic, within the larger realities of a social and economic system that denies coolies their humanity and reduces them to dispensable units of human resource. There is no kinder or more pathetic gesture than when the financially ruined Prabha, himself on the verge of a nervous breakdown, gives Munoo that single silver rupee as if such a paltry amount can help. These characters are as kind as they are ineffectual, their love for Munoo as noble as it is pointless.
Bibiji; Ganpat; Jimmie Thomas
If Munoo’s life is impacted by a series of sympathetic if ultimately ineffective caregivers, his life is impacted as well by a series of unsympathetic characters who exploit his vulnerability, deny him his humanity, and make the lost and lonely child feel miserable and alone. These characters, less carefully delineated individuals and more two-dimensional representatives of harsh attitudes toward the poor, use the vulnerability and helplessness imposed by the caste system on the coolies to bolster their own sense of empowerment or to profit from cheap labor. They are not evil; they are not villains. To be so would require emotional dimension, deep psychology, and individual motivations. Rather, they represent the banality of bigotry and intolerance. Conditioned by their society, they are simply indifferent to the plight of the poor, unaware of their humanity.
In turn, they allow their consciences to be limited by greed and to embrace and manifest a kind of general free-floating hate. They each accept that their position makes them superior to the coolies not because of any merits to their personality or the morality of their character but because that is the system. Bibiji browbeats Munoo as he struggles to learn the kitchen protocols because she does not regard him as anything more valuable than a mildly clever animal being trained for basic domestic chores. Ganpat, who curses the coolies, schemes to ruin the factory financially, to make himself richer, without regard for the humanity of the dozens of coolies and their families who rely on that employment to live. Like Ganpat, Jimmie Thomas, the masochistic foreman at the Bombay cotton mill, drives the coolies to the point of exhaustion, swears at them, and berates them without regard for the hellish and dangerous conditions in mill. Like a cartoon villain, Jimmie even slowly twirls the tips of his waxed moustache as he derides the coolies and mocks their exhaustion. These characters reveal what happens when the poor are denied respect and dignity—when greed, paranoia, ignorance, and bigotry drive society.
