Munoo is fourteen when his uncle takes him from his Kangra hill village to work as a domestic servant for a bank clerk's family in the town of Sham Nagar. Mistreated by the clerk's wife, he runs away, and the novel becomes a picaresque journey through the working life of colonial India.
He finds kindness and cruelty in turn: a pickle factory in Daulatpur, the docks and textile mills of Bombay, where he lives on the pavement and is caught up in a strike and communal riot, and finally Simla, where he pulls the rickshaw of an Anglo-Indian woman. Each place shows how class and poverty matter as much as caste, and how industrial capitalism uses up the bodies of the poor.
Published in 1936, a year after Untouchable, Coolie is broader and angrier, shaped by Anand's socialist convictions. It is valued as one of the earliest Indian novels about the urban working class and child labour. Its ending is bleak, and Munoo's innocence makes the cruelty he meets all the more striking for modern readers.
Book details
| Author | Mulk Raj Anand |
|---|---|
| First published | 1936 |
| Original language | English |
| Genre | Classic |
| Type | Fiction |
| Pages (approx.) | 282 |
| Setting | Kangra hills, Sham Nagar, Daulatpur, Bombay and Simla, 1930s |
Themes
- Child labour
- Class exploitation
- Industrialisation
- Poverty
- Colonialism
Who should read it
Readers interested in social-realist fiction and the lives of India's colonial-era working poor.