Question

Discuss Mulk Raj Anand's Coolie as a postcolonial novel.

Answer 1

OVERVIEW

Since its publication in 1936, Mulk Raj Anand’s novel Coolie has become a landmark in modern Indian literature. The novel condemned the social, economic, and cultural impact of more than two centuries of British occupation and indicted India’s own rigid caste system, which had long separated its citizens into groups based on their work status and their ethnicity. The novel appeared at the height of a turbulent decade in which India itself, under the moral leadership of Mahatma Gandhi, began to agitate for its independence and, in the process, struggled to define itself. Because Anand was among the first prominent Indian authors to introduce the idioms and patois of India’s indigenous people into otherwise English-language writing, Coolie secured a place in 20th-century Anglo-Indian literature.

Much like the social realist novels of Charles Dickens and John Steinbeck, writers to whom Anand (1905-2004) was compared, Coolie aims to awaken awareness to the plight of the underclass, the suffering and the indignities of life below the poverty line, and the generations, uneducated and unskilled, exploited by the wealthy and denied even the expectation of improving their lot. In telling the story of the life and death of a 14-year-old orphan named Munoo, an uneducated boy from the hill country of north central India who works his short life to secure gainful employment and a living wage, Anand offers a portrait of the struggle to assert one’s dignity and humanity amid poverty, hunger, and disease.

Answer 2

As a post colonial novel, the author has described the atrocities faced by people belonging to a lower caste.

• Coolie is a unique story, which tells the plight of those who are the most oppressed and abused in society, and who have no voice.
• It exposes the unpalatable reality that happiness belongs only to the wealthy, while the poor suffer wherever they are, whether in Kangra Hills, Bombay, or Simla.
• The inappropriate behavaiour is described through Munoo,'s life and the different professions which he took namely Servant, factory worker and a coolie.
• In every profession, Munoo, was humiliated and paid less as he belonged to a lower caste. However hard he tried he was always looked down by society and neglected. In the end after all hardships, he dies of tuberculosis.