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Themes in Mulkraj Anand's Coolie
Themes in Mulkraj Anand's Coolie
Munoo’s life is tragic to the extreme. The poor orphan is cast away by
his aunt and uncle who have no love for him. He gets a job as a
domestic servant in the house of a bank clerk at Sham Nagar. He
imagines that he will henceforth live in peace and comfort but is soon
disillusioned.
Munoo thought of the days of his childhood in the hills and recalled how
often he had played around the cart roads with the distended- bellied
Bishan, the lean Bishambar and that superior little Jay Singh. But the
purple hills of Kangra were too close in and there was no railway there to
watch. “It was as well, in spite of the pain I have suffered,” he said to
himself, ‘TO have come away from that world.’ I am now going to
Bombay, and there must be wonderful things there; many more
wonderful things than there were in my village or Sham Nagar or
Daulatpur. (Coolie 174)
The miseries of the past pale in insignificance in the light of his new
experience:
He was clever, too. The way he could read the messages of people’s
hearts and tell what diseases they were suffering from, by mean of that
machine with rubber tubes. The end of which he applied to his ears and
whose mouth he rested on the chest of a person. He had other
machines in velvet boxes. How he would like to handle them, Munoo
thought. How he would like to be the Chola Babu, medicines man! He
would not even mind being like the burra Babu, an official in the bank,
whom all the towns’ people saluted.
Munoo feels the surge of waters in the big metropolis. But he never
makes the great with drawal from life. He finds kindred hearts in Hari and
Laxmi, with whom he shares his lodgings. They, however, are far too
advanced in the scales of suffering, Munoo’s hero, however, is Ratan.
The wrestler, who faces life with calm confidence. He wants to emulate
Ratan and be like him: “I want to live, I want to work, to work this
machine. I shall grow up to be a men, a strong man like the
wrestler”(Coolie 83). Ratan takes him one night to the house of a
prostitute, who excited his pent-up desire. Back in the lodgings he is
baptized in the life of flesh by Laxmi.
Soon, crisis overtakes the city, and normal life is paralyzed Munoo finds
himself in the midst of the labour strike, followed by an outbreak of
communal violence .He is both an actor and a spectator who drifts with
the crowd. He senses the futility of rhetoric as also the greater futility of
disorganized action. The words of poet Sauda -“there are two kinds of
people in the world: the rich and the poor”(Coolie 52) echo in his ears,
but soon the anarchy of the ocean drowns him in sleep Even at this
hour, he is aware that “the city, the bay, the sea at his feet, had and
unearthly beauty”(Coolie 259). Now the feeling of pain seems to tinge
everything. He is run over by Mrs.Mainwairing’s car and is taken to Simla
as her page and rickshaw puller. She takes a fancy to him wants to play
the seductress, but Munoo is already broken. The strain of pulling the
rickshaw sucks his life blood, and he contracts tuberculosis and dies.
The peasant lad sprung up from the hills returns home to his origin.
The coolie touches the pathetic and the sublime areas of human
experience. Here, Anand explores the limits of pain central to the
existence of the downtrodden. He places Munoo in opposition to a
debasing and debased society- a frail, defenseless figure in a
predominantly hostile world. Society is the great destroyer that fells
Munoo and his like. The tragedy of Munoo is an indictment of the evils of
capitalism on the minor segment of society. But the purpose of the
novelist is not to present a gloomy picture of life. On the contrary, he
wishes to arouse the conscience of humanity against the ruthless
exploitation of the weak. He handles in this prose epic the realities of the
human situation as he sees and understands them.
The setting of Coolie merits special attention. The scene of action shifts
in space in orderly sequence .So does the centre of gravity. However,
the shift in scene of action is by no means arbitrary; it is conditioned by a
certain principle of organization to indicate the macrocosmic character of
the theme. The action begins in the village of Bilaspur and may be taken
as time of pain at birth. In sham Nagar, the hero fined himself in virtual
serfdom. In Daulatpur, he loses his job and is thrown out on the streets.
In cosmopolitan Bombay, He has the taste of the slum and the fifth;
finally, in Simla, his cup of misery full, he goes under. Simla, it may be
said prepares the stage for his crucifixion.