Coolie marks a greater confidence in the art of Anand and a farther intensifying description of fringy life.It comprehends greater veriety and deeper degrees of debasement than does Untouchable. The Plot of the novel is such as will non readily give to a field sum-up of facts. Here is the narrative of a hill male child, Munoo, Who moves from the small town to the town, from the town to the metropolis, and so up to the mountains. He traverses an experience, and is eventually swept off to his day of reckoning. He explores the bounds of being before he goes under.
Munoo ‘s life is tragic to the extreme. The hapless orphan is cast away by his aunt and uncle who have no love for him. He gets a occupation as a domestic retainer in the house of a bank clerk at Sham Nagar. He imagines that he will henceforth unrecorded in peace and comfort but is shortly disillusioned.
Munoo idea of the yearss of his childhood in the hills and recalled how frequently he had played around the cart roads with the distended- bellied Bishan, the thin Bishambar and that superior small Jay Singh. But the violet hills of Kangra were excessively close in and there was no railroad at that place to watch. “ It was every bit good, in malice of the hurting I have suffered, ” he said to himself, ‘TO have come off from that universe. ‘ I am now traveling to Bombay, and there must be fantastic things at that place ; many more fantastic things than there were in my small town or Sham Nagar or Daulatpur. ( Coolie 174 )
The wretchednesss of the past picket in insignificance in the visible radiation of his new experience:
He was clever, excessively. The manner he could read the messages of people ‘s Black Marias and state what diseases they were enduring from, by mean of that machine with gum elastic tubings. The terminal of which he applied to his ears and whose oral cavity he rested on the thorax of a individual. He had other machines in velvet boxes. How he would wish to manage them, Munoo thought. How he would wish to be the Chola Babu, medicines adult male! He would non even mind being like the burra Babu, an functionary in the bank, whom all the towns ‘ people saluted. ( Coolie 47 )
Although Sheila, the teen-aged girl of the maestro of the house, is sort to him, her female parent treats him shabbily: he realizes eventually his place in the universe. He is to be a slave, a retainer who should make the work, all the uneven occupations, person to be maltreatment, even crush, though as yet it had non come to that. He feels sad, lonely.
The ambivalency that tortures Bakha in Untouchable tortures Munoo every bit good. He resolves henceforth to be a perfect retainer, but the way to flawlessness is non easy. He is forthrightly blamed for debacle, which takes topographic point during the visit of a senior bank functionary to the glow of his maestro. Later, when he picks a right with the neighbor ‘s retainer, he is badly injured. During his recuperation, he experiences the birth injury of desire for Sheila, as he sees her coming out of the bath, a silhouette of pale bronze. At the same clip, he is cognizant of the huge gulf that exists between him and Sheila. He stifles his passion, but no Oklahoman does he return to wellness than his wanton uncontrollable desire asserts itself.
In the feudal town of Daulatpur, he runs into Prabha, a spouse in a pickle mill and is immediately hired as a cooly in the warehouse. Prabha ‘s married woman shortly grows fond of him and gives him maternally heat. But life in the mill proves every bit grim as of all time. To add to his discomposure, Prabha is ruined financially and returns to his native small town. Munoo is left entirely in the universe with no art or trade to gain his life.He becomes a freelance porter, transporting tonss on the streets.
Munoo feels the rush of Waterss in the large city. But he ne’er makes the great with drawal from life. He finds kindred Black Marias in Hari and Laxmi, with whom he portions his diggingss. They, nevertheless, are far excessively advanced in the graduated tables of agony, Munoo ‘s hero, nevertheless, is Ratan. The grappler, who faces life with unagitated assurance. He wants to emulate Ratan and be like him: “ I want to populate, I want to work, to work this machine. I shall turn up to be a work forces, a strong adult male like the grappler ” ( Coolie 83 ) . Ratan takes him one dark to the house of a cocotte, who excited his repressed desire. Back in the diggingss he is baptized in the life of flesh by Laxmi.
Soon, crisis overtakes the metropolis, and normal life is paralyzed Munoo finds himself in the thick of the labor work stoppage, followed by an eruption of communal force.He is both an histrion and a witness who drifts with the crowd. He senses the futility of rhetoric as besides the greater futility of disorganised action. The words of poet Sauda – ” there are two sorts of people in the universe: the rich and the hapless ” ( Coolie 52 ) reverberation in his ears, but shortly the lawlessness of the ocean drowns him in slumber Even at this hr, he is cognizant that “ the metropolis, the bay, the sea at his pess, had and spiritual beauty ” ( Coolie 259 ) . Now the feeling of hurting seems to color everything. He is run over by Mrs.Mainwairing ‘s auto and is taken to Simla as her page and jinrikisha puller. She takes a illusion to him wants to play the seductress, but Munoo is already broken. The strain of drawing the jinrikisha sucks his life blood, and he contracts TB and dies. The peasant chap sprung up from the hills returns place to his beginning.
The cooly touches the hapless and the empyreal countries of human experience. Here, Anand explores the bounds of pain cardinal to the being of the downtrodden. He places Munoo in resistance to a debasing and debased society- a frail, defenceless figure in a preponderantly hostile universe. Society is the great destroyer that fells Munoo and his like. The calamity of Munoo is an indictment of the immoralities of capitalist economy on the minor section of society. But the intent of the novelist is non to show a glooming image of life. On the contrary, he wishes to elicit the scruples of humanity against the pitiless development of the weak. He handles in this prose epic the worlds of the human state of affairs as he sees and understands them.
The word picture of Munoo is graphic, dramatic, and powerful. Munoo is cast in the manner of the archetypal, dry, and perfect victim or whipping boy under the sentence of decease. But the dry focal point in non crisp plenty to be converting. This is so because Anand attempts a realistic reproduction of the huge human landscape and develops and epic temper and graduated table. Like Balzac and Tolstoy, he draws huge infinites and creates memorable characters. He is non sufficiently detached to keep the esthetic distance which, decently talking, outputs the dry stance. Munoo is conceived as a romantic hero, and as such there is no incongruousness in the word picture, which is basic to the dry portraiture. He is foremost and last, a victim instead than a Rebel and, hence, is capable of lifting to a tragic stature.
Structurally, Coolie is less closely knit than Untouchable. It has a different sort of integrity, Comparable to a symphonic music V.S.Pritchett sees in it the glance of a Picaresque novel and the outgrowth of a new type of hero. If Untouchable is a microcosm, Coolie is microcosm that is Indian society is the appraisal of K.R.S.Iydengar. Its loose, bird’s-eye construction, with huge assortment of characters and incidents, represents a comprehensive image of life itself. The novelist sees in the formless flux a rhythm of return and gives it a meaningful look. The power of the fresh derives from its fidelity to truth, from its capacity to examine beneath the sordid and the banal, and from its ability to touch the tragic, the sublime and the beautiful.
The scene of Coolie virtues particular attending. The scene of action displacements in infinite in orderly sequence.So does the Centre of gravitation. However, the displacement in scene of action is by no agencies arbitrary ; it is conditioned by a certain rule of organisation to bespeak the macrocosmic character of the subject. The action begins in the small town of Bilaspur and may be taken as clip of hurting at birth. In fake Nagar, the hero fined himself in practical serfhood. In Daulatpur, he loses his occupation and is thrown out on the streets. In widely distributed Bombay, He has the gustatory sensation of the slum and the fifth ; eventually, in Simla, his cup of wretchedness full, he goes under. Simla, it may be said prepares the phase for his crucifixion.
Coolie is barely less poetical than Untouchable. A deep under current of poignancy tallies through both ; “ We belong to enduring! We belong to enduring! My love! ” ( Coolie 207 ) . Sometimes Anand lifts the head covering of the universe of visual aspect, sinking wholly into a sort of poetic enchantment, liberating linguistic communication from the confines of field prose. For the most portion, nevertheless, the battle to hammer a new indo-English parlance continues, particularly when Anand deals with matter- of fact state of affairss and events or hastens the gait of the narrative. Taken as a whole, Coolie is a landmark in indo-Anglian fiction.
