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A Thematic Reconsideration of Anand's Coolie

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A Thematic Reconsideration of Anand's Coolie Volume II, Issue V, September 2014 - ISSN 2321-7065 A Subaltern’s Hunger for Love: A Thematic Reconsideration of Anand’s Coolie Dr. Archana Kumari Assistant Professor Department of English & Foreign Languages Guru Ghasidas Vishwavidyalaya (Central University) Koni, Bilaspur – 495009 (Chhattisgarh) The notion of the subaltern became the issue in post-colonial theory when Gayatri Spivak critiqued the assumption of the Subaltern Studies Group in the essay, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak”? The term ‘subaltern’, which etymologically means ‘below the rank’, has been used by many thinkers for the marginalised groups and the lower classes. In literature, subaltern is a non-western and post-colonial concept, which is generally used for downtrodden belonging to the lower cast and class, weak sex and economically poor group in the rigid social strata of the developing countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, known as the Third World Nation.1 Subordination on the basis of class, caste, gender, race, language and culture has long influenced the study of colonial India. Since time immemorial, the creative writers have been writing on the problems of the downtrodden. But Mulk Raj Anand is known as the champion of subaltern or out-castes. Mulk Raj Anand often expresses himself in terms of humanism. The nature of Anand’s humanism is strengthened by eastern as well as western thought. His novels evidence his profound concern for and deep understanding of the problems of the existing Indian society. His concerns with the predicament of man in society sensitively explore the possibilities of personal salvation in the nightmarish world. His novels like Coolie, Untouchable, Two Leaves and a Bud, deal with the theme of subaltern’s hunger for love. It is true that man cannot live without food and water; but it is no less true that man cannot remain man without love. This is the message that Anand’s Coolie conveys, that is, “Munoo was an orphan and hungered more for love than for bread.”2 http://www.ijellh.com 464 Volume II, Issue V, September 2014 - ISSN 2321-7065 K. R. S. Iyenger’s opinion on Coolie is pertinent here to quote: “If Untouchable is the microcosm, Coolie is more like the macrocosm that is Indian society: concentration gives place to diffusion and comprehension, with several foci of concentration. Coolie is verily a cross- section of India, the visible India, the mixture of the horrible and the holy; the inhumane, the sordid and the beautiful ....”3 Now there is no doubt that the horrible in Coolie is the hatred, the inhumane, the sordid of the rich for the poor and that the horrible cannot be ever beautiful. What is holy, inhumane, and beautiful is nothing but love – that never ceases to end even while dying. Munoo, the protagonist, for example, confidently says, “After all, I am not going to die.”4 The story in brief is that Munoo was a fourteen-year-old boy from the Kangra hills who was orphaned by the circumstances in that his father’s five acres of land had been seized by the landlord which caused his father die a death of disappointment and bitterness leaving his mother a penniless beggar. Munoo leaves his idyllic surroundings so that he may work and see the world. The first contact with reality shatters his dreams. Arriving in the house of a bank clerk, he falls foul of a shrewish and vindictive housewife, and he flees from his employers’ frenzied rage. Munoo next arrives at a primitive pickle and jam factory in a feudal city, where a quarrel over money between his employers uproots him and sends him as one of the workers of a cotton industry in Bombay. Finally, he arrives in Shimla as the servant of an Anglo-Indian woman. There he becomes her rickshaw-puller and dies of tuberculosis. What Munoo could not get throughout his life was love and affection. Anand asserts: “He was vaguely aware of the need of love in his orphan’s body but he was as yet essentially an ineffectual ‘pawn on the chessboard of destiny’ such as the village priest had declared all men to be, with perverted ambitions in a world of perverted ideas, and he was to remain a slave until he should come to recognise his instincts.”5 Everybody wants to be happy and so did Munoo and left the slummy life and entered into a new world of pomp and show – a mechanical urban living – empty of love, pity, empathy, sympathy, etc. necessary for life. Munoo was in utter need of it: “Life in the Babu’s house soon resolved itself, for Munoo, into the routine of domestic slavery. He did not settle down to it easily. The wild bird of his heart fluttered every now and then with the desire for happiness.”6 http://www.ijellh.com 465 Volume II, Issue V, September 2014 - ISSN 2321-7065 A servant deserves a good place at least in a corner of human heart and so does he deserve to get not only proper wages, but also proper treatment. Munoo, on the contrary, gets all the time nothing except abuse even if he is not at fault. “He now believes she could always find something to abuse him for some fault ....”7 Bibiji’s inhuman treatment sometimes led him to remember his past: “The only quarrel between himself and his aunt, he realised, was that she could not have children, and people shamed her for her barrenness. Otherwise he remembered how often she had taken him in arms and kissed him and how often he had gone to sleep embracing her. But, this woman seemed to hate him for nothing.”8 Being a hill-boy, Munoo was innocent, but he had the zeal for being “a good servant, a perfect model of a servant.” Anand indicates the future of Munoo’s promise and says: “Unfortunately, however, the road to perfection is punctuated by pitfalls, and it was not long before he tripped up and brought the odium of his mistress’s wrath upon himself.” 9 Rich are their ‘appearances’, but not their heart, otherwise they could shower more love and affection on the poor. Munoo’s experience with Mainwaring Sahib proved a good example of it as he was pleased with “his easy manner and ever-ready smile on his face”. Munoo used to think, “Why were not all sahibs like him?” Surely they could not lose anything by giving him a smile.” This results in the feeling of Munoo as: “Would not he do anything for his Sahib?” 10 What Anand portrays in Coolie is that only love can solve all problems and diseases of man and on the contrary, hatred aggravates them. Munoo recovered from his illness not only by medicines but also by the loving hands of his mistress. Munoo’s thirst for love is carved as natural as could be possible. His mistress’s motherly tenderness towards Munoo is by no means unnatural and her kind words: “May I be your sacrifice; may I die for you! May I suffer instead of you!” were sufficient to soothe his eyesore. Here Anand adds something more important and inevitable needed for love: “She would lie down by him and take him into her arms while he was tossing from side to side, restless and he would fall sound asleep, drugged into a stupor by the warmth that radiated from her comfortable body, intoxicated by the tenderness that was in the smell of her body.”11 http://www.ijellh.com 466 Volume II, Issue V, September 2014 - ISSN 2321-7065 Anand employs memory as flashbacks to enliven Munoo even in the darkness of adversity and thereby he widens the extent of love: “And this was another unforgettable memory which remained ever fresh in him. A memory different from the recollection of his mother’s embrace yet like it, but with an extra element of reaching out to the unknown. A memory which starched from the innocent joy of a child’s love, learning from one woman the need to know another, a memory of love travelling from faith and trust and care, along the curves of desire, into the wild freedom of a love which is natural, which acknowledges the urges of the heart, which seeks fulfilment, like the animals, and which mocks at the subterfuges of religion and the limitations of morality.”12 As there is no fire without heat, so there is no human without humanity. The inhuman treatments don’t keep Munoo’s dreams sway and ultimately lead him to utter harassment. As a servant in the Bibiji’s house, as a worker in a pickle and jam factory, as a coolie at a railway station, and as a labourer in a cotton mill, “Munoo is beaten from pillar to post as millions are beaten even today.”13 The semiotics of abuses is not only confined to the utter helplessness and increasing torture that Munoo had been undergoing throughout, but also the abuses reflect the machine- like human heart, the vanity of the so-called big men for whom “Money is everything; money is indeed, everything”.14 The oft-cursed abuses like ‘brute’, ‘brutish’, ‘savage’, ‘swine’, ‘son of a pig’, ‘monkey’, ‘illegal begotten’, ‘rascal’, ‘wretch’, and so on so forth reflect the stone- like hearts of the abusers. The rage turns into slapping and thrashing the rag-tag Munoo. He was badly reproached at several places and at several occasions by his uncle Dayaram, Babu Nathuram, and Ganpat. At one occasion, for example, Munoo’s request to be forgiven arouses pity but of no avail: “Munoo writhed with pain and groaned”.15 The ‘worse-than-dog’ treatment with Munoo compelled him to escape.
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