Preoccupation In Anand's Coolie

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Anand’s preoccupation with the theme of exploitation derives from his experience in the rural life of the Punjab and elsewhere in India. He has seen the poor peasants naked but for the loin clothes, groaning under extreme poverty, and insulted and exploited. His sympathy for such poor and oppressed people is so deep and sincere in his Coolie. He almost cries with anguish against the injustice and cruelties inflicted upon them. Anand’s Coolie is about a class-ridden society. In this society or world of the coolies, the sufferers are subject to more rigidity and deprivation. The focal point in Coolie is always Munoo the coolie, who has no such assurance. He drifts from place to place, job to job and thus he is virtually rootless, incapable of finding a place for himself in society. Anand portrays in Coolie that the sufferings, torments and uncertainty of the underprivileged that have to accept subhuman existence. The protagonist of Coolie is modelled on one of Anand’s childhood …show more content…

Munoo remembers how his father has been exploited by the landlord who seized his five acres of land because the interest on the mortgage covering the unpaid rent has not been paid by Munoo’s father when the rains had been scanty and the harvests bad. Anand portrays the exploitation of the workers by the native employers in the factories of Daulatpur. The pickle factory of Prabha and Ganapat looks like an inferno. The old women workers, engaged in peeling apples, have to do their job in the caverns of the factory. The coolies are huddled against each other when they are sleeping. The factory itself is an outhouse converted into a factory which has no chimney even. The smoke from the factory is a health hazard to the workers as well as to the neighbours, and what is more pitiable is that the health authorities are lethargic to such unhygienic

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