Coolie

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Coolie portrays the picaresque adventures of Munoo, a young boy forced to leave his hill village to fend for himself and discover the world. His journey takes him far from home to towns and cities, to Bomboy and Simla, sweating as servant, factory-worker and rickshaw driver. It is a fight for survival that illuminates, with raw immediacy, the grim fate of the masses in pre-Partition India. Together with Untouchable, Coolie places Mulk Raj Anand among the twentieth century's finest Indian novelists writing in English.

Mulk   Raj Anand was born in Peshawar in 1905 and educated at the universities   of  Punjab and London. After earning   his PhD in philosophy in 1929, Anand began writing for T.S. Eliot's magazine,   the Criterion,as well as books on cooking and art. Recognition came with the   publication of his first two novels, including his well- known trilogy - The   Village (1939), Across the Black Waters ( 1940) and The Swaord and the Sickle   ( 1942). By the time he returned to India in 1946 he was easily the best -   known Indian writer abroad.                         Making Bombay his   home and centre of activity, Anand threw himself headlong into the cultural   and social life of India. He founded and edited the fine art magazine Marg,   and has been the recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award, several honorary   doctorates and other distinctions.

Mulk Raj Anand

One of the most eloquent and imaginative works to deal with this difficult and emotive subject

It recalled to me very vividly the occasions I have walked 'the wrong way' in an Indian city, and it is a way down which no novelist has yet taken me

Bakha is a proud and attractive young man, yet none the less he is an Untouchable - an outcast in India's caste system. It is a system that is even now only slowly changing and was then as cruel and debilitating as that of apartheid. Into this vivid re-creation of one day in the life of Bakha, sweeper and toilet-cleaner, Anand pours a vitality, fire and richness of detail that earn his place as one of the twentieth century's most important Indian writers.

Mulk Raj Anand

Praise for Untouchable

One of the most eloquent and imaginative works to deal with this difficult and emotive subject

It recalled to me very vividly the occasions I have walked 'the wrong way' in an Indian city, and it is a way down which no novelist has yet taken me

Books by Mulk Raj Anand

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