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 Bombay and Simla, sweating as servant, factory-worker and rickshaw driver. It is a fight for the 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 this century’s finest Indian novelists writing in English.