'Anand's picture is real, comprehensive and subtle and his gifts are remarkable' - V. S. Pritchett. "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 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. 'Munoo is a universal kind of figure. He is the passion not only of India but of mankind' - "Spectator".

Mulk Raj Anand (1905�2004) was born in Peshawar and educated at the universities of Punjab and London. After earning his PhD in Philosophy in 1929, he began writing notes for T.S. Eliot�s magazine Criterion as well as books on diverse subjects such as cooking and the arts. Recognition came with the publication of his first two novels, Untouchable (1935) and Coolie (1936). These were followed by the well-known trilogy The Village (1939), Across the Back Waters (1940) and The Sword and the Sickle (1942). By the time he returned to India in 1946, he was the best-known Indian writer abroad.

Making Bombay his home and centre of activity, Anand plunged completely into the cultural and social life of India. He founded and edited the fine art magazine Marg and worked tirelessly on his monumental autobiographical fiction The Seven Ages of Man. Recipient of several honorary doctorates and other distinctions, he spent his last years at his retreat in Khandala, where he had opened a small dispensary for the poor.