No Country: Working-Class Writing in the Age of Globalization

Navigating the bookstores and book parties of 1930s Bloomsbury, Mulk Raj Anand finds himself called upon to validate the genius of Kipling’s novel, Kim.¹ The newly arrived graduate student turned native informant, however, soon discovers that his judgment is solicited and undermined in the same polite gesture. For among the literary elite that he encounters, it is a foregone conclusion that no better realist account of modern India exists. “If I may say so, Professor Dobrée [Anand is compelled to take aboard one of his new mentors on the point], … I have read Kim twice. It is a fairy tale glorifying a young boy. Going about with that exotic Hooi Sipi Lama, who keeps revolving the wheel of life. A little hero of the Empire—a fantasy boy” (Conversations, 15).² We learn from Anand’s biographical reminisces published under the heading Conversations in Bloomsbury as well as from unpublished letters that Anand’s 1936 novel Coolie is planned as a corrective “rewriting” of Kim, the boy’s adventure story and celebration of Empire so admired, it appears, by certain gatekeepers of the modernist culture industry. Anand’s statement, addressed to T.S. Eliot, rehearses the beginnings of an intention: “I am going to rewrite Kipling’s Kim … from the opposite point of view” (Conversations, 50).³

It is an interesting pronouncement on several different levels. In fact, the novel that Anand writes is not a straightforward counterargument to Kim. As “opposed” to the bildungsroman of the colonizer, Anand might have proffered up a story of the culture and education of the nationalist intellectual. Instead, as Anand envisions it, the antonym to Kim is Coolie—a generic, collective title that corresponds to the general story of unskilled, unorganized labor. The alternative perspective to the panoramic vision of India opened up by the adventures of Kipling’s picaresque hero is that of a migrant child-worker who must travel all over India in search of work. Coolie is a rewriting that engages debates on style but also “moves beyond” Bloomsbury to engage—through the conventions, notations, and ideology of the 1930s proletarian novel form—the challenges of ethically translating worker biography into art. We know from Anand’s Conversations in Bloomsbury that Coolie is a rewriting of Kim, but it is less well known that his literary text also follows as a supplement to Diwan Chaman Lall’s 1932 part-activist polemic/part-sociological tract, Coolie: The Story of Labor and Capital in India, “an attempt to share the truth about the working classes in India.”⁴

“Rewriting,” then, as Anand conceptualizes it, is not only writing against (Kim) or, as in the most transparently obvious sense, writing again (with regard to Lall) but something of both. Anand’s novel comes down to us a densely layered palimpsest of citations and omissions. It is at once a literary reimagining of subaltern labor history and an anticolonial rebuttal to Kipling’s imperial fantasy. But ultimately Coolie is also a revision and challenging of its own form, that of the proletarian novel. It is both a comment on the paradoxes of capitalist modernity—a modernity that must rely on backward, feudal institutions of indentured labor for the efficient extraction of surplus value—and a meditation on the paradoxes of trade unionist socialism. In Coolie, organized industrial action in England means short time for coolies in colonial factories in India. Even sympathetic Marxist critics withhold comment on the consensus-breaking episodes in Coolie that dramatize the structural opposition between the working class in the metropole and that of the colony.

Postcolonial scholars have theorized on Kipling’s strategy of delaying the colonial coming-of-age story through the use of the narrative device of the figure of imperialist-as-boy.⁵ Anand’s decision to record the seamy underside of the boy’s adventure story, to make visible the trade-related, occluded antithesis to the moves and maneuvers of the Great Game, also requires a technique of delaying and deferring the boy-child’s coming-of-age tale, but along very different lines and to very different ends. A child coolie’s story is only imaginable in violation of the 1933 Children (Pledging of Labor) Act, a pre-Independence law whose provisions continue to be debated today by the government of India, transnational corporations, and human rights-watch agencies.⁶ The very structure of Anand’s novel unfolds as a scheme of postponements, detours, and interruptions. But furthermore, the indefinitely deferred story of Coolie lingers in decolonized terrain well into the time frame of contemporary globalization.

Though begun in London and written in English, Coolie addresses not just the cultural establishment of Bloomsbury but also the changing, moving, living tradition of working-class literature. Upon returning to India, now a recognized author of world literature in English, Anand advises aspiring critics to see his work in the broader context of proletarian literature as a social formation.⁷ Since the proletarian moment of the 1930s, however, Anand’s writings have been read and studied primarily as the cultural product of anticolonial nationalism (as opposed to class struggles). Thirties internationalism, in general, becomes absorbed into broader canons of culturally dominant fields like mainstream postcolonial studies and, now, transnational modernism.⁸ In recent years we notice a specific effort at recuperating Anand as, first and foremost, a modernist among other modernists. His connections with other proletarian writers of the 1930s are left largely unexplored.

Under these circumstances, what does it mean to read Mulk Raj Anand’s works as constitutive, but also critical, of proletarian writing as a practice of internationalism? By extension, perhaps, we should also ask what is at stake in the critical recovery of 1930s proletarian literature now, when everything old is new again? In 2008 the biggest international economic and financial crisis since the 1930s registered, albeit unevenly, across the globe. The specter of 1929 casts a long shadow, especially if we consider how today’s overlooked global food crisis persists alongside, and arises from, similar yet different profit-maximization motives as the recent banking debacle. Leftist arts and culture movements are at the forefront of the Occupy Wall Street and other counterglobalist Occupy movements across the world. We are confronted with the long 1930s when we consider that post-World War II neoliberal practices of state-restructuring and international relations were put into effect as corrective measures to avoid a replay of the sequence of events that threatened to undermine the global capitalist order in 1930. Writing in the 1980s on the twists and turns of literary history as knowledge production, Cary Nelson makes the point forcefully and eloquently, reminding us that “what and who we are now, is already in part a result of what we no longer know we have forgotten.”⁹ Though Nelson, in context, is referring to how U.S. modernism as a national literary tradition is premised in an ideological blind spot—an active forgetfulness of the literature of labor—his provocation informs questions raised in this chapter as well.

During different phases of its reception and circulation, Anand’s Coolie has been variously classified as Indo-Anglian fiction, world literature in English, anticolonial writing, postcolonial writing, modernist fiction, and—on rare occasions—socialist fiction of the 1930s. Most often, however, even the most comprehensive of judges and exacting of critics seem to discuss the sometimes intersecting, sometimes opposed, agendas of colonial counternarrative and proletarian writing as distinctly separate registers. This study follows a different route. Without summarily collapsing the distances and discontinuities between specific trajectories of historicization, through a close reading of the rhetorical conduct of Coolie, this chapter tracks some places where the breaks become visible and instructive—where something called proletarian writing and something called colonial counterdiscourse work to critique each other in productive ways. The final movement of this chapter pushes beyond this confrontation to suggest that rather than either proletarian writing or colonial counterdiscourse, Anand’s Coolie might perhaps be read as a literary representation of the subaltern.

In The Global Impact of the Great Depression, Dietmar Rothermund evaluates “the ’30s” according to a different scheme of events than the Bank of England’s return to the gold standard in 1925, the New York City stock market crash of October 1929, and dilemmas over war debts and reparations.¹⁰ His book shifts the center of gravity away from the United States and Europe, where the crisis originated, and instead begins with the history of other spaces hardest hit by the impact—spaces intimately connected with, yet continents apart from, the metropolitan financial centers of the world. He focuses instead on indices of export agriculture, overproduction of wheat, peasant indebtedness, and instances of rural insurgency in areas such as the Punjab. In addition to analyzing agrarian movements in the wheat-growing regions of South Asia, he considers specific case histories from Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America as he labors to demonstrate how the overproduction of wheat contributed to the final breakdown of the international credit system.¹¹

Of course, these particular happenings, involving the rural workers of the colonial periphery, are not conventionally written up as being of global historical magnitude or meaning. In his beautifully heretical little book, Rothermund tries to correct a theoretical bias in economic historiography: “At most some attention has been paid to the supposedly positive effect which the depression had on the industries located in the peripheral countries which could benefit from import substitution. The peripheral peasantry which bore the brunt of the impact of the depression has remained dark, its fate has not entered into economic consciousness” (10). His rural-centered approach is particularly anomalous in relation to the resolutely urban focus of most contemporary studies of the current situation of economic globalization.¹²

A similar counterintuitive move to center the periphery is also the plan of Anand’s writings of the 1930s. He imagines the spaces blocked from the view of colonial administrators and the British labor party alike—indeed, organized labor in general.¹³ More specifically, he proceeds by way of a technique of reversing and displacing the recognized narrating subject’s standpoint: once again, Coolie is the antonym to Kim. Anand gives us the precarious existence of the migrant child laborer as a foil to the questing mobility of Kipling’s boy adventurer. Kim’s schoolroom is the world. In Anand’s novel the global is not mapped with the tools and measures of the schoolboy/imperial surveyor but rather measured sack by sack of wheat for export. The grain market coolies have a different understanding of space management all together. The “art and science of mensuration” is computed differently.¹⁴ In 1937 Anand follows the publication of Coolie with Two Leaves and a Bud, staging the story of the exploited indentured laborers on the Assamese tea plantations. Of all his texts from the 1930s, his first novel, Untouchable (1935), attracts the most attention from the British liberal establishment, predictably perhaps, because there the subject of child labor is framed in terms of the racism of the Hindu caste system. Anand’s later novels of the 1930s—which for better or worse garner less critical attention and validation—focus on the question of the exploitation of the working class in British colonial India. Two Leaves and a Bud was ultimately withdrawn from circulation because its caricature of the English plantation manager was deemed obscene. The president of the Indian Tea Association had the book placed on the list of “proscribed books in India”—of course, thereby guaranteeing it popularity and a new discursive life upon India’s Independence, and thus unwittingly doing his part toward paving the way for Anand to be read and received as a nationalist writer.

In a collection of letters from Mulk Raj Anand to Saros Cowasjee published under the title Author to Critic, we are made privy to the author’s own active attempt to (re)introduce his work in the context of traditions of working-class writing. The very first letter, dated 3 October 1965, proposes a set of instructions to be followed: “If you feel you would like to do a study then I think there is an angle which none of these books on my books has covered: that is the relation to the 30s movement in Western Europe (in fact all over the world)” (1). The published study, So Many Freedoms, does not follow up on this request—at least not in a consistent manner.¹⁵ No sustained effort has been made to situate Anand’s works in relation to the international alliance of writers, readers, activists, and workers that comprised the dynamic formation of proletarian writing.¹⁶ And yet to ignore this collective identity—to uncritically designate Anand as a nationalist writer—is to ignore the fact that in 1936 he was a member of the Communist Party and that while he was living in London he cofounded the Marxist-oriented Progressive Writers Association.¹⁷

Also, to categorize Anand as a nationalist writer is to ignore his critiques of the way in which national liberation was won, as well as to discount his continuing work as an activist in post-Independence India in the wake of the failure of decolonization and the rise of the new transnational agencies. For example, in a second postscript to his Apology for Heroism: A Brief Autobiography of Ideas, he soberly recaps the revolutionary élan of the 1930s intellectual.¹⁸ Commenting on the transition of power from imperial Britain to the pax Americana, he writes, “I do not want to hide any mistakes that I have made in my life or to defend them … [b]ut it is important to realize that the illusions of an Indian intellectual in the ’30s could be based on a sincere belief in the necessity of national freedom and socialism” (189). Writing after Independence (and the new world-order of Bretton Woods), he goes on to comment on the thwarted legacy of proletarian writing as a counterglobalist movement: “[T]he construction of [a] poetic and philosophical vision by the enormous and intricate propaganda that deforms genuine ideals and puts them in the service of half lies and quarter lies has left little room for complacency. While the intelligentsia still inquires into the rights and wrongs of personal relations, international morality condones belligerency and war in the name of the United Nations” (200).¹⁹

Indian writers of the 1930s such as Anand (writing in English), Zaheer (writing in Urdu), and Premchand (writing in Hindi) constitute a genealogy for anticolonial fiction that has not been adequately theorized in English. Writing within a late colonial, pre-Independence milieu, the Progressive Writers sought to expand the definition of literature and the literary to engage the ideas of class as a structural and structuring aspect of reality. But in the impress of the predominant metropolitan myth that all Third World literature is national allegory or paradigmatically magical realism, the aesthetics and politics of this Marxist-oriented group of internationalist writers have been overlooked by contemporary literary critics.²⁰ Gustav Klaus, a scholar of British working-class and socialist fiction, represents a notable exception to dominant trends. In The Literature of Labor he identifies Anand first and foremost in relationship to a tradition of political fiction born of the decade of internationalism and the “radical” 1930s. But Klaus’s well-intentioned argument, absolving Anand of a type of revolutionary defeatism, unfolds by way of taking stock of the irreducible determinations of history and burdens of cultural relativism that inevitably shape Anand’s ideological viewpoint and aesthetic choices in a way that disconnects him from his European contemporaries. By contrast, as we shall see, Bessie Head references and reimagines the ideological scope (and compromises of) the Progressive Writers Association members’ collective vision in the name of a broader, more diffuse antinationalist cultural politics—a politics that holds humanist lessons for Apartheid-era South Africa.

Most critical inquiries concerning this novel begin and end with a reading of the anticlimactic episode of a failed strike. In Coolie, the workers do not come together to act in their rational, economic self-interest as a class. Does this make it a failed socialist novel? What in fact constitute the failings of Coolie as a narrative? Accessible, “reasonable” explications have been volunteered by sympathetic critics. They attribute the failings of the narrative to the “fatalism peculiar to the Indian peasantry,”²² the infancy of the Indian labor movement, the paradoxes of nationalist agency, and also the “technical handicap which limits the author’s possibilities … the choice of the protagonist, a low-caste boy who is unlikely to become involved in revolutionary activities.”²³

The last observation, suggested by Klaus, is quite simply a misrepresentation of the central character’s caste origins—a mistake that affects how we contextualize Anand as a 1930s writer. In fact, the central character shares the same caste origin as the writer: Kshatriya, the second caste. At one point in the text, when dismissed by a shopkeeper as low caste, we encounter Munoo adamantly correcting the misperception: “He said to himself, ‘I let him put me in my place as a coolie, but I was paying for the soda water and I am not an untouchable. I am a Hindu Kshatriya, a Rajput, a warrior’” (157). In Coolie, the novelist underscores the contradiction that U.S.-Euro Marxists are largely incapable of thinking through: The “elite in caste [can be] subaltern in class.”²⁴ If in Anand’s first published novel, Untouchable, he inscribes the topos of child labor within the narrative of caste, in this, his second novel, he makes a pronounced statement against liberal critics when he renegotiates the story in terms of global capitalism and theories of class—not caste.²⁵ Arguably, this shift in object (from questions of caste to questions of class) has everything to do with why Anand’s relationship to 1930s writing remains relatively obscured—why his works remain untouched by metropolitan Marxists on the one hand, and South Asian area studies specialists on the other. Outside the literary scene, the need to adjust the focus of the narrative of child labor continues as part of the consciousness-raising work of international human rights and metropolitan groups such as FOIL (Forum of Indian Leftists), which begins its exposition of the increase in the exploitation of child labor in India by addressing the governing misperception that child labor is primarily explicable in terms of the Hindu caste system.²⁶

But what constitutes the making of class according to the narrative logic of Coolie? “Surely, the Coolies had no religion,” it occurs to Munoo, as he watches the mix of Hindu hill coolies, Kashmiri Muhammedan laborers, and Sikh coolies sharing tobacco pipes and water. And yet, later on in the story we have the dramatization of the Hindu-Muslim communal riots that completely disrupt trade unionist efforts at working-class organization. Reversing and displacing the proposition (of Coolie as a failed revolutionary narrative), we might say instead that the defective parts and recalcitrant bits teach us something about how we produce the concept of class in working-class literature. As Ellen Rooney puts it, “when form is conceived as the effect of reading, the burden falls entirely on the reader/reading to produce the formal and to register its productive and contradictory relation to the social, including its relation to social thematics” (212).²⁷

In an aligned movement—though speaking of literature, rather than form, specifically—Spivak outlines a practice of reading literature for its literariness that might work to supplement the evidentiary claims of sociological and historicist commentary. In context, the category that she is discussing is sociological constructions of gender, but the statement also holds for Marxism and the unfinished texts of class:²⁸

Such a reading practice enables us to open up the episode of the failed strike according to the (il)logic of the literary text, rather than to close it off as simply discontinuous with successful examples of working-class history. “The historian must persist in his efforts in this awareness, that the subaltern is necessarily the absolute limit of the place where history is narrativized into logic.”²⁹ In Coolie, readers are apprised of successful moments in Indian working-class history. Topical allusions are made to the historic TISCO (Tata Iron and Steel Company) steelworkers’ strikes—taking place elsewhere in Jamshedpur—in a textual space parallel with (although not connected to) the main storyline.³⁰ What, then, can be learned from the primary story of an anonymous coolie and a failed strike?

We know from unpublished records and autobiographical writings that Coolie (notice that even the definite article is stricken from the title) is the planned antonym to Kim. Just as Kipling’s text is “about” the colonial subject coming of age and finally asserting (his) identity, Anand’s text is “about”³¹ the agent(s) of (colonial) production remaining anonymous—of not being able to “mak[e] their class interest valid in their proper name.”³² With regard to this last point, it is crucial to mark the significance of rumor—a narrative without author—that disrupts the trade unionist’s speech. Ironically, it is here in this brief moment that the exorbitant story of an “abducted” child takes center stage—overwriting the message of trade union socialism in the name of exploited child labor.

In the area of anticolonial historiography, members of the Marxist Subaltern Studies collective draw upon structuralist analyses of narrative to show us how to read closely for indices such as “fatalism,” “infancy,” “handicap,” and “caste” where they occur in examples of supposedly value-neutral historical documentation. Ranajit Guha, in “The Prose of Counter Insurgency,” alerts us to the production of historical writings where insurgency is explained purely in terms of “an enumeration of causes—of, say, economic and political deprivation … where Cause is made to stand in as a phantom surrogate for Reason, the logic of that consciousness” [as well as, in our view, for creative un(r)eason] (47). In Rethinking Working-Class History, Dipesh Chakrabarty theorizes “the paradox of labor militancy without organization,” giving us a narrative for reading resistance where it has not been coded as resistance—where “what has so far been viewed simply as an absence of trade union discipline or training reveals on closer inspection, the presence of alternative systems of power and authority.”³³ Vinay Bahl’s The Making of the Indian Working Class, detailing the situation of the TISCO strikes, has affiliations with the premise of Rethinking (although in her preface, Bahl goes to great lengths to distance herself from the project of subaltern studies, based on a general suspicion of “Postmodernists and Subalternists”).³⁴ Certainly subaltern studies historians have consistently sought to make visible the constructedness of official historical discourse, drawing upon the resources of structuralist and poststructuralist theory in the service of those subaltern populations that fall outside established systems of representation (nationalist history, trade union socialism, and others). What is missing from Bahl’s critical assessment of the general oeuvre—a critical assessment that, let us notice, confuses poststructuralist theory with postmodernism—is a consideration of the broader implications of reading failure, otherwise. To extend the critical impetus of subaltern studies into the field of literature is to recognize that the making/unmaking of class happens in counterintuitive ways—outside the speech acts of the state, oppositional nationalisms, and organized labor.

Consider, for example, this scene in Coolie where (writing) working-class history is staged as predicated upon the suppression of a child’s testimony. In terms of the plot sequence, this scene occurs after the management-provoked “communal riots.” In terms of the rhetorical conduct of the text, this space is imprinted by the calculated silence following a sequence of rhetorical questions. We might say that this scene composes the center of the book. In it, the subaltern is placed in the twisted position of eavesdropping as the official account of his story is being negotiated by the press, Congress wallahs, and community leaders:

“Bande Mataram,” Munoo heard the Congress-Wallah greet his majesty. He did not know who he was. But he was impressed and curious.

“What are your leaders doing?” the dignitary exclaimed. “What are the police and the government doing? What are the newly elected members of the corporation doing? For a whole night Pathans have been murdered by Hindus and the Congress has done nothing about it. If Miss Mayo came to India and wrote a chapter about children being kidnapped for sacrificial purposes, would you not deny it as a wicked libel?” The congress men kept quiet … [And then finally the baffled listener is discovered.] “Go away! Who are you?” one of the Congress volunteers shouted as he returned to his post at the door. Munoo started, blushed a confession of guilt, and capered on his way.

(246–247)

The author figure, Katherine Mayo, is a crucial index here. In fact, the structural irony upon which the narrative is based might be summed up as follows: the publication of sensationalist accounts of brutalized Indian children (in the metropole) detracts attention from the reality of child labor (in the periphery).³⁵ The two events are simultaneous and inextricably connected. A coolie’s story is not noteworthy enough to make it into the local and national news—nor is it scandalous enough to warrant mention in Mayo’s catalogue of child victims, Mother India. But in fact, it is just as the international and national furor over missing (Indian, Hindu, Muslim) children reaches its height that Munoo is abducted by the colonial memsahib, Mrs. Mainwaring, to serve as her houseboy in Simla. Significantly, the word “kidnap” is not used to describe this encounter.

The center of a book, E.M. Forster argues, often has nothing to do with its plot or spatial arrangement. More often than not, “the center” contains authorial commentary on the validity of disparate truth claims. Forster suggests “truth in life versus truth in art” as an example.³⁶ At the center of Coolie is Anand’s commentary on the validity of writing historical fiction versus writing history. To apprehend the scene in this register we need to know that Anand shares a certain affinity with the figure of the doorkeeper/Congress wallah. (Anand was, for a while, a member of the Indian Congress Party.³⁷) We also need to be familiar with the fact that the literary representation of the central character owes to a “childhood friendship”³⁸ and that, in fact, the novel is predicated upon a deliberate decision not to transcribe a testimony.³⁹ In this sense we cannot overlook the significance of the scene of “communication” between the Congress wallah and the small, silent, nameless witness. It is a scene that is replayed in Anand’s fictionalized autobiography (there with the figure of a mother as mediator facilitating communication).

What do we make of this active marginalization of the “true story” (testimony) in the interest of staging, indirectly (through literature), the drama by which justice is obstructed and testimony is suppressed? Do we see it as the novelist’s case for historical fiction (focalized) from below? Or do we see it as the writer’s disclosure of complicity with the very processes that he is critiquing (that is, some testimonies are never collected)?⁴⁰ The protocols of the passage (the sequence of rhetorical questions) will not allow us to choose between the two agendas (of history and of fiction). A rhetorical question, as we know, is where “the same grammatical pattern engenders two meanings.”⁴¹ In this scene, composed of questions where no answers are required and no witness solicited, Anand involves himself in the scheme of the aporia that he returns to over and over again in Coolie: representation for one constituency is predicated upon subalternity for another.

We must keep in mind that Coolie was written and published while the author was living in England, having received his doctoral degree in philosophy from the University of London. Is this, then, a condition of possibility of proletarian writing representing the colonial periphery? The author figure (in the above scene) is hardly represented as a welcome character. I am not suggesting that the positions of the American imperialist (sojourning in India) and that of the socialist, colonial intellectual (studying in England) can be deemed equivalent. I am saying that this scene indexes a moment of complicity between the author and the object of his critique. Notice that the textuality of imperial philanthropy disguised as feminist reform is cited as “wicked libel”: “If Miss Mayo came to India and wrote a chapter about children being kidnapped for sacrificial purposes, would you not deny it as a wicked libel?” But on the other hand, nationalist discourse is not the answer: “The congressmen kept quiet.” This scene is focalized from the perspective of those for whom negotiated political independence means nothing. At its close, we are given the figure of the Congress volunteer who wittingly or unwittingly waves the nondescript coolie out of the picture: “Go away! Who are you?” What can be learned from this attempt to enter into the protocols of the text? In “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak, via a critique of Michel Foucault, notices the slippage between the representing intellectual’s desire to render visible the (suppressing) mechanism and his desire to render vocal the individual. Anand consistently guards against this impulse in his (literary) representation of the subaltern. This scene makes intelligible (through the protocols of the text: rhetorical questions, presupposed silences, and so on) the mechanisms by which the child-worker/part-subject of labor is made to unspeak himself.⁴²

In Coolie, this wordless center is emblematic of other instances where the writer formalizes a pattern of silences. There are, for example, as discussed also in my introduction, moments of “interruption from a source relating ‘otherwise’ to the main system of meaning unfolding.” Munoo reads the export trader’s sign, but he is “too young to know the laws of political economy.” Here, the defining comment on the global text has to be made by the narrator as a marked aside to the reader, who must know the significance of the corn laws in 1930s India. Another place of interruption (a break in speech) that defines how we read this book is the meaningless rumor that disrupts the trade unionist’s charter. This writing of course encrypts the exorbitant story that will never make it onto center stage—that of the central character’s “kidnapping.” Here, in this scene of the failed strike, it is set wild—a narrative without author. Rumor marks the place of subaltern discourse: “the broken accents of a voice defined, ‘kidnapped, kidnapped … o my son has been kidnapped.’” Significantly, the disembodied voice is gendered: “Only the moaning of a coolie could be heard, a queer, broken moaning like the howling of a she-hyena” (234).

Once again, if “the work of form is revealed in reading,” something is to be learned, also, from the moments where the text transgresses its own rhetorical rules.⁴³ In a novel focalized almost entirely from the perspective of a factory coolie, Anand then gives us this telling episode that stands out as particularly gratuitous (lacking good reason) in terms of the narrative code. The following scene breaks with the general conduct (of presupposed silences staged as rhetorical questions) to give us an answer where none is called for. It represents a space to which the central character has no access: the bosses reasoning (boardroom discussions about transnational corporations, consolidated interests, tariffs, imperial preference, world trade, and other obscure topics). Focalized from the point of view of the ubiquitous “Parsi” messenger boy who sees and hears all, this scene gives away the reasons behind the production of a notice informing the coolies of short work, effective immediately.

A dispatch arrives from “Sir George White” (factory headquarters) in England, prompting the manager to hastily dictate a notice to his scrivener. In the official document to be sent out, the impending season of short time is explained in terms of global economic depression:

“In view of the present trade depression and currency crisis,” Mr. Little dictated, in a slow, deliberate manner, screwing up his eyes and puffing out his cheeks, till the words began to twist and roll like windy rhetoric,⁴⁴ “the Board of Directors regrets to announce that in order to keep the plant running and to curtail expenses, the Mills will go on short time immediately. There will be no work for the fourth week in every month till further notice. No wages will be paid for that week, but the management, having the welfare of the workers at heart, have sanctioned a substantial allowance. …”

(223)

But afterwards, as Sir Reginald White, the proprietor of the Bombay Mills, arrives on the scene, he intimates that socialist agitation in the home factories in England is connected to the policy of cost-cutting crisis management here. The gaps in the blandly worded company document are filled as he explains, “the Board of Directors had serious news about a threatening crisis at home. And in view of the Company’s interests, not only in this mill, but in the Calcutta Jute Mills and the Madras Mines, and to guard against any loss to the shareholders we have had to take this unfortunate decision…. Britain must go through with the Singapore agreement and make the Indian ocean safe for our ships. But the trouble is that these Indians are getting more and more restive, and the socialists at home, you know …” (225). Elsewhere in the story, the impossible aporia of socialist agitation at home being the condition for short work here is perhaps too easily resolved in Anand’s caricature of Jimmy Thomas, once a Lancashire mill operative, now the evil foreman who brutalizes factory coolies in sync with newspaper reports on communist agitation:

Occasionally he kicked a coolie. But that was when he had read in the morning paper the news of a nationalist demonstration, a terrorist outrage or an attempt at seditious communist propaganda which he, as a member of the British race in India, considered to be more of a personal affront than the pursuit of an ideal of freedom on the part of the exploited. He had long since forgotten the days during which he himself had eked out a miserable existence in Lancashire.

(217)

The “supplementary” scene of boardroom discussions is also crucially significant in that it introduces into the story the shadowy figures of the Indian capitalists/businessmen who stand to benefit indirectly from Sir Reginald’s appeals to the viceroy for a “high tariff on foreign goods.”⁴⁵ “Did you hear that the Stephenson Mills have been bought by the Jamsetji Jijibhoy group? That makes the Indian Interests in the cotton industry 75 percent to our 25. It is a bad look-out,” opines Sir Reginald. Of course the issue of trade wars between British and Indian capitalists is set in a system of knowledge and calculation that is worlds apart from the life and times of a coolie. Once again, the narrator underscores the protagonist’s subaltern bafflement: “Munoo, who knew nothing about directors and shareholders and threatening crises, believed that it was Ratan’s dismissal that had been the cause of this uproar” (226).

At the heart of Anand’s novel is a dilemma for reporter, politician, Marxist, writer, and reader. The question becomes: should we suppress the damaging details to preserve the integrity of the story? At stake is the issue of whether we should edit the testimony of a coolie in order to produce a more manageable account of events (e.g., the failed strike, the management-manufactured communal riots, international working-class solidarity). Indeed, some of us would like to suppress the evidence of the sad misfirings of the socialist message in colonial India altogether, a message delivered, as Chakrabarty so eloquently puts it, “only in a travestied form by the mad and violent agency of imperialism.” Coolie marks the problem that is discreetly effaced in the craft and analysis of the proletarian novel—the unspeakable margins of peripheral labor.

With the writing of Coolie, Anand follows through with the promise made to T. S. Eliot: he gives us a counternarrative to Kipling’s feted boy’s adventure story from the perspective of unorganized child labor. But as touched upon in the opening lines of this chapter, Anand’s novel is a 1930s rewriting in another sense in that his novel also draws upon a 1932 tract produced by Diwan Chaman Lall titled Coolie: The Story of Labor and Capital in India.⁴⁶ The foreword to Lall’s book explains that the text to follow is “a monograph attempting] to share with the reader the truth about the working classes in India.”