Mulk Raj Anand is the greatest and the most prolific of the Indian writers. His three novels Untouchable (1935), Coolie (1936), Two leaves and a mud (1937) were produced in quick succession. Coolie is a truly a picaresque novel an epic of thousands of “coolies” in India. A picaresque novel is a novel which deals with the adventures of rogues and villains. The picaro, the central figure in the novel is Munoo and he plays many roles and wears many masks. A writer’s views and attitudes which condition his work are the resultant of a number of influences that operate upon him from childhood onwards, and Anand is no exception in this respect. His heredity, his social milieu, his education, the books he has read and the people he has met, have all conditioned his art, and gone into the making of Anand, the novelist. Coolie is another great epic of misery. Its action is not confined to some particular village, but moves from the village to the city, from the North to the South, and then again to the North. It conducts us on a guided tour of India and gives us a cross- section of India and Indian society. It studies the relationship of the rich and the poor, of children, of servant and master, and of the poor themselves, and of Indians and Europeans. Coolie is the one of the great hunger novels, with hunger, starvation, suffering, sickness, disease and degradation.