Disciplining the Coolie, Regulating the Artisan: A Foucauldian Reading of Power and Labor in Mulk Raj Anand’s Two Leaves and a Bud and The Big Heart

Abstract

This article examines the shifting topologies of power and labor subjugation in Mulk Raj Anand’s Two Leaves and a Bud (1937) and The Big Heart (1945) through Michel Foucault’s analytics of power, supplemented by Marxist political economy and postcolonial theory. While conventional criticism emphasizes Anand’s socialist realism or Gandhian humanism, this study demonstrates that his fiction tracks an evolutionary movement from an anatomo-politics of bodily discipline to a biopolitical apparatus of industrial regulation. In Two Leaves and a Bud, the Assam tea plantation operates as an enclosed carceral institution wherein the indentured coolie, Gangu, is produced as a docile body through spatial partitioning, surveillance, and sovereign violence. In The Big Heart, the ancestral thathiar (coppersmith) guild of Amritsar confronts the dislocating shock of mechanization, where labor is governed through machine temporalities, surplus populations, and market fluctuations. By analyzing the dialectic between institutional capture and subaltern counter-conduct, the article reveals Anand’s incisive diagnosis of how colonial capitalism and modern industrialization systematically govern and expend marginalized human life.