Cite this Essay
MLA:
Mondal, Subarna. “R. K. Narayan.” Indian Writing In English Online, 21 Oct 2022 , https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/r-k-narayan-subarna-mondal/.
Chicago:
Mondal, Subarna. “R. K. Narayan.” Indian Writing In English Online. October 21, 2022. https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in/r-k-narayan-subarna-mondal/.
Rasipuram Krishnaswami Iyer Narayanaswami (1906-2001) is one of the three most prominent Indian novelists in English (the other two being Raja Rao and Mulk Raj Anand) in late colonial and early post-colonial India. Born on the 10th of October, 1906, in Madras, Tamil Nadu, in British India, Narayan studied in the Maharaja College of Mysore, and worked as a school teacher for a brief span of time before writing his first novel Swami and Friends in 1930.
It is in his very first novel that Narayan creates his famous Malgudi, a fictional town in Southern India that forms a constant setting for all his fifteen novels and most of his six short story collections. Malgudi as a literary space evolves with Narayan’s writings and his life: from a sleepy little town of Swami and Friends, it gradually grows to become a more settled space where the middle-class populace resides and socialises in The Bachelor of Arts (1937) and The English Teacher (1945). These three semi-autobiographical works reflect Narayan’s perception of his surroundings that gradually changes with time. From cricket matches to disrupted friendships, from the heady days of youth to a settled happy married life to the loss of his beloved wife – Narayan’s Malgudi, in this trilogy, charts the most turbulent years of his life.
Malgudi also traces the changing lives of a populace that was coping with and reacting to a succession of baffling fluctuations. While Narayan’s trilogy along with The Dark Room (1938) and Malgudi Days (1942) are set in a colonial space where the freedom movement is in full swing, The Financial Expert (1951), Waiting for the Mahatma (1955), The Guide (1958), The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1961), and The Vendor of Sweets (1967) are written at a crucial juncture of Indian history when the nation, like the fictitious Malgudi, is a newly (re)invented place, a hastily constructed melting pot of Indian and English milieu that the countrymen had to come to terms with.
In fact, during Narayan’s most prolific phase, India was going through major political and economic crises. Food scarcity, rising population, a listless economy, poor infrastructure, and four successive wars–World War II that ended in 1945, India’s war with China in 1962, and two consecutive wars with Pakistan in 1965 and 1971 brought about an all-pervading gloom that eclipsed the initial euphoria of the post-independence years. Going against the tendency of his contemporary authors to brood over the prevailing conditions, Narayan continued to write of the everyday existence of ordinary Indians in his own ingenious comic ironic tone that rarely verged on being acerbic – a tendency which also earned him much caustic criticism. While Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak criticises his cultural compliance to an indifferent international reading class in An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (2012), Shashi Tharoor does not spare Narayan in a deferred obituary published in The Hindu where he mentions “the banality of Narayan’s concerns, the narrowness of his vision, the predictability of his prose, and the shallowness of the pool of experience and vocabulary from which he drew” (2001). Undoubtedly, his scope was limited and he refrained from an outright censure of British rule, except in Swami and Friends and Waiting for the Mahatma. According to Paul Brians this itself was a deliberate political stance that Narayan had adopted as a form of silent resistance against the colonial regime (60). He concentrated on the daily oddities of Malgudi-dwellers, their professions, their leisure, and their love for folklore and mythology.
Folklore and mythic stories formed a significant part of Narayan’s childhood as he was brought up by his grandmother who provided him with a healthy dose of the magic of fables. This love for tales that were simple yet fantastic is perhaps what made him dare to choose a difficult and an unconventional career during 1930s: that of a writer. Further, the decision to write in English made him confront the added problem of dealing with Western readers whose minds were already swarming with images of sadhus, and cobras, and black magic when it came to visualising his country. It is this challenge which Narayan met with considerable success. As Olivia Manning states in The Spectator:
From Sirajudowlla to the curious monsters of Mother India, the Indian male has been presented to the British female as a tyrannical horror, a nightmare in the home. Mr. Narayan has changed him for us into a human being (qtd. in Imaging Malgudi, Ahluwalia 1).
The long-held extreme views of torture, violence and villainy that most Indian men were attributed with by the East India Company’s collective memory smarting in the aftermath of the Sepoy Mutiny were furthered by contemporary issues such as child marriage, female infanticide, and Sati. Narayan, to some extent, mitigated this stereotypical image by humanising India through Malgudi. Narayan’s popularity in the West is based on his ability to depict the people of this newly independent country in all their diversity, inhabiting a society which is complex and multi-layered.
Narayan’s first three novels – Swami and Friends (1935), The Bachelor of Arts (1937), and The Dark Room (1938) were all published in London, with the help of his friend and admirer Graham Greene (1904-1991). Swami and Friends, the first novel in his semi-autobiographical trilogy is about Swaminathan, a six-year-old boy and his gradual evolution as he journeys as a student from Albert Mission School to the indigenous Board School. From fascination for cricket and an internalising of British values and education to an understanding of how deeply attached he is to his grandmother and her tales, Swami and Friends is a bildungsroman where the protagonist after his brief encounter and awe of everything British, realises that he cannot resist the pull of his own culture and his own roots. Swami’s English-learning experiences and those of witnessing the Indian freedom struggle are straight out of Narayan’s own life (My Days, Narayan 1974). The novel may well be an autobiography of any reader belonging to Narayan’s generation growing up under similar bewildering circumstances, oscillating between two different worldviews.
In Swami’s outburst against Christian teachings and his consequent expulsion from Albert Mission and his subsequent admission to the Board School of Malgudi, in his realisation of cricket and its values as a meaningless charade, in his oscillation between a choice of losing his friend Rajam and being true to his newly found belief, are rooted the basic dilemmas of an adolescent Indian male and his responses to colonialism. This dilemma is well-expressed in Narayan’s use of the English language in this work. The author’s use of Standard English Language with a third person narrator proceeds along with the characters’ use of English with a distinct Indian hue giving the readers a taste of Indian English.
The Bachelor of Arts continues the semi-autobiographical account of the author. In Chandran’s tale one finds a depiction of Narayan’s journey from the adolescent restlessness of Swaminathan in Swami and Friends to the restraint and maturity that Krishna strives for and ultimately achieves in The English Teacher. Sharing apparent similarities with “Araby” in Joyce’s Dubliners (1914), The Bachelor of Arts has a tongue-in-cheek approach to a coming-of-age novel. Chandran, the protagonist, falls in love with Malathi at first sight and is determined to overcome the narrow age-old customs of caste and class to marry her, as he ponders,
[s]uppose, though unmarried, she belonged to some other caste? A marriage would not be tolerated even between sub-sects of the same caste. If India was to attain salvation these watertight divisions must go–Community, Caste, Sects, Sub-sects, and still further divisions. He felt very indignant. He would set an example himself by marrying this girl whatever her caste or sect might be (1978, 97-98).
Failing to acquire the love of his life, Malathi, (whose opinion or voice we do not hear even once in the entire novel) for differences in horoscope, Chandran leaves home, feigns to be a sannyasi, survives by begging in a distant village, then comes to his senses, and returns to Malgudi. Much in the spirit of “Araby”‘s profound conclusion “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity” (Dubliners, 38), Chandran’s deep understanding of life is stated thus:
Long after the babble of the crowd on the sands had died, and darkness had fallen on the earth, Chandran’s voice was heard, in tune with the rumble of the flowing river, narrating to Mohan his wanderings. He then explained his new philosophy, which followed the devastating discovery that Love and Friendship were the veriest illusions. He explained that people married because their sexual appetite had to be satisfied and there must be somebody to manage the house. There was nothing deeper than that in any man and woman relationship (198).
However, his first sight of Susila dispels all his dark opinions on the institution of marriage and shatters all his resolutions of remaining a celibate for life:
At this moment the girl slightly raised her head and stole a glance at Chandran. He saw her face now. It was divine; there was no doubt about it. He secretly compared it with Malathi’s, and wondered what he had seen in the latter to drive him so mad…. For the rest of the journey the music of the word “Susila” rang in his ears. Susila, Susila, Susila, her name, music, figure, face, and everything about her was divine. Susila, Susila- Malathi, not a spot beside Susila; it was a tongue twister; he wondered why people liked that name (258).
Thus ends a realistic comic-ironic depiction of a bachelor’s adventure, an adventure only to be taken up later by Krishna in The English Teacher. However, Chandran’s desire for love marriage and his refusal to succumb to the dictates of astrology, suggest the beginning of a generation that was attempting to step out of the traditional kinship networks so important in the Indian marriage market. As he raves at his mother, “To the dust-pot with your silly customs” (118).
The Dark Room, on the other hand, is an exploration of this same marital institution from the perspective of a woman. The most uncharacteristic of Narayan’s work, The Dark Room is a bitter tale of a disillusioned housewife, Savitri, who walks out on her philandering husband only to return to the confines of the same stifling household, burdened with the realisation that she will never be able to transcend the fear of being a lonely working woman for life. Unlike his other works, Narayan does not conclude this novel on a note of peaceful acceptance of the vicissitudes of life – a factor responsible for Narayan’s popularity amongst critics of the West – as rightly pointed out by Teresa Hubel in (114). The Dark Room offers us no consolation. Savitri remains lonely at the end. But she nevertheless realises the futility of trying to live up to her name – Savitri – the mythical archetypal woman of the Mahabharata, a figure exploited by the nationalist patriarchs of the time to safeguard the image of a selfless Indian woman readily sacrificing herself at the altars of a patriarchal society.
William Walsh detects a note of hysteria in this work of Narayan. He considers The Dark Room a “much less appealing one … It shows … at certain places a wash of unabsorbed feelings. There is a touch of hysteria in the novel …” (43). This reading perhaps misses a note of desperation in this story of Savitri that is in keeping with contemporary volatile debates around women’s issues. In The Dark Room, Teresa Hubel finds echoes of the concerns of the All India Women’s Conference, a major wing of Indian nationalist movement of the 1930s. She states, “[i]t is significant that he [Narayan] chooses to centre Savitri’s revolt on those two issues from the 1930s … the demand of middle-class women for work outside the home and their efforts to move beyond the discourse of the selfless heroine” (124).
Despite dealing effectively with contemporary issues and dilemmas and despite receiving good reviews, Narayan’s first three works did not do well. As Narayan famously speaks of his predicament: “Good reviews, poor sales, and a family to support” (qtd. in Sen 2004, 125). Under such adverse circumstances, desperately seeking publishers in India and abroad, Narayan finally managed to publish his articles and short stories fortnightly in a leading Madras daily, The Hindu, from 1938. The following year, Narayan’s wife, Rajam, died of typhoid. Narayan struggled with the twin burden of the loss of his wife and the loss of his readers in war-ridden England. Consequently, a series of three short story collections Malgudi Days (1943), Dodu and Other Stories (1943), and Cyclone and Other Stories (1945) were published by Narayan’s own publishing house in India, named Indian Thought Publications. Many of these stories had already been published in The Hindu.
Narayan states in his introduction to Malgudi Days (Indian reprint, 2005) that in his short stories there is “almost invariably the central character [who] faces some kind of crisis and either resolves it or lives with it” (viii). An astrologer who manages to escape his past, a doctor who would not lie, a dog who refuses to abandon his master despite being mistreated, a postman who loves reading others’ letters, or a retired office guard who is petrified of opening a registered post – Narayan’s short stories are teeming with oddities. His plots remain simple yet captivating, with a fair share of their focus on the underdogs of the society. Although depicting a clearly identifiable South Indian milieu, Narayan surprisingly manages to prove through these very stories that India is a culturally diverse nation space. In fact, to Narayan, Malgudi does not merely represent India in a microcosmic form, but it can be a place in any part of the world:
I can detect Malgudi characters even in New York: for instance, West Twenty-third Street … possesses every element of Malgudi, with its landmarks and humanity remaining unchanged – the drunk lolling on the steps of the synagogue … the barber, the dentist, the lawyer and the specialist in fishing hooks, tackle and rods, the five-and-ten and the delicatessen … all are there as they were, with an air of unshaken permanence and familiarity (Malgudi Days, Narayan 2005, viii).
It is perhaps for this untiring fascination with humans and nonhumans that Narayan continued to be a keen observer of the life around him and an expert chronicler of their everyday existence.
His other collections of short stories An Astrologer’s Day and Other Stories (1947), Lawley Road and Other Stories (1967), and later Under the Banyan Tree (1985) were mostly reprints of the first three collections. While Under the Banyan Tree was published by Viking Press, An Astrologer’s Day and Lawley Road were published by Eyre & Spottiswoode and Hind Pocket Books respectively. Earlier, Eyre & Spottiswoode had also published the third of Narayan’s semi-autobiographical trilogy, The English Teacher in 1945. Unlike The Dark Room, The English Teacher presents an almost perfect picture of an idyllic married life of Krishna and Susila, only to be abruptly punctuated by the death of Susila. The novel ponders over the possibilities of life after death, the problems of a mechanical education system, and the politics of the kitchen through a study of ordinary yet highly eccentric characters. And all this is done in Narayan’s characteristic simple disarming prose. Susila’s character, for instance, is drawn with all its believable and relatable contradictions. She is parsimonious, but does not grudge added expenses for the old housekeeper. She tries to “get through Ivanhoe … and Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare” (2022, 59) while imbibing “many sensible points in cooking and household economy” (2022, 39) from her mother-in-law. She is a complete contrast to her predecessor (the elder daughter-in-law) in the family who “would never allow a remark or a look from my [Krishna’s] mother to pass unchallenged” being the daughter of a “retired High Court Judge” (2022, 40). Narayan, thus, offers us a brief glimpse of the functioning of a typical Indian middle-class family with the familiar mother-in-law versus daughter-in-law trope so popular, unfortunately, even today. Pitting one woman against another in a situation where ironically both women are victims of the same stifling customs is a motif touched upon in The Guide and The Painter of Signs as well. The English Teacher was an instant success selling thousands of copies. Narayan had tapped on the English taste for the idiosyncratic and had satisfied their curiosity about the pious East to a certain extent.
The English Teacher was followed by Mr Sampath- The Printer of Malgudi (1949), The Financial Expert (1952), Waiting for the Mahatma (1955), and The Guide (1958). The last three works were published by Methuen, London. While Mr Sampath traces the rise and fall of a printer, Mr Sampath, as his career spans from the world of print to the world of the celluloid, The Financial Expert is the story of a financial wizard Margayya. The novel is pervaded by Narayan’s characteristic comic ironic tone with a touch of subtle pathos. While Margayya fleeces unsuspecting customers and amasses wealth only to be ruined by his own son, Babu; Mr Sampath is himself the architect of his own fall.
In Waiting for the Mahatma, Narayan depicts Gandhi as a character who visits Malgudi. The novel, however, is again a charting of the career of Sriram, a high-school pass-out – his love for Bharati (a staunch follower of Gandhian principles), his involvement with extremists, his consequent imprisonment and his reunion with Bharati as India moves towards its partition in 1947. Mr Sampath, Margayya, and Sriram, like many of Narayan’s protagonists, are flawed yet human, and it is not difficult, at times, to identify with them.
The Guide, his next venture, traces the journey of a self-centred tourist guide, Raju, who has no real love for the place he belongs to and yet is compelled to fast for his community at the end. Before the publication of The Guide, Indian readers were not as receptive to Narayan as the English, the Russian, and the American readers (Ahluwalia 9). While Narayan’s works were by then being published in America by the Michigan State University Press and Viking (followed by Penguin, which took over Viking), the gaps between these foreign publications and their Indian reprints reflect the relative indifference of the Indian readers in relation to their Western counterparts. Ahluwalia in Imaging Malgudi (2019) observes:
The first three novels – Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts, and The Dark Room – were published in India after a gap of nine, twenty-eight, and twenty-two years, respectively. The gap reduced to single digits of nine, seven, and six in the next cluster of three novels – The English Teacher, Mr. Sampath, and The Financial Expert (8).
It is Narayan’s The Guide that made a perceptible difference in his Indian readership. The Guide won him the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1961 and was adapted on screen in 1966. The figure of the truant young man transforming into a sadhu to perform the rites of expiation on behalf of his people, continued references to drought (a frequent occurrence in India), the developing town of Malgudi with relatable figures, and perhaps the appearance of a powerful woman character, Rosie/Nalini, who, unlike Savitri of The Dark Room, could free herself from the clutches of patriarchal expectation and could move from “strength to strength” (The Guide 2005, 222), finally appealed to the Indian mind.
Yet, a number of Indian critics were left unimpressed by Narayan’s works. Malgudi, to them, remained a fictitious town that had little to do with the multi-layered reality of India at a crucial historical juncture. Malgudi, according to them, was too simple a space to depict and critique the complex series of colonial happenstance and neo-colonial alteration that shaped India. Shashi Deshpande, for instance, in R.K. Narayan: A Personal View (2007), equates Narayan’s writing to the act of “sending flat stones skimming over the surface of a still pond” (67). Kanaganayakam in Counterrealism and Indo-Anglian Fiction (2002) reminds us that “[a]part from Waiting for the Mahatma which deals specifically with the politics of Indian National Congress and the career of Mahatma Gandhi … the politics of decolonization have hardly ever been foregrounded in his work …” (40).
On the other hand, British authors like Graham Greene and Jeffrey Archer were staunch supporters of Narayan’s work. Greene compares Narayan with Chekov in his ability to coalesce humour and pathos and his complete freedom from the temptation of making subjective statements (Ram and Ram 2001). For Greene, it is this objectivity, this ability to describe people and incidents with minimum authorial intervention, that makes him an engaging author for the West. These attributes of his works gradually grew on the Indian sensibility as well.
A common dilemma that plagued the Indian sensibility of the time was explored in Narayan’s The Vendor of Sweets. The novel brings forth a common paradox of a typical Indian torn between his attachment to wealth and his commitment to the Gandhian principle of frugality and distaste for excess. On the one hand, Jagan never owns “more than two sets of clothes at a time” (9) and eats only “stone-ground wheat … with honey and greens” (10), on the other hand, he hoards “free cash” that comes from selling sweets “after six o’clock” that is “entitled to survive without reference to any tax” and is “converted into crisp currency at the earliest moment” (14). Jagan’s obsession over his son’s diet, his eccentric decision of a complete renunciation of salt and sugar, and his extreme efforts for procuring the hide of dead animals for his footwear, provide generous scope for the comic. But the comic is tempered with an understated pensiveness as we witness his affection for his insensitive son Mali, the reminiscences of his conjugal life and his ultimate capacity to let go. The comic in Narayan becomes effortlessly profound as we spontaneously respond to the weaknesses and flaws of these individuals of Malgudi, a place that has by this time expanded to Lawley Extension, South Extension, and the New Extension giving rise to a number of “newer colonies” (Vendor of Sweets 17).
By the time The Painter of Signs was published in 1977, Malgudi “was the base for a hydro-electric project … jeeps and lorries passed through the Market Road … The city had a new superintendent of police … Policemen were posted every few yards” and “pedestrians and vehicles” choked the once-leisurely-paced streets (12). Like the shifting geography of Malgudi, the changing patterns of an individual’s love life are also addressed in this novella. From Chandran’s inability to marry Malathi because of a mismatched horoscope in The Bachelor of Arts to an idyllic conjugality in The English Teacher to the more complex companionship in The Guide where relationships are mostly transactional, The Painter of Signs brings forth a pronounced clash between two opposed views on romance and marriage- that of Raman’s grandmother and that of Daisy, Raman’s love interest.
Raman is caught between two worlds–a literary world that he inhabits through his reading of English authors, and the actual world, the complex social milieu of Malgudi that is a part of his real existence. Narayan, through this work (along with The Bachelor of Arts and The English Teacher), maps how an ordinary Indian middle-class man, with his distant but constant exposure to the West, deals with or reacts to these shifting perspectives on love, partnership, and marriage. On the contrary, Daisy, the strong-willed female protagonist of the novel, is more resolute and has a clearer insight about the reality that surrounds her. At the end, it is Daisy who questions and challenges the age-old patriarchal beliefs that even most of the womenfolk of Malgudi (like Raju’s mother and Raman’s grandmother) have internalised, not realising that they have also been victims of unresponsive and unfeeling men for generations. “I can’t live except alone” is what Daisy says–doing away with the age-old fears that a single woman carries within her (179).
Narayan’s The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1961) and A Tiger for Malgudi (1983), partly shift from human narratives and ponder on our anthropocentric complacency that takes the hierarchical positions of humans and non-humans for granted. In the introduction to A Tiger for Malgudi, Narayan observes, “… with a few exceptions here and there, humans have monopolized the attention of fiction writers. Man in his smugness never imagines for a moment that other creatures may also possess ego, values, outlook and the ability to communicate…” (7).
While A Tiger for Malgudi speaks of the adventures of a live tiger, his friendship with a man he calls “Master” and his ultimate peaceful settlement in Malgudi zoo, The Man-Eater of Malgudi is much more layered, as it deals with dead animals. The novel begins with the ominous appearance of Vasu, an evil characterwho disrupts the otherwise complacent and harmonious existence of Malgudi, especially the existence of a printing shop owner, Nataraj. Vasu is a taxidermist by profession. The word “taxidermy” has its roots in the Greek words “taxis” and “derma” which literally means “arrangement of the skin”. Vasu arranges the skin of dead animals and accrues profit from them and it is Natraj’s attic that he chooses as his workspace. Throughout the novel he bullies Natraj and makes his life a living hell.
A harmless peace-loving character being relentlessly bullied by a trouble-maker is common in Narayan’s work. But what is new in The Man-eater of Malgudi is the staggering number of deaths that the text speaks of. Animals are killed in hordes. The novel reeks of blood and tanned skin. Vasu’s career of hunting, killing, flaying and preserving animal skin is described in detail. The man himself explains:
… one takes a lot of care to bleed the animal, and only the skin is brought in … The paws and the head are particularly important … Bleeding, skinning and cleaning … we pack, or rather pickle, the skin in tins of salt immediately after flaying (50).
This destruction in the name of preservation leads Sundhya Walther to observe that “[b]y positioning the state’s ideology of conservation and Vasu’s ideology of preservation as ideologically linked, the novel calls nonhuman animal bodies into service to represent the violence of the dominant drives of postcolonial modernity …” (77). She reads the text as a critique of colonial appropriation of nonhuman bodies as a consequence of capitalist expansion. By situating The Man-Eater of Malgudi within the wider context of Nehru’s policy of animal conservation from the 1950s as a significant marker of ownership and unity of the newly independent state, Narayan, according to Walther, critiques and brings forth the failure of this project (2015, 80).
Vasu’s futile exercise of creating permanent artefacts from animal skin which is itself perishable is also comparable to Narayan’s futile efforts at preserving Malgudi, a peaceful harmonious space of Swami and Friends, that undergoes disturbing changes with time (as is evident in Malgudi’s enthusiasm to use Kumar, the elephant, as a trophy in processions that could fetch cash for the building of their temple). Malgudi has become as acquisitive and as “ugly” as Vasu – and thus Narayan’s failure to preserve his imagined India unruffled by caste, gender and religious discriminations. The work is peopled by upper-caste Hindus with no significant place for the outsiders. However, this highly insular space is finally contaminated by the stench of rotten animal carcasses that seem to linger even at the end of the novel (the stuffed cub, for instance). The novel concludes with Nataraj carrying a “little bit of Vasu that has become a part of him” (Cronin 1989, 33). The end of The Man-Eater of Malgudi is predictably dark, ambiguous and dystopic.
Narayan’s last two novels Talkative Man (1986) and The World of Nagaraj (1990) are centred on financially secure complacent men residing in Kabir Street with dreams of becoming successful writers – one a serious journalist and the other the author of a magnum opus on Narada (ambitions that remain unrealised) – till their peaceful life is disturbed by outsiders who enter their lives and change them forever.
Apart from this by-now-familiar plot of Narayan, Talkative Man, though hilarious in parts, is sketchy and lacks depth. But what is intriguing in the novella is that the reader is never sure as to who the actual ‘talkative man’ is. Is it the narrator, TM himself? Or is it the mysterious man, who calls himself Dr Rann from Timbuctoo who imposes himself on the narrator and the station master? Or is it the intimidating ‘talkative woman’ from Delhi in search of her coquetting husband, the supposed Mrs Rann? The novella explores the fascination and tyranny of tales. From TM’s constant small talks in the Town Hall reading room and the Boardless Hotel, to the tall talks of Mr Rann from Timbuctoo, to the recollections of the formidable Mrs Rann’s past life that TM is compelled to listen to- the reader of Talkative Man is alternately exasperated and amused by the ‘ancient mariners’ of this text (TM describes himself as Coleridge’s wedding guest when he cannot escape the grip of the recounting of Mrs. Rann’s past love life).
It is the figure of a compulsive storyteller that Narayan constantly evokes in many of his works. Nataraj’s printing shop, the Town Hall, the Boardless Hotel, the broad steps around the pedestal of Sir Frederick Lawley’s statue, Bari’s stationery shop, and Jayaraj’s studio are some of the spaces where stories are created, myths revisited and strange theories formulated. Narayan had once likened Mysore to an ancient Greek city, “[v]ital issues, including philosophical and political analyses, were examined and settled by people … on the promenades of Mysore” (Krishnaswami 2017). Narayan recreates this compulsive habit of weaving tales, preaching high philosophy, criticising government policies and spreading gossips in the shops, parapets, and restaurants of Malgudi streets and the pyols laid in the front yards of its households.
Nagaraj, the protagonist of The World of Nagaraj is also assailed by a similar compulsion. His ambition is to produce a work of epic proportions whose hero will be the sage Narada, the compulsive story-teller and trouble-maker. Narayan’s evocation of the figure of Narada may be a subtle dig at his own creative vocation. Like the mythical Narada, the author carries so many tales and news snippets in his head that he is compelled to share or else his head would crush under the burden of untold stories and unsung heroes (Talkative Man 2020, 1).
Nagaraj desires to belong to this world of story-tellers. Thus, his search for the Narada lore leads him to visit a gambling Pundit and a bungling stationer. But his artistic pursuit remains unfulfilled as the ever-elusive Narada escapes him, not only because of inept advisors but because of a crisis in the form of Tim, his brother’s son, who arrives in his Kabir Street home and disrupts his peaceful family life and his noble quest for the Narada opus.
Narayan, unlike Nagaraj, contributes significantly to the body of Indian myths. Srinath notes that “Narayan, more than any Indian novelist except Raja Rao, has been inspired to a considerable extent by the Puranas, not merely in the ingenious way one of the legends is adapted in The Man-Eater of Malgudi but also in the art of story-telling” (419). Being raised in a Tamil Brahmin family and staying in close proximity to a grandmother who was a storehouse of ancient lore, Narayan internalised Hindu myths spontaneously. But Nandini Bhattacharya, while discussing the use of myth and reality in Narayan’s The Guide, rightly points out that in the present hybridised Indian space, it is no longer possible to use myths in a straightforward manner (Bhattacharya 2004). Thus, we have the Sitas and the Savitris of Malgudi households, the river Sarayu, the elephant Kumar worshipped in the temple of Malgudi, the snake dance of Rosie reminding us of Natraj’s crowning glory, the numerous mentions of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata that are direct references to Indian myths that coexist with growing technology, interest in commerce and an increasing thrust on individualism that are part and parcel of a modern Malgudi life.
Narayan in his essay “The World of the Storyteller”, the opening chapter of his Gods, Demons and Others (1964), speaks of his belief in this coexistence:
Everything is interrelated. Stories, scriptures, ethics, philosophy, grammar, astrology, astronomy, semantics, mysticism, and moral codes – each forms part and parcel of a total life and is indispensable for the attainment of a four-square understanding of existence (4).
In Gods, Demons and Others Narayan retells stories the Indian Puranas. He narrates the tales of Yayati, Draupadi, Nala, Savitri, Shakuntala, Harishchandra and Sibi from the Mahabharata along with stories of Viswamitra, Ravana, and Valmiki from the Ramayana. From the Tamil epic Silapadikharam, he retells the tale of “The Mispaired Anklet”. Narayan’s taste for the comic-ironic is evident in his rendition of these tales – a tone he adopts even in his retelling of the epics The Ramayana (1972) and The Mahabharata (1978). He does not set himself up to the task of reinterpreting the epics and the Puranas as they appear in his writings. His approach is playful yet profound with a sharp insight that lends a fresh tone to the already-familiar episodes of these age-old literary texts.
Narayan’s last published work The Grandmother’s Tale and Selected Stories (1992), revisits the motifs that he had been preoccupied with in his long writing career–a storyteller in an anguished search of stories, a devoted husband in perpetual fear of his wife’s impending death, and a slice of Narayan’s great-grandmother’s biography – her dogged search for her philandering husband and her complete submission to him after he returns. We find traces of Savitri, Nagaraj, Daisy, Natraj, TM, Swami, Rosie, Raju, Krishna and the unnamed Mrs Rann in this work – numerous memorable and forgettable characters who dot our everyday lives and who appear in the pages of Narayan so effortlessly.
Both his fiction and his non-fiction such as Next Sunday (1960), My Dateless Diary (1960), My Days (1973), Reluctant Guru (1974), Emerald Route (1977), A Writer’s Nightmare (1988), A Storyteller’s World (1989), and The Writerly Life (2001) deal with a fascinating array of topics and characters. They range from a postman to the archetypal storyteller, from cows and milk to the landmarks of Mysore, from educational policies to his own anguished days as a student. All this is done with a subtle mix of humour and irony and a complete absence of didacticism.
Often compared to authors like Chekhov, Faulkner and Maupassant, Narayan was the recipient of the A C Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature, the Padma Vibhushan and the Padma Bhushan awards. A tireless chronicler of small-town Indian ethos in the first three quarters of the twentieth century, Narayan’s constant search for the minutest plotlines in the local streets and markets he frequented ended on the 13th of May 2001–the day he died in Chennai at the age of 94.
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