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| Legends from the South |
| R K Narayan |
| Rasipuram Krishnaswami Iyer Narayanaswami
was possibly the first modern Indian writer to capture the imagination
of Western readers and critics. Swami and Friends, his short
novel on the joys, anxieties, disasters and triumphs of a dreamy
young schoolboy in sleepy little Malgudi, somewhere in South
India, gave glimpses of the idyll that childhood can be anywhere
in the world. Miraculously, the book, an impecunious young Mysorean’s
maiden attempt at long fiction, was published not in India,
but in England, in 1935, through the unlikely offices of novelist
Graham Greene, already an established writer in England. By
this time, Narayanaswami was known as R K Narayan, the name
he adopted following Greene’s advice, a name respected and recognised
in literary circles the world over. |
| To begin at the beginning, Narayan was born
to middle class Tamil parents at Madras on October 10, 1906.
While his father and the rest of his family lived in the princely
state of Mysore, Narayan was brought up by his grandmother for
the first 15 years of his life. According to journalist N Ram,
who with Susan Ram, co-authored the first part of his biography,
“Narayan’s was a wonder-filled childhood—anchored in a capacious,
sociable, enlightened middle class home environment in an ancient,
socially mixed, but changing quarter of a great city (Purasawalkam).
It was an upbringing under somewhat straitened circumstances.”
His father R V Krishnaswami Iyer, a principled school teacher,
his mother Gnanambal, “a very rare soul… absolutely committed
to truth-telling,” and grandmother Ammani, who developed in
him a love of our mythology, were each an important influence
in Narayan’s life. |
| In 1921, at the age of 15, Narayan moved
to Mysore, joining his parents and Maharaja’s Collegiate
High School, where his father was Head Master. Ever the
dreamer, Narayan scarcely distinguished himself academically,
and twice failed the university entrance examination.
Finally succeeding in his third attempt, he joined Maharaja’s
College to study History, Economics, Political Science,
English and Tamil. The experience bored him but he made
friends who along with the teachers, provided him characters
for his works of fiction. He began his writing career
with a succession of short stories, encouraged by his
friends, who formed his first captive audiences. He eventually
completed his BA degree, but not without failing in his
first attempt. |
| Narayan wrote Swami and Friends in 1930.
When he started writing the book on auspicious Vijayadasami
day of that year, the name Malgudi and the visual impression
of a small railway station came to him in an intuitive
flash. Thus was born the home of almost all of Narayan’s
stories, a town which was not Madras, Mysore, or Coimbatore,
the three cities the author was most at home in, but “an
imagined little town into which many real places and experiences
have made inputs. Here change happens slowly, but surprises
abound at every step in the midst of ordinariness…” |
| Malgudi is a fictional town like no
other town in Indian literature. It has a lyrical quality,
a sense of the familiar and of days gone by, never to
come back, languorous afternoons and magical evenings,
peopled by ordinary people—bankers and businessmen, schoolmasters
and station masters, dreamers and schemers, raconteurs
and rapscallions—but people that we can recognise from
our own lives, rather than heroic figures of impossible
attainments. There are few saints among Narayan’s characters
but the worst sinner among them is no villain, and the
reader tends to develop a grudging fondness for him. |
| Five long years separated the writing
of Swami and its eventual publication. Narayan had by
then become quite inured to rejection slips as he did
the rounds of British publishers, spending what was for
his family a minor fortune on postage and adamantly pursuing
a freelance writing career after an abortive attempt or
two at teaching. His friend and neighbour Krishna (‘Kittu’)
Raghavendra Purna, convinced of Narayan’s greatness as
an author, was an undergraduate student at Oxford University
where his leftist political leanings and literary preferences
brought him into contact with Graham Greene. Just when
Narayan advised him to drown his masterpiece in the river
Thames, Purna managed to get Graham Greene to read the
manuscript of Swami and Friends, and the rest is history.
Not only did Greene like what he read, he persuaded Hamish
Hamilton to publish the book and became a lifelong friend
and guide who helped Narayan’s writing career immensely. |
| It was only apt that Graham Greene made
the most telling observation of all on Narayan’s writing
style when he said: “This complete objectivity, this complete
freedom from comment is the boldest gamble a novelist
can take. If he allows himself to take side, moralise,
propagand, he can easily achieve an extra-literary interest,
but if he follows Mr Narayan’s method, he stakes all on
his creative power. His characters must live, or else
the book has no claim whatever on our interests. And how
vividly Mr Narayan’s characters do live…”. |
| Narayan’s journey to recognition and
success was an arduous one. He worked as a journalist
for a while, reporting crime, and had short stories published
in The Hindu and the Merry Magazine, a shortlived English
version of the Tamil weekly Ananda Vikatan. He married
a girl of his own choice in 1934, but his beloved wife
Rajam died in 1939 after a brief illness. The tragedy
and the spiritual experiences he went through soon afterwards
had a profound influence on Narayan the man and novelist.
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| Narayan’s successes and reputation as
a novelist of substance grew from the second half of the
1950s onwards, and his prolific writing ensured that in
the next four decades, he carved a prominent place for
himself in world literature. |
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| A chronology of R K Narayan’s books |
| 1935: Swami and Friends |
| 1937: Bachelor of Arts |
| 1938: The Dark Room |
| 1939: Mysore |
| 1945: The English Teacher |
| 1947: An Astrologer’s Day, and Other Stories |
| 1949: Mr. Sampath - The Printer of Malgudi |
| 1952: The Financial Expert |
| 1953: Grateful to Life and Death |
| 1955: Waiting for the Mahatma |
| 1956: Lawley Road, and other stories |
| 1958: The Guide |
| 1960: Next Sunday : Sketches and Essays |
| 1961: The Man-Eater of Malgudi |
| 1964: My Dateless Diary: An American Journey |
| 1965: Gods, Demons, and Others |
| 1967: The Vendor of Sweets |
| 1970: A Horse and Two Goats, Stories |
| 1972: The Ramayana; a Shortened Modern
Prose Version |
| 1974: My Days |
| 1974: Reluctant Guru |
| 1976: The Painter of Signs |
| 1978: The Mahabharata: a Shortened Modern
Prose Version |
| 1980: The Emerald Route |
| 1982: Malgudi Days |
| 1983: A Tiger for Malgudi |
| 1985: Under the Banyan Tree and Other Stories |
| 1986: Talkative Man |
| 1988: A Writer’s Nightmare : Selected Essays |
| 1989: A Story-Teller’s World: Stories,
Essays, Sketches |
| 1990: The World of Nagaraj |
| 1992: Malgudi Landscapes: the Best of R.K.
Narayan |
| 1993: The Grandmother’s Tale: Three Novellas |
| 1993: Salt & Sawdust : Stories and Table
Talk |
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| As a member of the Upper House of the Indian
Parliament, Narayan spent his time espousing the cause of children
oppressed by the Indian education system. The trauma of school
admissions, the heavy load of books very young children are
forced to carry, the accent on marks and grades killing creativity
and originality, were all targets of his wrath. Four decades
after leaving school, Narayan was still haunted by nightmares
“of the anxiety and sleeplessness, the gamble over possible
questions, the hush-hush and grimness of the examination hall,
the invigilators watching like wardens at the gallows, the awful
ritual of breaking open the seal of the examination papers”,
he once wrote, giving the reader a clue to the compulsions that
catalysed his early writing. |
| Living in Mysore for most of his adult life,
Narayan moved to Madras in the early 1990s for health reasons,
and lived with his daughter Hema and her family. Tragedy struck
for the second time in Narayan’s life when Hema died of cancer
at the age of 57 in 1994. Living with his son-in-law thereafter,
he continued to write into his nineties. |
| R K Narayan’s mind was alert and clear until
the very end. Just before his death on 13 May 2001, he was planning
a short novel and had asked friends to bring him a diary to
his hospital bed, so that he could start working on it. It was
truly the end of an era in Indian writing in English. |
| Honours |
| The honours Narayan won include the Sahitya
Akademi Award in 1958 for his novel The Guide the first work
of fiction in English, to do so. He also won the Christopher
Benson Award from the Royal Society of Literature and was made
an Honorary Member of the American Academy and Institute of
Art and Letters. He was nominated as a member of the Rajya Sabha
in 1985 and received the Padma Vibhushan in 2000. |
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