by Sachi Sri Kantha; published May 10, 2004
Remembering Malgudi’s Creator, R.K.Narayan
Front Note
May 13th marks the third death anniversary of literary giant R.K.Narayan. Herewith, I provide a revised and extended version of my tribute to him, which originally appeared in the now defunct Tamil Nation website in May 2001, following his death.
A Trend Breaker
One in every six humans living now is an Indian. In addition, millions who are living beyond the borders of India also live their days immersed in the religion, languages and culture founded in India. In the 20th century, it was left to Rasipuram Krishnaswamy (R.K.) Narayanaswami Iyer (Narayan) to plough a virgin Indian landscape in English language with humor and grace. Of course, the Indian subcontinent had been mined for literary pursuit by quite a handful of capable literati before Narayan. These include literature Nobelists Rudyard Kipling and Rabindranath Tagore. But what they projected were portrayals of the milieu in which they lived. Kipling was an apologist for the British imperialism; thus, his understanding on the minds of native Indians was clouded by his imperialistic flag-waving. Tagore was a poet, who delightfully portrayed the Bengal region of India, in the Bengali language; but, his English prose was stodgy. It was left to Narayan to explore the Dravidian region of the Indian subcontinent in commanding English. While born and settled in London, New York and in other Western cities, there are dozens of other literati of Indian origin now, who gallop along the path Narayan opened nearly seven decades ago in English fiction. But, none has the home-field advantage Narayan was blessed with; he lived as an Indian, in India.
 R.K. Narayan |
It is a folk belief (supported by medical evidence) in many cultures that widowers do not live long, following the death of their wives. Narayan was an exception to this belief. His wife, Rajam, lived only for five years after marrying him, dying in 1939. That he lived for over 60 years as a widower, taking care of his only daughter, Hema, who herself predeceased him in 1994, tells something about Narayan’s courage and mental resilience. That Narayan was a trend-breaker, not only in his personal life, but in the literature domain of the Indian subcontinent as well, is worthy of admiration.
Though being born as a Tamil, he wished to become internationally known by writing in English – the language of India’s imperialists. He wished to be an Indian whale in the global sea rather than being a big catfish in the Indian lake. That ambition was not for the faint-hearted. But, Narayan was blessed with a brave heart, which withstood the early loss of his wife and with a child to care for. As a result, Narayan gave birth to Malgudi town in the literature world, the quintessential Indian town with its assortment of lovable characters. And the literary world has been ever thankful to him for his wonderful creation.
School Day Experiences
R.K.Narayan was born on October 10, 1906 in a Tamil brahmin household. Here is a tasty morsel from his autobiography, originally published in 1973. In this piece, he reminisced on his school days in Chennai, during the First World War period, which also saw religious rivalry (between Hindus and Christians) around his neighborhood.
“Ours was a Lutheran Mission School – mostly for boarders who were Christian converts. The teachers were all converts, and, towards the few non-Christian students like me, they displayed a lot of hatred. Most of the Christian students also detested us. The scripture classes were mostly devoted to attacking and lampooning the Hindu gods, and violent abuses were heaped on idol-worshippers as a preclude to glorifying Jesus. Among the non-Christians in our class I was the only Brahmin boy, and received special attention; the whole class would turn in my direction when the teacher said that Brahmins claiming to be vegetarians ate fish and meat in secret, in a sneaking way, and were responsible for the soaring price of those commodities. In spite of the uneasy time during the lessons, the Biblical stories themselves enchanted me. Especially the Old Testament seemed to be full of fascinating characters….
What I suffered in the class as a non-Christian was nothing compared to what Christian missionary suffered when he came to preach at our street corner. If Christian salvation came out of suffering, here was one who must have attained it. A European missionary with a long beard, escorted by a group of Indian converts carrying violins and harmoniums, would station himself modestly at the junction between Vellala Street and Purasawalkam High Road. A gentle concert would begin unobstrusively. A few onlookers stopped by, the priest nodded to everyone in a friendly manner, casting a genial look around, while the musicians rendered a full-throated Biblical hymn over the babble of the street, with its hawkers’ cries and the jutka-drivers’ urging of their lean horses. Urchins sat down in the front row on the ground, and all sorts of men and women assembled. When the preacher was satisfied that he had gathered a good audience, he made a sign to the musicians to stop. His speech, breaking into the abrupt silence that ensued, was delivered in an absolutely literary Tamil, stiff and formal, culled out of a dictionary, as far away from normal speech as it could be. It was obvious that he had taken a lot of trouble to learn the local language so that he could communicate his message to the heathen masses successfully. But Tamil is a tongue-twister and a demanding language even for Indians from other provinces, the difficulty being that the phonetic value and the orthography are different, and it cannot be successfully uttered by mere learning; it has to be inherited by the ear.
I am saying this to explain why the preacher was at first listened to with apparent attention, without any mishap to him. This seemed to encourage him to go on with greater fervour, flourishing his arms and raising his tone to a delirious pitch, his phrases punctuated with ‘Amen’ from his followers.
Suddenly, the audience woke up to the fact that the preacher was addressing them as ‘sinners’ (pavigal, in Tamil) and that he was calling our gods names. He was suggesting that they fling all the stone gods into the moss-covered green tanks in our temples, repent their sins, and seek baptism. For God would forgive all sinners and the Son of God would take on the load of their sins. When the public realized what he was saying, pandemonium broke out. People shouted, commanded him to shut up, moved in on his followers – who fled to save their limbs and instruments. The audience now rained mud and stone on the preacher and smothered him under bundles of wet green grass…But his voice went on unceasingly through all the travail; lamps lit up by his assistants earlier were snatched away and smashed. The preacher, bedraggled and almost camouflaged with damp grass and water, went through his programme to the last minute as scheduled. Then he suddenly disappeared into the night. One would have thought that the man would never come again. But he did, exactly, on the same day a week hence, at the next street corner.
The preacher was a foolhardy zealot to have chosen this particular area, as this was one place where the second commandment was totally violated. If you drew a large circle with this spot as the centre, the circumference would enclose several temples where people thronged for worship every evening. Vellala Street itself, though a short stretch, had three temples on it – one for Ganesha, the elephant-faced god, next to it Krishna’s temple, and farther off one for Ponni Amman, the goddess who was the frontier guardian at a time when this part of Madras was just a village…
Recently I visited Purasawalkam and spent a couple of hours viewing the old landmarks, and I found, though multi-storey buildings and near shop fronts and modern villas and the traffic stream have altered the general outlook, that the four or five temples I have mentioned are stil solid and unchanged, oil lamps still burning, and the congregations the same as they were half a century or more ago, surviving the street-corner iconoclast as well as the anti-iconoclasts who sought to demolish him with mud and bundles of grass.” [R.K.Narayan, My Days: A Memoir, Penguin Books, London, 1989]
Job as a Newspaper Hack
Narayan also reminisced in his autobiography, how he sharpened his observational powers on the society in which he was living. To quote,
“In order to stabilize my income I became a newspaper reporter. My business would be to gather Mysore city news and send it daily to a newspaper published in Madras called The Justice…I left home at about nine in the morning and went out news-hunting through the bazar and market place – all on foot. I hung about law courts, police stations, and the municipal building, and tried to make up at least ten inches of news each day before lunch time…Murders were my stand-by…I hung about the mortuary for the post-mortem verdict and the first police report. As long as I used the expression ‘alleged’ liberally, there was no danger of being hauled up for false reporting or contempt of court. I knew a lot of police officers, plain-clothes men and informers – apart from presidents and secretaries of various public bodies who craved publicity and sought my favour…” [ibid]
Narayan came to terminate this newspaper hack job for The Justice due to pay check delay. Though he had completed one year, he was not paid for three months. So, he wrote a stinging letter to the editor of the newspaper. In his words,
“I wrote to say, ‘I am a writer in contact with many newspapers and periodicals in America and England, who make their payments on precise dates; I am not used to delays in payments…’ To which the editor replied, ‘If you are eminent as you claim to be, you should not mind a slight delay on our part; if, on other hand, you could realize that afterall you are a correspondent eking out your income with such contributions as we chose to publish, your tone is unwarranted by your circumstances.’ I resented the tone of their reply, and decided to give up this work as soon as I could afford it…” [ibid]
As they say in occasions like this type of emotional conflict faced by a super achievers who finds their path to success ultimately, Indian journalism’s loss was the English literature world’s gain. Narayan’s memorable characters of his short stories had already found niches in his mind by the time he quit his job as a newspaper hack.
Chronicler of Middle Class and Under Class Indians
Reference books and encyclopedias in modern literature describe Narayan as a novelist. Calling Narayan a novelist is like pigeon-holing Chaplin as a circus clown. For Tamils, Narayan was more than a novelist. He became the foremost chronicler, story teller and interpreter of middle class and under class lives in 20th century India. His characters were created in the milieu of Tamil Nadu and Dravidian culture. A sample of these characters include, village story teller Nambi, rice seller Subbiah, goat-herd Muni, cinema front – food vendor Rama, octogenarian ‘Emden’ Rao, office – section head Rama Rao, body guard Shankar, school teacher Sekhar, petty shop assistant Ramu, monkey trainer Sami, first grader Dodu – the list is long. When one finishes reading the exploits of each of these characters in Narayan’s stories, one can marvel at Narayan’s knack for realistically etching personalities of vibrant Indian culture, who lead simple lives with simple worries and simple fulfillments.
Later in his life, for the benefit of an international literary audience, Narayan also abridged the Hindu epics Ramayana and Mahabharata into English. We are fortunate that a writer of his caliber made the noteworthy decision to write about Hindu culture in English. One wonders whether Narayan anticipated (ahead of others) the potential increase of Hindus in the diaspora in the last decades of the 20th century, and the concurrent need to educate the children of the Hindu diaspora in English about their cultural heritage. He was a giant in his chosen discipline and I am sure that his works will educate and enrich our culture for a long time to come.
Asiaweek magazine interview [1987]
I provide below the Asiaweek magazine interview [June 28, 1987, p.40] Narayan gave to Krishna Vattam. It more or less provides a synopsis of Narayan’s successful and trend-setting literary career.
Asiaweek: What usually prompts you to write?
Narayan: I observe minutely. I go for long walks every day. I chat with other walkers. No, I don’t take notes. Sometimes just one glance at a passing person triggers off the imagination and a whole new individual gets born out of that one glance. It has become second nature now.
Asiaweek: What makes a good writer?
Narayan: He must be a keen observer. More than anything else he must have interest in life. He must be interested in all kinds of characters. I have written about snake charmers and cobblers. They interest me as human beings who are constantly struggling against certain handicaps, living in difficult environments and still surviving because of their inner strength. I write about them because they have a sense of fulfilment. They are not sure of their earnings tomorrow; still they have peace of mind and inner tranquility. I wrote about the snake charmer Naga, who inherited both the profession and the snake from his father. This sort of thing interests me.
Asiaweek: What are your favourite character types?
Narayan: What is repulsive to me are big businessmen and politicians. I cannot write about politicians. They do not interest me. They are shallow. They are always manipulating, always manoeuvering for more power. My brother R.K.Laxman, the ace cartoonist [for The Times of India newspaper], is [satirizing such corrupt politicians] splendidly.
My first novel, Swami and Friends, was written 50 years ago. Even today Swami is still living. If I had written about politicians 50 years ago [they] would be out of date today. We have to write about fundamental human nature and psychological conditions. When I wrote Waiting for the Mahatma, I did not want it to be a political chronicle. I wrote it because [Mahatma Gandhi] was a great personality.
Asiaweek: What is your opinion of India’s literary output?
Narayan: The material available in India is not available in such abundance in any other country. Yet, we are bound traditionally to the epics, to their manners, their symbolism, philosophy and religion. Epic characters have relevance for all time.
Asiaweek: Before you sold your first novel, what did you do for a living?
Narayan: Money was a big problem. I was getting small amounts at highly irregular intervals from newspapers [that] published my short stories. So I served as a correspondent of an English daily named Justice, published from Madras. Though Justice was a propagandist paper against the Brahmin caste [the highest in India’s caste system], it somehow did not mind having me – a Brahmin – as its Mysore correspondent. One fine morning I received a cable from my friend Purna at Oxford saying: ‘Novel accepted. Graham Greene responsible.’ I jumped for joy and entire vistas of me as a novelist unfolded before my eyes. I could see the relief in my wife’s face, although she did not want to be too demonstrative about it.
Asiaweek: How much did you get for Swami and Friends?
Narayan: Very little! The advance on it was only 20 pounds, less 50% tax. Yet the first thing I did when I got Purna’s cable was to write to Justice, telling them that I would not be able to serve as their correspondent any longer.
Asiaweek: Did you fare well in English literature courses at the Maharajah’s College?
Narayan: No. I failed once in English and never got good marks in literature. Just enough marks to scrape through in third class. I got a belated graduation in 1930 and toyed with the idea of studying for a M.A.degree in literature and becoming a college lecturer. [But a friend advised him against it.] He said: ‘If you do this, it’s the surest way of losing interest in literature.’ [Holder of a doctorate from Britain’s University of Leeds, Narayan was a visiting professor at America’s Barnard College in 1972.]
Asiaweek: If you had your life to live over again, where would you choose to reside?
Narayan: Here in Malgudi of course! No, but seriously speaking, I can confidently say that even after having visited so many parts of the world, you cannot see such sunsets anywhere except in Mysore. If I had my life over again, I’d opt for Mysore again.”
In a subsequent interview given to Anthony Spaeth five years later [for Time magazine, August 24, 1992 international edition, pp.46-47], on a related important topic – death, that is – , Narayan stressed the orthodox Hindu and Buddhist world view of life [as opposed to the Christian world view]. “I don’t believe that death really is death. It is a continuation of personality in a different medium. What we lose is the physical structure, but there is something else that keeps the physical structure moving and thinking and acting. It is like casting off your old clothes and getting new ones.” This is not puzzling, since Narayan belonged to a Hindu Brahmin household.
Yes, what we lost in May 2001 was Narayan’s physical frame. But, he still lives among us via his Malgudi characters.