R. K. Narayan (1906–2001)

With a writing career that spanned two thirds of the 20th century, R K Narayan used to be one of the best-known Indian writers internationally (there were several shelves of his books in our public library when I was growing up), but he’s rather faded off the map recently. As someone who grew up heavily influenced by writers like Thomas Hardy, Arnold Bennett and P G Wodehouse, was promoted by Graham Greene, and who produced dozens of well-made middle-class novels, most of them set in the show more imaginary South Indian small town of Malgudi, he doesn’t really fit the profile we look for in postcolonial writers, but he was extraordinarily good at what he did, and there seems to be a lot of value in his Balzacian project of chronicling the way Indian small town society fits together.

ThIs recent reprint, with an introduction from that great modern comic storyteller Alexander McCall Smith, brings together three short novels from Narayan’s middle period, all written shortly after Independence.
In Mr Sampath: the printer of Malgudi a young man comes to Malgudi to set up a new, socially-critical weekly magazine. The only printer he can find willing to take on the legal risks is the eccentric Sampath, whose ancient printing plant clearly isn’t quite up to the job, but who somehow gets the magazine going anyway. All goes well until Sampath is distracted by an opportunity to get into the movie business, and chaos ensues as the young editor finds himself scripting a Hindu epic instead of writing columns attacking slum landlords and town officials.
The financial expert, Margayya, is a middleman who when we first meet him is making a good living sitting under a banyan tree outside the Co-operative Land Bank helping farmers to fill in their loan applications. A humiliation makes him determined to rise in the world and make a career for his son, and a few years later he has made it to a city office and is running a wildly successful pyramid scheme, but of course the son isn’t interested in following in his father’s footsteps, and the pyramid collapses…
Waiting for the Mahatma is more directly historical — a young man with no real political convictions is drawn into the Independence campaign after being asked for donations by a pretty girl who turns out to be in Mahatma Gandhi’s entourage. The only way to get close to the girl is to join the movement himself. Narayan cleverly manages to convey both the enormous excitement of the Mahatma’s personal charisma and the difficulty normal humans face in trying to put his radical ideas into practice in their lives. show less

There is such a gentle spirit to R.K. Narayan’s Swami and Friends, which sentimentally looks back at the years of childhood in a way that reminded me of Jean Shepherd’s In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash, the basis for the film A Christmas Story. The hero of the story, young Swaminathan Srinivasan, copes with strict school teachers, his father, and friends who come and go, dreaming of becoming the next Maurice Tate and cricket stardom.

As with other books I’ve read from Narayan, it show more focuses more on the foibles of human nature as opposed to politics, though through a demonstration he does prefetch India’s move towards independence (“England is no bigger than our Madras Presidency and is inhabited by a handful of white rogues and is thousands of miles away. Yet we bow in homage before the Englishman! Why are we become, through no fault of our own, docile and timid?”). As the book was written in 1935, I loved these little bits.

Narayan’s writing is simple and direct, but he pokes at emotions in subtle ways in telling what is also a universal story. It’s not a masterpiece but it feels wholesome and enjoyable. I’m also sucker for endings which have a parting at a railway station, so that worked for me too. show less

V.S. Naipaul's analysis, in his book India: a Wounded Civilization, of this short comic novel as typically Hindu in its outlook was what prompted me to finally read my first R.K. Narayan. I found it surprising and rather charming. We follow Srinivas, an unworldly 37 year-old with a wife and son, as he tries to make something of his life by setting up a one-man weekly journal of political, social and artistic comment. The title character, who is the only printer in Malgudi willing to take on show more such politically sensitive work, is introduced early on, but we don't get his name or the circumstances of their meeting until chapter 4, a third of the way through the book. So although the larger than life, boundlessly ambitious and optimistic Sampath is the main character, he's not the point-of-view character, which makes for an interesting dynamic as the odd-couple relationship of him and Srinivas develops. Then at the halfway point, when the journal is forced to close due to a wildcat strike by Sampath's workers and he ropes Srinivas into scripting an epic film based on a Hindu legend, film-industry chaos and farce quickly ensues. It's a strangely comforting novel about muddling through, or, as Naipaul picks up on, about how life's eddies, no matter how energetically navigated, tend not to any great end but to the same backwaters we started in. show less

As many have noted, R.K. Narayan wasn’t concerned with politics or stories revolving around grand historical movements, despite having lived in turbulent times over his life. Man, he sure does tell a good story though. In The Guide he masterfully interleaves two narratives of a young man’s life, one trying to make his way in the world as a tourist guide, and the other, after he’s been released from prison, being inadvertently taken as a holy man. Part of what makes the novel work is show more trying to see how these pieces of his life fit together.

We find the young man makes a name for himself but starts getting in over his head when he falls in love with the married wife of a cultural anthropologist traveling for research; she’s a “dancing girl.” Narayan may not write epics, but through these characters he subtly comments on class, ambition and corruption in India, and human nature in general. It may sound crazy to say it, but I think you can draw a straight line from Railway Raju, his protagonist, and Aravind Adiga’s Balram Halwai in The White Tiger, despite how much more explicit and wild the latter was. Loved Narayan’s little comedic touches, and it was pretty cool to learn that he wrote this book on his first trip abroad, in a residential hotel in Berkeley, California.

Just one quote:
“I’ve come to the conclusion that nothing in this world can be hidden or suppressed. All such attempts are like holding an umbrella to conceal the sun.” show less