R. K. Narayan

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R. K. Narayan
Born	October 10, 1906(1906-10-10) Chennapatna, Karnataka, India
Died	May 13, 2001 (aged 94) Chennai, India
Occupation	Novelist, Short Story writer, and Memoirist
Genres	Fiction, Mythology, and Non-Fiction
Notable work(s)	Swami and Friends 1935
Influenced Alexander McCall Smith

R. K. Narayan (October 10, 1906 – May 13, 2001), was India's greatest English language novelist,^[1] known for his novels based in the fictional town of Malgudi.^[2]

Contents 1 Personal life 1.1 Childhood 1.2 Adult life 2 The advent of an author 3 Writing career 3.1 Writing Style 4 Awards and Recognition 5 Criticism 6 Bibliography 6.1 Fiction 6.2 Collections 6.3 Short Story Collections 6.4 Non-Fiction 6.5 Mythology 7 TV and Movie Adaptations 8 Notes 9 References 10 External links

[edit] Personal life

[edit] Childhood

Rasipuram Krishnaswami Narayanaswami (later shortened to R. K. Narayan at the behest of Graham Greene)^[3] was born at Madras (now known as Chennai), Madras Presidency, India.^[4] Narayan's father was a school headmaster and for a while he studied at his father's school. However, his father's job required him to move frequently, so he spent a good part of his childhood under the care of his grandmother.^[5] His grandmother taught him arithmetic, mythology, classical Indian music and Sanskrit.^[6] According to his youngest brother R. K. Laxman, during their childhood, the family would primarily converse in English and grammatical errors on the part of Narayan and his siblings was frowned upon.^[7] While living with his grandmother, Narayan studied at a succession of schools in Madras, including the Lutheran Mission School in Purasawalkam,^[8] C.R.C. High School, and the Christian College High School. Then his father was transferred to Maharajah's Collegiate High School in Mysore, and Narayan moved there. The well-stocked library there, as well as his father's own, fed his voracious reading habit, and he started writing as well. Although he initially failed the University Entrance Examination, he spent a year at home reading and writing, passing the examination in 1926. He entered the Maharaja College of Mysore and obtained his Bachelor's degree in four years, a year longer than usual. After being persuaded by a friend that taking a Master's degree (M.A.) would kill his interest in literature, he briefly held a job as a school teacher; however he quit in protest when the headmaster of the school wanted him to substitute for the PT master.^[8] He decided to live at home and write novels.^[9]

[edit] Adult life

Although the writing would not earn a living (his income for the first year was nine rupees and twelve annas), he had a regular life and few needs, and his decision came to be respected.^[10] In 1933, Narayan met and fell in love with Rajam, a 15 year old girl who lived near his sister's house in Coimbatore; despite astrological and financial obstacles, Narayan managed to gain permission from the girl's father and married her.^[11] Following the marriage, Narayan became a reporter for a paper called The Justice, dedicated to the rights of non-Brahmins, a job which brought him in contact with a wide variety of men in Mysore. About this time, he completed his first novel, Swami and Friends, and sent it to his friend in Oxford who showed it to Graham Greene who recommended it to publishers. Reviews were favourable but sales were few, and his next novel The Bachelor of Arts was published by a different publisher, again at the recommendation of Greene. His third novel, The Dark Room, was published by yet another publisher, and was well reviewed. Meanwhile, his father died in February 1937 and Narayan, as he was making no money, was forced to accept a commission from the government of Mysore.^[12]

Rajam died of typhoid in 1939.^[13] At the time of her death, their only child, a daughter, was three years old. This bereavement brought about a significant change in his life and was the inspiration behind his novel, The English Teacher. Narayan remained distressed for a long time, out of grief and concerns of single parenthood.^[14]

His first collection of short stories, Malgudi Days, was published in November 1942, and The English Teacher in 1945. In 1948, following success at last, he moved to a new house on the outskirts of Mysore,^[15] where he lived until he fell ill in 1990 and moved to Madras to be close to his daughter's family.^[16]

Narayan died on May 13, 2001 in Chennai at the age of 94.^[17]

[edit] The advent of an author

Narayan’s first published work was the review of a book titled “Development of Maritime Laws 17th-Century England”. He is rather cynical about it and writes, “A most unattractive book, but I struggled through its pages and wrote a brief note on it, and though not paid for, it afforded me the thrill of seeing my words in print for the first time.” To make ends meet, Narayan took up teaching at a government school, and left the job within two days.

In the autumn of 1930, on a sudden spurt of inspiration, writing of his first novel “Swami and Friends” started. It was as if a window had opened, and through it Narayan saw a little town and its rail station, the Mempi Forest and the Nallapa’s Grove, the Albert Mission school, Market Road, the River Sarayu. Its inhabitants appeared, and Malgudi was born.

Malgudi is the setting of nearly all of Narayan’s work. It is described as being somewhere in southern India. Malgudi has some elements of Hardy’s Wessex and perhaps can be pinned on a map as exactly Wodehouse’s Blandings has recently been done. But Malgudi is different from either. Its moorings in geography — and also history — seem never an issue; Narayan’s space-time bubble bounces in absolute ether.

“Swami and Friends” was completed and sent to publishers. It repeatedly returned. Narayan dispatched it yet another time and gave the return address as one of his friend’s in London. He wrote to the friend requesting the manuscript be tied to a brick and thrown into the Thames if it came back. It did.

But the friend took it to his acquaintance Graham Greene, who was already an established author. Narayan received a telegram soon thereafter, “Novel taken. Graham Greene responsible.”

“Swami and Friends” was published in October 1935. Greene’s suggestion for pruning his never-ending name to something more succinct was readily taken by Narayan.

Thus began Narayan’s friendship with Greene; it continued till the latter’s death in 1991. They corresponded often but had met only once, in 1964. This association is surprising in its depth and sincerity, given the two’s widely varying oeuvres.

[4] “Swami and Friends” had a few enthusiastic reviews but was lost in the deluge of current bestsellers. Throughout his career, Narayan changed publishers often, sometimes publishers changed him; he even dabbled in self-publishing for some of his books.

Narayan’s renown as a writer came slowly, almost with a touch of diffidence. He never had the trappings of a high profile author, and stayed scrupulously shy of literary lunches and book signing binges. He was most at home near his characters, somewhere in south India.

Malgudi is a land of fantasy, not as in a dream, colored and brilliant; but the reverie of relaxed awakening, a contemplation of commonness. Life there is reduced, or elevated, to the lowest common denominator of living, which remains the same in nearly all places and times. Small men, smaller means, touched at times by the cares of a larger world, but unruffled, still moving on. The characters yearn for fame and money and virtue and those “real” things, but their longings stand tempered by a subtle sense of limitation, almost comic.

The narrator of one the novels is an archetypal Malgudian: “We were about twenty unrelated families in Kabir Street, each having inherited a huge rambling house stretching from the street to the river and back. …. so comfortably placed, (we) were mainly occupied in eating, breeding, celebrating festivals, spending the afternoons in a prolonged siesta on the pyol, and playing cards all evening. ….. This sort of existence did not appeal to me. I liked to be active, had dreams of becoming a journalist. …. I noticed a beggar woman one day, at the Market Gate, with Siamese twins, and persuaded my friend Jayaraj, photographer and framer of pictures at the Market Arch, to take a picture of the woman, wrote a report on it and mailed it to the first paper which caught my attention at the Town Hall reading room; that was my starting point as a journalist. Thereafter I got into the habit of visiting the Town Hall library regularly to see if my report appeared in print.”

[edit] Writing career

His writing career began with Swami and Friends. At first, he could not get the novel published. Eventually, the draft was shown to Graham Greene by a mutual friend, Purna. Greene liked it so much that he arranged for its publication; Greene was to remain a close friend and admirer of his. After that, he published a continuous stream of novels, all set in Malgudi and each dealing with different characters in that fictional place. Autobiographical content forms a significant part of some of his novels. For example, the events surrounding the death of his young wife and how he coped with the loss form the basis of The English Teacher. Mr. Narayan became his own publisher when World War II cut him off from Britain.

[edit] Writing Style

Narayan's novels are characterised by Chekhovian simplicity and gentle humour. He told stories of simple folks trying to live their simple lives in a changing world. The characters in his novels were very ordinary, down-to-earth Indians trying to blend tradition with modernisation, often resulting in tragi-comic situations. His writing style was simple, unpretentious and witty, with a unique flavour as if he were writing in the native tongue. Many of Narayan's works are rooted in everyday life, though he is not shy of invoking Hindu tales or traditional Indian folklore to emphasize a point. His easy-going outlook on life has sometimes been criticized, though in general he is viewed as an accomplished, sensitive and reasonably prolific writer. His stories are incredibly easy to read because of their simplicity. He almost always writes about India in some way, and usually puts cultural influences about Indian life in his works and literature . RK Narayan was also one of the writers of the Tamil film Avvaiyar, which was directed by Kothamangalam Subbu and produced by Gemini Films.

[edit] Awards and Recognition

Mr. Narayan won numerous awards and honours for his works. He won the National Prize of the Sahitya Akademi, the Indian literary academy, for The Guide in 1960. He was honoured with the Padma Bhushan, a coveted Indian award, for distinguished service to literature in 1964. In 1980, R. K. Narayan was awarded the AC Benson Medal by the Royal Society of Literature. He was an honorary member of the society. He was elected an honorary member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1982 and nominated to the Rajya Sabha — the upper house of the Parliament of India — in 1989. In addition, the University of Mysore, Delhi University and the University of Leeds conferred honorary doctorates on him. He was awarded Padma Vibhushan in 2000.

• R.K. Narayan was short listed for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times but never won. Literary circles often joke that the Nobel Committee ignored his works, mistaking them instead for self-help books due to their curious titles (The English Teacher, The Painter of Signs, etc.).

• His works were translated into every European language as well as Hebrew.^{[citation needed]}

• His admirers included Somerset Maugham, John Updike and Graham Greene, who called him the "novelist I admire most in the English language."

• His short story "Leela's Friend" is studied as part of a GCSE course in the UK, under the OCR Examining Board, from 2003 - 2009.

[edit] Criticism

Though Narayan's writing have been extremely popular amongst the masses, the upper, literary classes never really warmed up to him. It has been said that his writing was pedestrian, with his simple language and stories of village life. One of his most outspoken critics has been Shashi Tharoor.^[18]

There is nevertheless a respectable body of criticism, some of the best of which is listed below.

• AFZAL-KHAN, Fawsia, Cultural Imperialism and the Indo-English Novel: Genre and Ideology in R. K. Narayan, Anita Desai, Kamala Markandaya, and Salman Rushdie (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993).
• BEATINA, Mary, Narayan: A Study in Transcendence (New York, Washington, D.C./Baltimore, Bern, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Brussels, Vienna, & Oxford: Peter Lang Publishing, 1994 [Studies of World Literature in English, vol. 3]).
• BLOOM, Harold, R. K. Narayan (New York: Chelsea House Publishing, 1994 [Modern Critical Views Series 2]).
• GOYAL, Bhagwat S., ed., R. K. Narayan’s India: Myth and Reality (Lahore: South Asia Books, 1993).

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Fiction

• Mr. Sampath - The Printer of Malgudi
• Waiting for the Mahatma
• The Dark Room
• The Financial Expert
• Swami and Friends
• The Guide
• The Man-Eater of Malgudi
• The Vendor of Sweets
• The Painter of Signs
• A Tiger for Malgudi
• The World of Nagaraj
• The Bachelor of Arts
• Talkative Man
• The English Teacher

[edit] Collections

• The World of Malgudi (2000)
• Salt and Sawdust: Stories and Table-Talk

[edit] Short Story Collections

An asterisk indicates a collection published only in India.

• Dodu and Other Stories (1943)*
• Cyclone and Other Stories (1945)*
• An Astrologer's Day and Other Short Stories (1947)
• Lawley Road and Other Stories (1956)*
• A Horse and Two Goats (1970)
• Malgudi Days (1982)
• Forty-Five a Month
• Under the Banyan Tree and Other Stories (1985)
• The Grandmother's Tale and Selected Stories (1993)
• The Watchman
• Fruition at Forty
• Indian Thought(1941)
• The Missing Mail
• The Martyr's Corner

[edit] Non-Fiction

• Next Sunday (1960)
• My Dateless Diary (1964)
• My Days (1974)
• The Emerald Route (1980)
• A Writer's Nightmare (1988)
• Like The Sun

[edit] Mythology

• Gods, Demons and Others (1965)
• The Ramayana (1972)
• The Mahabharata (1972)

[edit] TV and Movie Adaptations

The Guide was made into a film in both English and Hindi by Dev Anand. It was commercially a most successful venture, but Narayan was not happy with the screen adaptation of his novel. His novel Mr. Sampath was made into a film in Tamil. Kothamangalam Subbu wrote the screenplay and directed the film, while S.S. Vasan of Gemini Films produced it. Another novel, The Financial Expert was made into the Kannada movie Banker Margayya. Swami and Friends, The Vendor of Sweets and some of Narayan's short stories were adapted by the late actor-director Shankar Nag into a television series, Malgudi Days. It was shot in the village of Agumbe in Karnataka. This village served as the backdrop for Malgudi, complete with a statue of the British personage. It was serialised and telecast on Doordarshan, the Indian National Television network.

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• Walsh, William (1982), R.K. Narayan: a critical appreciation, University of Chicago Press, ISBN 9780226872131, http://books.google.com/books?id=UnDxdX_vTscC&pg=PA13 
• Rao, Ranga (2004), R.K. Narayan, Sahitya Akademi, ISBN 9788126019717, http://books.google.com/books?id=Lgs4ebrb6XAC&pg=PA24 

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: R.K. Narayan

• The Hindu column by N Ram - Reluctant centenarian
• New York Times obituary for R. K. Narayan, India's Prolific Storyteller
• Time magazine - The Master of Small Things by V. S. Naipaul
• New York Review of Books - The Great Narayan
• Narayan Days, An essay in the Boston Review by Jhumpa Lahiri
• The Master of Malgudi An article in the The New Yorker on R.K. Narayan's 100th birth anniversary
• About "A Horse And Two Goats" Interpretations of and more background information on the short story.
• California Literary Review - The Life of R.K. Narayan
• Excerpts from R. K. Narayan's Mysore, a travelogue, 1939
• R. K. Narayan bibliography

Persondata
NAME	Narayan, R. K.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Narayanaswami, Rasipuram Krishnaswami Ayyar
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Indian novelist
DATE OF BIRTH	October 10, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH	Chennai, India
DATE OF DEATH	May 13, 2001
PLACE OF DEATH