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R. K. Narayan

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Not to be confused with K. R. Narayanan.
R. K. Narayan
File:RKNarayan.jpg
OccupationNovelist, Short Story writer, and Memoirist
GenreFiction, Mythology, and Non-Fiction
Notable worksSwami and Friends 1935

Rasipuram Krishnaswami Ayyar Narayanaswami, known as R.K. Narayan (October 10 1906 – May 13 2001), was one of the greatest Indian writers in English. He is particularly known for his novels based in the fictional town of Malgudi. He was also the elder brother of famous Indian cartoonist RK Laxman.

Early Life

Narayan was born at Chennai, Tamil Nadu in South India. Narayan studied at his father’s school and maintained a diligent dislike for studies. The qualifier to the graduate course in Arts proved his nemesis; Narayan failed. In spite of sustained loathing, Physics and Chemistry had stood by him, but English betrayed. He much liked the subject and was already aspiring for a writerly life. But a compromise was never reached with the English pieces in his syllabus. Narayan started reading in earnest, the classics of English literature, and writing. He read out his pieces to a close band of friends, and after priming the audience with coffee and snacks, asked for their opinion. Such reviews were laudatory, “brilliant” being the unanimous word. His father had his own qualms about institutional education, and encouraged Narayan in literary pursuits.

The advent of an author

Narayan’s first published work was the review of a book titled “Development of Maritime Laws of 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 better arrange meetings of the proverbial ends, 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.”

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.

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.

Personal Life

Narayan was married to Rajam. In 1939, Narayan’s wife Rajam died. Their only child, a daughter, was three years old. This bereavement brought about a permanent change in his life. His novel, "The English Teacher" is inspired by this experience. Narayan remained distressed for a long time, out of grief and concerns of single parenthood.[1]

Death

R. K. Narayan died at the age of 94. Until his very last days, he remained an avid critic of the changes occurring around his Alwarpet apartment in Chennai, and was also a voracious reader.

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

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.[2]
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).

Bibliography

Fiction

Collections

Short Story Collections

An asterisk indicates a collection published only in India.

Non-Fiction

Mythology

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.

References

  1. ^ http://calitreview.com/21
  2. ^ Comedies of Suffering
  3. ^ RK Narayan Bibliography of First Editions at Bookseller World
Wikiquote has quotations related to R.K. Narayan.


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