The Man From Malgudi

It took me some time to discover Rasipuram Krishna Swami Narayan’s house. Yadavagiri, the suburb of Mysore City, where Narayan stays, is an incredibly quiet area, with long, neat streets, tree-shaded bungalows lining them. It was late afternoon, and the neighborhood was just emerging from its siesta. “R. K. Narayan?” asked the passerby I stopped, looking very ignorant. “The writer,” I explained. “Ah!” my guide exclaimed. “Two fur-longs further,” his finger jabbed the sunlight, “and you’ll come to a two storeyed house.” And he strode on, his starched white turban’s zari edges glinting. 

Narayan himself answered the doorbell, and, after I had introduced myself, wanted to know whether I had had any trouble locating his house. No, I said. “We Mysoreans are very pleased to help visitors,” he smiled. Mysore, once the pomp-and-glitter seat of the Wadiyar kings, is today shorn of the mystique of a ruling monarchy. Yet its citizens continue their tradition of courtly behavior. As Narayan and I settled into cane armchairs on his wide verandah, I could see the distant Chamundi Hill, one of Mysore’s revered landmarks. “So I am to be written about!” Narayan said, as though such attention was strange to him. 

Behind his thick glasses, clad in homespun dhoti, Narayan hardly looked like one of India’s most-read, best-selling novelists in the English language. It was difficult to believe that he was the man who had created, out of thin air and a gentle imagination, the quintessentially Indian town of Malgudi, fictional arena in which all of Narayan’s novels have been set. 

Graham Greene has described Narayan as “the novelist I admire most in the English language after the death of Evelyn Waugh.” Yet, face to face with his simplicity, Narayan did not exude the aura of a successful writer. He looked like any other South Indian grandfather, enjoying a quiet moment with his home, his garden, his peace. 

Blessed with the ability to read drama into the plainest of events, R. K. Narayan, at age 70, is as much an inhabitant of Malgudi as his characters themselves. His novels have been said to “have a humanity with irony, a bittersweet charm”, and he has been likened to a “Chekhov flavored with jasmine and betel leaf.” Perhaps his winsome style has its roots in his ultraorthodox childhood, in the people he encountered in his early years, and in the experiences, he went through-all thoroughly Indian.  

Mysorean Narayan’s ancestors came from the deeper South—from a Tamil Nadu village called Rasipuram. Soon after his birth in 1906 in Madras, his father, Krishnaswami Iyer, migrated to Mysore in search of a better future. His mother followed with his brothers and sisters, leaving little Narayan behind to be looked after by his grandmother. “I called her Ammini,” says Narayan, “literally, Madam. We grew to like each other’s company so much that I stayed on at Madras even after the call from my parents came.” And so Narayan’s earliest memories are of Madras, of bare-chested men with tufts of hair crowning bald pates, of holy ash smeared on brown skins. His devout grandmother symbolized father, mother, sister, brother to Narayan. “Grand-motherhood was a wrong vocation for her; she ought to have been a school inspectress,” writes Narayan in his autobiography My Days. “She had an absolute passion to teach and mold a young mind.”  

When summer scorched Madras’ streets, Narayan’s grandmother would escort him to his father’s house in Chennapatna in Mysore State, where he was the headmaster of a government high school. And on these vacation trips, Narayan found his parents unfamiliar, his brothers and sisters strange. And, he told me, he would yearn to return to Madras, to his school friends and their dusty games.  

Was his childhood responsible for the general qualities his characters possess, I asked. Very much Hindu, quite timid, hemmed in by the staid continuity of Malgudi? “My heroes are timid,” he replied, “because our population is quite timid. I write about the mild Hindus, 90 per cent of whom haven’t realized their aspirations.” That is the characteristic present in all of Narayan’s novels the middle class cast that is tossed around between conflicts and frustrations, the kind of ethos that every Indian is very familiar with. 

Later, however, Narayan moved to Mysore, where his father was now headmaster of the Maharaja’s Collegiate High School. There, he says, he discovered the advantage of studying in a school where one’s father is the headmaster. He found teachers eager to help him, to win favor, to improve his performance. But Narayan did not share his family’s obsessive enthusiasm for education. “I, instinctively rejected both education and examinations,” he recalls, “with their unwarranted seriousness and esoteric suggestions.” In keeping with this distaste, Narayan failed to get through the university entrance examination after completing school, and so had a whole year to while away. It was then that his infatuation for literature began.  

Every morning, Narayan would leave home for a walk to a nearby pond, with a book in hand. During the long mornings of that year, he devoured volume after volume, and came to enjoy Palgrave, Keats, Shelley, Byron, and Browning, not to speak of Tagore. He read Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor and developed a liking for Highland mists and Scottish romance. After Scott, he drifted on to Dickens, and then Rider Haggard, Marie Corelli, Moliere, and Pope and Marlowe and Tolstoy and Hardy.  

Did this period lead on to his desire to write? “I was not really affected by the styles of all those writers,” Narayan told me. “Rather, I went through the reading, driven by some force. And I enjoyed it. But the literary value in those books impressed me. I think literary value, irrespective of style, is a great unifying force. Dostoyevsky’s literary value is as valuable as Dickens’, although their styles are different. The core of the books I read that year may have been foreign to me, but their literary quality was universal.”  

These days, Narayan said, he does not read much. Particularly when he is writing, he prefers not to read, which raised my eyebrows, surprised that Narayan could go in for such unabashed writing. “I am amused by the Westerner’s pursuit of sex,” Narayan laughed. “It’s romance first, then love, then the brass tacks—sex. And sex is not enough by itself, it is laced with anatomy, physiology. I enjoyed Jong! And I came away with the conviction that most characters in modern novels from the West do not carry on any activity above the waist!”  

Nevertheless, Narayan remains unaffected by his reading. I asked him what had made him take to writing in English. “Because English has the simplest style,” he answered simply, “and because with English, I can remain quite close to the spoken language. I piece together images, talk, expressions; and there is a transparency in my style. I try to write in such a way that the reader is not conscious of my style. Style itself should have no color of its own. Many writers today do not work hard enough, and forget the necessity for simplicity. They tend to get carried away by style, and all the devices of rhetoric.” 

Returning to his literary sabbatical in Mysore, Narayan told me how he grew to love novels with tragic endings. The most satisfying book he came across in this category, he recalls, was H. G. Wells’ Passionate Friends. He cannot recall, however, if the heroine’s career was ended by consumption or strychnine. Narayan also read many English magazines in the school library, and encountered writers like Conan Doyle, Wodehouse, W. W. Jacobs, and Arnold Bennett. And he started writing, “mostly under the influence of events occurring around me,” he says in My Days, “and in the style of any writer who was uppermost in my mind at the time.” He read his pieces out to a few friends, bribing them with coffee that “blunted the listeners’ critical faculties and made them declare my work a masterpiece.”  

Narayan sent those first efforts to the literary magazines he had read and waited in a feverish anticipation for the postman. And he would be infuriated by the cold rejection slips that would accompany his manuscripts back. Even today, he habitually watches for the postman. “It’s probably a conditioned reflex, like Pavlov’s salivating dog,” he thinks. In 1926, Narayan finally passed the university entrance examination, and took up studying for his B.A. degree at Mysore’s Maharajah College. He went through that experience without ever liking it, and graduated in 1930, at the age of twenty four, not sure what he would do thereafter. 

A series of unsuccessful attempts to get a job plummeted Narayan into despondency. He moved off to Bangalore and rejoined his grandmother, who was recouping her health there. “On a certain day in September,” he recalls, “selected by my grandmother for its auspiciousness, I bought an exercise book and wrote the first line of a novel; as I sat in a room, nibbling my pen and wondering what to write, Malgudi with its little railway station swam into view, all ready made, with a character called Swaminathan running down the platform peering into the faces of passengers… ” And thus his first novel, Swami and Friends, took shape. It was published in 1935, through the efforts of his friend Purna, who was in Oxford. Purna shored up Narayan’s sagging morale after a succession of publishers had turned the manuscript down, and ultimately approached Graham Greene, who was then in Oxford, and gave him the manuscript. With Greene’s recommendation, Hamish Hamilton agreed to publish Swami and Friends. Meanwhile, Narayan had fallen in love with a girl he had seen drawing water from the street tap close to his sister’s house in Coimbatore. Against opposition from her father (because her horoscope was considered incompatible with his) Narayan married Rajam (that was her name) in 1933.  

The Bachelor of Arts and The Dark Room, Narayan’s second and third novels, had been published by Nelson and Macmillan respectively. Between bouts of writing, he loved to play with his daughter, and wrestled with the running of a household. And then, in 1939, tragedy struck. Rajam caught typhoid, and, in early June that year, she died, leaving Narayan heartbroken. He has described her sickness and death in The English Teacher, and this novel, he feels, is, more than any other book of his, autobiographical in content.  

The grief that Narayan was plunged into on his wife’s death made him give up writing for some time. But soon, he began to write again, with a vengeance. Novel followed novel, recognition swirled around him. But he remained unaffected by all this, his senses dulled, in a way, by the tribulations he had had to go through. Today, the bookshelf in his study is dominated by a fading photograph of Rajam. Close by hangs another framed portrait, of his daughter and granddaughter to whose house he retreats occasionally, in Coimbatore, a day’s drive away from Mysore. 

Narayan’s books have all exhibited a surprising empathy with their characters’ minds. “I hardly went out of my own milieu,” said Narayan, when I asked him why he had confined himself, all the while, to Malgudi. Was it fear that prevented him from stepping out of Malgudi’s antiseptic continuum? “Fear?” he smiled. “No, not at all. I am not interested in venturing beyond Malgudi, that’s all. I am quite satisfied with the atmosphere I have built up, in novel after novel. I see enough to write on in my own circle. The higher the economic and social structure, the less interesting it is for me. I do not like the affluent society, with its cocktails, its skyscrapers, its conscious conversation.”  

Why, I wondered aloud, is Narayan so liked in the West? Does he symbolize to his readers there (and he has a vast following abroad) the exotic species of Indo-Anglian writers? “They like my books because of the pattern of life I portray,” Narayan said. “The colors that run through my novels, how I look at my characters from inside and outside, realistically. Whatever comes out of it is inherent in the style itself. I am faithful to my social, economic, and cultural values. There is validity in my presentation of characters. I never have a thesis and then try to fit a character into it. I write fundamentally for myself.”  

The critiques his books have earned in the West have surprised Narayan with their insight into his style, his purpose, his philosophy and his ethics. There is no deliberation, no self-consciousness, in his Indianness, he says. The wealth of material available to him, he feels, is amazing. “We are not a standardized society, except perhaps in our upper strata, where people pay more income tax!” This may be the reason why he appeals to the Westerner, he says, because “they are standardized on many levels, their struggles are all similar, and easily solved.”  

And that is the reason for his choosing Malgudi, he said. Because Malgudi is insular, what the Indians call a “mofussil place”. Because, in a way, Malgudi is Utopian, as like India’s hundreds of thousands of small towns as is possible, and unchanging at the same time. There is no single influence dominating Malgudi at any time, said Narayan. Why is Malgudi so static, so rooted in a fixed plane of time, I asked. Why doesn’t he introduce some changes in every successive book, to indicate the change that any town goes through? “I must consider that seriously,” Narayan laughed. “Perhaps in my next novel, to satisfy modern questioners like you, I shall put in an airfield! Perhaps, I’ll change my streets a bit, put in more traffic!” 

We left the verandah and climbed the stairs to Narayan’s well-lit study-cum-sitting-room. He opened a breath taking walnut writing desk an admirer had sent him from Kashmir and stooped to search for something. After a while, he raised his head, looked at his wife’s picture, and said aloud: “What was I looking for?” Then he turned to me and remarked that he was growing old. “Here’s a short story of mine that appeared in a recent Playboy,” he called out. “I’ll tell you the story behind the writing of it.”  

On a trip to Coimbatore, Narayan narrated, he had stopped by a roadside cobbler to get his sandals stitched. Behind the cobbler, as he worked, Narayan could see some film posters peeling from a dirty wall. And after he returned home, he told me, he sat down at his typewriter, and wrote the short story, God and the Cobbler. The hippie in the story came later, as he wrote, Narayan laughed. And he read out a portion of the story:  

“No need to explain who the hippie was, the whole basis of hippieness being the shedding of identity and all geographical associations. He might be from Berkeley or Outer Mongolia or anywhere. If you developed an intractable hirsuteness, you acquired a successful mask; if you lived in the open, roasted by the sun all day, you attained a universal shade transcending classification or racial stamps, and affording you unquestioned movement across all frontiers.” 

Later, Narayan conducted and its garden. He had moved into it in 1953. He pointed out the frangipani tree he had written about in My Days, and lingered near a twisted log of teak mounted amidst his crotons. He seemed very satisfied there, standing in his garden, looking at his beloved Mysore, waving to a friend who, he explained, accompanied him on his morning walks. We returned to the verandah for the last questions I had.  

All his novels, I remarked, ended ambiguously. Narayan interrupted. “Nothing is conclusive in this existence,” he said. “My characters continue. One cannot round off everything.” Why have all his books been brought out by publishers abroad, I asked. “Because I get very good reviews there,” Narayan said. “And the publishing industry in India was restricted to textbooks so far. It’s only now that it is developing. And the coming of Indian paperbacks, I think, is a great event. But our young writers do not try to take advantage of this facility. They are always searching for material, hardly ever writing sense. They are obsessed with subject matter.”  

As we prepared to part, Narayan showed me the reviews his latest book, The Painter of Signs, had got in various American journals. I read Updike, Naipaul, Robb, Hirsch, all extolling Narayan’s literary genius. The review I dwelt on the longest was Anthony Thwaite’s, in the New York Times. Thwaite wrote: ” (Narayan’s) is a world as richly human and volatile as that of Dickens, but never caricatured; and unlike E. M. Forster’s India—it is seen from the inside, though by a writer whose ironical detachment has no coldness.”  

And so I left Narayan in his armchair, looking every inch a man from Malgudi, and yet appearing to be just another old Indian. As I closed the plain gate, unadorned by a nameplate, I could see Narayan gazing at his frangipani tree, sunk in thought, planning, perhaps, the airfield he had promised to lay out.