Rereading: RK Narayan
A visit to the city that inspired RK Narayan's fictional south Indian town, Malgudi, on
the 10th anniversary of his death
The author RK Narayan. Photograph: Simon Winchester
Charles Nicholl
Sat 14 May 2011 00.04 BST
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n old-fashioned pictorial map shows the small south Indian town of Malgudi
as it would have looked some time before independence. There is the Albert Mission
College, the Ishwara temple, the Welcome restaurant, a cinema called the Palace
Talkies. Walking west along Market Road you would pass Dr Pal's Tourist Bureau, and
the local offices of the Madras Daily Messenger, and then the statue of a former British
governor, Sir Frederick Lawley, after whom the Lawley Extension housing-project is
named. To the north the town is bounded by the Sarayu river, near which can be found
the Untouchables' village, where Gandhi stayed on a visit to Malgudi in 1937, and the
Sunrise Picture Studios, where Mr Sampath the printer made an ill-fated venture into
the film industry. Beyond the river rise the Mempi Hills, with tigers and bamboo forests
and hidden temple-caves.
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The map is, of course, a cartographic fiction, for Malgudi exists only in the pages of a
book – or more precisely, in the pages of 22 books (14 novels and eight short-story
collections) written over a period of nearly 60 years by the great Tamil novelist RK
Narayan, who died 10 years ago this week. The style is spare and droll – impeccable
English with what used to be called an Indian "twang" – and the eye sharp and
unsentimental, and the little provincial world of Malgudi is so convincing that you are
soon drawn in. One of the first to succumb to its charms was Graham Greene, who in
1935 was instrumental in getting Narayan's debut novel, Swami and Friends, published in
England. It was also his idea that the author – Rasipuram Krishnaswami Narayanswami
– should be styled more succinctly on his title-pages. "Narayan wakes in me a spring of
gratitude," Greene later wrote. "Without him I could never have known what it is like to
be Indian."
The Malgudi stories are a meandering south Indian soap opera, full of small-town
intrigues and aspirations, and they were successfully translated to Indian television in
weekly episodes in the 1980s. As with most soap operas, it is easy to get hooked – easy,
indeed, to become a bit of a Malgudi nerd, as witness Dr James Fennelly of New York's
Adelphi University, who compiled the above-mentioned map to illustrate a learned
paper ("The City of Malgudi as an Expression of the Ordered Hindu Cosmos") that he
delivered to the American Academy of Religion in 1978. The map is both a tribute to the
rich verisimilitude of Malgudi, and a faintly Malgudian enterprise in itself. It clearly
tickled the author, and was published at his request in the front of his 1981 collection,
Malgudi Days.
That "ordered cosmos" that Fennelly discerned has been a cause for criticism. Narayan
is a bit unfashionable these days – his laconic voice seems out of touch with the
firecracker talents and political activism of new Indian fiction. VS Naipaul has spoken of
the "stasis" in his work; the world he depicts is "a fable", though Naipaul also notes
perceptively that Narayan's interest lies not in the surface currents of social change but
in "the lesser life that goes on below: small men, small schemes, big talk, limited means"
– an excellent synopsis of the Malgudian ethos.
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Things do change in Malgudi – in the later novels (the last was published in 1990) there
are "scooter-riding boys" and auto-rickshaws in the streets, and hotels serving European
food, and a hydro-electric project in the Mempi Hills – but the town remains trapped in
a dusty miasma of daily preoccupations in which pre- and post-independence are only
hazily distinguishable. Narayan is sometimes called the Indian Chekhov: a master of the
inconsequential and its hidden depths. In Waiting for the Mahatma, the tide of Gandhian
reform sweeps into town, in the person of Gandhi himself, but when the signwriter
Sriram is hired to paint "Quit India!" slogans on the walls, he is mostly concerned with
getting the tail of the Q as short as possible to save on paint. In The Vendor of Sweets,
Jagan sorts the small coinage of the day's takings "with the flourish of a virtuoso
running his fingers over a keyboard".
Malgudi cannot be visited, however much one would like to, but in this anniversary year
I was glad to find myself in the atmospheric city of Mysore, a hundred miles south-west
of Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore). It is a place of considerable charm, with a long
tradition of princely independence, and at an altitude of 2,000 feet in the foothills of the
Western Ghats it has a delightful climate. It was here that Narayan lived for most of his
life, and here that he found much of the raw material for Malgudi.
Born into a large Brahmin family in Madras (now Chennai) in 1906, Narayan came to
live in Mysore as a teenager in the 1920s, when his father was appointed headmaster of
the Maharaja's Collegiate High School. In those days it was a place of "quiet
demeanour", says Sunaad Raghuram, a prominent local journalist and a lifelong fan of
Narayan (or "RKN", as he is often known here). It was "a royal city, full of stately
buildings, but not really like a city – a little town". This suited Narayan, who was "a
small towner at heart". Narayan himself characterised it as a city of talkers. The vital
issues of the day "were settled on the promenades of Mysore", he wrote in his 1974
memoir, My Days. "If Socrates or Plato were alive, he would have felt at home in Sayyaji
Rao Road and carried on his dialogues at the Station Square."
Mysore today is no longer the small sequestered city-state of the 1920s and 1930s. It has
a population nearing 900,000, and all the problems of traffic and overcrowding
endemic in Indian cities. But it still has that easy-going, chatty, intellectual energy of a
university town with a strong sense of its own identity – though Plato would find Station
Square a less congenial spot for philosophising, as it is now a parking area packed with
scooters and motorcycles.
Raghuram did not know Narayan personally, but as a child in Mysore in the 1970s he
often met a jovial character called Mr Chaluvaiengar, who was a friend of his aunt's. He
was a noted amateur actor, putting on Shakespeare plays in the local language,
Kannada, but by profession he was a printer. At his City Power Press, in a little house
near the maharaja's palace, were printed the first Indian editions of Narayan's early
novels. And suddenly one slips across into Malgudi, for Chaluvaiengar was undoubtedly
the model for Mr Sampath, owner of the Truth Printing Works on Kabir Lane, and
eponymous hero of Narayan's fifth novel – a jaunty and very persuasive man. "When he
took a sheet from the press he handled it with such delicacy, carrying it on his palms, as
if it were a newborn infant, saying 'See the finish?'", and his customer, though privately
disappointed that the dummy copy of his idealistic new magazine looked like "the
handbill of a wrestling tournament", was "half-hypnotised into agreeing with him".
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After graduating in 1930 from the Maharaja's College – prototype of the Albert Mission
College in Bachelor of Arts – Narayan decided to "throw [himself] full-time into this
gamble of a writer's life". In his memoir, he recalls with affection his first typewriter –
an "elephantine" Smith Premier 10, which had separate keys for upper and lower cases,
and which he had to sell to a shopkeeper to pay an overdue bill for sweets and cigarettes.
One of his first professional assignments was as the Mysore correspondent of a Madras
newspaper, the Justice. All morning he "went out news-hunting" in the bazaar and the
law courts and police stations, gathering everything from crime stories to gymkhana
results. At 1pm he returned home, "bolted down a lunch", typed up his report, "and
rushed it to the Chamarajapuram post office before the postal clearance at 2:20pm". He
aimed to produce "ten inches of news" a day, at a rate of about 15 annas an inch, but
"thanks to the news editor's talent for abridgement" his earnings were minimal.
Though he dismissed this work as "a little bit of pot-boiling", one can see that the newshunting Mysore stringer is an important forerunner of the chronicler of Malgudi – an
ambulant, inquisitive figure, "going hither and thither", his antennae tuned for stories.
Narayan's daily walks through the city became the habit of a lifetime. His nephew, RS
Krishnaswamy, has recorded some memories of these, estimating that a typical
promenade would cover about seven miles. "After his ablutions, and chanting the 108
Gayathri mantras, he was ready for his daily walk at 10. Dressed in a white shirt and
white panche [dhoti] and carrying his legendary kode [umbrella] he would slowly walk,
never briskly, always talking to everybody on the road."
He was a frugal man – his lunch was rice and curds with a bit of pickle, the classic
Brahmin dish – and physically slight. His childhood nickname, Kunjappa (Little
Fellow), followed him through life. In later years he was described as looking like "a very
intelligent bird". In photographs with his wife, the strikingly beautiful Rajam, he is
shorter than her. Rajam died young, of typhoid, in 1939, an experience relived in his
most sombre novel, The Dark Room. Narayan's name is well-known here, but is oddly
lacking in official recognition. "He is an internationally recognised writer, and Mysore
was his muse," says Raghuram, "but there is not a road named after him, not a circle
[roundabout] named after him." (There is, admittedly, a Malgudi Coffee Shop in the
upmarket Green Hotel just outside Mysore, but that seems more branding than
commemoration.) In 2006 a petition was sent to the governor of Karnataka, proposing
that the Chennai-Mysore train service be christened the Malgudi Express. This seems an
eminently sensible idea, but the railways minister has other priorities, it seems, and the
request remains pending.
There is at least one place in Mysore where you can put your finger on the elusive RKN –
at his former home, up in the northern suburb of Yadavagiri. It was built to his own
specifications in the late 1940s. The area, then rustic and isolated, is now a leafy street in
a pleasantly breezy uphill location, but the house stands empty and rather forlorn, with
a look of out-of-date modernity – two storeys, cream-coloured plaster, with a stoutly
pillared verandah on the first floor. The idiosyncratic touch is a semi-circular extension
at the south end of the house, like the apse of a church. On the upper floor of this, lit by
eight windows with cross-staved metal grilles, he had his writing room. It had such a
splendid view over the city – the Chamundi Hill temple, the turrets and domes of the
palace, the trainline below the house – that he had to curtain the windows, "so that my
eyes might fall on nothing more attractive than a grey drape, and thus I managed to
write a thousand words a day".
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A few hundred yards up the street stands the smart Hotel Paradise. The manager is Mr
Jagadish, a courteous and slightly mournful man with a neat grey moustache. He knew
Narayan in the 1980s, when he would sometimes dine at the hotel with his equally
famous younger brother, the Times of India cartoonist, RK Laxman. I ask what he was
like, but it is Laxman who stands out in his memory. Laxman was "very funny", and had
opinions about everything, but Narayan was "more serious". He was a modest man, he
didn't "blow his trumpet". Sometimes, says Mr Jagadish, he has guests who ask him:
"Where is Malgudi?" He laughs and taps the side of his head. For a moment I think he is
giving an answer to the question – that Malgudi was all inside one man's head – but
what he means, of course, is that the question is daft. Narayan was asked it many times,
and ducked it in a variety of ways. One of his more enigmatic answers was this –
"Malgudi is where we all belong, and where we wish we lived."
Slow Train to Malgudi
John Keay on the novels of R. K. Narayan
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I’m not sure whether it was India that introduced me to R. K. Narayan or R. K. Narayan who
introduced me to India. Each superimposed itself on the other so that they became
indistinguishable. Travelling round India any time in the 1970s meant reading a Narayan; and
reading a Narayan anywhere else meant being transported to India. An Indian train journey was
unthinkable without one. In a sense it was one, for the Narayan experience began as soon as you
ventured on to railway property. This was his world. His dozen or so novels had been inspired by
the vision of a unremarkable town on the main line to Madras with a station nameplate that
announced it as MALGUDI. Railway life loomed so large in his fictional Malgudi that attentive
readers came to know exactly what to expect and could stroll from ticket barrier to tiffin room as
if to the platform born.
There was always a bookstall, sometimes on wheels, sometimes insinuated into an alcove between the Second Class Ladies
Waiting Room and the Station Master’s Office. It was either a Wheeler’s or a Higginbotham’s – both still flourishing if one
may judge by a recent Railways Budget in which ‘the removal of this foreign presence from India’s railway stations’ was
deemed long overdue. (The proposal was quietly withdrawn following an outcry in the press to which only Narayan could
have done justice; in fact the whole affair sounds like an incident of his own creation.) On the bookstall a garish display of
magazines, newspapers and biscuit wrappers caught the eye. Books, all paperback, were mustered to one side with the slim
Narayans squeezed unobtrusively between the bulging spines of international blockbusters. If none were there, it was a
waste of time asking for them. The stall’s attendant, glum and bristly or oiled and smiling, might have stepped straight from
the pages of Narayan’s The Guide. Like Raju, that book’s fictional hero, he had clearly acquired his stock in haphazard
fashion and without a view to meeting the literary tastes of passing foreigners.
Raju of The Guide soon tires of peddling stale biscuits and yesterday’s papers and, being a lad of parts, zooms up in the
world. From bookstall attendant he progresses to tourist guide and then agent and impresario for the ravishing Rosie, an
exceptionally talented dancer. Engagements come flooding in; the pair are forever on the move. Raju basks in their all-India
celebrity. But the buffers of nemesis stand ready. As so often in Narayan’s works, worldly success, a lavish lifestyle and the
caresses of a jingling muse take a heavy toll of his character’s integrity. Raju becomes cavalier with his friends, careless of
money and jealously possessive of Rosie. His extravaganza ends in a flurry of deceits, then two years for forgery. Emerging
from prison, he is not obviously changed. He establishes himself in a derelict temple and is indifferent to the villagers who
drop by. But his habit of making other people’s business his own proves incorrigible. For the apotheosis that awaits him in
the book’s climactic conclusion Raju is a most improbable candidate, yet it is precisely this element of an arbitrary destiny,
and of one man’s grudging submission to it, that makes The Guide the most satisfying of all Narayan’s novels.
My copy was purchased in 1975. You can tell the date from the slightly wonky column of reprintings listed on the reverse of
the title page. First published in 1958 (‘5,000 copies’), The Guide seems to have languished until 1963, after which every year
brought another reprint (‘10,000 copies’, ‘12,000 copies’). Totting them up gives a total of 83,000 by 1975. Admittedly there
was not a lot of competition in those days. The bookstalls carried only a limited stock of English-language titles, and Indians
writing in English had yet to conquer the heights of literary approval; Rushdie was still an advertising man, the Booker was
barely established. In time Narayan’s work would be internationally recognized and he was more than once nominated for
the Nobel. But he never won it. During a period of national revival and linguistic pride there was something vaguely incorrect
about writing in other than one’s native tongue. Worse still, Narayan seemed quite unaware of a writer’s responsibilities to
the burgeoning field of post-colonial studies. Instead of social outrage and swipes at the iniquities of imperialism, he
favoured a benign detachment and gently mocking humour.
The Guide was printed at the ‘The Wesley Press, Mysore City’, published by ‘Indian Thought Publications’, and cost Rupees
6.75. The price even then was a snip and, despite newsprint shortages, the Wesley Press had somehow acquired a stock of
near-white paper and had minimized the problems of uneven inking. There is no author’s dedication, although Narayan’s
next work, The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1961), is inscribed ‘For Graham Greene, to mark (more than) a quarter century of
friendship’. Greene had entered Narayan’s orbit as fortuitously as the occasional world event – Indian independence, Elvis
Presley – impinges on the dusty routines of Malgudi. A friend who had moved to England had sent Greene an unsolicited
typescript of Narayan’s first novel asking for suggestions about getting it published. Greene read it and, though knowing
nothing of India or Narayan, responded with the sort of encouragement that every aspiring writer dreams of. Swami and
Friends (1935) was duly revised and published in the UK on Greene’s recommendation. Though it caused no great stir, and
though it was twenty years before the two men actually met, Greene remained a friend, a champion and a collaborator to the
extent that he read and commented on the early drafts of all Narayan’s novels. After the death of Evelyn Waugh, Greene
acknowledged Narayan as ‘the novelist I most admire in the English language’.
The jacket of The Guide, a two-colour design showing a swirling Rosie going through her paces, is the work of Narayan’s
youngest brother, R. K. Laxman. Principal cartoonist of the Times of India, Laxman famously created ‘The Common Man’, a
Gandhian Mr Magoo who, without ever speaking, has been mercilessly puncturing Indian presumptions for as long as
anyone can remember. Verbal economy and a deftness of touch seem to have been family traits. Though Tamil-speaking
brahmins from Madras, the brothers had been brought up in Mysore where their father had been a headmaster, and which
may well have provided some of the inspiration for Malgudi. All of Narayan’s works rely heavily on personal input and the
resources of a circle of intimates. But prior to his death in 2001 I hadn’t realized that ‘Indian Thought Publications’ was yet
another Narayan creation. In respect of the home market, author and publisher were one. He set up the firm, it produced
only his works and, like Wheeler’s and Higginbotham’s, it’s still going.
This may explain the confident technical jargon with which Malgudi’s jobbing printer habitually fobs off his customers.
Under a variety of names the reluctant printer crops up in most of the Malgudi novels, as does the Adjournment Lawyer
(‘known for his ability to prolong a case beyond the wildest dreams of the litigant’), the choleric Englishman (‘a huge fellow
made of beef and whisky’), and the unpublishable poet (sworn to write only in monosyllables, he crafts lines like ‘Girls with
girls did dance in trance’). The printer, a stickler for propriety, is notable for an extreme sensitivity on the subject of his staff.
There is no question that he has a staff. The treadle-operated platen can be heard clanking away in the background, and
fleeting appearances are made by a small delivery boy in Mr Sampath (1945) and a greying compositor in The Man-Eater
of Malgudi. But between the front office and the press room there hangs a blue chintz curtain and of nothing is the
proprietor more particular than that his customers resist taking a peek behind it. Malgudi’s print shop, though staffed, was
clearly not overstaffed; and the same may be inferred of Indian Thought Publications.
By the time I eventually met Narayan, he was in his late eighties. A tall figure all in white, bald and boldly bespectacled, he
then lived in a residential district of Madras. As we sat on his veranda, I told him of our cats, each named after a Malgudi
location and each prematurely deceased. Lawley (Extension) had succumbed to poison, Mempi (Hills) had been run over by
a train, and Albert (Mission) had become Albert Missing. He sympathized. Coffee arrived and we got on well. But he was not
an easy man to interview. War and Peace? Too long; he’d never managed to read it. A Suitable Boy? Far too long. Midnight’s
Children? The God of Small Things? Their structures were too artful for his taste, their language too indigestible. Compared
to the high-calorie reading now on offer from India, Malgudi’s standard fare may indeed seem bland – more rice and curd
with a dash of pickle than Mughlai meats swimming in ghee. As ‘the first modern Indian to make literature a full-time
career’, how, I wondered, had he managed to evade the biographers for so long? Well, there was really nothing to tell, he
replied. Why would anyone be interested? He nursed no controversial opinions. His books were his only achievement. His
life had been uneventful.
This was not entirely true. In the 1960s he had torn himself away from south India to travel and lecture, mostly in the US,
and in 1989 he had been appointed a member of the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian parliament. Though he
rarely attended, he lobbied on behalf of trees (too many were being lopped for firewood) and spoke out on education
(children who walked to school should not be burdened with too many books). For someone who would be saluted by his
obituarists as ‘the greatest Indian writer of the century’ he was decidedly ambivalent about literature as a discipline. He had
always wanted to write but he had been an indifferent scholar, reading the classics only under duress, failing English exams,
and lasting only a matter of hours as an English teacher.
His novel of that name – The English Teacher (1945) – vies with The Guide as his most read. It too is set in Malgudi but is
unique in that Narayan here quickly forsakes his habitual playfulness to deal with a universal trauma – bereavement. The
book is agonizingly autobiographical. Narayan too had enjoyed four years of marital bliss before his young wife died of
typhoid in 1939. He never remarried and for a decade published nothing except The English Teacher. Inconsolable, both he
and his fictional creation sought not the silence of closure but the reassurance of communication; and they found it through
a spiritualist medium. The book, like Narayan himself, is ambivalent about this experience. Self-deception is not ruled out.
But from the experience there wells ‘a moment of rare, immutable joy – a moment for which one feels grateful to Life and
Death’.
He writes, as always, without a trace of sentiment. Greene once noted that his genius lay in his reticence; you read Narayan
for what he leaves unsaid; and ‘this complete freedom from comment is the boldest gamble a novelist can take’. For Narayan,
however, it was not a gamble but an imperative. It was how he was. Sharper minds and longer words might expose the
human condition more thoroughly, but not more poignantly. This reticence is complemented by an extreme simplicity of
narrative style. None of his novels runs to much over 200 pages. The sentences are short and his characters speak in an unIndianized English that would have been quite alien to them in real life. Critics suppose such child-like innocence of
expression came to him naturally. But not, I think, easily. Omission marks and crossings-out festoon his handwritten pads of
foolscap. A single phrase might need days of fine-tuning. To realize such perfectly poised stories required the turmoil of
creativity as well as the inborn calm of an inherently modest personality. The reader comes away undazzled, yet with a deep
sense of gratitude and an abiding affection – for Malgudi and its denizens, for the man who created them, and for that
aggregation of thousands of other Malgudis that is modern India.
Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 22 © John Keay 2009
https://frontline.thehindu.com/other/article30245385.ece