The news of the death of nonagenarian R.K.Narayan on
May 13 in Chennai saddened me. He has been one of my idols for the last 20
years, since I first became interested in his stories. As of now, 15 of his
published works decorate my library. Barbara Crossette, in her obituary to
Narayan in the New York Times [ R.K.Narayan, India's prolific story
teller, dies at 94; May 14, 2001] states that he has written "34 novels
and hundreds of short stories". This means, I still have more to collect,
which I intend to pursue strongly.
It is a folk belief (supported by medical evidence)
in many cultures that widowers do not live long, following the death of their
wives. Narayan was an exception to this belief. His wife Rajam lived only for
five years after marrying him, dying in 1939. That he had lived over 60 years
as a widower, taking care of his only daughter Hema who herself predeceased
him in 1994, tells something about Narayan's courage and mental resilience.
That Narayan is a trend-breaker not only in his personal life, but in the
literature domain of Indian subcontinent as well, and is worthy of admiration.
Though being born as a Tamil, he wished to become
internationally known by writing in English - the language of India's
imperialists. He wished to be an Indian whale in the global sea rather than
being a catfish in the Indian lake. That ambition was not for the
faint-hearted. But, Narayan was blessed with a brave heart, which had
withstood the early loss of his wife and with a child to care for. As a
result, Narayan gave birth to Malgudi town in the literature world, the
quintessential Indian town with its assortment of lovable characters. And, the
literary world has been ever thankful to him for his wonderful creation.
One in every six humans living now is an Indian. In
addition, millions who are living beyond the borders of India also live their
days - immersed in the religion, languages and culture founded in India. It
was left to Narayan to plough this virgin field in English language with humor
and grace. While settled in London, New York and in other Western cities,
there are hundreds of others now, who gallop along the path Narayan had opened
six decades ago. But none has the home-field advantage Narayan had.
Rasipuram Krishnaswami Narayanaswami was born on
October 10, 1906 in a Tamil Brahmin household. Here is a tasty morsel from the
autobiography of Narayan, originally published in 1973. In this piece, he
reminisces on his school days in Chennai, during the First World War period,
which also saw religious rivalry (between Hindus and Christians) around his
neighborhood. Narayan's mastery of words tinged with humor is a delight to
read.
"Ours was a Lutheran Mission School - mostly
for boarders who were Christian converts. The teachers were all converts,
and, towards the few non-Christian students like me, they displayed a lot of
hatred. Most of the Christian students also detested us. The scripture
classes were mostly devoted to attacking and lampooning the Hindu gods, and
violent abuses were heaped on idol-worshippers as a preclude to glorifying
Jesus. Among the non-Christians in our class I was the only Brahmin boy, and
received special attention; the whole class would turn in my direction when
the teacher said that Brahmins claiming to be vegetarians ate fish and meat
in secret, in a sneaking way, and were responsible for the soaring price of
those commodities. In spite of the uneasy time during the lessons, the
Biblical stories themselves enchanted me. Especially the Old Testament
seemed to be full of fascinating characters....
"What I suffered in the class as a
non-Christian was nothing compared to what Christian missionary suffered
when he came to preach at our street corner. If Christian salvation came out
of suffering, here was one who must have attained it. A European missionary
with a long beard, escorted by a group of Indian converts carrying violins
and harmoniums, would station himself modestly at the junction between
Vellala Street and Purasawalkam High Road. A gentle concert would begin
unobstrusively. A few onlookers stopped by, the priest nodded to everyone in
a friendly manner, casting a genial look around, while the musicians
rendered a full-throated Biblical hymn over the babble of the street, with
its hawkers' cries and the jutka-drivers' urging of their lean horses.
Urchins sat down in the front row on the ground, and all sorts of men and
women assembled. When the preacher was satisfied that he had gathered a good
audience, he made a sign to the musicians to stop. His speech, breaking into
the abrupt silence that ensued, was delivered in an absolutely literary
Tamil, stiff and formal, culled out of a dictionary, as far away from normal
speech as it could be. It was obvious that he had taken a lot of trouble to
learn the local language so that he could communicate his message to the
heathen masses successfully. But Tamil is a tongue-twister and a demanding
language even for Indians from other provinces, the difficulty being that
the phonetic value and the orthography are different, and it cannot be
successfully uttered by mere learning; it has to be inherited by the ear.
"I am saying this to explain why the preacher
was at first listened to with apparent attention, without any mishap to him.
This seemed to encourage to him to go on with greater fervour, flourishing
his arms and raising his tone to a delirious pitch, his phrases punctuated
with 'Amen' from his followers.
"Suddenly, the audience woke up to the fact
that the preacher was addressing them as 'sinners' (Pavigal in Tamil)
and that he was calling our gods names. He was suggesting that they fling
all the stone gods into the moss-covered green tanks in our temples, repent
their sins, and seek baptism. For God would forgive all sinners and the Son
of God would take on the load of their sins. When the public realized what
he was saying, pandemonium broke out. People shouted, commanded him to shut
up, moved in on his followers - who fled to save their limbs and
instruments. The audience now rained mud and stone on the preacher and
smothered him under bundles of wet green grass....But his voice went on
unceasingly through all the travail; lamps lit up by his assistants earlier
were snatched away and smashed. The preacher, bedraggled and almost
camouflaged with damp grass and water, went through his programme to the
last minute as scheduled. Then he suddenly disappeared into the night. One
would have thought that the man would never come again. But he did, exactly,
on the same day a week hence, at the next street corner.
"The preacher was a foolhardy zealot to have
chosen this particular area, as this was one place where the second
commandment was totally violated. If you drew a large circle with this spot
as the centre, the circumference would enclose several temples where people
thronged for worship every evening. Vellala Street itself, though a short
stretch, had three temples on it - one for Ganesha, the elephant-faced god,
next to it Krishna's temple, and farther off one for Ponni Amman, the
goddess who was the frontier guardian at a time when this part of Madras was
just a village....
"Recently I revisited Purasawalkam and spent a
couple of hours viewing the old landmarks, and I found, though multi-storey
buildings and near shop fonts and modern villas and the traffic stream have
altered the general outlook, that the four or five temples I have mentioned
are still solid and unchanged, oil lamps still burning, and the
congregations the same as they were half a century or more ago, surviving
the street-corner iconoclast as well as the anti-iconoclasts who sought to
demolish him with mud and bundles of grass." (*R.K.Narayan - My Days:
A Memoir, Penguin Books, London, 1989)
Reference books and encyclopedias in modern
literature describe Narayan as a novelist. Calling Narayan as a novelist is
like pigeon-holing Chaplin as a circus clown. For Tamils, Narayan was more
than a novelist. He became the foremost chronicler and story teller of Hindu
life in the 20th century India. His characters were created in the milieu of
Tamil Nadu and Dravidian culture.
Here is another excerpt from his autobiography, which
reveals how Narayan got acquainted with the ordinary folks which he later
transformed into delightful characters in his short stories.
"In order to stabilize my income I became a
newspaper reporter. My business would be to gather Mysore city news and send
it daily to a newspaper published in Madras called The Justice. The
daily was intended to promote the cause of the non-Brahmin who suffered from
the domination of the minority Brahmin class in public life, government
service and education. Though The Justice was a propagandist paper
against the Brahmin class, it somehow did not mind having me as its
correspondent in Mysore.
"...I left home at about nine in the morning
and went out news-hunting through the bazaar and market place - all on foot.
I hung about law courts, police stations, and the municipal building, and
tried to make up at least ten inches of news each day before lunch time...I
feared that other Madras papers like The Mail or The Hindu,
whose correspondents had telephone and telegraph facilities, might get ahead
of me. But those correspondents were lofty and did not care for the items I
valued....Murders were my stand-by...I hung about the mortuary for the
post-mortem verdict and the first police report. As long as I used the
expression 'alleged' liberally, there was no danger of being hauled up for
false reporting or contempt of court. I knew a lot of police officers,
plain-clothes-men, and informers - apart from presidents and secretaries of
various public bodies who craved publicity and sought my favour..." [ibid]
How Narayan came to terminate this job as a reporter
for The Justice is also humorous. Here is his version:
"I enjoyed this occupation, as I came in close
contact with a variety of men and their activities, which was educative. It
lasted for about one year, and might have gone on, perhaps indefinitely, but
for a letter I sent to the editor, which soured our relationship. They had
withheld my payment for three months, and I wrote to say, 'I am a writer in
contact with many newspapers and periodicals in America and England, who
make their payments on precise dates; I am not used to delays in
payments...' To which the editor replied, 'If you are eminent as you claim
to be, you should not mind a slight delay on our part; if, on other hand,
you could realize that after all you are a correspondent eking out your
income with such contributions as we chose to publish, your tone is
unwarranted by your circumstances.' I resented the tone of their reply, and
decided to give up this work as soon as I could afford it...."[ibid]
As they say in occasions like this type of internal
conflict faced by a super-achiever who finds his or her path to success
ultimately, The Justice newspaper's loss was literature world's gain.
Narayan's memorable characters in his short stories had already found niches
in his heart by the time he quit his journalist job. A sample of these
characters include, village story-teller Nambi, rice seller Subbiah, goat-herd
Muni, cinema front-food vendor Rama, octogenarian 'Emden' Rao, office section
head Rama Rao, body guard Shankar, school teacher Sekhar, petty-shop assistant
Ramu, monkey trainer Sami, prostitute and her neighbor hermit (Swamiji),
pavement astrologer, Taluk office watchman -the list is long. When one
finishes reading the exploits of each of these characters in Narayan's
stories, one can marvel at Narayan's knack for realistically photographing
personalities of vibrant Indian culture, who lead simple lives with simple
worries and simple fulfillments.
Later in his life, for the benefit of international
literary audience, Narayan also abridged the Hindu epics Ramayana and
Mahabharata in English. We are fortunate that a writer of his caliber made the
noteworthy decision to write about the Hindu culture in English. I wonder
whether Narayan anticipated (ahead of others) the potential increase of Hindus
in the diaspora in the last decades of the 20th century, and the concurrent
need to educate the children of Hindu diaspora in English about their cultural
heritage. He was a giant in his chosen discipline and I am sure that his works
will educate and enrich our culture for a long time to come.
Published Works
(in chronological order)
* indicates link to Amazon.com
online bookshop
1.
* Swami
and Friends (Phoenix Fiction Series) (1935)
2.
* The
Bachelor of Arts (1937)
3.
* The
Dark Room (1938)
4. Mysore (1939)
5.
* The
English Teacher (1945)
6.
* Astrologers
Day and Other Stories (1947)
7.
* Mr
Sampath - The Printer of Malgudi (1949)
8.
* The
Financial Expert (1952)
9.
* Grateful
to Life and Death (1953)
10.* Waiting
for the Mahatma (1955)
11.* Lawley
Road and Other Stories (1956)
12.
* The
Guide : A Novel (Twentieth-Century Classics) (1958)
13. Next Sunday: Sketches and Essays (1960)
14.
* The
Man-Eater of Malgudi (Twentieth-Century Classics)(1961)
15.
* My
Dateless Diary : An American Journey (1964)
16.
* Gods,
Demons, and Others (1965)
17.
* The
Vendor of Sweets (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) (1967)
18.
* A
horse and two goats, and other stories (1970)
19.
* The
Ramayana : A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic (Penguin Classic) (1972)
20.
* My Days; A Memoir
(1974)
21.* Reluctant
Guru (1974)
22.
* The
Painter of Signs (1976)
23.
* The
Mahabharata : A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic(1978)
24.
* The Emerald Route (1980)
25.
* Malgudi
Days (Twentieth-Century Classics) (1982)
26.
* A
Tiger for Malgudi (Twentieth-Century Classics) (1983)
27.
* Under
the Banyan Tree and Other Stories (1985)
28.
* Talkative
Man (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) (1986)
29.
* A
Writer's Nightmare : Selected Essays, 1958-1988 (1988)
30.
* A
Story-Teller's World : Stories, Essays, Sketches (1989)
31.
* The
World of Nagaraj : A Novel of Malgudi (1990)
32.
* Malgudi
landscapes : the best of R.K. Narayan (1992)
33.
*The
Grandmother's Tale and Selected Stories (1993)
34.
*Salt & Sawdust: Stories and Table Talk (1993)
