"The hardest of all things for a novelist to communicate is the extraordinary ordinariness of most human happiness... Jane Austen, Soseki, and Chekhov: a few bring it off. Narayan is one of them…” -thus remarked Francis King about one of the most charming masters of 20th century and his lovely, picturesque and larger than life creation ‘Malgudi’.
‘Malgudi’, the very sound of the name infuses a characteristic simplicity into the mind of the reader accompanied by a feeling of bliss. And when you actually sit down to read one of these novels, you feel a strange yet pleasurable feeling as the story unfolds with wizardry unique to R.K.Narayan. He was a real enchanter who wove emotions around this fictional haven set on the banks of the equally illusory yet quaint river Sarayu.
Almost all of his stories revolve around ‘Malgudi’ the most popular of them being “Swami and Friends”. This was Narayan’s earliest work and most popular too, being re-made into a T.V. Serial.He wonderfully portrays ‘Swami’ – a meek lad helpless at the hands of everyone from his rather stern father, his air-gun toting and club wielding friends to his strict Headmaster and of-course at the hands of fate. Yet he surprises everyone with his sudden bursts of energy and emotions and set of wild ideas. Swami’s day moves on like any other normal boy’s. Still the story is written with great skill that at times one can feel the childish innocence and predicament of Swami melting into oneself. This was followed by ‘The Bachelor of Arts’ where Narayan depicts the transition of a turbulent adolescent Chandran into a mature adult, falling in love but rejected due to astrological reasons, turning sanyasi and leaving home and finally embracing a job and a getting married to please his parents after all the emotional turmoil, in the process.
With the almost autobiographical ‘The English Teacher’, a thematic trilogy is complete. Elizabeth Bowen remarked about ‘The English Teacher’ “An idyll as delicious as anything I have met in modern literature for a long time. The atmosphere and texture of happiness and above all, its elusiveness have seldom being so perfectly described”.
Equally pungent are Narayan’s short stories often remarked to be more pungent than the famous Madras curry. These were welcome diversions for Narayan from his monotony of writing novels. Similarly, one can notice that in all of these tales humor and tragedy are deftly put together notwithstanding the artistic innocence (sometimes gullibility) of the central character haplessly tormented by emotional outbursts of love, lust, fear etc. Another important aspect is the gentle irony portraying the variety and colour of Indian life with the occasional bourgeois influence. Almost all stories in “Malgudi Days” end on a sad note. And all these are not entirely fiction. Narayan has laced the stories with memories of his own life.
Though most stories have a rather meek and gullible protagonist, to brand his stories as stereo typed would be quite unfair. Take for example “A Tiger for Malgudi” which is recounted by a tiger possessing a human soul, breaking free from a circus, and travels into town only to be recaptured by a sage and eventually seeks enlightenment. The story was so different and so thought provoking that ‘The London Times’ remarked “Narayan’s teasing wit and insight into human (and tiger) nature”.
Another fitting exception is “Grandmother’s Tale” written as told to him by his grandmother, the story of his great grandmother. Bala (his great grandmother) is married at seven but her ten year old husband runs off to Pune along-with some pilgrims. As years pass her husband is believed to be dead and she is frowned upon by society for not moving about like a widow. Eventually she goes out in trace of him and finds him in an alien land (Poona) where he is a thriving jeweler ,admired and respected and married to another woman. With the same resolve that brought her all the way from the south, she effects a dramatic ouster of the first wife and takes him back to the south where she settles down with him as the perfect picture of a caring and submissive wife. One cannot fail to appreciate the fabulous delineation of Bala from an innocent girl to a determined young woman and finally to a quiet orthodox Hindu wife.
Some of the other Malgudi novels are “The World of Nagaraj” “The Vendor of Sweets”, “The Guide” (made later into a film by Dev Anand) to name a few. Besides, there is also an entrancing memoir ‘My Days’, in which Narayan describes his own life in Madras and later on in Mysore and New York. This book is all about the world of a writer whose perception of human comedy is at once acute and forgiving, larger than life and always true to it. The author also has several essays and compilation of retold legends to his credit. In all these he establishes his special hold on human imagination.
Geographically his novels point to Malgudi being halfway between Trichinopoly and Bangalore. Still,many of his avid readers have enquired about the location of Malgudi. To one such query, he remarked that if Malgudi was said to be in South India only half the truth would be expressed, for the characters of Malgudi seemed to him to be universal.
Narayan won numerous awards during the course of his literary career. His first major award was in 1958, the Sahitya Akademi Award for The Guide. Six years later, he received the Padma Bhushan during the Republic Day honours of 1964.In 1980, he was awarded the AC Benson Medal by the (British) Royal Society of Literature, of which he was an honorary member. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature multiple times, but never won the honour.
Towards the end of his career, Narayan was nominated to the Rajya Sabha for a six-year term starting in 1989, for his contributions to Indian literature. A year before his death, in 2000, he was awarded India's second-highest civilian honour, the Padma Vibhushan. Eminent personalities have heaped praises on Narayan’s work including Lord Mountbatten and The Queen of England herself.
“A gem for everyone from eight to eighty sounds like an old cliché but that is exactly what the fables of Malgudi are.”
NOTE: This article is actually a slightly modified version of what I had written 3 years ago.
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