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Good synthesis of RKN’s writings
Rumina Sethi
R. K. Narayan: Special
Issue of South Asian Review.
edited by K. D. Verma. Volume 23, Number
1. Pages 267. $20.
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A cartoon of R K Narayan by his brother,
R K Laxman.
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This special issue on R. K.
Narayan is a commemorative one. Narayan belongs to the triumvirate of
the earliest Indian novelists who wrote in English, the other two being
Raja Rao and Mulk Raj Anand. Nobody talks of them much anymore, what
with the deluge of new writers in India. The volume under review takes
Narayan as its subject, bringing in new dimensions of poststructuralism
and postmodernism and scrutinising his novels in terms of contemporary
critical theory.Most critics of Narayan believe that his novels return
to the inevitable Indian values, reinforcing the strength of tradition:
"Whatever happens, India will go on." Narayan’s writing is
almost timeless in so far as historical mutation is viewed as an
illusory transfiguration which must revert back to solidity and custom.
Nearly all of Narayan’s novels move around this pattern which can be
expressed, in Meenakshi Mukherjee’s words, ‘Order—Dislocation of
order—Re-integration of order’. The Maneater of Malgudi may
be taken as a demonstrative model in which, Vasu, a taxidermist, visits
Malgudi to hunt animals culminating in his grandiose plans to shoot an
elephant. Destiny itself struggles to protect the life of the animal and
ensure the security of tradition when a blow directed at his forehead to
kill a mosquito leads to his own death. As Vasu knocks himself out,
Narayan celebrates the victory of traditional India that has no place
even for Nehru’s five-year plans for India’s development. India, for
him, is a state of introspective serenity. It is to such
"stasis" that Naipaul has reacted disapprovingly by saying
that "madness or sanity, suffering or happiness seemed all the
same" to Narayan. The case of Srinivas, the idle hero of Mr
Sampath who always somehow manages to survive, frustrates Naipaul
who cannot understand how "India will somehow look after
itself" like the hero of the novel. In India: A Wounded
Civilisation, Naipaul remarked: "[The novel] was also a fable,
a classic exposition of the Hindu equilibrium, surviving the shock of an
alien culture, an alien literary form, an alien language, and making
harmless even those new concepts it appeared to welcome." And
indeed, our assessment of Narayan’s fundamental ontological belief in
a placid India gets strengthened considerably on an examination of the
visionary qualities of not only Mr Sampath but also of The
Painter of Signs and Waiting for the Mahatma. Narayan’s
penchant for the spiritual finds fuller expression in Waiting for the
Mahatma where religious Hindu fables are advocated, creating social
comedies that find hardly any parallel with the ‘cruel and
overwhelming’ reality of India. As Gandhi says to Bharati: "Spin
and read Bhagavad Gita, and utter Ram Nam continuously, and then
you will know what to do in life." The charkha is depicted
as a devotional symbol or a prayer book. Even the act of going to prison
is not political; it is represented as a mysterious, religious
instruction which Bharati obeys without question. Yet admirers of
Narayan, as K. D. Verma’s excellent collection shows us, will decipher
postmodernist readings in his wry humour directed at his heroes and the
strange myths of his country. Krishna Sen’s contribution turns the
argument that Narayan "couldn’t develop". Narayan’s
achievement can be perceived in the manner in which he carries forward
traditional and spiritual values into the lives of 20th -century
characters in order to see their viability within a new context which
might hold the potential of dismantling "eternal" traditions.
While Narayan is sympathetic to indigenous culture and its manifestation
through myths, there are ironic tonalities at work. For instance, in Waiting
for the Mahatma, the ironic perspective is heightened when Sriram
endeavours to shorten the tail of the ‘Q’ in ‘Quit India’ while
inscribing it on his village walls in order to use up less paint. Again,
in The Guide, Narayan’s subversion of renunciation, the
essentialist Indian virtue, by creating a fake sanyasi is suggestive of
a reversal of accepted tradition. Jaina C. Sangha’s essay Malgudi’s
Indian Universe debates how Narayan is much too ambivalent in his
treatment of Indian legends and myths, so that even as one is aware of
the virtue of traditional wisdom, the absurdity of the application of
that very tradition is equally viable. In other words, Narayan
hybridises the sanctity attached to myths instead of employing them to
carry the weight of his ideology as Feroza Jussawalla shows in Cricket
and Colonialis’ and as Pushpa Parekh effectively demonstrates in
her essay on spirituality within postcolonialism. Narayan’s characters
even suffer because of the re-enactment of myth, as in Raman’s
betrayal by Daisy in The Painter of Signs, thereby restructuring
the reader’s conception of the benevolence of pure traditional
values. Though Narayan’s novels are all situated in Malgudi and his
characters are inhabitants of this little village, there appears to be
no explicit intention to define and emphasise a traditional continuity.
It is intriguing, in fact, how Narayan and his contemporaries treat
national identity in different ways considering that they share the same
historical environment: Rao’s representation is shaped by metaphysics
which Narayan exposes to be comic illusion. Narayan and Mulk Raj Anand
are also essentially different: while Anand advocates political
sentiment which arises out of experience and is settled through action,
Narayan insists on retelling myths against a contemporary background, so
that even in accepting the timeless relevance of the past, he can test
the validity of that past in the present. Narayan has thereby quietly
refused to be an ideologue; while Anand and Rao prescribe authoritative
ideologies in shaping the political consciousness of their readers, it
is Narayan who treats identity as a mixture of comedy and seriousness,
neither dismissed as completely farcical, nor sentimentally
endorsed. This issue on Narayan is a good synthesis of all parts of
Narayan’s writings. The essays are thought provoking for those deeply
immersed in South Asian literary studies. The collection will have
profound implications for a fresh look at Narayan’s fiction.
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