October 10

Not the Booker announcement date this time. The Centenary of the birth of R.K.Narayan. I spent the better part of this Sunday morning reading the exhaustive coverage in The Hindu and The Indian Express (not all articles linked here).

For a kid in my generation, it was impossible to grow up without knowing Swami and Friends or Malgudi. And while the books were around, the television kept that interest alive.

Narayan's Books and Collections

A 2001 article on R.K.Naryan by Pankaj Mishra. Very detailed.

A few months after Narayan passed away, Comedies of Suffering by Shashi Tharoor was published in The Hindu.

Some of my friends felt I was wrong to focus on language - a writerly concern, as they saw it - and lose sight of the stories, which in many ways had an appeal that transcended language. But my point was that such pedestrian writing diminished Narayan's stories, undermined the characters, trivialised their concerns. Other serious readers of Narayan disagree with me, and so many of them cannot be wrong. I was perhaps particularly unfair in suggesting that Narayan was merely a chronicler of the ordinary who reflected faithfully the world view of a self-obsessed and complacent upper caste (and middle-class). "I write primarily for myself," Narayan had said. "And I write about what interests me, human beings and human relationships .... Only the story matters; that is all." Fair enough: one should not expect Austen to be Orwell. But one does expect an Austen to enrich the possibilities of the language she uses, to illuminate her tools as well as her craft. Narayan's was an impoverished English, limited and conventional, its potential unexplored, its bones bare.

I distinctly recall being surprised by the tone of that article and on further consideration, I also remember thinking that Tharoor's point of view was valid too.

Links to other R.K.Narayan articles.

Graham Greene and R.K.Narayan

Greene regarded Narayan as one of the finest writers in English of his time, an extraordinary commendation for a man who never moved far from his social origins and who wrote largely about people in a small South Indian town in a prose that was simple and unadorned.

But it is this very simplicity that was the source of Narayan's genius - his English was personal and spontaneous, never mannered or measured, free from all artifice. Hardly a word rings false and, unlike many other Indian writers in English, Narayan's prose seems to emerge directly from the culture he was brought up in. It is this unpremeditated quality in his writing which lends it that special candour, which makes it to speak directly to the reader and which invests his rooted and microcosmic world with an expansive and universal character.

Valid too.

Like Austen's, the warmth of R.K.Narayan's stories cannot be understated. Each new reading, for me, unearths new meaning.