R K Narayan of Malgudi: "India will go on"

2011 marks the 10th death anniversary of one of India’s most-loved authors, RK Narayan. Step back with us to Malgudi, that “vague place not found anywhere”, peopled with sign-painters and sweet vendors, Swami and his friends. Was it really a timeless stage for the charming human comedy of small men and small schemes? And what would it have been today, this small town in 21st century India?

Rasipuram krishnaswami Iyer Narayanaswami, BA, had just emerged from an unfortunate stint of schoolmastering. An abject failure in the classroom, he had returned to his family home in Mysore, trying hard to give the impression of knowing what he was doing. He would wake, bathe, and take his coffee — his standards were exacting — and head out, an umbrella in one hand, a pen and pad in the other. Under a tree at the foot of Chamundi Hill, he would sit and write.

Inevitably, a sceptical uncle demanded to inspect the fruits of the young man’s endeavours. He was unimpressed: “What’s this Malgudi? Where is it? Why do you write about some vague place not found anywhere, while there are millions of real places you can write about?”

Narayan was not one to speak of these matters explicitly, but Malgudi was a town whose people were divided — as they would be — in all the usual ways: caste, class, gender, and religion. Equally, they were brought together in all the usual ways: blood, friendship, enmity, and work. The Malgudi of the novels is not, contrary to an old cliché, in any sense timeless. It is shaped by all the usual forces of history, religion, conquest, migration, and colonialism, though Narayan never alluded to these matters explicitly.

Some have been troubled by Narayan’s silence on the big questions.

VS Naipaul and Narayan had met once, in London in 1961. Asked about the prospects for India after Nehru, Narayan had pronounced sagely: “India will go on”.

If we could visit Malgudi, we would see changes of the same sort we see elsewhere in small-town India. Cable television, the internet, mobile phones, certainly, and more generally, a rise in wealth and entrepreneurship. No doubt the great social movements based on caste and religion of the last few decades, many of them violent, would have left their mark on the small town. Some of this has been chronicled by other Indian writers — Pankaj Mishra in Butter Chicken in Ludhiana (1995), or Naipaul in his own India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990). Perhaps the novel Narayan was planning from his hospital bed would have dealt with some of these matters.

Yet, the mutinies of contemporary India invite us to pose some of Narayan’s questions. Does money necessarily make one happier? And to what extent are happiness and suffering, success and failure, matters not of individual striving but of luck? These are deep questions, but we should not be too quick to write off Narayan’s response, not so much an answer as an attitude: of irony, of scepticism, of caution, and a faith that Malgudi, and India, will go on.

Nakul Krishna in Indian Express. Here

"...and I managed to write a thousand words a day" : R K Narayan

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.)

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".

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."

Rereading R K Narayan by Charles Nicholl in Guardian. Here