Discovering Malgudi

In the summer of 2003, between slurping on ripe mangoes and waiting for the fish-seller’s calls, I made a discovery- a yellow book with an illustration of a bharatnatyam dancer on the cover. The writer’s name was familiar, him having passed just a couple of years ago. It did seem like a grown-up book, but which wouldn’t be hard for any child to understand.  And then, ditching my Nancy Drew, I conceded to my mother’s prodding that maybe a try of this writer would be good. I had discovered Malgudi.

A snippet of life, and characters, of Malgudi, as envisioned by Narayan's brother and cartoonist, R.K. Laxman. 

Much of what I knew about Rasipuram Krishnaswamy Narayanaswami was from his autobiography that I read a few years after my first tryst with The Guide. Born into a middle-class Brahmin family, educated in a missionary school in Madras, and later in Mysore, R.K.Narayan’s upbringing and love for the provinciality of the metropolises of south India seeps into the town he created as the setting for novels, which featured (often overlapping) characters and stories that ran parallel to my own little world and the individuals that people it.

This write-up is not going to be a critical look at Narayan’s works; I am too clouded by affection for him to launch myself into that task. For a serious appraisal of his works, check out Nakul Krishna’s essay on the need to look at Narayan through a slightly altered lens today. For an old article about Narayan’s ‘pedestrian writing’, read Shashi Tharoor’s not-so-flattering obituary in The Hindu.

This piece will be a personal account of what Narayan’s works meant to a girl growing up in the early 2000s, in south India, and only educated in English, and whose literature selection was restricted to that language only.

It was Graham Greene who first gave Narayan's manuscript of Swami and Friends to publishers in London. The two shared a close bond that continued well into their lives. ( Photo from https://www.famousauthors.org/r-k-narayan) 

I spent the first ten years of my life in a hill station. Incidentally, these years also marked the time that I read a lot of Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl, the former more than the latter. The similarity of the climes of the Nilgiri hills and the British Isles of the books made comparison and transposition easy process- attics and fireplaces were a feature of the colonial bungalows in Ooty. We wore Wellington boots when it rained, frequently ate ‘English vegetables’ (Brussels sprouts, purple cabbages), treated ourselves to plums and peaches, lived on streets with names such as Higgins Road, and were friends with girls who went to schools that referred to something called Michaelmas term, and where the remnants of a colonial past looked out from behind the broken shutters of gable-roofed houses.  The books I was reading somehow reflected the world around me; at least, materially, I knew what they were talking about. Not everything seemed to be incongruent between the books and my life.

When my parents moved to the plains, the inconsistencies set in. No attics, no school named St. Hilda's and no neighbourhoods named Lovedale or Glenmark. And that’s when a suspicion set in- maybe I wasn’t living the life that a child was supposed to live. The other author whose books I read during that time was Ruskin Bond, but he too lived in the hills and wrote about the deodars and sal trees on Himalayan hill-slopes. With the lack of access to (and more importantly- and ashamedly- a lack of interest in) regional children’s literature, I felt lost, and that the life I was living and the world I was living it in was not worthy enough to be written about in English literature.

That’s when I met Narayan at 12.

Malgudi is a fictional town in south India, on the banks of the Sarayu. Being largely modeled on Narayan’s own hometown of Mysore, Malgudi was a microcosm of what was a quintessential town in newly-independent India. There was the Boardless ( a restaurant so called because the name-board painter never delivered), which was the meeting point of the town’s (male) conversation- makers; the library with its regulars trying to snip off competition entries from the magazines and astrologers hanging out under the shade of the trees outside; the two schools for boys, in addition to countless little schools in the front porches of Brahmin houses; the statue of the British administrator, Lawley, and the hills beyond the town. The characters were also typical of a small-town, who talked big, who aspired to do something that would require the subversion of cultures and values that they held dear and unbreakable, and which encompassed them and everything around them in the tight-knit manner of traditions. Most dreams of writing an epic or printing a journal gathered dust in Malgudi’s dusty backhouses, but the odd one got away. Amidst a series of broken hearts, one found a man who married the woman he loved; amidst the trials of school life, one also formed a cricket club. Life got on, with the usual trivialities that are characteristic of life everywhere.

Tharoor complains about the fact that Narayan’s work did not attempt to transcend the small-town of his own mind. It is true, but while for literature, it is necessary to spin a story that is placed in the imagination of the ‘universal’, it is necessary for a body of writing to be representative of lives that are often lost in the clamor of the noises of the cosmopolitan. Arundhati Roy was 2 years away at that point in my life. For a child in her teens, living in the plains of South India, seeing expressed in English the facts of her life- as trivial as a dollop of thick curd on steaming rice to as magnificent as the golubomma arrangements of dolls during Navarathri- Narayan’s works were indicative of the possibilities of Indian writing in English. Maybe there are other writers who did this for others, but for me, it was Swami running down the platform of the railway station, or Selvi leaving behind her husband and her fame to sing in the working class locality she grew up in. Reading these books, and later his autobiography, I started seeing my own world differently; temple bells in the evening, jasmine flowers on my classmates’ hair- they suddenly became worthy of a story.

Much like the towns that one grows up in, Malgudi runs out after a while. After a fantastic birthday gift from my parents of all of Narayan’s books to finish my collection, and the building of a model of Malgudi by a friend, Malgudi lost its charm for me. New writers were discovered and read, and I found Malgudi too stifling for the dreams I was spinning for myself. Narayan’s own subtle Brahminical tendencies suddenly became evident. It was hard to keep the critiques from hampering the love for his works. And to echo Tharoor, his language was not experimental enough. However, what R.K. Narayan showed me was that my world was significant too. Indian writing in English for children and young adults is diverse today, but 15 years ago, it was not. And into such a landscape of dearth did Narayan come and show me the joys of the reality I was situated in, and encourage me to deem that reality worthy of a story.