| ashu |
Posted
on 17-May-01 02:04 AM
I was surprised to read Namita's assertion that
R K Narayan had been homeschooled.
Anyway, it's too bad that Narayan died -- like his mentor
Graham Greene -- without winning a much-deserved
Nobel Prize in literature.
oohi
ashu
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R. K. Narayan, India's Prolific Storyteller, Dies at 94
By BARBARA CROSSETTE
R. K. Narayan, the literary chronicler of small-town life in South
India and one of the first Indians writing in English to achieve
international acclaim, died yesterday in Madras, India. He was 94.
Long before writers of the subcontinent broke free of the passions
and ideologies of the independence movement and Partition, Mr.
Narayan explored the value of village traditions and the lives of
ordinary people. In the 1930's, he created a town in South India
that he called Malgudi and populated it with characters who could
be fussy, tricky, harmlessly rebellious or philosophical — but who
were always believable. Mr. Narayan would return again and again to Malgudi in many of his 34 novels and hundreds of short stories.
Although Mr. Narayan's writing may strike many foreign critics as
dated today, his books accurately portray an India that hovers
between the unchangingly rural and the newly industrial and that is still filled with individualistic, often eccentric personalities that recall his imagined universe.
Mr. Narayan's biographers, Susan Ram and N. Ram, have noted that
Malgudi "connects with a rural hinterland, and jungle and forest
are never far away." They added: "This town teems with life,
abounds with color. To wander any street, peer through a window or
push open a door is to encounter a character."
As a fiction writer, Mr. Narayan preceded by more than half a
century the current crop of Indian novelists writing in English
about ordinary people living their ordinary, or sometimes
extraordinary, lives.
Although he wrote exclusively in English to a relatively small
audience in his homeland, Mr. Narayan did not deal, except
obliquely, with the impact of Britain on India and the struggle for independence. V. S. Naipaul once observed that Mr. Narayan was
interested not so much in the social changes that came to his
archetypal Indian town as in "the lesser life that goes on below:
small men, small schemes, big talk, limited means: a life so
circumscribed that it appears whole and unviolated, its smallness
never a subject for wonder, though India itself is felt to be
vast."
In "Gods, Demons and Others" (1964), Mr. Narayan's retelling of
stories from the Sanskrit religious epics "The Mahabharata" and
"The Ramayana" and from Tamil epics, he explained his approach: "It is personality alone that remains unchanging and makes sense in any
age or idiom, whether the setting is 3000 B.C. or 2000 A.D."
Mr. Narayan was 29 and had collected many rejection slips when his
first book, "Swami and Friends," was published, in Britain, in
1935. It was Graham Greene who managed to find a publisher after
the book had been rejected half a dozen times. Greene said that
"Swami" was "closer to Chekhov than to any English writer, with the
same underlying sense of beauty and sadness," and he admired Mr.
Narayan so much that he went on to find publishers for his second
and third novels, "The Bachelor of Arts" and "The Dark Room."
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| ashu |
Posted
on 17-May-01 02:10 AM
In addition to nearly three dozen novels and several short-story
collections, Mr. Narayan published a memoir and countless essays
during his rich literary life. He was never short of causes,
especially the environment. While in his 80's, he took on the
plight of Indian children and made them the subject of an unusual
inaugural speech in India's upper house of Parliament, the Rajya
Sabha, to which he was named in 1985 for his cultural contributions
to the country. Children, he said, no longer had time to play "or
look at birds and trees."
Rasipuram Krishnaswami Narayanaswami was born in Madras on Oct.
10, 1906, one of several children in a middle-class family. He
shortened his long South Indian family name to Narayan in 1935 at
the insistence of Graham Greene and his English publisher, Hamish
Hamilton, according to the Rams. Mr. Narayan was a Tamil Brahmin, a
member of arguably India's most intellectually gifted caste and of
a community intensely devoted to education and the arts that has
produced, in addition to writers, a number of renowned scientists.
Because his father was a headmaster in the government educational
service who traveled frequently and his mother was a frail woman,
he was largely brought up by his grandmother, who arranged lessons
for him in Tamil and fascinated him with her Indian tales and
poetry. His grandmother also had a steady stream of visitors who
stopped in her backyard to have their horoscopes read and to
receive advice about their love lives. His childhood days with his
grandmother and her visitors provided the material for "Swami and
Friends."
After his father was transferred to a school in another South
Indian city, Mysore, Mr. Narayan studied at the Maharaja of
Mysore's Collegiate High School. In 1930, he graduated from the
maharaja's college, tried teaching for a short and unhappy spell
and then plunged directly into writing full time, a profession
almost unknown in India, then or now. His family was shocked but
supportive.
"I chose to be writer," he later told a radio interviewer, "mainly
because it is the only career which guarantees absolute freedom to
live as one pleases."
"On a certain day in September, selected by my grandmother for its
auspiciousness, I bought an exercise book and wrote the first line
of a novel," Mr. Narayan remembered in his memoir "My Days" (1974).
"As I sat in a room nibbling my pen and wondering what to write,
Malgudi with its little railroad station swam into view, all
ready-made."
He broke with family tradition to marry a woman he chose, rather
than being drawn into an arranged marriage. His wife, Rajam, could
not read English, the only language in which her husband could
write, but she took a strong interest in his work. He and his wife
had only five years together before she died of typhoid fever in
1939. Mr. Narayan never remarried, electing to bring up his
daughter, Hema, by himself. Hema died of cancer in 1994. He is
survived by a brother, the cartoonist R. K. Laxman, and two
grandsons.
The death of his wife plunged him into a period of depression
during which he became obsessed with trying to communicate with her
through spiritual mediums. The experience was reflected his fourth
Malgudi novel, "The English Teacher." Among other books in the
series were "The Guide," "The Financial Expert," "The Man Eater of
Malgudi," "The Vendor of Sweets" and "The World of Nagaraj."
"The Guide" (1958) is particularly well regarded by critics. It
concerns the rise, fall and rise again of Raju, a railway-station
food vendor who becomes a tourist guide. Raju seduces the wife of a
client, then quits his job to manage her career as a dancer. She
becomes a star and he becomes prosperous until he is thrown into
jail as a swindler. Eventually released, he searches for his true
identity and finds it as a mahatma, or spiritual adviser, in a
small town.
The painful search for "true identity" is a major theme of Mr.
Narayan's work. In "The Vendor of Sweets" the merchant eventually
rejects the world for a life of contemplation.
In the Narayan world, the streets are a never-ending theater "and
your neighbor's life is a fat novel, which you are sometimes
invited to revise," Anatole Broyard wrote in his review of the
story collection "Malgudi Days."
"Some of Mr. Narayan's best stories are benign satires," Mr.
Broyard continued, "like the one in which the town council decides
to pull down the 20-foot metal statue of a former British governor.
Research has exposed him as a tyrant, and the statue is offered
free to anyone who will carry it away. After dynamiting it off its
pedestal, an enterprising citizen has it pulled away by the temple
elephant and 50 men. While trying to decide how best to liquidate
it, he keeps it in his small house, where half of the statue sticks
out into the street. Then it is discovered that the researchers
were mistaken, the man commemorated by the statue was a veritable
saint, and it must be re-erected."
Over the years Mr. Narayan's books have been published in the
United States by the Viking Press, by Farrar, Straus & Giroux's
Noonday paperback imprint, by Michigan State University Press and
by the University of Chicago Press. He liked to travel and visited
Europe and the United States.
In his long, productive life, Mr. Narayan became his own
publisher, a step he took when World War II cut him off from
Britain. He also wrote occasionally for newspapers and magazines.
His work earned him a number of Indian awards, including the Padma
Bhushan, the country's highest prize. He was an honorary member of
the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and his papers and
manuscripts have been given to Boston University and the University
of Texas.
Mr. Narayan was once described by J. Anthony Lukas as looking "a
little like a highly intelligent bird."
He was never much of a self-publicist. "Everyone thinks he's a
writer with a mission," Mr. Narayan once told N. Ram. "Myself,
absolutely not. I write only because I'm interested in a type of
character, and I'm amused mostly by the seriousness with which each
man takes himself."
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