Rasipuram Krishnaswami Narayanaswami (10 October 1906 – 13 May 2001), better known as R. K. Narayan, was an Indian writer and novelist known for his work set in the fictional South Indian town of Malgudi. He was a leading author of early Indian literature in English along with Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao. In 1980, he received the AC Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature, and in 1981 he was made an Honorary Member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
Narayan is the author of more than 200 novels, as well as short stories and plays. His work portrays his characters' social context and everyday life, often in between traditional life and modernity. He has been compared to William Faulkner, who similarly set much of his work in a locale of his own invention and explored ordinary life with humor and compassion. Narayan's short stories have been compared to those of Guy de Maupassant for their compressed narratives.
In a career that spanned over 60 years, Narayan received many awards and honours, including the AC Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature, the Padma Vibhushan and the Padma Bhushan, India's second- and third-highest civilian awards, and in 1994 the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship, the highest honour of India's National Academy of Letters. Quote: "S. Radhakrishnan was the first "Fellow of the Akademi" to be given this title in 1968 after he left the service of both the government and the Akademi. ... Mulk Raj Anand was the first Indian English writer to be inducted in 1989 and R. K. Narayan the second Indian writer working in English to be inducted in 1994." He was also nominated to the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian Parliament.
Life and career Early life
R. K. Narayan was born in a Tamil Brahmin family on 10 October 1906 in Madras (now Chennai, Tamil Nadu), British India. He had five brothers and two sisters. Narayan was the second-oldest brother; his younger brother Ramachandran became an editor at Gemini Studios, and his youngest brother, Laxman, a cartoonist. His father was a school headmaster, and Narayan did some of his studies at his father's school. As his father's job entailed frequent transfers, Narayan spent a part of his childhood under the care of his maternal grandmother, Parvati. During this time, his best friends and playmates were a peacock and a mischievous monkey.
His grandmother gave him the nickname Kunjappa, a name that stuck in his family circles. She taught him arithmetic, mythology, classical Indian music and Sanskrit. According to Laxman, the family mostly conversed in English, and grammatical errors were frowned upon. While living with his grandmother, Narayan studied at several schools in Madras, including the Lutheran Mission School in Purasawalkam, C.R.C. High School, and the Madras Christian College Higher Secondary School. Narayan was an avid reader, and his early literary diet included Dickens, Wodehouse, Arthur Conan Doyle and Thomas Hardy. When he was 12 years old, Narayan participated in a pro-independence march, for which he was reprimanded by his uncle; the family was apolitical and considered all governments wicked.
Narayan moved to Mysore to live with his family when his father was transferred to the Maharaja's College High School. The school's well-stocked library and his father's own fed his reading habit, and he began to write. After completing high school, Narayan failed the university entrance examination and spent a year at home reading and writing; he passed the examination in 1926 and joined Maharaja College of Mysore. It took Narayan four years to obtain his bachelor's degree, a year longer than usual. After being persuaded by a friend that taking a master's degree (M.A.) would kill his interest in literature, he briefly worked as a schoolteacher but quit in protest when the school headmaster asked him to substitute for the physical training master. The experience convinced Narayan that the only career for him was in writing, and he decided to stay at home and write novels. His first published work was a book review of Development of Maritime Laws of 17th-Century England. Subsequently, he started writing local interest stories for English newspapers and magazines. Although the writing did not pay much (his income for the first year was nine rupees and twelve annas), he had a regular life and few needs, and his family and friends respected and supported his unorthodox career choice. In 1930, Narayan wrote his first novel, Swami and Friends, an effort ridiculed by his uncle and rejected by a string of publishers. With this book, Narayan created Malgudi, a town that creatively reproduced the social sphere of the country; while it ignored the limits imposed by colonial rule, it also reflected the sociopolitical changes of British and post-independence India.
While vacationing at his sister's house in Coimbatore in 1933, Narayan met and fell in love with Rajam, a 15-year-old girl who lived nearby. Despite many astrological and financial obstacles, Narayan gained Rajam's father's permission to marry her. Narayan then became a reporter for the Madras-based paper The Justice, dedicated to the rights of non-Brahmins. The publishers were thrilled to have Narayan, a Brahmin Iyer, espousing their cause. The job brought him in contact with a wide variety of people and issues. Earlier, Narayan had sent the manuscript of Swami and Friends to a friend at Oxford, and around this time the friend showed the manuscript to Graham Greene. Greene recommended the book to his publisher, and it was published in 1935. Greene also counselled Narayan to shorten his name for English-speaking readers. The book is semi-autobiographical, drawing on many incidents from Narayan's childhood. Reviews were favourable but sales were few. Narayan's next novel, The Bachelor of Arts (1937), was inspired in part by his experiences at college, and depicts a rebellious adolescent becoming a rather well-adjusted adult; it was published by a different publisher, again on Greene's recommendation. His third novel, The Dark Room (1938), is about domestic disharmony, portraying a man as the oppressor and a woman as the victim in a marriage, and was published by yet another publisher; this book also received good reviews. In 1937, Narayan's father died, and Narayan was forced to accept a commission from the government of Mysore as he was not making any money.
In his first three books, Narayan highlights the problems with certain socially accepted practices. The first book focuses on the plight of students, punishments of caning in the classroom, and the associated shame. The concept of horoscope-matching in Hindu marriages and the emotional toll it levies on the bride and groom is covered in the second. In the third, Narayan depicts a wife putting up with her husband's antics and attitudes.
Rajam died of typhoid in 1939. Her death affected Narayan deeply and he was depressed for a long time. Their daughter, Hema, was three years old when Rajam died. Narayan never remarried. His bereavement inspired his next novel, The English Teacher. Like his first two books, it is autobiographical, but more so, and completes an unintentional thematic trilogy that begins with Swami and Friends and The Bachelor of Arts. In interviews, Narayan acknowledged that The English Teacher was almost entirely autobiographical, with different names for the characters and a change of setting to Malgudi; he also said the emotions in the book reflected his own at the time of Rajam's death.
In 1940, bolstered by his success, Narayan tried his hand at a journal, Indian Thought. With the help of his uncle, a car salesman, Narayan got more than 1,000 subscribers in Madras city alone. But the venture did not last long, due to Narayan's inability to manage it, and it ceased publication within a year. His first collection of short stories, Malgudi Days, was published in 1942, followed by The English Teacher in 1945. In between, being cut off from England due to the war, Narayan started his own publishing company, naming it (again) Indian Thought Publications; the company was a success and is still active, now managed by his granddaughter. Soon, with a devoted readership from New York to Moscow, Narayan's books started selling well, and in 1948 he started building a house on the outskirts of Mysore; it was completed in 1953. Around this period, Narayan wrote the screenplay for the 1947 Gemini Studios film Miss Malini, the only screenplay he wrote that was filmed.
The busy years After The English Teacher, Narayan's writings took a more imaginative and creative external style compared to the semi-autobiographical tone of the earlier novels. His next effort was the first book exhibiting this modified approach. However, it still draws from some of his own experiences, particularly the aspect of starting his own journal; he also makes a marked movement from his earlier novels by intermixing biographical events. Soon after, he published The Financial Expert, considered to be his masterpiece and hailed as one of the most original works of fiction in 1951. The inspiration for the novel was a true story about a financial genius, Margayya, related to him by his brother. The next novel, Waiting for the Mahatma, loosely based on a fictional visit to Malgudi by Mahatma Gandhi, deals with the protagonist's romantic feelings for a woman, when he attends the discourses of the visiting Mahatma. The woman, named Bharti, is a loose parody of Bharati, the personification of India and the focus of Gandhi's discourses. While the novel includes significant references to the Indian independence movement, the focus is on the life of the ordinary individual, narrated with Narayan's usual dose of irony.
In 1953, his works were published in the United States for the first time, by Michigan State University Press, who later (in 1958), relinquished the rights to Viking Press. While Narayan's writings often bring out the anomalies in social structures and views, he was himself a traditionalist; in February 1956, Narayan arranged his daughter's wedding following all orthodox Hindu rituals. After the wedding, Narayan began travelling occasionally, continuing to write at least 1500 words a day even while on the road. The Guide was written while he was visiting the United States in 1956 on the Rockefeller Fellowship. While in the U.S., Narayan maintained a daily journal that was to later serve as the foundation for his book My Dateless Diary. Around this time, on a visit to England, Narayan met his friend and mentor Graham Greene for the first and only time. On his return to India, The Guide was published; the book is the most representative of Narayan's writing skills and elements, ambivalent in expression, coupled with a riddle-like conclusion. The book won him the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1960.
Occasionally, Narayan was known to give form to his thoughts by way of essays, some published in newspapers and journals, others not. Next Sunday (1960), was a collection of such conversational essays, and his first work to be published as a book. Soon after that, My Dateless Diary, describing experiences from his 1956 visit to the United States, was published. Also included in this collection was an essay about the writing of The Guide.