R. K. Narayan

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.

Narayan's next novel, The Man-Eater of Malgudi, was published in 1961. The book was reviewed as having a narrative that is a classical art form of comedy, with delicate control. After the launch of this book, the restless Narayan once again took to travelling, and visited the U.S. and Australia. He spent three weeks in Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne giving lectures on Indian literature. The trip was funded by a fellowship from the Australian Writers' Group. By this time Narayan had also achieved significant success, both literary and financial. He had a large house in Mysore, and wrote in a study with no fewer than eight windows; he drove a new Mercedes-Benz, a luxury in India at that time, to visit his daughter who had moved to Coimbatore after her marriage. With his success, both within India and abroad, Narayan started writing columns for magazines and newspapers including The Hindu and The Atlantic.

In 1964, Narayan published his first mythological work, Gods, Demons and Others, a collection of rewritten and translated short stories from Hindu epics. Like many of his other works, this book was illustrated by his younger brother R. K. Laxman. The stories included were a selective list, chosen on the basis of powerful protagonists, so that the impact would be lasting, irrespective of the reader's contextual knowledge. Once again, after the book launch, Narayan took to travelling abroad. In an earlier essay, he had written about the Americans wanting to understand spirituality from him, and during this visit, Swedish-American actress Greta Garbo accosted him on the topic, despite his denial of any knowledge.

Narayan's next published work was the 1967 novel, The Vendor of Sweets. It was inspired in part by his American visits and consists of extreme characterizations of both the Indian and American stereotypes, drawing on the many cultural differences. However, while it displays his characteristic comedy and narrative, the book was reviewed as lacking in depth. This year, Narayan travelled to England, where he received the first of his honorary doctorates from the University of Leeds. The next few years were a quiet period for him. He published his next book, a collection of short stories, A Horse and Two Goats, in 1970. Meanwhile, Narayan remembered a promise made to his dying uncle in 1938, and started translating the Kamba Ramayanam to English. The Ramayana was published in 1973, after five years of work. Almost immediately after publishing The Ramayana, Narayan started working on a condensed translation of the Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata. While he was researching and writing the epic, he also published another book, The Painter of Signs (1977). The Painter of Signs is a bit longer than a novella and makes a marked change from Narayan's other works, as he deals with hitherto unaddressed subjects such as sex, although the development of the protagonist's character is very similar to his earlier creations. The Mahabharata was published in 1978.