The first Indian novelist in English of international repute was neither Salman Rushdie nor the Noble laureate V. S. Naipaul but Rasipuram Krishanaswamy Aiyer Narayanaswamy who is better known to his readers by his shortened name R. K. Narayan. His career as a writer spanned more than five decades, dating from the first published novel Swamy and Friends (1935) to a collection of shorts stories Salt and Sawdust (1993).
Narayan is a conspicuous star in the galaxy of fiction writers by the virtue of his achievement. It is certified by the fact that his novels have been translated into all major languages of the world, which also indicates his wide popularity the world over.
Narayan is the first member of the “unique trio” who has in fact defined and shaped the nature and stature of Indian fiction in English. Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao are other members of this group. Anand’s fiction is tragic-comic, whereas the fiction of Raja Rao is religio-comic, Narayan’s is serio-comic. It is Narayan who gave comedy a new shape and semblance with his bifocal vision which comprises the absurd and the grand. The absurd he dramatizes pleasingly, exposing the ideal suggestively. Almost all his novels are comedies of sad manners and they are invested with his harmless humour, by jovial power of his language. The language of his novels is like a kind of clownish language exposing the splendour of laughter: ‘Man laughing at his own weakness is divine.’
“Why take life too seriously?” asks Narayan and then adds: “Mine is an unserious attitude towards life.” That is perhaps why his character-portrayal is neither ironic nor satirical but cartoonic, like his brother Laxman’s cartoons. His is pure fiction, great fiction. He does not ridicule or condemn anybody, but with his impersonal sympathy he analyzes human weakness or selfish undue aspiration in terms of laughter, and his humour is a purifying medium. Finding one’s own weakness or deficiency in the weakness of Narayan’s protagonists, one laughs at oneself and that is the myth and essence of his novels.
Narayan depicts the general in the particular. Although his characters appear to be individuals but they are types – personifications of the various shades of human aspirations at different stages of life. Malgudi is itself imaginary and universal, spiritual fantasy which is timeless. It has been Narayan’s obsession through some fifty years ever since Malgudi with its little station swam into his view all readymade. The river Sarayu flows endlessly through the heart of Malgudi representing the eternal flow of life. Mempi (caves) Hills are the peaks of natural beauty and knowledge or spiritual refinements for the seekers like the Master or Marco. The imaginary Malgudi has given Narayan immense freedom to portray life from the mythical times to ultramodern time.
Narayan is a master of realism and angst. His characters and situations, incidents and episodes, are real and true to daily life. Man appears, passes through self-made travails of life, and vanishes into life. That is the central theme of his fiction. He portrays life as a mighty force to which man has to bow, willingly or unwillingly.
It is the achievement of Narayan that his reader feels as an initiated insider whereas he feels as uninitiated outsider with other novelists. The end of one trouble is but the beginning of another. Life is but a series of tribulations and failures, and every failure leads to a fresh beginning. This truth about life Narayan illustrates by the closing and opening of his novels. He achieves this through dramatizing the aspirations of the simple middle-class individuals of our society. Implying the philosophical behind the physical, the spiritual behind the secular, the ideal behind the absurd, the infinite behind the finite, in the medium of harmless humour and laughter, Narayan’s art is unique achievement unprecedented which he attains by the power of his written word and wisdom.
