narayan n naipaul.pdf

Two Great Commonwealth Novelists: R. K. Narayan and V. S. NaipaulAuthor(s): George WoodcockSource: The Sewanee Review, Vol. 87, No. 1 (Winter, 1979), pp. 1-28Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27543502Accessed: 30/11/2009 11:52

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SK

TWO GREAT COMMONWEALTH NOVELISTS R. K. NARAYAN AND V. S. NAIPAUL

GEORGE WOODCOCK

COLONIAL

LITERATURES present their most striking aspects when there is an evident difference in tradition

between the ruling power and the colonial people?a differ ence that manifests itself in such matters as religion, custom,

spoken language. There are, of course, some colonized cultures, like the

French in Canada, which already have a language that is not only sophisticated in a literary sense but is also adapted to the technological needs of the modern world. Such cul tures tend to retain and develop literary traditions within their own

languages, as the literature of Quebec (and to a

lesser extent the literature of the Acadians in New Bruns

wick) has developed; and though the language may be cor

rupted by an invading alien culture, at the same time that it is changed by distance from the original motherland, it is

not displaced,

as a way of intellectual or aesthetic expression,

by the language of the conquerors. The literature of Quebec is therefore part of a French, not an English, tradition, just as the literature of the Boers in South Africa is part of a

Dutch tradition. In other cases, of which New Zealand is perhaps the most

striking example, colonization consists mostly of a transfer of population from the imperial center. Except for a few

surviving indigenes, the people of the colony retain their

? 1979. George Woodcock. 0037-3052/79/0115-0001/$02.21/0.

2 NARAYAN AND NAIPAUL

racial, linguistic, cultural, and religious links with the home land: it is only distance and different experience that, a

generation after settlement, make them other than those who have stayed at home.

With such people, colonists as well as colonials, the process of development by which a distinct literary tradition emerges is one of reluctant alienation. The early immigrant, trans

forming himself into a pioneer in a wild land, is imperiled enough by his experience to seek reassurance in whatever artistic activities he may pursue. In Canada, for example, the second Oliver Goldsmith (1794-1861), grandnephew of the celebrated author of "The Deserted Village," felt impelled to write, in a now outdated Augustan manner, a poem

en

titled "The Rising Village," in which the vision of social de struction that his forebear saw in the death of the English village of Auburn is replaced by a vision of happiness re

tained in the creation of a Loyalist pioneer village in Nova Scotia. For the first generations of English-Canadian and

Australian and New Zealand writers there was indeed a

magic in what now seems a slavish imitation of the themes and literary diction of the settled homeland. It preserved con

tinuity, the sense of ties unbroken, of allies beyond the wilderness that seemed so hostile; and by its very use men

contrived to live, as Northrop Frye has remarked, within a

mental garrison. For initially all colonial societies, whether

they must deal with unpredictable native populations or

merely with an unfriendly land, are desperately defended

bridgeheads. It is only when generations of living have made the new country into a homeland, and have turned the old

country into a merely ancestral land, that a literature which is no longer colonial comes into being. In English Canada that began to happen as recently as the 1930s, a hundred and

seventy years after the land was conquered from the French? an earlier wave of colonizers on the Plains of Abraham. A

little longer time had elapsed between the first settlements on the eastern seaboard of what is now the United States and

GEORGE WOODCOCK 3

the emergence in the early nineteenth century of a distinctive and identifiable tradition of American writing.

But more remarkable than either of these cases?the reten

tion of its existing literature by a subjected people, and the transformation or the imported literature of a colonizing people?are the situations ?ke those of India and West Africa and the West Indies, where traditions of English writing have

developed (as in Africa and India) among people who still use another language in their daily lives or (as in the West

Indies) among people who customarily speak an English vernacular that has already become so distinct as to take on some of the characteristics of a new language rather than of a mere pidgin dialect. Some of the best writers of English in the mid-twentieth century have come from countries

where the English themselves lived only as a small class of

imperial rulers governing and exploiting people who were Asian or African by birth or (as in the Caribbean) by origin, and where the traditional cultures from which these writers

emerged continued largely unchanged in the shadow of the

empire. Two of the finest among these writers?and among novel

ists writing anywhere in English today?are R. K. Narayan and V. S. Naipaul. Both are Indian by race and both are Brahmin by caste; but, while Narayan was born and has

spent all his life in south India, mainly in the graceful princely city of Mysore, Naipaul is the grandson of a village man from the north Indian province of Bihar who lost nis caste by migrating "over the dark waters" and so disobeying

Hindu custom, yet who joined other Indian plantation work ers in reestablishing on the remote island of Trinidad, where

Naipaul was born, a fragile replica of the traditional culture, which frayed away as his grandchildren were absorbed into the English-dominated ambiance of the West Indies.

The paths of the two men have crossed, both personally and in terms of their writing. Narayan, who was born in 1907 and published his first novel, Swami and Friends, in 1935,


never felt in his youth the urge to wander far from India. In the southern environment where he was brought up, that of highly cultured Madrasi and Mysori Brahmins who found north Indians almost as alien as they did Europeans, English literature and English ways were valued and no need was felt to abandon native tradition; and the interplay of the two cultures has always been one of the principal themes of

Narayan's novels.

It was not in fact necessary to leave his native region?let alone India?in search either of a subject for his writing (which he created for himself in the mythical small town of

Malgudi with the changing fortunes of its inhabitants as India moved forward from raj to republic) or of a superb English style. He was fifty and had already published seven

novels, highly praised by Graham Greene and other English critics, before he ventured abroad; even then he spent most of his time in the United States holed up in a Berkeley hotel,

writing one of the most intensely Indian of his novels, The

Guide, on which his temporary American surroundings had no influence whatever. Yet the contradiction one seems to

detect between Narayan s mastery of the English language and his deep loyalty to the Indian past, and specifically to the Hindu past, is far more apparent than real, for he him self would reconcile them by arguing that the English lan

guage and the Hindu religion are the two uniting factors in

modern Indian culture: Hindu myths provide a content for

traditions and literatures in many languages, and English provides the common speech by which the multilingual con

course of Hindus can understand each other and even each others' vernacular literatures, for without it the writing of

Dravidian-speaking Tamils would be incomprehensible to the

Hindi or Bengali speakers of northern India, and vice versa.

Certainly Narayan is not a man without roots or traditions;

his essential concern in fact is to describe in a world lan

guage that is also an all-Indian language how a traditional

society experiences change, how it survives the invasion of

GEORGE WOODCOCK 5

alien cultures. His loyalty to a single imaginary town ("a

kingdom of the mind where I have absolute control/' as he once described it to me when we were talking in India),

which changes and yet remains essentially the same, is in

keeping with his consciousness of the essential continuity of the culture to which his work belongs as naturally as the

sculptures of Ellora or the plays of Kalidasa. "India will go on," he remarked to V. S. Naipaul when they first met in London in 1961, before Naipaul had ever been to India; and the remark impressed the Trinidadian writer so much that in his second book on the country, India: A Wounded Civiliza

tion, written fifteen years later, it began one of the early chapters.

Narayan s sense of living within a continuing tradition in fact assumes an almost obsessive importance in both of V. S.

Naipaul's books on India, An Area of Darkness and India: A Wounded Civilization. In an essay in a third book (the miscellaneous essays entitled The Overcrowded Barracoon)

Naipaul summarizes in a single sentence his whole message about India: "Indians are proud of their ancient, surviving civilization. They are, in fact, its victims." And Narayan,

whom he rightly acknowledges to be rivaled only by Nirad Chaudhuri as India's best living writer in English, he sees as

personifying this flaw in the view Indians have of their own condition. "The virtues of R. K. Narayan," he says, "are

Indian feelings magically transmuted. I say this without dis

respect: he is a writer whose work I admire and enjoy. He seems forever headed for that aimlessness of Indian fiction?

which comes from a profound doubt about the purpose and value of fiction?but he is forever rescued by his honesty, his sense of humour and above all by his attitude of total accep tance. He operates from deep within his society."

As I shall endeavor to show later in this essay, Narayan's fiction is not even remotely "aimless," and it conveys almost the opposite of a "profound doubt about the purpose and value of fiction"; but it is significant of a peculiarity in Nai

3


pauTs outlook that he should have such thoughts about a writer whose achievement and even whose way of writing are in many ways so like his own. The reasons are to be

found, I suggest, partly in NaipauTs traumatic encounters with the land of his ancestors, and partly in his sense?as a

Trinidadian rather than as the heir to an Indian past?of being part of nothing one might call "an ancient, surviving civilization."

While Narayan never felt the wish to leave India until after he was fifty, and then went on a journey which he spent largely in writing yet another novel about Malgudi, Naipaul could not wait to leave the luxuriant island of his birth. "I had never wanted to stay in Trinidad. ... I knew Trinidad to be unimportant, uncreative, cynical.

. . . Power was recog

nized, but dignity was allowed to no one. Every person of eminence was held to be crooked and contemptible. We lived in a society which denied itself heroes." Trinidad's single social virtue?that it encouraged eccentricity and individual ism?was also a social vice. "Nationalism was

impossible in

Trinidad. In the colonial society every man had to be for himself ; every man had to grasp whatever dignity and power he was allowed; he owed no loyalty to the island and scarcely any to his group."

Within such a fluid and disunited society the Indians carried on their rituals and maintained their temples, which seem so exotic to the foreign visitor to Trinidad; yet even

they, Naipaul recognized, were "immigrants." "To them India is a word."

In 1950, when he was eighteen, Naipaul emigrated to Eng land, where he attended Oxford and began his literary career; his first novel, The Mystic Masseur, appeared in 1957 in

London, which has been his place of first publication?as it has been Narayan's?ever since. He has traveled in India, in

Africa, in many countries of North, South, and Central

America, and has returned to the West Indies; but since his late boyhood England has remained the physical center of

GEORGE WOODCOCK 7

his world, the metropolitan magnet. Yet, as he has remarked, it is a world where it is hard not to feel himself a permanent outsider. "The Americans do not want me because I am too British. The people here do not want me because I am too

foreign." While English is, by virtue of his upbringing in the West Indies, the language he has used most frequently (for he remembered only enough Hindi from hearing it spoken in India to give "the sensation of an experience that had been lived before") and the natural language for him to write in, the language that "belongs to those who speak it," he has

always felt in many ways outside the world from which Eng lish emanates. "Every writer is, in the long run, on his own;

but it helps, in the most practical way, to have a tradition. The English language was mine; the tradition was not."

To be outside the tradition?which of course marks one of the main subjective differences between Naipaul and Nara

yan?creates excitement as well as apprehension.

It makes

one?and Naipaul constantly returns to the idea?a perpetual colonial, and "to be a colonial is to be a little ridiculous and

unlikely, especially in the eyes of someone from the metro

politan country." But to be "an Indian from Trinidad" is also "to be unlikely." All of this suggests the unattached man,

granted that disponibilit? which Gide used to regard as a

necessary attribute of the completely free man. And indeed

Naipaul has admitted that "to be a member of a minority has

always seemed to me attractive."

In fact Naipaul appears to have worked, so far as his fiction is concerned, in a fruitful condition of physical detach ment and imaginative attachment. He has written almost all his fiction about Trinidad while living away from the island; the most notable exception, a novel of English middle-class life called Mr Stone and the Knights Companion, was written in a period of intellectual disorientation in Kashmir, and is

perhaps the least convincing book Naipaul ever wrote. With all his reminiscent senses sharply at work he has vividly re

created, in novels like A House for Mr Biswas, The Suffrage


of Elvira, and Miguel Street, the lives of people of Indian descent gradually lapsing out of the traditions they brought with them into the directionless existence of a society too small and too divided between blacks, browns, and whites to

develop any sense of national identity. This is hence a stage for a rich cast of "characters" and oddities but for few beings of wisdom or profundity, virtues strikingly absent from the

world that Naipaul presents with such an unusual combina tion of laughter and sardonic compassion.

Mr Stone and the Knights Companion and In a Free State

(a trio of stories set in England, Africa, and the United

States) complete the fiction which Naipaul had set outside the West Indies; so even if he lacks a tradition that he can call his own, he possesses, like Narayan, his physical terrain and his social ambiance, and in his own way he has created a

special world out of Trinidad's villages and small towns that is as

evocatively autonomous as Narayan's Malgudi.

But about India, which certainly stirred his consciousness more deeply by far than the England where he lives or than

any country except Trinidad, Naipaul has never written a word of fiction. What he has written in Area of Darkness and India: A Wounded Civilization is even strikingly unlike his

fiction, being much less the descriptive narrative one might expect of a novelist, and much more the discursive and argu

mentative accounts of a polemicist. Of course there are pas

sages when the novelist, interested in the play of character, in the tone of dialogue, in the tangibility of a scene, takes over, as in the description of living in a Kashmiri lakeside hotel in Area of Darkness and the account of visiting the overcrowded working-class chawls of Bombay in India: A

Wounded Civilization. But it is obvious in Area of Darkness, and to an even greater extent in the succeeding book, that

Naipaul is more anxious to tell us about what India has failed to be than to show us what the country actually is.

Even more, as one reads through these two very un

characteristic books, it becomes evident that Naipaul is writ

GEORGE WOODCOCK 9

ing less about India than about himself. In fact, on none of his journeys did he travel widely in the Indian hinterland, with its extraordinarily varied ways of life; and he spent far too much time in cities founded by the British, like Bombay and Delhi and Calcutta, and in the old resorts of the raj like Kashmir and Simla. These may be the best places?as indeed

they were under the raj?to see the top and the bottom of In dian society: the westernized upper crust of bureaucrats and box wallahs mingling incongruously with the khadi-clad Con

gress men who have replaced the British sahibs, and the alien ated lower crust of impoverished villagers who have fled into the cities because Indian governments over thirty years have

ignored Gandhi's admonition that the first task of an indepen dent India must be the rehabilitation of the village world that is its true foundation and the place where most of its people

belong. The whole south of India, the central plateau, the eastern coast south of Calcutta might not exist?for all the attention Naipaul pays to them; and without knowing such

regions and their populations no one can claim to know India.

Many things in both Area of Darkness and India: A Wounded Civilization are palpably yet only partially true,

like the evidence presented to a judge, who is given the facts but has to guess the motives by watching the behavior of the witness. It is true that the weight of the past bears down ex

cessively on India?the British as much as the Vedic past. It is true that the magnificent idealism of the Gandhian tradi

tion has been perverted by politicians and has declined to ineffectual crankiness among many of Gandhi's surviving dis

ciples. (This degeneration has been documented very frankly by the Indian writer Ved Mehta in his recent book, The Ma hatma and His Apostles.) It is true that thousands of rich Indians live a selfish and meretricious life while hundreds of thousands of people sleep out at night on the pavements of

Bombay; even worse destitution exists in Calcutta. All these things, which Naipaul repeats, are the common

places of travel books on India, and everyone who has done


no more than visit the great cities and the main tourist haunts is aware of them. But, India being a complex and contra

dictory country, the opposite of all these propositions is also to a

great extent true. There are many educated Indians?and

not Sikhs only?who effectively belong to the modern world: India has a considerable roster of brilliant scientists. The

Gandhian cranks have to be compared with, and balanced

against, Gandhians of the mental stature and political energy of Jaya Prakash Narayan. There is still a vast middle ground of peasants and artisans and traders, particularly in the rural areas, who live adequately and not hopelessly and who can

make their voices felt, as the rural population did very em

phatically in the 1976 elections that displaced Mrs. Gandhi's

quasi-dictatorship. The farther one travels in India, the more one becomes impressed not merely with India's capacity to

"go on," of which Narayan talked to Naipaul so long ago, and with its ability to survive in crisis after crisis, but also, es

pecially in places comfortably distant from the main cities, with its power to live and evolve without recourse to the aid of government and largely in ignorance of its existence. India, so long subject to alien rulers, whose institutions and methods their Indian successors are inclined to imitate, has long ago developed its own native substratum of entirely nonpolitical institutions?institutions like the village panchayat, the re

ligious community centered around the temple, the ashram, the cooperatives, the hospitals and other voluntary institu

tions associated with the Ramakrishna and Gandhian move ments?and it creates and re-creates them endlessly

in re

sponse to needs. India cannot be dismissed lightly, unless one feels dismissed by it.

It is in the sense of being dismissed by one's ancestral

country that we must, I think, find the interpretation of

Naipaul's attitude to India and, by extension, of his peculiar

interpretation of R. K. Narayan's standpoint and his work.

"India," Naipaul tells us in Area of Darkness, 'liad in a

special way been the background of my childhood. ... It re

GEORGE WOODCOCK 11

mained a special, isolated area of ground that had produced my grandfather and others I knew who had been born in India and had come to Trinidad as indentured labourers,

though that part too had fallen into the void into which India had fallen, for they carried no mark of indenture, no

mark even of having been labourers." The journey he made was a journey of attempted reconciliation, yet when he did

go to his ancestral village he became enmeshed in a series of

embarrassing misunderstandings, and he came to feel that he was a stranger in his grandfather's land.

India became for him a "difficult country," as he says in India: A Wounded Civilization. "It isn't my home and can not be my home, and yet I cannot reject it or be indifferent to it; I cannot travel only for the sights. I am at once too close and too far." Increasingly, he adds, "I feel that my Indian memories, the memories of that India which lived on into my childhood in Trinidad, are like trapdoors into a bottomless past." Those memories are in fact the transmitted

knowledge that was only memory even for his father's gene ration, and thus they are secondhand memory for Naipaul,

whose experience begins in the small community of Indians in Trinidad, cut off from the Indian mainland a century ago and hence, in a very real sense, a

colony from one colo

nized land transplanted to another colonized land?a colony "more homogenous than the Indian community Gandhi met in South Africa in 1893, and more isolated from India."

As Naipaul remarks at the end of Area of Darkness, it is this memory that remains the real India for him, while the actual India is alien and impenetrable. "India had not worked its magic on me," he says, writing at the end of his first jour ney there. "It remained the land of my childhood, an area of

darkness; like the Himalayan passes, it was closing up again as fast as I withdrew from it, into a land of myth; it seems to exist in just the timelessness which I had imagined as a

child, into which, for all that I walked on Indian earth, I knew I could not penetrate." The magic India might have


worked?and did not?was to reenact the inherited memory that had turned to myth within Naipaul's mind. Since this did not happen, Naipaul's disillusionment was inevitable, and this disillusionment with the actual India of the twen tieth century is the reason why he found it impossible, in the

end, to accept the novels of Narayan, in which the myth and the actuality are, by and large, successfully reconciled.

Naipaul seems to have begun, before he went to India, with a sense of affinity toward Narayan, whose writing he felt in

many ways resembled his own. It was only after he had been to India that he became aware of the difference and began to

regard Narayan as something other than a novelist, and also as an exemplification of the mental enslavement of Indians

by their past. These views, tentatively expressed in Area of Darkness, were more sharply defined as time went on and

given emphatic form in India: A Wounded Civilization, in which Naipaul astonishingly refers to Narayan as "an in

stinctive, unstudied writer"?which is perhaps the last way most critics see that very urbane and subtle man.

Talking of his first reaction to his fellow novelist, Naipaul tell us: "Narayan's India, with its colonial apparatus, was

oddly like the Trinidad of my childhood. His oblique per ception of that apparatus, and the rulers, matched my own; and in the Indian life of his novels I found echoes of the life of my own Indian community on the other side of the world." But then, after his experience of India, Naipaul begins to see other aspects of the saga of Malgudi and declares that, "for all their delight in human oddity, Narayan's novels are less the purely social comedies I had once taken them to be than religious books, at times religious fables, and intensely

Hindu." He sees the typical Narayan novel as "a classic expo sition of the Hindu equilibrium, surviving the shock of an alien culture, an alien literary form, an alien language, and

making harmless those new concepts it appears to welcome."

He even relates the small and restricted world of Narayan's early novels, "where men could never grow, talked much and

GEORGE WOODCOCK 13

did little, and were fundamentally obedient," to the needs of this exposition of equilibrium, and he sees in the sadness and

resignation of Narayan's late novel, The Vendor of Sweets, the creaking open of the fictional world of Malgudi, the revelation of its essential fragility as "the Hindu equilib

rium . . . collapses into something like despair." And this, of

course, takes us back to Naipaul's suggestion that Narayan's fiction is headed always toward "that aimlessness of Indian fiction?which comes from a profound doubt about the pur pose of fiction" and that he is rescued by?among other virtues?his "sense of humour." The sense of humor having grown perceptibly less confident in The Vendor of Sweets,

Narayan has at last presumably fallen a victim to the Indian "aimlessness."

I shall now present a view of Narayan's fiction that will differ considerably from Naipaul's, following it with a fur ther glance at Narayan's own work to show how interestingly the two novelists in fact complement each other in creating viable literary uses for English outside the major English language cultures. But first let me make two points that arise

out of Naipaul's remarks on Narayan.

First of all it is true that Narayan's books are "intensely Hindu," but no more, perhaps, than Dickens was "intensely Christian": in other words they belong within their culture, which happens still to be strongly oriented toward religion. There is also an element of fable in them, and a great deal of myth, but a fiction-maker can deal in fable and myth and still remain a novelist in the true sense of delineating man's condition as exemplified in human relationships and their concurrent emotional patterns.

Second, while it is true that the novels of Malgudi tend to set up a world in equilibrium, this does not seem to me in

any way inconsistent with their being social comedies, which

they certainly are. The world of comedy, unlike that of

tragedy, is essentially one held in equilibrium, where change is never dramatic enough to be destructive, and where even


the most grotesque of perils lead always, if not to happy endings, at least to wise ones in which the balance of the

microcosm presented to us reflects the grand harmonies of the universe. Narayan's books tend toward equilibrium be cause he is a comic writer, not because he is a Hindu.

In the autobiography My Days (1975) Narayan gives a

fascinating account of how he began to write and how, at that very time, the idea of Malgudi came into his mind. He

was in Bangalore, living with his grandmother. His academic career, as student and later teacher, had been so unimpressive that his family was almost reconciled to his intent to become a writer (though there had been some opposition because in

Madras the word writer had retained its East India Company connotation of a copying clerk).

On a certain day in September, selected by my grand mother for its auspiciousness, I bought an exercise book and wrote the first line of a novel; as I sat in my room

nibbling my pen and wondering what to write, Malgudi with its little railway station swam into my view, all

ready-made, with a character called Swaminathan run

ning down the platform peering into the faces of the pas sengers, and grimacing at a bearded face; this seemed to take me on the right track of writing, as day by day pages grew out of it linked to each other. (In the final draft the only change was that the Malgudi Station came at the end of the story. ) This was a satisfactory beginning for me, and I regularly wrote a few pages every day.

In such a way Swami and Friends began, and the Indian Proust first imagined the Indian Combray and began the creation of a special world whose growth, after eleven novels, one hopes is not complete. The comparison with Proust is not farfetched, for just as in Combray Proust takes the pro saic little real-life town of Illiers and turns it into a glittering construct of the mind, Narayan does the same for Mysore,

GEORGE WOODCOCK 15

the nearest of actual places to an original for Malgudi; and ?as Proust did?he subsumes his own life in that of his char acters. There is even, as in A la recherche du temps perdu, a structural cyclicity that embraces all of Narayan's novels.

Time moves on through them in chronological relentlessness as the Indian world changes under the pressure of history, and the boy hero of Swami and Friends is superseded more than thirty years later by the old man Jagan, who withdraws from the world in The Vendor of Sweets. Yet at the same time there is the reciprocating interplay of cultures, with the ancient and prerational always likely to surge up in the face of the new and rational, a situation modestly illustrated even in the quotation I have just made from My Days, in which a novel in English is initiated by a grandmother's determining the day's auspiciousness by astrological formulae.

In Narayan's early novels the interplay between old and new is illustrated by the strong presence of what one oan best call the Matter of English. These are certainly his most

directly autobiographical works: Swami and Friends draws

heavily on his experience as a mission-school boy, The Bache lor of Arts on his years as a college student, and The English Teacher on his unsuccessful pedagogic

career.

When I talk of the Matter of English in connection with these novels, I touch on an issue with profound cultural and

political significance for South Indians, and particularly for the Brahmins of Madras and Mysore who?unlike their caste fellows in North India?accepted the English language and, far from regarding themselves as assimilated, strove to assimi

late British culture. While the North Indian nationalists who dominated Congress at India's liberation were dogmatically devoted to the goal of replacing English by Hindi as the

country's lingua franca, the South Indians found the reten tion of English preferable to being forced to accept an Aryan language unrelated to their Dravidian tongues. In the 1960s students rioted over the issue, and in his more philosophic

way Narayan has supported their point of view, which is bound up with his very practice as a novelist.


By birth he is Tamil-speaking, but he has known Kannada since childhood, while Hindi for him is an alien tongue which

?at least when I knew him in 1962?he had tried unsuccess

fully to learn. English was the language of all his levels of

education, and when he was about to start writing, the Eng lish classics meant far more to him than the Hindu classics, to which he came only quite late in life. He used and con tinued to use English as his literary language not only for the joy of mastering it, but also because he realized that even in India English still offered the greatest actual reading pub lic a writer could hope to reach.

Not only did Narayan, as an artist, find in English the most

satisfying means of expression; but as a South Indian he also knew he must come to terms with the power which in his novels he shows shaping Malgudi physically, giving it the

plan of streets created by the mythical Sir Frederick Lawley, the schools and colleges, the municipal government, the rail

ways and mills and printing presses, the whole structure of a western city superimposed on a native life that, with its

temples and household shrines and vegetarian Brahmin food and astrologers and untouchables and arranged marriages, had remained obstinately unchanged. In Malgudi the two worlds are shown as indissolubly linked?even though no more than three actual Englishmen appear in minor roles

during the whole cycle?and linked (Narayan seems to im

ply) forever, since on the public level India has become as

inevitably dominated by twentieth-century progress as on the private level it has remained loyal to the Hindu past, to the traditions that embody the essential genius of India and to which its people return when the world's attractions grow

dim.

Swaminathan and his fellow schoolboys in Swami and Friends are unwitting examples of the contradictions Nara

yan sees entering deeply into the culturally divided lives of

twentieth-century Indians. They attend a mission school oriented toward preparing them for the college in Malgudi,

GEORGE WOODCOCK 17

and in this imitation English grammar-school they become

passionately devoted to the alien game of cricket; their heroes are the English cricketers Hobbs and T?te, and their special form of the quest that occurs in all Narayan novels is a comic

one, the creation on Malgudi's waste lots of a Marylebone Cricket Club that will rival its English namesake. Yet when nationalist riots take place, Swaminathan participates in them and smashes school windows; and when one of his Christian teachers attacks and derides the Indian deities with a con vert's zeal, Swami is moved to defend them.

Can a modern Indian reject westernization, with its po litical and ultimately moral implications? The only way to

attempt it, Narayan suggests, is by withdrawal into one of the two Indian worlds that remained relatively untouched by the intrusion of the raj and the influences that have survived it. These are the interlocking worlds of villages, still living largely by traditional techniques as well as beliefs, and of the

wandering holy men, who usually find their warmest wel come among poor and illiterate peasants. In Narayan's novels such withdrawal rarely provides a way to self-transformation, but it does often lead to self-discovery.

After being graduated, Chandran in The Bachelor of Arts wanders for eight months as a sanyasin because conflicting horoscopes prevent him from marrying the girl he has fallen in love with when he saw her sitting beside the river. But he

goes through the motions of the holy life without being holy, and his moment of revelation comes when he realizes the fraud he has been perpetrating on himself as well as on the

villagers who feed him out of their scanty means. He returns to normal Ufe, becomes a successful small businessman, and

marries a girl whose stars ride well with his.

Savitri, the misused wife of The Dark Room, runs away from home when her husband carries on with a seductive

young widow, his colleague at the Egladia Insurance Com

pany. She tries to drown herself but is rescued by a thief and taken to his village, where she acts as servant in the local


temple until she finds that love of her children calls her back, and she returns in resignation to her home where the middle-class world?which has not changed much since she left it?reclaims her.

Raju, in The Guide, does not return to the world. He has

emerged from prison, where he has served a term through being led astray by an infatuation for a former temple dancer he met while acting as guide to the cave temples in the hills near Malgudi. He decides to escape the public eye and chooses an old riverside temple for his refuge. The villagers take him for a saint who will advise them and work oc casional miracles, and, accepting their gifts, he pretends to a role into which he grows imperceptibly until it finally traps him. He finally undertakes a quixotic fast to end a drought, and as the rains come he dies. Only Jagan in The Vendor of Sweets, old and tired of profitable business, disillusioned and defiled?as he believes?by the behavior of a son corrupted by education in the west, seems likely to find in his eventual retreat from the world the wisdom of detachment that he seeks.

On a different and political level the search for a fulfillment outside the ordinary currents of middle-class Indian life is

portrayed in Waiting for the Mahatma. A rich immature man, Sriram, is involved in the Gandhian movement through fall

ing in love with one of the mahatma's court of young women devotees. He and the girl, Bharati, whom Gandhi has ap pointed Sriram's instructor, work together until, at the mahat

ma's command, she courts imprisonment in the satyagraha

campaigns preceding Indian independence. Deprived of her

guidance, Sriram falls in with a violent revolutionary, Jaga dish, who leads him into acts of sabotage, so that eventually he too is imprisoned. Sriram is finally released at the time of India's liberation and rejoins Bharati; they take their places in Gandhi's entourage in time to witness his assassination in 1948.

The bullets that kill Gandhi both in real life and in Nara

GEORGE WOODCOCK 19

yan's novel remind one of Stendhal's dictum that politics in a novel is like a pistol shot in a concert. Gandhi and his death

represent an incursion from the outside world that shakes the magic equilibrium of Malgudi and makes Waiting for the Mahatma one of the most interesting but also one of the

most disturbing of Narayan's novels, and all the more disturb

ing because of the difference in grain and stature between Gandhi and the people of Malgudi. For if there is one char acteristic which Narayan's characters almost without ex

ception share, it is mediocrity. Eccentrically colorful as it

may strike one on first introduction, Malgudi is a city of the

petty and the unfulfilled through which Narayan's art moves, to quote Stendhal again, 'Tike a mirror walking down a main street." Narayan resembles Chekhov in that from the very inadequacies of his characters, their weakness and their shal low pretensions, he can produce a blend of sadness and

comedy that appeals irresistibly. The sickness from which all the citizens of Malgudi suffer, and which their mediocrity re

flects, is the mid-twentieth-century alienation of the Indian middle class. Their traditional codes and hierarchies have be come fragmented and private, so that no man can any longer fulfill himself in a traditional way except by holy withdrawal; yet the material success on the western model to which the

Malgudians aspire belongs to an alien world which they rarely understand, so that here too their lives are diminished and unfulfilled.

When the inhabitants of Malgudi do seek to break out of their encircling mediocrity, they fail because their ambitions

overleap their capacities. The eponymous hero of Mr Sam

path sets out to establish in Malgudi a film studio rivaling those of Bombay and Calcutta, but the great Hindu epic that is to be his first production is ruined by a series of farcical disasters arising out of the jealousies, passions, and sheer in

adequacies of Sampath and his associates. Srinivas, the other

leading character, is an unsuccessful writer and editor caught up in

Sampath's megalomaniac schemes, and in other Nara


yan books appear writers whose aims outrun their talents, like the poet Mohan in The Bachelor of Arts and the mono

syllabic epic poet who appears in The Man-Eater of Malgudi. Even when they seem to triumph, Narayan's characters

cannot sustain their success; no citizen of Malgudi goes on to become an all-Indian celebrity. Margyya in The Financial Ex

pert has enough native cunning to charm away vast quanti ties of the cash hoarded by the peasants of the Malgudi countryside. He has illusions about rivaling the local banks, but he has no idea what to do with the money he gathers, and merely hoards it more extensively than his clients. When a malicious associate spreads rumors of his insolvency, there is a run on his house, where he has stacked all the rupees in sacks and bundles; his fortune vanishes overnight, and he

prepares to start again as a petty operator under the peepul trees in the town square. Margyya is defeated by abilities he does not know how to discipline, and the fate of Vasu, the villainous taxidermist who terrorizes the townspeople in The

Man-Eater of Malgudi, is similar: he dies from his own

strength when the hand that can destroy an iron bedstead cracks his skull as he kills a mosquito on the fateful night

when he is plotting to slaughter a sacred elephant. In these novels of Narayan's prime one feels the influence

of the classical Indian epics he began to read with attention

only in middle age. Situations out of myths are re-created in

contemporary life. Weak and inexperienced characters fall under the influence of malign men who are little more than nature forces personified: the terrorist Jagadish in Waiting for the Mahatma; the evil Dr. Pal in The Financial Expert,

who sets Margyya on his course of prosperity by giving him the copyright on an erotic book, who later corrupts Margyya's son Balu, and who starts the rumors that destroy the "finan cial expert"; and Vasu, who disrupts the life of the modest little printer Nataraj in The Man-Eater. All the victims learn

bitterly from experience but emerge in the end alive and

ready to continue the struggle of Ufe, and so the comic pur pose is fulfilled.

GEORGE WOODCOCK 21

Sometimes the evil goes beyond the tyrannizing of an indi

vidual to the threatening of a whole community and its

values. Vasu, who turns Nataraj's office building into a nause

ating charnel house with the corpses of beasts he brings in

to skin and stuff, does not merely offend his host's orthodox Hinduism by implicating him in killing; he also defies the

state's game laws and finally derides the religious feelings of the community by plotting to slaughter the sacred elephant so that he can sell its ivory and make its legs into umbrella stands. The complex maneuvers by which the printer Nataraj and the temple-dancer-prostitute Rangi set out to frustrate him take on a faint aura of the great fight between good and evil forces in Narayan's favorite epic, the Ramayana, with Vasu in the role of the malign titan Ravana who once at

tempted to slaughter the divine elephants who guard the four directions of the universe. But, as Nataraj's assistant Sastri remarks at the end of the novel, there is an even closer

parallel in the myths: "the story of Bhasmasura the uncon

querable, who scorches everything he touched, and finally reduced himself to ashes by placing the tips of his fingers on

his own head." Like Bhasmasura, Vasu kills himself because of a super

human power he has not the wisdom to control, and the

elephant marches on unharmed while Malgudi settles down

again into the peace of mediocrity, a middle-class town in a

country divided against itself: a town in which, creating an

ambiance for the sad eccentric characters and their quasi

mythical adventures, the colors and smells of India are so

powerfully evoked that anyone who knows India south of

Bombay need only pick up a Narayan novel and read a dozen

pages for the whole setting to re-form in his mind's eye and nostril and the chatter of Indian voices to echo again in his ear. One would indeed have to be a south Indian Brahmin bred into Narayan's world to catch every nuance of his intent, but he has?like Proust?the ability of the natural and univer sal writer to present facets of his vision for every degree of ex

4


perience to grasp, so self-contained his fictional world has

become; and this is why other novelists like Greene, Eliza beth Bowen, and E. M. Forster accepted him from the be

ginning, reacting as artists rather than as critics. They recog nized the power that draws us, whether we share or have ex

perienced their cultures or not, to writers intense in their

rendering of localities and hence intensely universal. Malgudi could be no other than an Indian town, and in that fact be

gins its appeal to readers in so many countries.

Especially in his later work, from The Guide onward,

Narayan has tended to base his novels structurally on the classic Indian myths, but to no greater extent than many

western writers have used the Odysseus or the Orpheus myth; and insofar as a traditional moralism underlies the social

comedy of his works, he can certainly be called?as Naipaul calls him?a Hindu fabulist. But this, it seems to me, strength ens rather than weakens his power as a writer of social

comedy, for comedy is not nihilistic: it demands a tacitly accepted collective view of life and behavior. Naipaul im

plies that in the long run the past-oriented negation which he sees overwhelming India has also overwhelmed Narayan as India's leading novelist. Admittedly I lack Naipaul's Indian

ancestry, but having an experience of the country certainly broader and perhaps deeper than his, I see in Narayan's microcosmic Malgudi a just and not despairing projection of the lasting reality of India.

The similarities between Narayan's and Naipaul's novels are evident. English is used by both novelists in unfamiliar and intriguing ways, because Narayan is often actually trans

lating TamilNforms of speech into English, while Naipaul takes advantage of all the unfamiliar kinds of verbal wit made

possible by using Trinidadian dialect. In each case western

culture is seen through a refracting glass, adapted by the colonized people to their own lives, or alternatively is seen as shaping the larger background in such distant forms as

the plans of towns or the half-understood methods of parlia

GEORGE WOODCOCK 23

mentary government. Much of the comedy in each novelist

emerges from the incongruity that occurs when people pur suing largely westernized Uves persist in carrying on tra ditional ceremonials. Such a situation, of course, is a rich source of hypocrisy and superstition, and when the two come together one encounters in both Naipaul's and Nara

yan's novels the pseudoreUgious frauds preying on the credu

lous, like Ganesh in Naipaul's The Mystic Masseur, who be

gins as a bogus healer and ends as an angUcized political leader and a member of the Order of the British Empire. The folties of poUtical and social ambition play a considerable role in both Narayan's Malgudi and Naipaul's island towns and

villages, and in each case the opportunities of upward mo

bility that come with the achievement of independence are the objects of ironic or even strongly satiric comment; in

Naipaul's novels?such as The Suffrage of Elvira, a tale of

petty intrigue in one of the early elections of independent Trinidad?the satire is strongest.

Here indeed we find the first clearly defined difference be tween Naipaul and Narayan. Narayan is not primarily a satirist: the comic irony through which he sees his characters

suggests no strong desire to change them. Perhaps his Hindu ism emerges most strongly in this limitation: the people he describes are what their karmas made them, and in accepting their weaknesses all we hope is that by following out their destinies they may transcend them. But even such an attitude is not exclusively Hindu: the Christian visionary William

Blake tacitly agreed with the anonymous poet of die Bhaga vad Gita when he said: "If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise." Narayan never condemns men be cause they are not better than they are: he merely shows how the evil they manifest may in true comic manner be diverted.

Naipaul, on the contrary, is a satirist in the full Swiftian sense. He has never found a society or a situation that satis fied him: he would like them all to be different from what

they are. He wrote about Trinidad only after he had escaped,


and wrote of it?at least according to his own statement? because it offered an admirable and little-tilled field for the satirical novelist:

Only a man's eccentricities can get him attention. It

might be also that in a society without traditions, with out patterns, every man finds it easier "to be himself'.

Whatever the reasons, this determination of people to be

themselves, to cherish their eccentricities, to reveal them selves at once, makes them easy material for the writer.

This paragraph might almost be the manifesto for the first book that Naipaul wrote (though it was not the first he pub lished), Miguel Street, an episodic fiction about people in a

poor quarter of Port of Spain. Miguel Street is hardly a novel, for the continuity consists fragilely of a narrator who grows up as the tales continue, and a few recurring characters who form a kind of chorus; each chapter in fact is a self-contained

story, and each story is devoted to bringing out in full oddity the character of some resident individual or family in Miguel Street. Underneath the playful humor there is already more than a little of the mercilessness of the satirist, particularly in stories like that of Laura, who lives freely with many men until one of her numerous daughters has an illegitimate child, when she hounds the girl to suicide; or of Morgan, the mis

anthropic pyrotechnician who eventually burns his house down in an unprecedented display of firework explosions. The things we love most will always turn against us seems the oblique message of this sardonic little book.

"I came of a family that abounded with pundits. But I had been born an unbeliever," remarks Naipaul. An unbeliever one can perhaps grant him to be, but also a searcher for

something to believe in. Naipaul did not leave Trinidad

merely out of boredom: he was in search of fulfillments and also of roots he could not find at home. He went first to Eng land, where he at least found publishers and readers, though

GEORGE WOODCOCK 25

he did not find the kind of society he was looking for. And it is evident, even from the tone of bitter disappointment that

pervades all his writings on India, that he went there, even

though "three generations and a lost language lay between

us," in the hope of making contact with the "ancient, surviv

ing civilization" that Narayan had never left. Certainly his own past had not offered him anything even remotely re

sembling such a traditional world. "For nothing was created in the British West Indies, no civilization as in Spanish

America, no great revolution as in Haiti or the American colonies. There were only plantations, prosperity, decline,

neglect: the size of the islands called for nothing else. ... The

history of the islands can never be told. Brutality is not the

only difficulty. History is built around achievements and crea

tion; and nothing was created in the West Indies." What Naipaul of course found in India was that our an

cestors are not our fathers, and that the ancient civilization whose continuity made it so accessible to Narayan was closed to him, not merely by time and distance but also by the real istic patience with which Indians have accepted the incredi

ble misery which surrounds their lives, and in the foreseeable future must still surround them, whatever technological

changes may take place. The very touches of affinity he encountered, the tenuous cords of inheritance he felt,

made Naipaul all the more conscious that this was not his world, and he reacted, not with satirical fury (which is a

sign of involvement), but with a despairing pessimism that echoed India's dismissal of him. "India is part of the night: a dead world, a long journey."

Satire arises when we are deeply concerned and involved, when we love and despise, and when we despair not because we know things are hopeless but because we know they could have been better. For this reason Naipaul could write no fiction about India and has written his best novels and stories, if not invariably about Trinidad, certainly always about the

West Indies. This is the world he knows, the world to which,


however he may travel, he is drawn back, sometimes physi cally, often in memory. And it is the sadness of the islands, the enforced smallness of every life that is lived out among them, that drives Naipaul into fury and eloquence. "We have no scientists, engineers, soldiers or

poets. The cricketer was

our only hero-figure." Undoubtedly the best of Naipaul's novels?the largest in

both conception and physical volume?is A House for Mr

Biswas, a kind of family chronicle in negative, which tells of the trivially eventful life of Mr. Biswas, inauspiciously born child of a rural Hindu household, who makes his way out of the plantations, marries into a great joint household of Indian merchants, and, in that miniature and enclosed world of sisters-in-law and brothers-in-law and their children with out number, strives to develop his individuality. All that is available to him is Port of Spain's little world of journalism,

where he occasionally acquires notoriety rather than fame for some outrageous newspaper story. To have a house of his own becomes a mark of self-fulfillment in the mind of Mr.

Biswas, and after two disastrous attempts to build houses on

family property he finally acquires in Port of Spain a jerry built structure, all fa?ade and tremulous foundations, like a

rickety stage set, which is at least his?though after he has

acquired it, all he can do is to give up the struggle; at least Mr. Biswas dies in his own house. This sham of a building that represents fulfillment for the browbeaten journalist un

doubtedly has its oblique relationship with establishing a

house that comes to a people with independence; and Mr.

Biswas, putting up with his new home while slowly discover

ing and recognizing its faults, personifies the colonized

peoples who long to be on their own, ruling their own desti

nies, even when they understand that they will probably make a shabby show of it.

As Naipaul remarks in one of his essays, Trinidadians, In dian and black alike, "form a lively, well-informed society

which feels itself part of the great world, but understands at

GEORGE WOODCOCK 27

the same time that it is cut off from this world by reasons of

geography, history and race." The only way to take part in die wider world is to depart, but those who cannot depart are

condemned to the yearning for a great culture and the in

completely self-deceiving substitutes that dominate the Uves of Mr. Biswas and his kind. They are wasted lives, Uves rotted

by the "self-contempt" that Naipaul often notes as a char acteristic shared by West Indians of all islands and of all racial groups. It is the recognition of this waste of lives, this

spiritual as well as physical impoverishment, that fuels Nai

paul's bitterness as well as his compassion and in his novels

?especially in A House for Mr Biswas?brings about an ex

traordinary combination of satiric sharpness and pathetic poi gnancy. We weep for Mr. Biswas; we rage at the pettiness of die world that has imprisoned him without appeal.

R. K. Narayan made the best of his world, as an artist as well as a man, and the result is the strange contained universe of Malgudi, that we always seem to see from within by its own sympathetic light of comedy. V. S. Naipaul left his world of childhood, failed to find another, and re-created from a distance that which he had abandoned; though we see it in the same kind of preternaturally vivid detail in which we see

Malgudi, we see it from the outside, illumined by a distant

yet mercilessly vivid external light of satire. I would say that both Narayan and Naipaul differ from

their contemporaries among novelists in the former white

English dominions, Canada, AustraUa, and New Zealand, not

only because of the greatly different social and physical set

tings within which their fiction is enacted, but also because of the special incongruity of presenting their own cultures in a language not generally used among their peoples, Uterary EngUsh. I have always felt that some of the particular fasci nation of Joseph Conrad came from his writing in an ac

quired language while he retained?and must have been aware of while he wrote?all the memories and traditions of an earlier life in another land and culture. In many ways the


cases of Narayan and Naipaul are similar to Conrad's. Writers in such situations often use the language with special

care, treating it as if it were something apart from ordinary usage, as singing is from speech, and so gaining a peculiar amalgam of verbal lucidity and atmospheric intensity that I think distinguishes both R. K. Narayan and V. S. Naipaul among those whom we now call commonwealth writers.

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