the gateman’s gift - shodhgangashodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/bitstream/10603/173745/20/20_chapter...

The Gateman’s Gift

R.K.Narayan

Author’s biography

R. K. Narayan (10 October 1906 – 13 May 2001), shortened from

Rasipuram KrishnaswamiIyer Narayanaswami. In Indian author whose

works of fiction include a series of books about people and their

interactions in an imagined town in India called Malgudi. He is one of

three leading figures of early Indian literature in English, along with Mulk

Raj Anand and Raja Rao. He is credited with bringing Indian literature in

English to the rest of the world, and is regarded as one of India's greatest

English language novelists.

Narayan broke through with the help of his mentor and friend,

Graham Greene, who was instrumental in getting publishers for Narayan’s

first four books, including the semi-autobiographical trilogy of Swami and

Friends, The Bachelor of Arts and The English Teacher. Narayan’s works

also include The Financial Expert, hailed as one of the most original

works of 1951, and Sahitya Akademi Award winner The Guide, which

was adapted for films in Hindi and English languages, and for Broadway.

An Anthology of Short Stories : The Gateman’s Gift

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In a writing career that spanned over sixty years, Narayan received

many awards and honours. These include the AC Benson Medal from the

Royal Society of Literature and the Padma Vibhushan, India's second-

highest civilian award. He was also nominated to the Rajya Sabha, the

upper house of the Indian parliament.

R. K. Narayan was born in Madras (now known as Chennai),

Madras Presidency, British India. His father was a school headmaster, and

Narayan did some of his studies at his father's school. As his father's job

required frequent moves, Narayan spent 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 of Kunjappa, a name that

stuck to him in family circles. She taught him arithmetic, mythology,

classical Indian music and Sanskrit. According to his youngest brother R.

K. Laxman, the family mostly conversed in English, and grammatical

errors on the part of Narayan and his siblings were frowned upon. While

living with his grandmother, Narayan studied at a succession of schools in

Madras, including the Lutheran Mission School in Purasawalkam, C.R.C.

High School, and the Christian College High School. Narayan was an

avid reader, and his early literary diet included Dickens, Wodehouse,

Arthur Conan Doyle and Thomas Hardy. When he was twelve years old,

Narayan participated in a pro-independence march, for which he was


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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 Maharajah's Collegiate High School. The well-

stocked library at the school, as well as his father's own, fed his reading

habit, and he started writing as well. After completing high school,

Narayan failed the university entrance examination and spent a year at

home reading and writing; he subsequently 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 held a job as a school teacher; however, he

quit in protest when the headmaster of the school asked him to substitute

for the physical training master. The experience made Narayan realize

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 the occasional local interest story 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 choice of career. 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


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country; while it ignored the limits imposed by colonial rule, it also grew

with the various socio-political 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

managed to gain permission from the girl's father and married her.

Following his marriage, Narayan became a reporter for a Madras based

paper called The Justice, dedicated to the rights of non-Brahmins. The

publishers were thrilled to have a Brahmin Iyer in Narayan 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 about this time, the friend showed the

manuscript to Graham Greene. Greene recommended the book to his

publisher, and it was finally published in 1935. Greene also counseled

Narayan on shortening his name to become more familiar to the English-

speaking audience. The book was semi-autobiographical and built upon

many incidents from his own 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 dealt with the theme of

a rebellious adolescent transitioning to a rather well-adjusted adult; it was

published by a different publisher, again at the recommendation of

Greene. His third novel, The Dark Room (1938) was about domestic

disharmony, showcasing the man as the oppressor and the woman as the

victim within a marriage, and was published by yet another publisher; this


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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.

Rajam died of typhoid in 1939. Her death affected Narayan deeply

and he remained distressed for a long time; he was also concerned for

their daughter Hema, who was only three years old. The bereavement

brought about a significant change in his life and was the inspiration

behind his next novel, The English Teacher. This book, like his first two

books, is autobiographical, but more so, and completes an unintentional

thematic trilogy following Swami and Friends and The Bachelor of Arts.

In subsequent interviews, Narayan acknowledges that The English

Teacher was almost entirely an autobiography, albeit with different names

for the characters and the change of setting in Malgudi; he also explains

that the emotions detailed in the book reflected his own at the time of

Rajam's death.

Bolstered by some of his successes, in 1940 Narayan tried his hand

at a journal, Indian Thought. With the help of his uncle, a car salesman,

Narayan managed to get more than a thousand subscribers in Madras city

alone. However, 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 November 1942, followed

by The English Teacher in 1945. In between, being cut off from England


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due to the war, Narayan started his own publishing company, naming it

(again) Indian Thought Publications; the publishing company was a

success and is still active, now managed by his granddaughter. Soon, with

a devoted readership stretching from New York to Moscow, Narayan's

books started selling well and in 1948 he started building his own house

on the outskirts of Mysore; the house was completed in 1953.

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, Mr. Sampath,

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 away 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.


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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 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 1958.

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.


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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.


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After a long journey in the field of literature in May 2001, Narayan

was hospitalized. A few hours before he was to be put on a ventilator, he

was planning on writing his next novel, a story about a grandfather. As he

was always very selective about his choice of notebooks, he asked N.

Ram to get him one. However, Narayan did not get better and never

started the novel. He died on May 13, 2001, in Chennai at the age of 94.

Plot Summary: ‘The Gateman’s Gift’

Narayan's writing style was simple and unpretentious with a natural

element of humour about it. It focused on ordinary people, reminding the

reader of next-door neighbours, cousins and the like, thereby providing a

greater ability to relate to the topic. Unlike his national contemporaries, he

was able to write about the intricacies of Indian society without having to

modify his characteristic simplicity to conform to trends and fashions in

fiction writing. He also employed the use of nuanced dialogic prose with

gentle Tamil overtones based on the nature of his characters. Critics have

considered Narayan to be the Indian Chekhov162, due to the similarities in

their writings, the simplicity and the gentle beauty and humour in tragic

situations. Greene considered Narayan to be more similar to Chekhov

than any Indian writer. Anthony West of The New Yorker considered

Narayan's writings to be of the realism variety of Nikolai Gogol.


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According to Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri, Narayan's short

stories have the same captivating feeling as his novels, with most of them

less than ten pages long, and taking about as many minutes to read. She

adds that between the title sentence and the end, Narayan provides the

reader something novelists struggle to achieve in hundreds more pages: a

complete insight to the lives of his characters. These characteristics and

abilities led Lahiri to classify him as belonging to the pantheon of short-

story geniuses that include O. Henry, Frank O'Connor and Flannery

O'Connor. Lahiri also compares him to Guy de Maupassant for their

ability to compress the narrative without losing the story, and the common

themes of middle-class life written with an unyielding and unpitying

vision.

Critics have noted that Narayan's writings tend to be more

descriptive and less analytical; the objective style, rooted in a detached

spirit, providing for a more authentic and realistic narration. His attitude,

coupled with his perception of life, provided a unique ability to fuse

characters and actions, and an ability to use ordinary events to create a

connection in the mind of the reader. A significant contributor to his

writing style was his creation of Malgudi, a stereotypical small town,

where the standard norms of superstition and tradition apply.

Narayan's writing style was often compared to that of William

Faulkner since both their works brought out the humour and energy of

ordinary life while displaying compassionate humanism. The similarities

also extended to their juxtaposing of the demands of society against the


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confusions of individuality. Although their approach to subjects was

similar, their methods were different; Faulkner was rhetorical and

illustrated his points with immense prose while Narayan was very simple

and realistic, capturing the elements all the same.

Malgudi – A living character of Narayan’s short stories

The setting for most of Narayan's stories is the fictional town of

Malgudi, first introduced in Swami and Friends. His narratives highlight

social context and provide a feel for his characters through everyday life.

He has been compared to William Faulkner, who also created a fictional

town that stood for reality, brought out the humour and energy of ordinary

life, and displayed compassionate humanism in his writing. Narayan's

short story writing style has been compared to that of Guy de Maupassant,

as they both have an ability to compress the narrative without losing out

on elements of the story. Narayan has also come in for criticism for being

too simple in his prose and diction

Malgudi is a fictional, semi-urban town in southern India, conjured

by Narayan. He created the town in September 1930, on Vijayadashami,

an auspicious day to start new efforts and thus chosen for him by his

grandmother. As he mentioned in a later interview to his biographers

Susan and N. Ram, in his mind, he first saw a railway station, and slowly

the name Malgudi came to him. The town was created with an impeccable

historical record, dating to the Ramayana days when it was noted that


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Lord Rama passed through; it was also said that the Buddha visited the

town during his travels. While Narayan never provided strict physical

constraints for the town, he allowed it to form shape with events in the

various stories, becoming a reference point for the future.Dr James M.

Fennelly, a scholar of Narayan's works, created a map of Malgudi based

on the fictional descriptors of the town from the many books and stories.

Malgudi evolved with the changing political landscape of India. In

the 1980s, when the nationalistic fervor in India dictated the changing of

British names of towns and localities and removal of British landmarks,

Malgudi's mayor and city council removed the long standing statue of

Frederick Lawley, one of Malgudi's early residents. However, when the

Historical Societies showed proof that Lawley was strong in his support

of the Indian independence movement, the council was forced to undo all

their earlier actions. A good comparison to Malgudi, a place that Greene

characterised as "more familiar than Battersea or Euston Road"163, is

Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. Also, like Faulkner's, when one looks

at Narayan's works, the town gets a better definition through the many

different novels and stories.


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The Gateman’s Gift: Critical Appreciation

R.K. Narayan, who died in 2001, is one of India's greatest authors.

A good friend of Graham Greene and many others, he wrote many, many

novels and stories about the conflicts with which the average Indian

citizens have contended from the Colonial Period through Independence

and into the present. He wrote right up until the time of his death. The

Great Narayan, for an appreciation of his accomplishments.

While Narayan does not write in great detail about specific

contemporary issues in India--he invents the town of Malgudi--his

characters, including the ex-gateman Govind Sing, contend with struggles

that beset India.

In our story, the gateman lives under the Colonial regime of the

British, who did not leave India until 1947, the year of the partition when

more than a million people died. And this system of social and political

organization comes to dominate the character's life and to determine the

rather limited horizons he comes to view as the defining characteristics of,

well, a sane person.“When a dozen persons question openly or slyly a

man's sanity, he begins to entertain serious doubts about himself.”164

The opening statement sets the stage for a narrative that asks

questions about just what sanity actually means?


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The story divides well into three parts:

1. Life up to retirement.

2. His retirement "hobby."

3. His bout with sanity.

Behind these issues of insanity/sanity lurk questions about what the

society dictates concerning behaviour and what therefore is valued--and

who dictates these norms.

The narrative uses the flashback technique to emphasize the

juxtaposition of past life and present circumstance, two phases in the

man's life linked by a registered letter from his former employer.

Obviously, this letter causes him no small consternation. And you

might find that the character's actions border on the absurd; indeed you

are supposed to, for he thinks others insane for failing to understand why

he fears opening the letter.“Everywhere the suggestion was the same, till

he thought everyone had turned mad”165.

We leave the first two paragraphs wondering what the hell is going

on in this man's mind. What other questions? Why does he fear the letter?

What from the past accounts for these fears?


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All good questions that our author will not answer all that directly.

Among other things, we have to assume that the man does not get

registered mail all that often--either do we? And most of us probably feel

very much the same when this kind of mail reaches us: Must be bad news.

So we can identify just enough to link, as it were, with the story.

After war service in 1914-18, he came to be recommended for a

gatekeeper's post at Englandia's.

The name of the company certainly resonates--England joined with

India, but also a reference to the British Empire--land that belongs to

England. At any rate, the title bespeaks the contrast between the colonizer

and the colonized.

And Govind Singh certainly conforms to a very British view of

how an Indian should behave:

He was given a khaki uniform, a resplendent band across his

shoulder and a short stick. Obviously, his job does not amount to all that

much. In the morning, he salutes cars as they arrive and repeats the

process at quitting time. And he retires only because he really cannot do

his job anymore, strange as that might sound:

He would not have thought of retirement yet, but for the fact that he

found his sight and hearing playing tricks on him; he could not catch the

Manager's footsteps on the stairs, and it was hard to recognize him even at

ten yards. The preceding gives the impression that Singh is on close terms

with his "Master." Such is hardly the case, however; and the fact that the


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boss really does not know him at all makes the job and the man's

relationship to it and to his Master very pathetic--what would happen to a

person who works all those years at doing nothing?

Consider the job itself, the gateman who has absolutely no stake in

running the business or the country, as a metaphor for colonialism. Who

does all the real work? What is the position of the Indian?

The supposed insanity to follow suggests, perhaps, how upside

down everything is, for conforming requires, one could argue, that a

person sacrifice all individuality.

To what extent does the gateman depend on "the great man" for his

sense of purpose in life and his self identity?

Though so little was said, Singh felt electrified on both occasions

by the words of his master. In Singh's eyes the chief had acquired a sort of

godhood, and it would be quite adequate if a God spoke to on only twice

in a lifetime. In moments of contemplation Singh's mind dwelt on the

words of his master, and on his personality. And then to get a registered

letter from, well, God; no wonder the poor man finds himself at wit's end.

Indeed, he pretty much prays to the General Manager.

Remember that his story is a work of literature. And you want,

therefore, to consider the significance between what Singh does for

twenty five years of his life and then how he handles retirement, in terms

of what you see as the story's comments on the social system.


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And consider, too, if Singh represents a huge class of Indian

citizens, what shape are they in for self rule, which comes just around the

time the gateman retires after all those years on the job?

Singh does not deal directly with politics--he mentions, for

example, none of the turmoil leading to independence, all the violence, for

instance, between Hindu and Muslim; however, the events in the life of

Singh certainly suggest the effects all this matter has on individuals.

How much imagination is required to fulfil Singh's job

requirements? And for his hobby, through which he brought into

existence a miniature universe, how much imagination is required? Note,

too, how much satisfaction he takes from his accomplishments on which

he must depend on his own talents and abilities to create:

It was a wonderful miniature reflection of the world; and he

mounted them neatly on thin wooden slices, which enhanced

their attractiveness. He kept these in his cousin's shop and

they attracted huge crowds every day and sold very briskly.

More than from the sales Singh felt an ecstasy when he saw

admiring crowds clustering around his handiwork.166

While the artistic endeavours and accomplishments bring him

tremendous pleasure and satisfaction, how much importance does the man


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place on this individual accomplishment? Compared with his former

occupation, which affects people directly?

Notice the religious overtones in the following passage about

Singh's monthly trip to get his pension check:

He made it a convention to carry on every pension day

an offering for his master, and each time his greatest

reward was the accountant's stock reply to his

question: "What did the Sahib say?"

"He said it was very good."

Gods speak to mere humans only through an intermediary167.

At this juncture in the story, the registered letter arrives, and you

must ask yourself why the man fears its contents. He tells his wife of his

fears:

Why not open it and see, ask someone to read it?" He threw

up his arms in horror. "Woman, you don't know what you are

saying. It cannot be opened. They have perhaps written that

my pension is stopped, and God knows what else the Sahib

has said...168

The Kafka-like humour of this poor, illiterate fellow's paranoid

odyssey to discover the contents of the message from authority becomes,


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of course, pathetic. Again, you must remember that you read a piece of

fiction and ask yourself the significance of what goes on.

He does crazy things and determines that he is mad, for he feels

that the world on which he depended--the one made of real clay--might

well crumble. And he begins to perceive the work he did in clay as the

occupation of a lunatic.

The fear from the letter offers, of course, numerous avenues to

pursue. But if you think about how he depicted himself in the masterpiece,

you get an idea of why in his strange thinking the model could be

considered rather blasphemous: he put himself in the same scene with the

one he worships.

Given the context of what goes on, the preceding helps account for

his actions.

Now we have numerous contrasts in the story. Compare, for

example, the difference between the workplace masterpiece, which shows

Singh serving the Sahib, and the special piece on which he had been

working, the model village:

It was the most enjoyable piece of work that he had so far

undertaken. He lived in a kind of ecstasy while doing it. "I am going to


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keep this for myself, a memento of my father's village,"169 he declared.

This artistic creation is special. And he determines to share it with

everyone, a communal gift, if you will, one that serves his memory and

which will bring people enjoyment. But in his madness, he instead

destroys the village and makes himself a clay helmet: His madness had

given him a sense of limitless freedom, strength and buoyancy. The

remarks and jeers of the crowds gaping at him did not in the least touch

him.

In his insanity, he begins to talk about other things connected with

his personal life.

The village he creates replicates memories from his childhood, and

as he goes on his crazed walk though the town in his clay helmet, he talks

about what he did during the war, when he was stationed, the narrative

suggests, in Mesopotamia--all these things he keeps repressed during the

years he worked for that company.

Who is the real Singh?

While the police drag him away, Singh sees the accountant from

the office, who tells him of the letter's contents, 100 rupees, over nine

month's worth of salary:

The General Manager greatly appreciates the very artistic

models you have sent, and he is pleased to sanction a reward

of 100 rupees and hopes it will be an encouragement for you

to keep up this interesting hobby.170


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Note that on the basis of the accountant's word--a member of the

company--Singh determines that he is no longer insane:

"You look quite well, you aren't mad," said the accountant. Singh fell at

his feet and said with tears choking his voice, "You are a god, sir, to say

that I am not mad. I am so happy to hear it."171

What might have happened if the message just said "splendid work"?

And he gives up the making of these "toys." Are they simply toys?

What is more important as a basis for self identity, the job or that thing he

labels a mere hobby, which he quits:

"Nothing sir. Never again. It is no occupation for a sane man...." 172he

said, received his pension and walked stiffly out of the office.

Yes, the story certainly is "different."

As you have read these past weeks, however, the literature has

offered numerous depictions of people under what seems unnatural

conditions, from war to other kinds of oppressions.

And none of the literature offers easy fixes.

What the man takes his measure from is empty; that which fills him

with a sense of accomplishment and that which brings joy to the people

around him, he labels insane.

What causes this unnatural contrast? One possible answer is found

at the center of the story.


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This story does bear on the topic, the colonial overtones

notwithstanding. In India, a caste system remains very much in place,

with the Brahman class at the top--the people to whom other and lower

classes owe allegiance and religious awe.

In the "Breast-Giver", for example, consider the boss of the

company, who eats scrapings from the poor Brahman man's feet as a sign

of reverence, though he keeps the man in a low-paying position.

In this story, the General Manager receives the awe generally

accorded the upper caste; they are the ones who inspire, and they hold

these positions naturally.

Consequently, the story might well suggest that the colonial

organization fills a pre-existing social organization with strict divisions.

Thus, the gateman must remain for his career an unseen gateman, who

asks for little and who thinks less.

To ask for more or to call attention to self is socially unacceptable.

The situation is therefore and indeed complex and hardly bodes

well in the author's estimation for India's chances to enter the so-called

modern world.


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Twentieth Century View

Narayan first broke through with the help of Graham Greene who,

upon reading Swaminathan and Tate, took it upon himself to work as

Narayan's agent for the book. He was also instrumental in changing the

title to the more appropriate Swami and Friends, and in finding publishers

for Narayan's next few books. While Narayan's early works were not

exactly commercial successes, other authors of the time began to notice

him. Somerset Maugham, on a trip to Mysore in 1938, had asked to meet

Narayan, but not enough people had heard of him to actually effect the

meeting. Maugham subsequently read Narayan's The Dark Room, and

wrote to him expressing his admiration. Another contemporary writer who

took a liking to Narayan's early works was E. M. Forster, an author who

shared his dry and humorous narrative, so much so that Narayan was

labelled the "South Indian E. M. Forster"173 by critics. Despite his

popularity with the reading public and fellow writers, Narayan's work has

not received the same amount of critical exploration accorded to other

writers of his stature.

Narayan's success in the United States came a little later, when

Michigan State University Press started publishing his books. His first

visit to the country was on a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation,

and he lectured at various universities including Michigan State

University and University of California, Berkeley. Around this time, John

Updike noticed his work and compared Narayan to Charles Dickens. In a

review of Narayan's works published in The New Yorker, Updike called


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him a writer of a vanishing breed—the writer as a citizen; one who

identifies completely with his subjects and with a belief in the

significance of humanity.

Having published many novels, essays and short stories, Narayan is

credited with bringing Indian writing to the rest of the world. While he

has been regarded as one of India's greatest writers of the twentieth

century, critics have also described his writings with adjectives such as

charming, harmless and benign. Narayan has also come in for criticism

from later writers, particularly of Indian origin, who have classed his

writings as having a pedestrian style with a shallow vocabulary and a

narrow vision. According to ShashiTharoor, Narayan's subjects are

similar to those of Jane Austen as they both deal with a very small section

of society. However, he adds that while Austen's prose was able to take

those subjects beyond ordinariness, Narayan's was not. A similar opinion

is held by Shashi Deshpande who characterizes Narayan's writings as

pedestrian and naive because of the simplicity of his language and diction,

combined with the lack of any complexity in the emotions and behaviours

of his characters.

A general perception on Narayan was that he did not involve

himself or his writings with the politics or problems of India, as

mentioned by V. S. Naipaul in one of his columns. However, according to

Wyatt Mason of The New Yorker, although Narayan's writings seem


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simple and display a lack of interest in politics, he delivers his narrative

with an artful and deceptive technique when dealing with such subjects

and does not entirely avoid them, rather letting the words play in the

reader's mind. Srinivasa Iyengar, former vice-chancellor of Andhra

University, says that Narayan wrote about political topics only in the

context of his subjects, quite unlike his compatriot Mulk Raj Anand who

dealt with the political structures and problems of the time. Paul Brians, in

his book Modern South Asian Literature in English, says that the fact that

Narayan completely ignored British rule and focused on the private lives

of his characters is a political statement on its own, declaring his

independence from the influence of colonialism.

In the west, Narayan's simplicity of writing was well received. One

of his biographers, William Walsh, wrote of his narrative as a comedic art

with an inclusive vision informed by the transience and illusion of human

action. Multiple Booker nominee Anita Desai classes his writings as

"compassionate realism"174 where the cardinal sins are unkindness and

immodesty. According to Wyatt Mason, in Narayan's works, the

individual is not a private entity, but rather a public one and this concept

is an innovation that can be called his own. In addition to his early works

being among the most important English-language fiction from India,

with this innovation, he provided his western readers the first works in

English to be infused with an eastern and Hindu existential perspective.

Mason also holds the view that Edmund Wilson's assessment of Walt

Whitman, "He does not write editorials on events but describes his actual

feelings"175, applies equally to Narayan.


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Narayan's greatest achievement was making India accessible to the

outside world through his literature. He is regarded as one of the three

leading English language Indian fiction writers, along with Raja Rao and

Mulk Raj Anand. He gave his readers something to look forward to with

Malgudi and its residents and is considered to be one of the best novelists

India has ever produced. He brought small-town India to his audience in a

manner that was both believable and experiential. Malgudi was not just a

fictional town in India, but one teeming with characters, each with their

own idiosyncrasies and attitudes, making the situation as familiar to the

reader as if it were their own backyard.

Whom next shall I meet in Malgudi? That is the thought that

comes to me when I close a novel of Mr Narayan's. I do not

wait for another novel. I wait to go out of my door into those

loved and shabby streets and see with excitement and a

certainty of pleasure a stranger approaching, past the bank,

the cinema, the haircutting saloon, a stranger who will greet

me I know with some unexpected and revealing phrase that

will open a door on to yet another human existence.176

‘Malgudi Days’ is a later collection (1975), and it draws from two

earlier collections and includes some "New Stories." They are really short

(some are just three pages) and crisply plotted. Some of the better stories

seem almost like textbook examples of how to write a memorable short

story in five hundred words or less: a gesture at characterization and


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setting, a conflict, and a twist of some kind (often ironic reversal) at the

end.

There is a kind of elemental pleasure in reading these stories in

close succession, and watching Narayan people his world with tragic

shopkeepers, ethical pickpockets, mean beggars, storytellers, anxious

college students, and of course, "The Talkative Man." For Narayan,

storytelling is deeply concerned with establishing a sense of community,

of people completely involved in each other. The story that best

exemplifies this constitutive sociality in Malgudi Days might be "The

Missing Mail." Here Narayan imagines a somewhat over-social postman,

who knows the business of all the residents on his beat. When someone

has good news coming to them, he stops and has tea. And he happily stays

to give advice when a family is trying to marry off a daughter using

newspaper matrimonial and bio data sent through the mail. Here, one

particular family has been struggling to find a boy for their daughter, and

the postman gives them the advice that leads to a successful match (go to

Madras and meet him face-to-face). On the day of the wedding, on the

only astrologically viable date that year, he brings the father a telegram

saying that his uncle in another village has passed away. But the telegram

was dated two weeks earlier! The postman had been sitting on it for two

weeks, knowing that the family's knowledge of the death would have

ruined the wedding plans. He apologizes, but it's clear that he's done the

right thing.


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In a very basic sense, "The Missing Mail" is about the value in face

to face conversation, and resistance to bureaucracy, professionalization,

and the ethic of efficiency. When you know that doing your job correctly

will cause someone to suffer, it is better that you consider not doing your

job. One of the students in the class talked about this story as a 'fable

about the value of face-time,' and that seems like an apt description to me

(though Narayan would never have used the term "face-time"!).

Finally, several of the stories deal with art, depicting art as having

an almost mystical power and danger to the artist as well as the world. So

you have stories like "Such Perfection," where a sculptor who makes idols

for temples learns that he shouldn't try and make them too perfectly. Most

of these stories end with the artist giving up his ambitions when things

don't go as they should.

The story that really stands out in this regard is "The Gateman's

Gift." An elderly and retired gateman at an insurance company has taken

to making small clay sculptures of the people and places he knows in the

town. He sends them to the "Sahib" at his old company (a man he almost

never sees, and who has a kind of absolute authority in his imagination).

The day after he submits his "masterpiece," he gets a piece of registered

mail from the company and he is petrified to open it, assuming the worst

(i.e., that his pension has been cut off). He walks about for weeks with the

letter in his pocket, afraid to let anyone open it, and begins to go slightly

insane. Finally he runs into an accountant from the office on the street


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who tears open the letter: inside is a check rewarding him for his

interesting art-works, and a letter praising and encouraging him.

The way Narayan describes the gateman's approach to making

sculptures sounds a lot like Narayan's own artistic process:

He made a new discovery about himself, that he could make

fascinating models out of clay and wood dust. The discovery

came suddenly, when one day a child in the neighbourhood

brought to him its little doll for repair. He not only repaired

it but made a new thing of it. This discovery pleased him so

much that he very soon became absorbed in it. His back yard

gave him a plentiful supply of pliant clay, and the carpenter's

shop next to his cousin's cigarette shop sawdust. He

purchased paint for a few annas. And lo! he found his hours

gliding. He sat there in the front part of his home, bent over

his clay, and brought into existence a miniature universe; all

the colours of life were there, all the forms and creatures, but

of the size of his middle finger; whole villages and towns

were there, all the persons he had seen passing before his

office when he was sentry there -- that beggar woman

coming at midday, and that cucumber-vendor; he had the eye

of a cartoonist for human faces. Everything went down into

clay. It was a wonderful miniature reflection of the world;

and he mounted them neatly on thin wooden slices, which

enhanced their attractiveness.177


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The gateman's sculptures are all mimetic, that is to say they directly

reflect the world around him. The joy he gets from creating them -- his

own creative geniuses profoundly social.

The gateman's "masterpiece"178 is a detailed recreation of the

insurance company campus where he worked for some thirty years. The

only thing about it that makes him nervous is his decision to include an

image of himself standing out front; out of humility, he worries that he

might be too insignificant to merit a place.

What he's done is use artistic expression not merely as a mirror of

the world around him, but as a vehicle for self-fashioning. It's when he

does a sculpture of himself that he feels the most exhilarated and anxious

about his work: art takes on a kind of power that exceeds the sum of its

parts. It's the danger in art that leads the Gateman to give up his hobby at

the end of the story. We might read it as the Gateman's naive simplicity

(as an illiterate man dependent on a pension, he dreads receiving

"official"179 mail of any kind). But it will be preferable to see it as

Narayan's comment on the difficult responsibility associated with using

art to create one’s world and oneself.

Incidentally, "The Gateman's Gift" isn't a very widely discussed

story. For instance, the great critic M.K. Naik, in his essay "Malgudi

Minor: The Short Stories of R.K. Narayan," dismisses it in a line or two.

But there is at least one essay that takes as its primary focus this one story.


298

Prajapati P. Shah published an essay in Literary Criterion in 1980, called

"R.K. Narayan's 'Gateman's Gift': The Central Theme." Shah's reading

focused not on the mimetic nature of the Gateman's art, but on his status

as a marginalized figure in the socio-economic life of the town. According

to her interpretation, the Gateman's transgression is his presumption of a

creative role discouraged by the capitalist system which has structured

every aspect of his life. It's a little bit Marxist andthere's more than a little

truth to her reading.

According to Barbara Crossetti, 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.

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


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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.''180

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.''181


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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,''182 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.''

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 RajyaSabha, 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.''


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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,''183 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.184

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


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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.''185

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.''186

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