Some 35 years ago, I decided that it was fashionable to develop a disdainful attitude towards certain novelists. I was so much in love with Raskolnikov kissing the asphalt on the street and with chapters with titles like, ‘Pro and Contra’, that I talked myself into disliking anything that was not heroic and tragic at the same time. I concentrated all my supercilious criticism on Jane Austen and our very own home-grown R.K. Narayan.
Today, of course, I can re-read the chronicles of Eliza Bennett or Swami with relish...and quite frankly the Russians bore me. It was my father’s friend in what was then Madras, T. Narasimhan, an erudite TamBrahm if there ever was one, who drew my attention to the humour in Narayan. “Paar-appa, Jaithirth... there is nothing which he writes that is not laced with gentle humour and irony. Do pay attention to that.” I filed this advice away at the back of my mind. And as I re-read the Vendor of Sweets, which had first been serialised in the Illustrated Weekly of India, the very idea of having a “story-writing machine” made us want to chuckle and guffaw!
Some months later I was in Bangalore (thank heavens its name is unchanged!) and went to see my grandfather. We dined “not wisely but well”, to use an expression of his, on cucumber sambar and other Mysorean delicacies. After lunch, he liked to hold forth for a while before he took his afternoon snooze. I gingerly brought up the subject of Narayan and I was so glad I had. The next half hour was a treat for the intellect and the soul. “There are many gifts we Mysoreans have been given. There is the divine coffee that Baba Budan himself blessed us with. But let me tell you about three things that are poles apart and yet so similar. They are our vegetarian cuisine, our Mysore veena and R.K. Narayan’s novels. You ask what they have in common. They are all very limited. Our vegetarian cuisine has endless permutations of the same rice, broken wheat and dals...nothing else... no meat or fowl or fish.
And yet think of how much our cuisine achieves with so little. Our veena has only four strings...and yet within the constraints of those strings, what cannot our musicians achieve? And Narayan...all his novels are literally on a small scale — no large canvas for him — and yet what a gift he gives us!” Thus spoke the inimitable Nagavara Madhava Rao, inveterate coffee-lover, patriotic Mysorean, loyal subject of our own maharaja (now sadly dethroned in the socialist welfare state that is India) and admirer of those with a Mysorean pedigree with names like Mirza Ismail, Kuvempu and Maasti.
The idea of deliberately restricting one’s scale of operations, but achieving exquisite balance, irony and brilliance has never left me since then. Narayan is the ultimate veena-playing vegetarian. He does not pretend to have an orchestra with hundreds of violins, harps, cellos and horns. He does not pretend to a wide range of sauces and meats. But within his self-imposed limits of a quietly comical Malgudi he plays an exquisite raga, concocts a delectable rasam!
We all love Swami...the book reminds us of our childhoods and as we watch our children play, we see a Swami in each of them. The Tamil poet of antiquity, Tiruvalluvar, has said: “They praise the music of the flute and the harp...they...who haven’t heard the lisp of children’s voices” (my rough translation). Narayan captures Valluvar’s spirit in Swami’s games. Every time I go past a bunch of boys playing cricket, which is several times every weekend, I think of Swaminathan and his cricket club.
Naipaul has accused Narayan of being ahistorical in his approach and there is an element of truth to that. Malgudi exists in a timeless world and seems untouched by the big bad world outside. And yet that is not wholly true. It is Salman Rushdie, in The Moor’s Last Sigh, who points out that future generations are as likely to know the Mahatma from Narayan’s portrait of the gentle public speaker addressing a meeting on the banks of the Sarayu river in Malgudi — the casual saint who befriends an untouchable waif and seeks his hospitality rejecting that of the greedy, oily municipal chairman!
Rushdie is remarkably prescient. In India, we rarely distinguish between imagined history and “accurate” recorded history. Raja Rao points out that people are capable in the same breath of making statements like “Rama visited this grove and shot an arrow into the ground; and of course, Gandhi came here on his way to some-place-else”. That one is a mythic character, admittedly very real in our historical consciousness; the other, a real historical character certainly of mythic proportions, are somehow ignored as separate categories in the all-embracing vision of India’s distant and recent past.
Twentieth century India may well have derived its imagined history from Narayan in a manner not dissimilar to Shakespeare’s Richard III replacing the real historical crook-back in our views of medieval England.
Narayan is a writer of short sentences, a minimalist in the use of adjectives and possessed of an enduring and unending sense of the understated and the subtle. Those who have heard the ‘Raghuvamsha Suta’ on the veena (the raga, for the uninitiated, is the unpronounceable Kadana-Kuduhulam) will relate to the soft, understated mood. Those who have eaten the white-yellow dal chutney in Vidyarthi Bhavan in Basavangudi (in Bangalore, where else?) will relate to this constant emphasis on not exaggerating anything, on approaching the canvas of life with a light deft touch! When one sees that Narayan is being prescribed in textbooks put out by the pompous citadel of our socialist bureaucracy, the un-venerable NCERT, one reflects on the ultimate irony of it all. Would this have passed muster at the Albert Mission School? Would our Ouija-board-fancying English teacher have approved? Would Swaminathan have answered precis-and-comprehension questions based on The Astrologer’s Day or the Financial Expert? On the Sarayu banks, by Nallappa’s grove, I sit down and laugh.
The writer is chairman and CEO, Mphasis. Write to him at jerryrao@expressindia.com
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