An Analysis on Modern Vision and Fictional Works in the Novel of R. K. Narayan: A Critical Study

R.K. Narayan, a creative artist in fiction for over four decades, draws his strength from an inexhaustible source – Indianness. He is the most essentially and comprehensively Indian of the Indo Anglian novelists.‖1 Narayan‘s novels have a strong story line and his characters are clearly delineated. Placed in situations which are well developed in the novels, they exhibit a wide range of feelings through which it is not difficult to identify the main emotion. The traditional method of storytelling that Narayan follows in his fiction makes his novels more Indian than Western, though the novel itself is a Western form of literature, in that like all Indian stories it has a beginning, a middle and an end. Of course, his characters are not idealized, but one can still find in them the interplay of emotions out of which the predominant emotions could be identified and worked out. But while analyzing Narayan‘s novels from the Rasa point of view the traditional method of working out only the friendly emotions has been followed. But as the traditional theory permits an alignment of inimical Rasas through the intervention of a catalytic emotion, like, for example, the emotion of the Wonderful (Adbhuta). The analysis has taken recourse to the traditional theory of reconciling the opposites (Virudha) through an intermediary emotion. Without deviating very much from the traditional mode, and by sticking to it by and large Narayan‘s novels have been analyzed from the Rasa point of view. One of the principles by which the true Erotic emotion is to be distinguished from the shadowy is that if the woman desired by man is somebody else‘s wife, the love of that man for that woman is not true Srngara but the simulacrum of love sentiment. Another instance is where the love is not reciprocated and the third where the love is for a lowly woman. In The Guide Raju loves Rosie who; is a dancing girl, who does not reciprocate his love and who is Marco‘s wife. As pointed out earlier the shadowy love emotion which can all be traced in Raju‘s desire for Rosie. As a self-styled guide Raju has been guiding people to the tourist spots in Malgudi. It is his blood to be a guide wherever he is and in whatever he does. So his affair with Rosie though one sided marks another side of his guiding disposition. At a time when she is drifting without a proper sense of direction to exhibit her talent as a dancer, Raju enters her life as her lover and starts guiding her form out of a moribund existence to a thrilling life of glare, publicity and renown. The instinct to guide others is an instinct for self – effacement, putting the others above oneself. By his own confession towards the end of the novel there is something of a Karma Yogi in Raju. This dormant emotion surfaces slowly and gets manifest when by a quirk of fate Raju is thrown into jail. Even he has all the time to himself to ruminate over his life, the latent yogic instinct in him starts asserting itself. But it requires greater impetus to manifest itself completely and this final push forward is supplied by the saintliness thrust upon him by the people of Mangala. The factors that contribute to the generation of the Quiet emotion are worked out sometimes through hints and sometimes directly by Narayan in the last few pages of the Novel. In fact there is more of suggestion (dhvani) than statement (vacya) in the words and actions of Raju on the twelfth day of his fasting, culminating in the excellent suggestion of his final action, the body is sagging and the spirit soaring. R. K. Narayan was born in 1907 to a Brahmin family, his family, like that of most Indians, settled ultimately from a village, Rasipuram. His family had long been established in the city of Madras. Tamil, the language of the province of Madras, was the one spoken at home. His earliest memory was of himself sitting half-buried in sand with a peacock and a monkey for company in his grandmother's house, No.1 Vellola Street, Madras, where he lived with her and a maternal uncle, a student of the local college. The large rambling house had been partitioned and rented out as offices, shops and apartments except for a minimum reserved for the Narayan's family. Narayan observed when writing we attempted, to compress the range of our observation and subject the particle to an intense scrutiny. Passing, inevitably, through phases of symbolic, didactic, or over – dramatic writing, one arrived at the stage of valuing realism, psychological exploration and technical virtuosity. The effort was interesting, but one had to differ from one's model in various ways. In an English novel, for instance, the theme of romance is based on a totally different conception of man–woman relationship from ours. We believe that marriages are made in heaven and a bride and groom meet, not by accident or design, but by the decree of fate, that fitness for a match not to be gauged by letting them go through a period of courtship but by a study of their horoscopes; boy and girl meet and love after marriage rather than before. The eternal triangle, such a standby for a western writer, is worthless as a theme for an Indian, our social circumstances not providing adequate facilities for the eternal triangle. We, however, seek excitement in our system of living known as the joint family, in which several members of a family live under the same roof. The strains and stresses of this kind of living on the individual, the general structure of society emerging from it, and the complexities of the caste system, are inexhaustible subjects for us. And the hold of religion and the conception of the Gods ingrained in us must necessarily find a place in any accurate portrayal of life. Nor can we overlook the rural life and its The evil of Narayan's stars was a matter of tense discussion but finally, a more favourable reading having been obtained from another expert, the marriage took place, 'celebrated with all the pomp, show, festivity, exchange of gifts, and the overcrowding that my parents desired and expected.' His father had a stroke soon after the marriage and his mother spent most of her time with him. Rajam, the new wife, acted as her surrogate downstairs. She got on excellently with the family and they had a room in the house to themselves. They were idyllically happy. In Narayan's novels, the actual existing forms and materials of the society are put to the best aesthetic advantage by his creative imagination with the result that a marvellous picture of tne aesthetic world different from the empirical world, but arising out of it, in which violence, love pathos, humour', fear and disgust shovr» of their personal impurities reign, is presented. The typical Indian characters in his novels present temperaments similar to the traditional characters, because they basically remain the Same. They are almost static characters like their archetypes, so much so that they become amenable to Rasa theory. Narayan's characters and situations draw sustenance from the Indian ethos with all its mythological dimensions and depths. The changes in the society impinge on the consciousness of his characters and rouse conflicting emotions in their minds which make them react or respond to the societal transformations. These reactions and responses carry a strong emotional weight which could be measured in terms of the Indian classical critical theory. While admitting such a possibility, his characters show how basically their sensibilities are Indian. R.K. Narayan writes his novels as a true artist. He is therefore, basically different from both Mulk Raj Anand, the progressive humanist and from Raja Rao, the philosopher - novelist. R. K. Narayan tries to give his readers the joy of a purely creative artist. He loves humanity but does not take sides. In his novel we have no didacticism, no philosophy and no propaganda, he interprets Indian life aesthetically, with unprejudiced objectivity. But he does not lack sympathy for his character. Each one of his characters, wicked or virtuous, is drawn with extra-ordinary delicacy and tenderness. In his sympathetic hands they turn into interesting and amusing figures as make the earth very colourful by their presence and by their actions.

R.K. Narayan's fiction, says William Walsh, "is unusually close to an intimate with his personal life."

autobiographical and utilizes the experiences of his life to organize them in his work of art. Narayan's personal life in My Days reads like any of his novels, with his emphasis on the Indian domestic scene, the middle class, especially the small segment of the agricultural community, and the personal relationships. The Indian middle class, which Narayan says is the only class he understands, is beautifully represented not only in his autobiography but also in Swami and Friends and The English Teacher – the two novels which have drawn heavily from Narayan's life. Though it makes Narayan limited in his scope of art, he is content, as K.R. Srinivas Iyengar says, "Like Jane Austen with his little bit of ivory, just so many inches wide." The difference between autobiography and fiction is clearly marked in the writings of R. K. Narayan. The novels portray the autobiographical events in new combinations; they are selected, altered and imbued with the brilliant projection of various themes to suit the particular frame work and ambience of the stories. Narayan's art is a blending of explicit realism with poetic myth, experience with imagination. Narayan's "serious comedies", as Walsh calls his novels, depict the rebirth of the self and the revelation of his most intimate experiences through the recomposition of other personalities, his characters, who live their day to day life quite happily. Narayan's mode of writing gives a "Slant" of its own to the events of his life, uses "recall and hearsay" to "turn fact into fiction," stays "deceptively simple and seemingly innocent of literacy technique," mingles the comic with the sad providing a philosophical insight into life, and employs a "lean, lucid and wonderfully expressive" style of writing typically characterized by a "lightness of touch". Narayan became so fond of this name that he once jokingly said: "I am a treacherous writer when I move out of Malgudi." However Narayan in My Days emphatically states that "the river side forest, village and crowds, granite steps and the crumbling walls of a shrine" of Mysore "combine to made up the Malgudi of my story." This fictional town is essentially Indian with a unique identity says William Walsh : "After having read only a few of his books it is difficult to shake off the feeling that you have vicariously lived in this town. Malgudi is perhaps the single most endearing 'character' R. K. Narayan has ever created." This authentic and endearing Malgudi, though a kind of 'local habitation and a name,' has a ring of the universal around it. "What happens in India happens in Malgudi and whatever happens in Malgudi happens everywhere," mention in My Days. Perhaps this was the reason why he mingled incidents, both major and minor, from his life, which he wove in his fiction. The artistic motive is to immortalize his life-experience by giving it the form of a story. Undoubtedly it gains a kind of richness by being transformed and transmuted. When he wrote Swami and Friends in 1935 and The English Teacher in 1945 he had been too young to think about writing his autobiography, which he eventually did in 1974, at the ripe old age of sixty – seven. And in order to eternalize the many events and the people of his life, he included them in these two novels as in many others. This practice is not confined only to Swami and Friends and The English Teacher : his printer, Mr. Sampath became a character in one novel and two film stories. An incident about someone "suffering enforced sainthood in Mysore offered a setting for…… a story". The story concerned a drought – hit region, where in desperation the municipal council organized a prayer for rains. A group of Brahmins prayed and fasted, to the accompaniment of the chanting of mantras on the dry bed of kaveri and brought rains to the region on the twelfth day; "This was really the starting point of The guide." R.K. Narayan selected and organized the new material, which was available to him in the city of Mysore and which reflected the thematic constraints of his various books. The routine of ordinary life is transformed into a rich experience. The data is not presented in a photographic way; the exclusion of certain episodes from his life makes the writer emphasize certain other events. The very ordinary people are focused on in amazingly extraordinary manner. Their minor aims and their small / petty machinations brilliantly come to life.

Narayan takes up the theme of a young man's search for a place in the society consequent upon his taking the B.A. degree. The search is, however, complicated by the various ups and downs in his life, the havoc caused by his frustration and disappointment in love, his subsequent renunciation of society which virtually means giving up one's social obligations and search for meaning in the garb of an ascetic, his realization of the deception of it all, his return to his home and parents, his taking up the agency of a newspaper as a source of his livelihood and then his marriage and complete absorption in the householder's life. Thus the name of the novel appears to be an ironic comment on the inability of a university degree to equip a man to face the challenges of life. As Narayan says – "These are all instances of my own life, just the extension of what I underwent through experiences in 'Swami' as a little boy, now consists of five chapters which reveal Chandran's activities at the Albert Mission College in the process of his earning the degree of the Bachelor of Arts. Right from the beginning of the novel, when he finds himself trapped into becoming the Prime mover of the union debate on the subject, "In the opinion of this house historians should be slaughtered first," Chandran is actively involved in college activities. Outside the college he finds enjoyment in the company of his friend, Ramu, with whom he goes to cinema, which for him is "an aesthetic experience to be approached with due preparation."3 In the college, an Historical Association is formed and Chandran is assigned the task of organizing the inaugural meeting as the Association's secretary. But Chandran's notions "as to what one did on the day of the meeting were very vague. He faintly thought that at such a meeting people sat around, drank tea, shook hands with each other, and felt inaugural." At the inaugural Meeting, the speech of Professor Brown is described by Narayan in words which, by and large, may be applied to Narayan's own fictional art, technique and vision : He held the audience for about an hour thus, with nothing very serious, nothing profound, but with the revelation of a personality, with delicious reminiscences, touched with humour and occasional irony. Narayan's art takes a nose-dive in his seventh novel Waiting for the Mahatma as his creative energy appears to sag here. The fragile foundation of this novel's theme – a young man's infatuation for a girl landing him in the midst of strange experience and ultimately restoring him to his original self is a repetition of the pattern of his earlier novels, but conviction and credibility are the prime casualties in the novel's recording of the human motivation and in its grasp of the nature of political pressures working during India's national struggle for freedom. It would appear that the author's own ideological myopia might partly account for this lack of authenticity in the novel. But then artistic integrity, which bears almost a dialectical relationship to one's ideological convictions, also falters leaving it an aesthetically botched work. Narayan's heroes are ordinary people whose lives take on a religious dimension. They revolutionize their inner selves to become better Indians and in this way the author reminds us that Gandhi's message appealed to the spiritual in man. As such it remains valid today and will be so forever.

The artistic excellence of R. K. Narayan is incomparable. His easy way of storytelling, his understanding of psychological behaviour of human beings, his realistic approach towards the art of characterization, his smooth plot making and above all, his use of stylist language make him the novelist of unique genius. Narayan does not use the medium almost philosophical in their realism. Narayan is noted for the objectivity and detachment of his stand. He is free from desire to preach, to advise and to convert the contemporary society. He has created a very large variety of characters that will continue to delight the heart of his readers for a long time to come. R. K. Narayan holds a unique place in Indo-Anglican fiction. He is unique on a number of counts. He avoids spectacular scenes and sticks to the common place comedy of middle class life in South India. In appearance also he is just a commonplace ordinary man one of the millions of South Indian educated men. And yet this quiet simple man, with nothing spectacular about him, gradually rose to be one of the great, if not the greatest Indo-Anglian novelists. Narayan himself was a very sensitive and emotional man and so are his characters, who try to live independently. He describes their family, their traditions, their ethics, and even religion in his novels which are very much parallel to his own upbringing and life.

1. K. Natwar Singh (2006). ―R.K.N : Evergreen at 90" The Hindustan Times, 6 Oct. 2006. 2. Mathur, O. P. (2003). ―West Wind Blows Through Malgudi,‖ Perspectives on R. K. Narayan, ed. Atmaram, Gajiabad, Vimal Prakashan, p. 28. 3. R. K. Narayan (1975). ―My Days‖, London, Chatto and Windus, p. 110. 4. R. K. Narayan (1983). ―Swami and Friends", Mysore, Indian Thought Publications, p. 21. 5. R. K. Narayan (1991). ‗The Bachelor of Arts', Madras, Indian Thoughts Publication, p. 144. 6. R. K. Narayan (1991). ‗The Bachelor of Arts‘, Madras, Indian Thoughts Publication, p. 54. 7. R. K. Narayan (1981). ‗The English Teacher‘, Mysore, Indian Thought Publications, p. 134 8. R. K. Narayan (1981). The English Teacher‘, Mysore, Indian Thought Publications, p. 29. 9. Timothy F. Weisss (2002) on the Margins, The art of Exile in V.S.Naipaul, The

p. 212. 10. William Walsh (1983). ―R. K. Narayan: A Critical Appreciation", London, Allied Publishers, p.19.

PGT in English