It is odd at a time when we are beginning to pay attention to Commonwealth writers that a writer of the character and maturity of R. K. Narayan should hardly have been noticed at all. It is true that some of the more obvious motives directing us to these writers probably do not operate in respect of Narayan. His themes are not particularly contemporary, fashionable or provocative…. Nor does his language work with the peasant vigour which we are apt to find so attractive in the West Indians, our current novelists having elected, either from inclination or simply helplessness, to restrict themselves to very few of the language's possibilities. Narayan uses a pure and limpid English, easy and natural in its run and tone, but always an evolved and conscious medium, without the exciting, physical energy—sometimes adventitiously injected—that marks the writing of the West Indians. Narayan's English, in its structure and address, is a moderate, traditional instrument but one abstracted from the context in which it was generated—the history, the social condition, the weather, the racial memory—and transferred to a wholly different setting—brutal heat and hovering vultures, flocks of brilliant, glistening parrots, jackals rippling over the rubbish dumps, an utter shining clarity of light and the deadly grey of an appalling poverty. It is clear of the palpable suggestiveness, the foggy taste, the complex tang, running through every phrase of our own English. What it has instead is a strange degree of translucence. Unaffected by the opacity of a British inheritance or by the powerful, positive quality of a language which as we use it can never be completely subordinated to our private purposes, Narayan's language is beautifully adapted to communicate a different, an Indian sensibility.
By now Narayan is the author of a fairly substantial body of fiction, some eight or nine novels…. The world established in these novels (although 'established' is too harsh a term for the delicate skill in implication everywhere evident) impresses the reader with its coherence, its personal stamp and idiom. The action is centred in the small town of Malgudi in Mysore…. The detail suggests, surely and economically, the special flavour of Malgudi, a blend of oriental and pre-1914 British, like an Edwardian mixture of sweet mangoes and malt vinegar—a wedding with its horoscopes and gold-edged, elegantly printed invitation cards; tiny shops with the shopkeeper hunched on the counter selling plantains, betel-leaves, snuff and English biscuits; the casuarina and the Post Office Savings Bank; the brass pots and the volumes of Milton and Carlyle; the shaved head and ochre robes of the sanyasi and Messrs. Binns's catalogue of cricket bats. Especially is this true of the detail of the public life, of the shabby swarming streets and the stifling bye-lanes, the cobbles of Market Road and the sands on Sarayu bank, the banyan tree outside the Central Co-operative Land Mortgage Bank (built in 1914), the glare of Kitson lamps and the open drain down Vinayah Mudali Street. (pp. 91-2)
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Read the rest of this Criticism with our Narayan, R(asipuram) K(rishnaswami) 1906–: Critical Essay by William Walsh Access Pass.
