SOURCE: "R. K. Narayan's Neglected Novel: Waiting for the Mahatma," in World Literature Written in English, Vol. 26, No. 2, Autumn, 1986, pp. 362-69.

In the following essay, Driesen analyzes Narayan's Waiting for the Mahatma by tracing the main character's relationship to Gandhi.

By the time Waiting for the Mahatma was published (in 1957), R. K. Narayan had already established an international reputation as a novelist. It is therefore somewhat surprising that in the steadily accumulating volume of critical commentary on Narayan's work in Western literary journals, no detailed study of this particular novel has yet appeared. Some general discussions of Narayan's work hardly mention the novel, while those that do evince a variety of contradictory impressions. For example, Keith Garebian objects to the portrait of Gandhi in the novel as being "sketchy, and at worst, clichéd," while another critic sees it as one of the novel's strengths, "a sure and...