Realistic Fiction Writer in English (2) (original) (raw)
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“The Train Has Moved On”: RK Narayan's The Guide and Literary History
asiatic.iium.edu.my
The critical reception of R.K. Narayan's fourteen novels over a period of more than half a century has established him as the most popular of the three founding fathers of the modern Indian novel in English. Nearly 900 publications -monographs and essay collections, contributions to learned journals and magazines, reviews of single works in diverse media, and filmed versions of at least two works -exceed by far the attention paid to Mulk Raj Anand, or Raja Rao's achievement. They testify, besides, to the sustained interest in Narayan's narrative oeuvre that ranges from Swami and Friends (1935) to The World of Nagaraj (1989). An overview will give an idea of the number of critical responses during the periods 1935-1970, the 1970s, the 1980s, and 1990-2004. Besides, it will permit a close look at The Guide (1958), Narayan's most popular novel. Its literary innovative features will show that this story, though embedded in the intermediate period between the late colonial and the early independence years in India, is a forerunner of the post-1980s Indian novel in English.
Discovery of India: V. S. Naipaul’s Trilogy on India
This study is an attempt to know one’s own country interpreted by the western critic with Indian sensibility in socio-cultural point of view during the years 1964 – 1990. His narration gives several allusions from mythology, religion, ancient literature to modern writings from Gita to Kamsutra. However Naipaul is shocked by India’s backwardness, its superstitions, caste system, poverty, illiteracy, unhygienic conditions, and lack of concern on the part of the government officials through which he tries to portray the dark side of Indian culture. Especially he criticizes on social metamorphosis of Dalits in India. He is amused by the snobbish behavior of upper class Indian people who try to mimic the west. He sympathizes with the lower classes who imitate the high class people. Thus the originality of each culture is lost in this blind imitation. Eminent critic like William Darylmple has felt that Naipaul arrived in India with pay load of prejudice and freight of complexes and found fault in everything that he saw. However the earlier darkness about India in the mind of the author which he clearly expresses in An Area of Darkness is later on changed with affection in the following two books India A: Wounded Civilization and India: A Million Mutinies Now. An Area of Darkness (1964) depicts his first visit to India when he was twenty nine years old when he stayed here for twelve months. From the moment of his inauspicious arrival into the country he begins to experience a cultural estrangement from the land. The book is an elegant and passionate account of Naipaul’s disillusioned state of affairs. As it is a travelogue it gives factual information about the events, incidents and his interaction with the people. Second time he returned to India in 1975 at the height of Indira Gandhi’s ‘Emergency’ and based on those experiences he wrote India: A Wounded Civilization. The book is an honest portrait of a society traumatized by centuries of foreign conquest and is immersed in a mythic vision of its past. During this visit Naipaul realized that though India is wounded by centuries of colonial rule, yet it has not found an ideology of regeneration. India: A Million Mutinies Now is the third and the last book in the trilogy that came into existence when Naipaul returned to India in 1980s. This work shows the country’s ongoing struggles, its triumphs and upheavals through the stories of common people. He succeeds in weaving them all into a common thread effortlessly. The book also talks about wrenching poverty, horrifying injustice against women i.e. child marriage and dowry. He also dwells on length on the extremes of ideology that have fractured the country and disabled it.
Sexuality and the Fiction of R. K. Narayan
South Asian Review, 2006
There are two schools in Narayan criticism. One of them is typified by V. S. Naipaul who admires the Indian writer but tends either to slight him or damn him with faint praise by assuming that he simplified reality, sanitizing it as it were, or finds him guilty of positing a static world because of a worldview that was impervious to flux. Much more critical than Naipaul, Meenakshi Mukherjee has thus taken over the Trinidadian English writer's perspective to characterize Narayan as a "chronicler of a society resistant to change, eternal and immutable" and as someone who has opted for an "even-toned minimalistic representation that will not depend too much on the intricacies and contradictions in the culture" (82). On the other hand are admirers of Narayan-M. K. Naik is an early example-who believe that he has a complex and ironic view of India and who show that he is able to convey the contradictions and fissures in the Indian psyche through his representation of Malgudi and its citizens. A recent representative of this group of critics could be someone like Tabish Khair who has argued in Babu Fictions: Alienation in Contemporary Indian Novels that it is myopic to assume that Narayan's art "has remained relatively untouched by the tensions of socioeconomic and discursive alienation" and that his characters are usually racked by doubts and tensions and show "self-estrangement" (228). This essay aligns itself with the second school of Narayan criticism in depicting Narayan as a writer intricately and intensely involved with a changing India by looking at his treatment of sexuality in his fiction. It was sparked by the fascinating historical work, Charu Gupta's Sexuality, Obscenity, and Community: Women, Muslims, and the Hindu Public in Colonial India. In this work, covering roughly the span of time in which Narayan grew up and the period covered in his major fiction up to The Financial Expert, Gupta
R. K. Narayan Internationalizing Indian English Literature.doc
Abstract: India has made a distinct place in the arena of literature written in English. Beginning with Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, fairly a large number of Indian writers have so far written in English and this huge bulk of literature produced in English language in India has been named Indian English literature. Colonial experiences, colonial legacy, postcolonial reactions and realizations, diasporic consciousness, exchange of culture between nations, etc. have functioned in the production of this Indian English Literature. Although produced by Indian writers, the readership of this literature is not limited only to India, it has gained international readership. R. K. Narayan played the most significant role in creating international readership for this literature of India. This essay attempts to show what made R. K. Narayan a world-class fictionist and how much he contributed to the internationalization of Indian English literature.
Abstract: Mahatma Gandhi struggled for the sake of Indian freedom and development. He became an immense source of writing and influenced different disciplines and writers from different fields like philosophy, politics, history, literature, sociology, and so on. Indian English literature has great impact of Gandhian philosophy. The great Indian trio- R.K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao has explored Gandhian thoughts in their writings. Their novels follow Gandhian ideology and his principles of Non-violence, Truth, Brotherhood, Satyagraha and his views on untouchability. The present paper is an attempt to study Gandhian strain in R.K. Narayan’s Waiting for the Mahatma, Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable, and Raja Rao’s Kanthapura. Waiting for the Mahatma portrays Gandhi as a great leader who is deeply connected with the problems of ordinary people. In Untouchable his views give a hope for a good life for the downtrodden. And at the same time Kanthapura shows influence of Gandhi’s struggle for Indian Independence and its impact on the people of a small village. Key Words: Gandhism, influence, impact, leader, downtrodden.
The Double Making of R.K. Narayan
Published in Critical Spectrum: Essays in Literary Culture in Honour of Professor C.D. Narasimhaiah, ed. Satish C. Aikant, New Delhi: Pencraft, 2004:172-91.
This essay considers the effect of Western publication on the fiction of R.K. Narayan, discussing the extent to which this influenced his treatment of his South Indian subject-matter. It examines the ways in which two of his novels, written a quarter of a century apart, Swami and Friends and The Man-Eater of Malgudi, fuse the Western and “Hindu” strands that have fed into their composition. It gives an account of the publication history of Swami, arguing that the novel was partly adapted to fit the conventions of English schoolboy fiction, but finally subverts this genre. It discusses The Man-Eater in relation to Narayan's self-portrayal of himself as a "reluctant guru", but contends that, paradoxically, the emerging American vogue for Indian mysticism at the time when the novel was written provided Narayan with more opportunities to draw on the Hindu myths that were one of the wellsprings of his imagination.
Fantasy and Realism in the Novels of R.K. Narayan
Journal of emerging technologies and innovative research, 2020
This paper aims to reveal the 'REALISM' and 'FANTASY' present in R.K. NARAYAN'S novels. In the fiction of R. K. Narayan, there is an accurate representation of contemporary Indian life, traditions and culture in its vivid and realistic form. Social realism is observed minutely. Narayan is a pure storyteller, an artist who portrays reality in its real rare rhythm. Social customs and reality are portrayed vividly with unbiased objectivity and complete detached observation. He apprehends the delicate rhythms of modern Indian life in his well-known novels. He presents realism in the discerning of life-experiences through the characters of his fictional works.