R. K. Narayan

R. K. Narayan (October 10, 1906 - May 13 2001), born Rasipuram Krishnaswami Ayyar Naranayanaswami,R. K. Narayan: A Profile was one of the well known and most widely read Indian novelists writing in English.

R.K. Narayan was essentially a storyteller, whose sensitive, well-drawn portrayals of twentieth-century Indian life were set mostly in the fictional South Indian town of Malgudi. Most of Narayan's work, starting with his first novel Swami and Friends (1935), captures many Indian traits while having a unique identity of its own. He was sometimes compared to the United States writer William Faulkner, whose novels were also grounded in a compassionate humanism and celebrated the humour and energy of ordinary life.R.K. Narayan 1906-2001

Narayan lived till ninety-five, writing for more than fifty years, and publishing till he was eighty seven. He wrote fifteen novels, five volumes of short stories, a number of travelogues and collections of non-fiction, an English translation of Indian epics, and the memoir My Days.The Life of R.K. Narayan

Biography

Birth

R. K. Narayan was born in Madras, India on October 10, 1906. His father was a provincial head-master. He was the third of eight surviving children. His full name was Rasipuram Krishnaswami Ayyar Naranayanaswami. In South India, the given name(s) is/are usually written last. His first name is a toponym and his second name is a patronym. For this reason, all of Narayan's brothers have the same first two names. See, for example, R. K. Laxman. The writer became R. K. Narayan at the suggestion of Graham Greene, who felt his full name was simply too long.

Childhood

Narayan's mother, Gnanambal, was quite ill after his birth and enlisted a wet nurse to feed her young son. When she became pregnant again, the two-year-old Narayan was sent to Madras to live with his maternal grandmother, Parvathi, who was called "Ammani". He lived with her and one of his uncles, T. N. Seshachalam, until he was a teenager. He only spent a few weeks each summer visiting his parents and siblings. Narayan grew up speaking the Tamil language and learned English at school. In his autobiography, My Days, Narayan writes of visiting his parents in Mysore and being unable to understand the shopkeepers, who spoke Kannada, a language he later learned.

Education

After completing eight years of education at the Lutheran Mission School close to his grandmother's house in Madras, he studied for a short time at the CRC High School. When his father, Rasipuram Venkatarama Krishnaswami Iyer, was appointed headmaster of the Maharaja's High School in Mysore, Narayan moved back in with his parents. To his father's consternation, Narayan was an indifferent student and after graduating, he failed the college entrance exam in English because he found the primary textbook too boring to read. He retook the exam a year later and eventually obtained his bachelor's degree from the University of Mysore.

One of the few Indian-English writers who spent nearly all his time in India, he went abroad to the United States in 1956 at the invitation of the Rockefeller Foundation. Narayan's first published work was the review of a book titled Development of Maritime Laws of 17th-Century England.The Life of R.K. Narayan. He began his literary career with short stories which appeared in The Hindu, and also worked for some time as the Mysore correspondent of Justice, a Madras-based newspaper. He also took up teaching at a government school, but left the job within two days.The Life of R.K. Narayan

Writing Career

His writing career began with Swami and Friends. At first, he could not get the novel published. Eventually, the draft was shown to Graham Greene by a mutual friend, Purna. Greene liked it so much that he arranged for its publication. Greene was to remain a close friend and admirer of his. After that, he published a continuous stream of novels, all set in Malgudi and each dealing with different characters in that fictional place. Autobiographical content forms a significant part of some of his novels. For example, the events surrounding the death of his young wife and how he coped with the loss form the basis of The English Teacher. Mr. Narayan became his own publisher, when World War II cut him off from Britain.

Death

R. K. Narayan passed away on May 13, 2001, due to cardio-respiratory failure. He was 95.

Writing Style

Narayan's novels are characterised by Chekhovian simplicity and gentle humour. He told stories of simple folks trying to live their simple lives in a changing world. Characters in his novels were very ordinary down-to-earth Indians trying to blend tradition with modernisation, often resulting in tragi-comic situations. His writings style was simple, unpretentious and witty-conveyed, with a unique flavour as if he were writing in the native tongue. Many of Narayan's works are rooted in everyday life, though he is not shy of invoking Hindu tales or traditional Indian folklore to emphasize a point. His easy-going outlook on life has sometimes been criticized, though in general he is viewed as an accomplished, sensitive and reasonably prolific writer.

Awards and Recognition

Mr. Narayan won numerous awards and honours for his works. He won the National Prize of the Sahitya Akademi, the Indian literary academy, for The Guide in 1958. He was honoured with the Padma Bhushan, a coveted Indian award, for distinguished service to literature in 1964. In 1980, R. K. Narayan was awarded the AC Benson Medal by the Royal Society of Literature. He was an honorary member of the society. He was elected an honorary member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1982 and nominated to the Rajya Sabha in 1989. In addition, the University of Mysore, Delhi University and the University of Leeds conferred honorary doctorates on him. His work is unique in writing field.

Bibliography

TV and Movie Adaptions

The Guide was made in English and Hindi by Dev Anand. It was commercially a most successful venture, but Narayan was not happy with the screen adaptation of his novel. His novel Mr. Sampat was made into a film by S.S. Vasan of Gemini Films. Another novel, The Financial Expert was made into the Kannada movie Banker Margayya. Swami and Friends, The Vendor of Sweets and some of Narayan's short stories were adapted by the late actor-director Shankar Nag into a television series, Malgudi Days. It was shot in the Western Ghats town of Agumbe near the South Karnataka coast. This town served as the backdrop for Malgudi, complete with a statue of the British personage. It was serialised and telecast on Doordarshan, the Indian National Television network.

Trivia

*R.K. Narayan was short listed for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times, but he never made it all the way. One of the jokes in the literary circles was that the Nobel Committee and the western readers ignored his books because of the misleading titles. Many people apparently thought that they were self-help books on various subjects (The English Teacher, The Painter of Signs, etc).
*His works were translated into every European language as well as Hebrew.
*His admirers included Somerset Maugham, John Updike and Graham Greene, who called him the "novelist I admire most in the English language".

References

External links

*New York Times obituary for R. K. Narayan, India's Prolific Storyteller
*Times magazine - The Master of Small Things by V. S. Naipaul
*The Life of R.K Narayan
*New York Review of Books - The Great Narayan

R. K. Narayan: Encyclopedia BETA

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