*India

*India. South Asian nation in which the novel is set during the 1950’s, after it became independent. Because of India’s vastness and its population’s relative stability, the various parts of the country differ dramatically in climate and terrain, customs, languages, architecture, food, and manners. During the country’s long colonial period, southern India was less influenced by the presence of the British Empire than other parts of India. Southern Indian cities and countryside thus tend to be “more Indian” and colorful than such metropolitan centers as Delhi, Bombay, and Calcutta.

During the 1950’s, India’s northern cities and the areas around them still retained vestiges of colonialism. However, there is nothing British about the novel’s Malgudi; it is pure Indian. Its authenticity and its central role in Narayan’s work has been aptly compared to William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi. Both serve as microcosms for the writers’ explorations of the human condition, which prevents them from evolving into places marked by maudlin regionalism.

Malgudi

Malgudi (mahl-GEW-dee). Fictional city in southern India. During nearly seventy years of writing fiction, Narayan built this memorable city street by street, building by building, and neighborhood by neighborhood. Lying next to a river, Malgudi is a bustling place, full of schools, restaurants, temples, the humble stands of street vendors, a hodgepodge of businesses, cinemas with garish posters, hotels from the grand to the shabby, and open places where people gather to talk and gossip. Like all Indian cities, Malgudi brims with humanity, noises and turmoil, animals wandering the streets, beggars and loiterers, an abundance of vehicles ranging from carts to motorcars, and odors—some pleasant, some not so pleasant. Because of Malgudi’s warm climate, many of its shops are open to the street, and much of the daily living takes place outdoors.

The concept of community assumes its fullest meaning in an Indian city like Malgudi, in which much of life is carried on publicly and collectively. This spirited place, so familiar to Narayan’s readers, serves as the backdrop for the novel. Much of the action takes place at the railway station where the main character, Raju, in his better days offers guide services to Malgudi visitors. In remote Indian cities railway stations serve as nerve centers. They are chaotic places, often dilapidated and unkempt, yet teeming with vitality. When trains pull in, the arriving passengers face armies of guides, porters, hawkers, and others offering varied services. Raju moves through the city, which unfolds naturally in the course of the action. Descriptions of Malgudi are never excessive. The environs simply emerge and blend with the characters and their behavior.

Temple

Temple. After his imprisonment Raju undergoes a transformation from a travel guide to a spiritual guide. This duality, which takes Raju from the mundane to the spiritual, serves as the book’s theme. Thus, in his new life the temple, not the railway station, becomes his office. India is dotted with temples, so many, in fact, that it should not be difficult to find a deserted one, as Raju does. In the novel’s first paragraph Raju is described assitting beside an ancient shrine, whose original significance has probably been long forgotten. From this point onward, though, the ancient shrine takes on new meaning, which is typical of Narayan’s focus on spiritual progression in his fiction. As the opening dialogue proceeds, the appearance of the temple and its setting slowly and subtly emerge, with one detail building on another.

Narayan is not usually given to elaborate technical experiments or overt display of his artistic skills, but The Guide is one of his few works that draws attention to itself because of its somewhat unusual narrative method. In telling Raju's story, Narayan alternates third-person and first-person narration and uses such cinematic techniques as flashbacks and jump cuts. When we first encounter Raju, he is about to meet Velan, and he is seen at this point from the perspective of an omniscient narrator. Then Raju takes over the narrative chores and relates his progress from sweetmeat seller to jailbird to Velan. In between, the omniscient narrator punctuates Raju's narrative by showing him dealing with the villagers as a holy man. At the end, Raju ceases to be a narrator as he loses his hold on his consciousness. The omniscient narrator concludes the story, showing us a Raju who is about to achieve transcendence. While not as technically sophisticated as classic modernist works, The Guide's flexible narrative mode is a notable achievement and is well-suited to the tale of a man who is seen to rise above himself and his unsatisfactory past.

Narayan's technique here, as in his other novels, involves the use of images and symbols rooted in Indian life, but having universal appeal. To take one example, at the end, as Raju is drowning himself, he has his eyes turned towards the mountains. As the villagers look on, the morning sun suddenly illuminates everything. The whole scene is a simple but effective way of utilizing an Indian village setting to symbolize the death by drowning that will give rise to the birth of hope. Raju seems to derive inspiration from the heavens by submersing his worldly self and becoming a true guide who will show his charges the path from this world to the next.

The Financial Expert (1952) sounds much like a fable. It is the story of Margayya, a man first seen under a banyan tree with a tin box, eking out an existence by advising peasants in obtaining loans from a co-operative institution. He is then seen acquiring considerable wealth through questionable means, only to lose everything and return to the banyan tree with his tin box and a condition close to penury. Narayan's point seems to be a simple but profound one: the wealth Margayya acquired was illusory; true riches can never accrue when one makes money into a god.

The Financial Expert probes dubious paths to wealth: Margayya's work as a "financial expert"; his successful stint as a publisher of a semi pornographic book by a Dr. Lal that masquerades as a work on domestic harmony; and his phase as a moneylender who bases his business on the strategy of withholding the interest from the first installment on the loan. The desire to amass money, Narayan seems to suggest, leads to moral blindness. Certainly, in its exposure of the folly and delusion of Margayya and its focus on the transience of human action, The Financial Expert is typical of Narayan's best work.

The story of the modern-day "financial expert" comes to us, in a manner which is uniquely Narayan's, with the trappings of Indian religious myths. Margayya's fate, Narayan suggests obliquely, has been decided as much by his own dealings as by the ongoing quarrel between Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth, and Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge and enlightenment. In other words, when Margayya has wealth, he cannot have enlightenment; at the end of the novel, and at a point when he has lost all that he acquired, he is closer perhaps to self-knowledge than he had ever been. Nevertheless, he goes back to his old profession of adviser to peasants seeking money, showing thereby a spirit that is indestructible, and untouched by the war between deities.

Margayya is a good example of Narayan's skill in drawing complex characters. Shrewd and mean but also susceptible to a kind of mysticism in his feelings about money, comic and energetic but also tragically drawn to the ruin of what he had accomplished, capable of contemptible behavior but also incredibly naive, he is a convincing study in obsession and moral confusion. What is especially remarkable about his portrait is the way Narayan presents his ugly, predatory side without withdrawing his sympathies from this driven but vulnerable man.

Margayya's portrait also draws strength from his links with other, equally fascinating characters. Thus Dr. Lal, the aggressive, confidence man author of the book Margayya publishes, is another remarkable study. An outsider in Malgudi who does not care for traditional values and dabbles in sociology to make money, he is not unlike Dr. Tamkin, the memorable character created by Saul Bellow in Seize the Day (1956). Margayya is also shown with his spoiled and inconsiderate son Balu, who does everything he can to ruin his indulgent father. Also impressive are the scenes between Margayya and his brother, between whom there is no love lost, and the encounter between Margayya and the enigmatic priest who tells him about the unending war of the gods and conveys a sense of holiness. Strangely enough, the priest manages to sound somewhat skeptical and irritable when he prescribes the rituals Margayya must follow in his quest for wealth. The holy man, like Margayya, illustrates Narayan's feelings about the ambiguity of human actions and the inexplicable mysteries of our behavior.

There have been two unsuccessful attempts to represent The Guide in other mediums: a film version produced in India, which Narayan has decried for taking all sorts of liberties with the text; and on off-Broadway adaptation by Harvey Breitt and Patricia Rhineheart that folded after three performances in 1968.