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)

But although these novels convey so full and intimate a sense of place, they are not in any limiting way regional. They send out long, sensitive feelers to the villages where the inhabitants are 'innocent and unsophisticated in most matters excepting their factions and fights', and to the cities where they are 'so mechanical and impersonal'. They concern themselves too with such varied spheres of interest as business, education, journalism, filmmaking, money-lending. One mustn't, of course, exaggerate this matter of the scope of reference. Narayan does work by focusing his attention sharply. Part of his strength is never to ignore his instinct for limitation. But he has the serious artist's gift for achieving representativeness by concentration. His preoccupation is with the middle class, a relatively small part of an agricultural civilisation and the most conscious and anxious part of the population. Its members are neither too well off not to know the rub of financial worry nor too indigent to be brutalised by want and hunger. They may take their religion more easily than the passionately credulous poor but even in those with a tendency towards modernity one is always aware under the educated speech of the profound murmur of older voices, of 'Lakshmi, the Goddess of Wealth, the spouse of God Vishnu, who was the Protector of Creatures'. It is the members of the middle class who are psychologically more active, in whom consciousness is more vivid and harrowing, that Narayan chooses for his heroes—modest, unselfconfident heroes, it is true. They have some room for independent, critical existence; but there is always a tension between this and that deep source of power, the family where the women rather than the old represent 'Custom and Reason' and know 'what is and what is not proper'. The family indeed is the immediate context in which the novelist's sensibility operates, and his novels are remarkable for the subtlety and conviction with which family relationships are treated…. (p. 93)

It is against the presence of the town, firmly and freshly evoked, and amid a net of family relationships, each thread of which is finely and clearly elaborated, that Narayan's heroes engage in their characteristic struggles. The conditions of the struggle vary from novel to novel, the stress is highly particularised, the protagonist may be a student, a teacher, a financial expert, a fighter for emancipation. One still discerns beneath the diversity a common pattern, or predicament. What is so attractive about it is the charm and authenticity of its Indian colouring; what makes it immediately recognisable is that it seems to belong to a substantial human nature. The primary aim of all these characters is to achieve, in the words of Chandran in The Bachelor of Arts, 'a life freed from distracting illusions and hysterics'…. At first the intention is obscure, buried under the habits of ordinary life, personal responsibilities and—since this is India—a heavy, inherited burden. The novels plot the rise of this intention into awareness, its recognition in a crisis of consciousness, and then its resolution, or resolutions, since there are more often than not several mistaken or frustrated efforts at a resolution.

This theme—it doesn't seem extravagant to call it the aspiration towards spiritual maturity—is sustained throughout Narayan's work. Clearly it is one with its own special dangers. How easily it could slide into formlessness or puff itself into grandiosity. It is a remarkable achievement—given such a theme and an Indian setting—that Narayan's work is singularly free of pretentiousness. A cool sympathy, a highly developed sense of human discrepancy, a rare feeling for the importance and the density of objects—these check any straining after undue significance or any tendency to lapse into a search for large truths about life. In particular each stage of the impulse towards maturity is defined with meticulous accuracy in minutely specified circumstances, so that the reader is left not with a vague scheme of some dialectical progress but the conviction of an individual living his chequered, stumbling life. Let me give an illustration of this. Here is an example of one of these young men—it is Krishna and it occurs on the first page of The English Teacher—at the beginning of his development when what I have called the impulse or aspiration is still too dim to be recognized and when it simply produces vague feelings of dissatisfaction and irritable moods of brooding and analysis:

The urge had been upon me for some days past to take myself in hand. What was wrong with me? I couldn't say, some sort of vague disaffection, a self-rebellion I might call it. The feeling again and again came upon me that as I was nearing thirty I should cease to live like a cow (perhaps a cow, with justice, might feel hurt at the comparison), eating, working in a manner of speaking, walking, talking, etc.—all done to perfection, I was sure, but always leaving behind a sense of something missing.

                                          (pp. 94-5)

The issue from this malaise comes about through some critical event which precipitates a crisis of consciousness and a new effort of will. In The English Teacher the event is the illness and death of Krishna's wife, but more often it is a meeting or a series of meetings. The meetings may be disconcerting or terrifying, bewildering or exalting. In The Financial Expert, Margayya, perhaps Narayan's most brilliant single comic creation, gradually realises his desire for a life 'freed from illusions' (but for him this means ironically a life dedicated to the cult of money—not money which with gross simplicity is spent across the counter of a shop but money as a beautiful, living force) in a series of encounters: first with Arul Dass, the dignified peon of the Co-operative Bank who shows up Margayya's utter insignificance, then with the strangely impressive priest in the seedy temple who rehearses him in rituals for propitiating the Goddess of Wealth, then with Dr. Pal, 'journalist, correspondent and author', whose 'sociological' work, Bed Life, (later changed to Domestic Harmony) combining the Kama-Sutra with Havelock Ellis eventually makes Margayya's fortune, and finally with Mr. Lal, the large, astute, but fundamentally uncomprehending businessman. The effect of these meetings, the effect of Sriram's exalting meeting with Gandhi in Waiting for the Mahatma or Chandran's baffling meeting with the middle-aged rake in Madras in The Bachelor of Arts, is to wake the character from 'an age-old somnolence', from what he now sees to have been his illusory and hysterical past and to determine him wholly in favour of a completely new life.

If the analysis of the subject's struggle to extricate himself from the habitual, dreamy automatism of his past—and in a country like India where the influence of the given is so powerful, the severity of the effort required must be arduous and intense—if this shows Narayan's gift for serious moral analysis, then the various solutions adopted by his personae in the search for another, more conscious life, exhibit his remarkable comic talent. (Not of course that the fiction offers a neatly logical division just like this. The serious and the comic flow in and out of one another throughout in an intricate, inseparable alliance.) Tracts of human experience are looked at with an affectionately ridiculing eye, and with that kind of humour in which the jokes are also a species of moral insight. Such treatment brings out the note of the bizarre, of human queerness, in the activities of many sorts of people, business men, printers, teachers, holy men, press agents, money-lenders. At our most commonplace we are all exotic if scrutinised by a fresh eye. The range is impressive but it has to be said that it follows naturally on Narayan's reading of the key experience at the heart of his novels. Since it was a meeting, the intervention of human difference, human otherness, into the hero's narcissistic world which first shattered it for him, he feels in response that he has to break out of his solipsistic circle into a novel, even a deliberately alien, field of action. To evoke so much variety with such casual, convincing authority and to make it also organic and functional testify to a notable and original talent.

Sometimes these solutions end in a moment of illumination like Krishna's vision of his dead wife in The English Teacher, 'a moment for which one feels grateful to Life and Death', or in a total reverse like Margayya's bankruptcy, or even for Raju in The Guide in death. Often they show a character now more solid yet also more conscious, more finished yet more sensitive, accepting, though with misgivings and backslidings, the responsibilities of ordinary life. Always they conclude on a note of acceptance…. 'Accepting' indeed, is the word which best defines his attitude, not just here but Narayan's attitude generally in the face of his experience. 'Welcome' would be too shrill and hearty, 'resignation' too passive and submissive. In any case his attitude is too nimble with irony for one or the other. And that irony, it should be noted, is an irony of recognition, not an irony of correction.

Perhaps irony is too sharp a word for the calm scrutiny turned on these ardent young men and earnest old ones. Irony has a social reference and the characters in these novels seem to be tested against something deeper than conscious, formulated standards. And irony is in place in the presence of corruption, but all these people, even the seedy, the stupid and the vain, retain what Lawrence called 'a peculiar, nuclear innocence'. The naïveté of being human: that is the daring subject of this decidedly self-effacing writer.

For Narayan is not a pushing or intrusive novelist. He has no anxiety to be tugging at our sleeve or to be giving us a knowing look. He has no message, no doctrine. The half-baked is not an item in his diet. The acceptance of life which his art expresses has no doubt a root in the national condition. One feels that a more than individual sensibility, more than simply personal categories and feelings, are operating under the surface. But his acceptance, a kind of piety towards existence, isn't simply an inherited temperament with its corresponding technique of passive reflection. It is something which has to be worked towards, grown up to, gradually matured. Nor is it—as I mean to imply by calling it 'piety'—in any way rapt or mystical but altogether homely and human. It includes delight in the expressive variety of life, cognisance of its absurdities, mockery at its pretensions and acknowledgement of its difficulties. And like other kinds of piety, other sorts of tradition, it tends to focus itself in objects. Objects become hallowed with more than their own nature and invested with singular and lasting importance. This appreciation of the weight, the form, the value of things is both a feature of the temperament sustained throughout these novels and a device of the art employed in their construction. It pins down and solidifies the lightness and fluency of a manner that might otherwise be too evasive, too 'spiritual'. The effect of Krishna's clock, of his father's 'steel pen with a fat green wooden handle' and his ink made up by hand in a careful, yearly ceremony, or Sriram's teak and canvas chair, is to help to enclose the souls of these people in flesh, pitted, worn and ordinary flesh. Here is an example of this particularising power of objects at work, a passage from Mr. Sampath which gives a new meaning to the words, 'an object of sentimental value':

He prayed for a moment before a small image of Nataraja which his grandmother had given him when he was a boy. This was one of the possessions he had valued most for years. It seemed to be a refuge from the oppression of time. It was of sandal wood, which had deepened a darker shade with years, just four inches high. The carving represented Nataraja with one foot raised and one foot pressing down a demon, his four arms outstretched, with his hair flying, the eyes rapt in contemplation, an exquisitely poised figure. His grandmother had given it to him on his eighth birthday. She had got it from her father, who discovered it in a packet of saffron they had brought from the shop on a certain day. It had never left Srinivas since that birthday. It was on his own table at home, or in the hostel, wherever he might be. It had become part of him, the little image. He often sat before it, contemplated its proportions and addressed it thus: 'Oh, God, you are trampling a demon under your foot, and you show us a rhythm, though you appear to be still. May a ray of that light illumine my mind.' He silently addressed it thus. He never started his day without spending a few minutes before this image.

The permanence of objects makes them a protection against the oppression of time. Clearly the direct reference here is to the Indian scene, to the hard agricultural tradition, the vast distances, the ruthless climate, the terrible poverty. But it seems to me to have as well, like so much in Narayan's writing, a measure of the wider validity that belongs to genuine works of art—the universal imprisoned but visible in the particular. In utterly different conditions, where nobody's grandmother could have handed down an image of Nataraja discovered by her father in a packet of saffron, we are probably like Srinivas and 'grasp the symbol but vaguely'. And yet as we contemplate its proportions we are not, I think, deceived in detecting through all the appearances of stillness and strangeness a rhythm; the common and extraordinary rhythm of life. (pp. 96-9)

William Walsh, "The Intricate Alliance: The Novels of R. K. Narayan," in A Review of English Literature (© Longmans, Green & Co. Ltd. 1961), Vol. 2, No. 4, October, 1961, pp. 91-9.