SOURCE: "Quite Quiet India," in Encounter, Vol. LXIV, No. 3, March, 1985, pp. 52-9.

I know of only one substantial attack on R. K. Narayan's achievement. It might be of some interest simply as a novelty, but, coming as it does from a man who has claims to be the best living writer in English, it deserves more serious attention than it has received. V. S. Naipaul admires Narayan, and his admiration survived, he tells us, the rainy season in India during which he slowly re-read Mr Sampath, the Printer. It survived, but the account of the novel that follows leaves us in little doubt that it did not survive intact. Before the monsoon Naipaul had admired Narayan as a comic realist: after it he was left with an uneasy appreciation of Narayan's skill in disguising religiose fables to make them look like novels. A Tiger for Malgudi would not seem to him a retreat into quasi-philosophical whimsy forgivable in a writer near the end of a distinguished career, but the predictable outcome of tendencies present even in Narayan's strongest work.

Naipaul's problem has to do with the status of Malgudi. He knows that Narayan's fiction depends on the creation of Malgudi: his "comedies were of the sort that requires a restrictive social setting with well defined rules," and he knows too that Malgudi is not Bangalore or any other real South Indian town: it is "a creation of art." But for Naipaul the value of fictional worlds depends on their maintaining a vital connection with the real world that they mirror. When he had read Narayan's novels in Trinidad and in London he had not doubted that connection: when he read Mr Sampath in Bombay, in Delhi, in Kutch, his sense of it snapped. He could not connect the India he read about with the India he saw around him. The cool sympathy with which Narayan views his characters and their doings, his "ironic acceptance" of the oddity of men and women and the oddity of their ways, no longer seemed evidence of a Chekhovian sophistication, but an expression of a weary indifference to human pain, not the less offensive because it is presented to the reader as sanctioned by Narayan's religious sense of life, his Hinduism.

Towards the end of Mr. Sampath, Srinivas, the central character, experiences a vision in which he sees the history of India pass before him, stretching back into the prehistoric past, forward into the unimaginable future. The vision leaves Srinivas in a state of elevated philosophical calm, a mood in which "madness or sanity, suffering or happiness seemed all the same." He then witnesses a primitive exorcism ritual in which a friend of his, a young artist called Ravi who has been driven mad by unrequited love, is beaten with a cane by an old priest. Srinivas has an impulse to protest against this cruelty, but finds himself "incapable of any effort": "The recent vision had given him a view in which it seemed to him all one whether they thwacked Ravi with a cane or whether they left him alone…." Ravi has, he now sees, all eternity to regain his sanity, "though not in one birth, at least in a series of them." All the same, Srinivas is troubled by the noise of the thwacking: he goes outside.

Mr. Sampath was written in 1949, and, as Naipaul notes, it expresses a sense of India that had been fixed before Independence. Srinivas, dependent on his brother for money, on his wife for domestic comfort, is left free to cultivate his interest in the lofty spiritual doctrines of the Upanishads. His spirituality is a flower of idleness. His character is less a product than a symbol of stultifying colonial dependence. When Narayan published The Vendor of Sweets India had been independent for twenty years, and the economic achievement of independent India could no longer be ignored. India had laid itself open to Western technology, and had become a major producer of industrial goods. Naipaul reads The Vendor of Sweets as Narayan's report on the new India, Jagan, the sweet vendor, is a Gandhian. That is to say, when he was a young man Gandhi gave him, as he gave millions of his countrymen, a vision of citizenship, its dignities and responsibilities. Since then Jagan's vision has narrowed, and bifurcated. He sits in his shop reading the Gita and listening to the tinkling of coins on the counter. Gandhi had shown him how he might become a whole man, how his religious and practical sense might each vitalise the other, but he has long since forgotten the lesson. His Gandhianism has become a harmless variety of nostalgia.

When Jagan's son returns from America with a foreign girl-friend and a business project based on a fiction-writing computer, Jagan, the old India, is forced to recognise the new. His response is bafflement, anger, and at last panic. He decides to become sannyasi, but his decision is only a mockery of Hindu orthodoxy, and not only because Jagan takes his cheque-book with him into his new life as a mendicant. He gives up the world not because he has completed his worldly duties but because he can no longer deal with them. The Indian ability to absorb and to direct Western technology is coarsely parodied in the representation of Jagan's son and his fiction-writing machine: "You see these four knobs? One is for characters, one for plot situations, one for climaxes." Narayan evidently has no notion how such a machine might work. He ridicules machines from a position of invulnerable technological innocence. He is unable to see in the person of a young Indian educated in the West anything other than decadence—alcohol, girl-friends, unscrupulousness, a trivial aping of Western manners and dress, and a pathetic interest in machines that owe more to Heath Robinson than to the micro-chip. Narayan laughs and Jagan panics, but Narayan is only apparently more sophisticated than his character. At bottom their responses are much the same.

So ends Naipaul's critique, and for all his insistence that he remains an admirer, it is damning. His Narayan shelters from the fact of pain by cultivating a religiose indifference, and responds to change only with uncomprehending mockery. At moments of crisis he retreats, as Srinivas retreats from the noise of Ravi being thwacked, into a visionary India, a pastoral land, eternal, free from pain, an India that can only be seen in a vision, for it is a country that never existed. Such places of imaginative refuge are perhaps necessary for a colonial people, a people deprived of responsibility for their own lives, but in modern India they are a harmful luxury, for they get in the way of the duty to see the real world and to see it clearly, which the citizens of a self-regulating nation must accept if ever they are to make a better life.

India: A Wounded Civilization records two visits made by Naipaul to India, the second, the visit with which the book is mainly concerned, during the Emergency. Naipaul makes no mention of The Painter of Signs, and this is odd, because The Painter of Signs is an Emergency novel. In it, Narayan responds to the same crisis that Naipaul records. Here, if anywhere, the truth of Naipaul's critique may be tested.

The Painter of Signs is a rewriting of a novel which Narayan had published 22 years earlier—Waiting for the Mahatma. The point is too obvious to need detailed justification. Sriram and Bharati in the earlier novel become Raman and Daisy in the later. Sriram and Raman are both of them impelled by love to become campaigners, and both are sign-writers. Sriram roams the countryside daubing on every available wall Gandhi's ringing demand. "QUIT INDIA." Raman is a professional calligrapher, and the message has changed: "We are two; let ours be two; limit your family." The relationship between the two novels signals Narayan's acceptance of an argument that occupies Naipaul throughout his book. With the Emergency, the pattern of India's development as an independent nation decisively changed. Gandhianism had run its course, and the Emergency was the suitably dramatic signal that it had been replaced by a new political philosophy, led and articulated, ironically enough, by someone also called Gandhi.

Waiting for the Mahatma is the story of Sriram growing up. At the beginning of the novel he is "comfortably reclining on the cold cement window-sill" of his grandmother's house. It is his favourite posture: "The window became such a habit with him that when he grew up he sought no other diversion except to sit there, sometimes with a book, and watch the street." By the end of the novel he has broken his adolescent habit of disengagement from life, and prepares to set up home with his bride, Bharati, and to shoulder the responsibility of looking after 30 children, orphans of the partition riots. But Sriram's growth into adulthood is entangled with the development of India into nationhood. All through his adolescence Sriram is fascinated by a picture hanging in the sweet-shop opposite his house, a "portrait of a European queen with apple cheeks and wavy coiffure." Before he can become a man he must free himself from this vague Western ideal of womanhood and fall in love with Bharati, whose beauty is Indian, who is what her name means, the daughter of India. Bharati is a disciple of Gandhi, and Gandhi, though only an occasional actor in the story, is the novel's dominant presence. Through Bharati he superintends Sriram's emergence into independent manhood just as he presided over India's progress to independent statehood. The novel ends with the assassination of Gandhi and the marriage of Sriram and Bharati. The coincidence is symbolic. Gandhi is not so much murdered as translated: his work done, the children of the new nation safely given into the hands of young India, Gandhi feels free to shrug off the burden of existence. It is not the death of a man, but of a saint, foreseen by Gandhi and calmly accepted by him. Waiting for the Mahatma is a weird hybrid, at once a comic Bildungsroman and a religious fable of national origin.

At times, the two work well enough together. A sharply observed detail like the portrait of the apple-cheeked queen is weighted by its significance within the fable. The portrait allows Narayan to treat a potentially ponderous theme, the escape from emotional and imaginative dependence on the colonial power, without disturbing the deft ease of his narrative. The fading of the old imperial roll of honour and its replacement by a new nationalist martyrology is caught in the contrast between Sriram's father, killed in Mesopotamia, whose memorial has shrunk to the meagre proportions of the buff envelope that brings his monthly pension, and Bharati's father, killed in the Congress agitation of 1920, whose death is proudly remembered.

Even the representation of Gandhi is not monotonously fabular. It is enlivened occasionally by the novelist's sharp perceptions. Narayan seems quietly amused by Gandhi's penchant for delphic utterance—"How do you know he means that and not something else?" The spiritual weight of Gandhi's presence, though awesome, can become oppressive: "The Mahatma's silence was heavy and pervasive, and Sriram was afraid even to gulp or cough, although he very much wanted to clear his throat, cough, sneeze, swing his arms about." But more often than not the effect secured by the mingling of fable and novel is evasion. Narayan turns to the novel when he wants to evade the consequences of his fable, and to the fable when the novel starts to drift into dangerous areas. Waiting for the Mahatma is an evasive book, and what it is most anxious to evade is politics.

The most striking instance is Narayan's representation of Gandhi. Few would deny that Gandhi's success had to do with his ambiguous status as the leader at once of a religious movement and a political campaign. When he returned to India from South Africa he found a country with deep and continuous religious traditions, but a country that was governed by Britain, and was in consequence, politically underdeveloped. His achievement was to take those religious traditions and to make them serve in place of absent traditions of political association. Narayan's effort is to undo Gandhi's project; to salute Gandhi as a saint while leaving as vague as possible his other role, as a statesman.

Narayan offers a Gandhianism with the politics left out. The charka, for instance, functions in Narayan's fable as a religious implement, like a rosary. In the novel it is a wickedly frustrating little machine. Sriram's attempts to master it are rendered with all Narayan's comic flair. What no one would guess is that hand-spinning had a crucial place in Gandhi's economic programme, freeing India from dependence on the Lancashire cotton mills, and indicating that the best means for India's economic development was through village industries. Even giving oneself up to imprisonment scarcely seems a political act. Gandhi instructs Bharati to surrender herself at the nearest police station. He does not tell her why. She accepts his instruction as a religious command, inscrutable, not to be questioned. She obeys, not because she is Gandhi's follower, but because she is his disciple. Obedience in this religious view of things is not a means to the successful outcome of a project, but an end in itself.

Sriram does not go with Bharati to prison. He decides, conveniently, that Gandhi has left his followers free each to continue the struggle as he thinks best. There follows the most enigmatic section of the novel. Sriram falls in with Jagadish, a photographer with ambitions to make movies, always a danger signal in Narayan. Jagadish is a supporter of Chandra Bose and the INA, less a Gandhian than a guerrilla, and, under his direction, Sriram himself becomes a terrorist. [Cronin adds a footnote explaining that the Indian National Army was largely recruited from Indian prisoners of war. Chandra Bose believed the Germans and the Japanese to be India's natural allies in their struggle against the British. He planned to invade India with the cooperation of the Japanese, oust the British, and establish an independent government.] There is a detailed account of his taking some leaflets to distribute at a nearby military barracks, and deciding, after he has scratched his arm on the barbed-wire perimeter, to make a dignified retreat. He tosses the leaflets into the compound: "The boys may pick up and read the messages at their leisure tomorrow morning."

Sriram's subsequent career—he becomes an arsonist, a bomber, he derails trains—is narrated in a single paragraph. The reason is clear. The first episode is available for treatment in the dry, comic manner that Narayan favours, but the later incidents are not, and so they must be glossed over. Sriram is a dreamy young man. Nothing much in the outside world except for Bharati impinges on his dreaminess. Narayan is well practised in the depiction of such characters, and Sriram is utterly convincing. But the chief function of the novelist's skill, here, is to save the fabulist from the need to offer any serious account of the political implications of Sriram's career. Narayan suggests clearly enough that Sriram is wrong to be diverted from Gandhi's kind of nationalism to Chandra Bose's, but since Sriram is scarcely represented as a responsible moral agent, Narayan avoids the obligation either to indicate why Sriram is wrong or to assess the gravity of his error.

At the end of the novel Sriram asks Gandhi's permission to marry Bharati. Gandhi asks Bharati if she finds the proposal agreeable:

Bharati bowed her head and fidgeted.

"Ah, that is a sign of the dutiful bride," said the Mahatma.

After her parents' death Bharati was "practically adopted by the local Sevak Sangh." Her life has been devoted to the Independence struggle. She is strong-minded, fearless, and ignores most of the traditional restrictions placed on the behaviour of Indian women. She walks alone through rough countryside to meet Sriram at the ruined temple where he has his hide-out. She handles his inept sexual advances quite unhysterically. She gives herself up to imprisonment without fuss, and she risks death in the partition riots calmly. It is curious to see such a woman at the very end of the novel revert to the stereotype of the coyly blushing Indian bride.

This is just one example of what is surely the oddest fact about Waiting for the Mahatma. Narayan contrives to celebrate India's independence, because he can represent it as having changed almost nothing. When Sriram is released from prison, the waiter in a local restaurant and Jagadish both complain of the country's disorganisation and the government's ineptitude:

"We ought to rejoice that it is our own people that are blundering, isn't that so?" Sriram asked, some of his irresponsible spirit returning.

The tone of this whole passage is odd. There is the novelist's wry amusement at the dashing of millenarian hopes; but there is also, one senses, a queer satisfaction, as though Narayan is reassured that what was a muddle when the British ruled will go on being a muddle now that they have left. Walking down his own street Sriram sees life going on as it always had done. He thinks:

Why could he not have lived like these folk without worries of any kind or any extra adventures: there seemed to be a quiet charm in a life verging on stagnation, and no change of any kind.

This is a moment of lassitude, and yet one feels that Narayan's strange achievement is to invest what might seem the most dramatic moment in recent Indian history, India's accession to independence, with something of that quiet charm.

The surprising transformation of Bharati into a traditional Indian bride is one aspect of this: it is a somewhat desperate stratagem by which Narayan reassures himself and reassures the reader that the process by which India won its independence has not unloosed any uncharming forces for social change. But crucial to the whole enterprise is the representation of Gandhi. It seems obvious that Gandhi, apparently despite but in fact because of his claim to be an orthodox Hindu, threatened a radical, for Narayan an alarming, reorganisation of Indian society.

Throughout the novel Narayan contrives at once to celebrate Gandhi and to defuse his threat. One example must suffice. When he visits Malgudi, Gandhi politely declines an invitation to stay at the municipal chairman's luxurious house, and chooses instead to stay in the outcaste colony, among the sweepers. It is a symbolic challenge to the caste system and Narayan unambiguously applauds it. But caste is the principle on which traditional Indian society, the society that Narayan sees as possessed of a quiet charm, relies for its stability. Narayan's response is to enclose Gandhi's symbolic challenge within the fabular life of a saint. Incidents in such a life are contemplated with religious awe, but they are invested with an autonomous rather than an exemplary value. Gandhi's action is proper, saintly: it is admired, but with an admiration that does not have uncomfortable social consequences. That is why Gandhi's response when Sriram confesses his terrorist activities is not at all surprising:

"We will hear if there has been anything so serious as to warrant my going on a fast again. Do you know how well a fast can purify?"

Narayan's Gandhi shows no concern to establish whether Sriram has killed or maimed, no concern for his victims. His worry is that Sriram may have polluted himself: his concern is to fix on the appropriate purification ritual. It is a response explicable only in terms of the caste feeling that, earlier in the novel. Gandhi has seen it as his business calculatedly to outrage, and it is appropriate to the novel's benign conclusion, in which Narayan salutes the birth of a new nation, the moment when everything has changed, and yet magically, charmingly, everything stays just the same.

In The Painter of Signs Bharati becomes Daisy, Sriram becomes his near-namesake Raman, and the place of Gandhi is taken by—no one. Narayan is not a rash man. Like Sriram, Raman is an orphan. He lives not with his grandmother but with an old aunt, and like Sriram's grandmother the aunt leaves Malgudi to live out her last days in Benares. Raman shares Sriram's detachment. In The Painter of Signs it is signalled by Narayan's use of a narrative technique in which Raman's actual words are supplemented by unspoken speeches in which Raman expresses those feelings that he is too polite, too timorous, or too canny to voice. Like Sriram, too, he is impelled by love to give up his familiar life for the uncomfortable lot of the political campaigner. He accompanies Daisy as she tours the surrounding villages spreading the message of birth control.

Bharati, whose name proclaims her Indianness, is replaced by Daisy—"What a name for someone who looked so very Indian, traditional and gentle!" She has many of Bharati's best qualities. She is careless of physical comfort, self-assured, independent, and utterly committed to her mission. But Bharati's struggle was to secure India's independence; Daisy's is to control the growth of India's population. Whereas the one project secures Narayan's hearty—if, as I have tried to show, oddly complex—approval, the other seems to him not so much mistaken as sacrilegious. Bharati is a disciple of the Mahatma, Daisy of some unnamed missionary who has appointed her an officer in his campaign to spread propaganda for birth control throughout India. But there is no need for me to imitate Narayan's reticence. Daisy is a Sanjayite. Waiting for the Mahatma is transformed into The Painter of Signs to mark the difference between the idea of nationhood inspired by Gandhi, and the idea that replaced it, the idea most strikingly embodied not in the person of Indira Gandhi, but in that of her son. Raman carries the tools of his trade in a shoulder bag decorated with a "bust of Gandhi printed in green dye." It is a bag that the reader knows from another of Narayan's novels, The Guide, where it is carried by Raju's uncle, but here it bears an added significance. It signals that Gandhi has, as it were, been assimilated into the fabric of Indian life, that Gandhi's achievement was to enrich without damaging the complex web of social relationships in which Narayan finds his Indian identity incorporated. Narayan represents the new Gandhianism as an attempt to rend that fabric, to cut it with a surgeon's knife.

There is much that Narayan admires in Daisy and, by implication, in the social campaign that she represents. He is aware, as Raman's survey of the venalities of Malgudi's public and business life makes clear, of the corruption that it opposes. He can admire, too, Daisy's steely idealism, her energy, her willingness selflessly to give herself up to a cause. She is, after all, a Sanjayite, and Sanjay Gandhi's achievement had this in common with the Mahatma's, that he activated the social consciences of a sizeable proportion of India's best young people. He took an idealism which a few years before might have dissipated itself in the futile and ugly violence of Naxalite revolution, and disciplined it, gave it an outlet in the service of the state rather than in its destruction. In his characterisation of Daisy, Narayan accepts as much. To understand why Daisy, in some ways so admirable, is at last bitterly repudiated, we must understand Narayan's response to sex and to children.

In Waiting for the Mahatma nothing about Gandhi is stressed more than his love of children. He distributes the fruit and flowers he is given to the children that he meets. In Malgudi, at the municipal chairman's house, he shares his couch with a little sweeper boy and feeds him the chairman's oranges. The orphan children, victims of the partition riots, are his special care. Almost his last thought before he is killed is to ask after the health of one such child, a girl he has named Anar, pomegranate bud, and to give Bharati apples and oranges to take to the children. His love of children is not so much an aspect of his character as one of the proper badges of his saintliness. He is not like Marx, writing Das Kapital with children balanced on his knees. That image works to characterise Marx, to supplement his austere identity as a political philosopher with the human qualities of the family man. Gandhi's love of children is more like Christ's. He savours the frisky energy of young life with a holy relish, as a way of marking as movingly as possible his loving care of all humanity. Daisy is carefully established as his antitype:

She never patted a child or tried any baby-talk. She looked at them as if to say, You had no business to arrive—you lengthen the queues, that's all.

At Malgudi station the stationmaster assembles his children before Gandhi "as if on a drill parade." "Why don't you let them run about and play as they like?" asks Gandhi. When Daisy leaves a village the children are assembled to bid her goodbye:

Daisy looked at them critically. "Don't suck your thumb, take it out, otherwise you will stammer," she said to one. To another one she said, "Stand erect, don't slough." She turned to their mother and added, "Correct posture is important. Children must be taught all this early in life." She was a born mentor, could not leave others alone, children had better not be born, but if born, must take their thumbs out of their mouths, and avoid slouching.

The contrast needs no underlining, nor, perhaps, does what it implies. Daisy's resistance to the growth of India's population is represented as a perverse refusal to accept and to rejoice in the processes of life, an attempt to substitute a stiff, sterile angularity for the prolific, leaping spontaneity that is found at once in the movements of playing children and in the patterns of Indian dance and architecture, and signifies in all three the divinely generous creativity that assures us of the presence of the gods within the world.

Narayan plays fair by Daisy. The spokesman for the religious point of view is a cantankerous, boastful, and thoroughly unattractive old priest, keeper of an image of the Goddess of Plenty: "Be careful, you evil woman, don't tamper with God's designs. He will strike you dead if you attempt that." But Narayan's distance from the priest's style does not mark any serious disagreement with his point of view. Raman's aunt, as Narayan's old women often are, is the mouthpiece of the traditional wisdom: "Isn't it by God's will that children are born?" Raman responds with a joke: "But our government does not agree with God." It is a serious joke.

But what follows? Daisy visits a village where the population has increased by 20% in a year. She responds vigorously:

"Has your food production increased twenty per cent? Have your accommodations increased twenty per cent? I know they haven't. Your production has increased only three per cent in spite of various improved methods of cultivation…."

Narayan pokes fun at this display of statistical earnestness, but to mock the style of Daisy's speech is not to challenge its substance, and what Daisy spells out in her gauche, bureaucratic manner is the fact of starvation. Narayan has nothing to say to this. He can offer in reply only Raman's bland assurance that though the children may be starving they appear perfectly healthy:

Malgudi swarmed with children of all sizes, from toddlers to four-footers, dust-covered, ragged—a visible development in five years. At this rate they would overrun the globe—no harm; though they looked famished, their brown or dark skins shone with health and their liquid eyes sparkled with life.

One remembers Naipaul's weighty charge that in Narayan religion is an excuse for indifference to the sufferings of others, that his Hindu piety breeds, and is a disguise for, callousness.

To Narayan, sexuality is first of all a threat, a dangerous impulse that must be struggled against, Sriram and Raman, pricked by sexual desire, both try to follow Gandhi's remedy for the control of lustful thoughts: "Walk with your head down looking at the ground during the day, and with your eyes up looking at the stars at night." But both fail. Raman tries to rape Daisy, and Sriram is only saved from raping Bharati by his sexual inexperience. When she visits him in his temple refuge, he notices "her left breast moving under her white Khaddar sari," and makes a clumsy, frantic, sexual assault on her. After it is over she rebukes him hesitantly, unhappily: "He had never seen her so girlish and weak. He felt a momentary satisfaction that he had quashed her pride and quelled her turbulence." Male sexuality is darkened, Narayan believes, by other desires—sadism, the urge to dominate. More than Bharati is threatened, for desire releases even in the mild and diffident Sriram impulses which, if unrestrained, would make impossible the continuation of any society that Narayan could recognise as civilised.

But Narayan is no ascetic. Sexuality threatens social stability, but it is also true that a test, possibly the crucial test, of a society's value is whether in restraining the sexual instinct it allows that instinct to be fulfilled. Lust must first of all become love. In The Painter of Signs the process is beautifully traced. "Do you ever recollect the face of the woman whose thighs you so long meditated on at the river-steps?", Raman asks himself, and then he visits Daisy in her office:

A side glance convinced him that the full sunlight on her face made no difference to her complexion, only he noticed a faint down on her upper lip and the vestige of a pimple on her right cheek.

When Raman notices that pimple it is the proof that his generalised capacity for lust has yielded a particular inclination to love. But love, even love genuine enough in its way, like Raju's for Rosie in The Guide, is still a dangerous and a destructive emotion. It is redeemed only within marriage, when it is constrained within the larger social organisation.

Bharati agrees to marry Sriram only if Gandhi gives the couple his permission. Gandhi stands to her in place of father, and so Bharati does no more than show proper filial duty in requiring his consent. But for Narayan the convention embodies a deep truth: that love can be fulfilled only through an act of submission in which the lover submits his love to the higher duty of obedience. It follows that love is redeemed only within a society that exerts over its members a traditional authority. Daisy becomes Raman's mistress, and promises to be his wife. But the novel ends when she hears of a dramatic increase in the population of Nagari, packs her bags, and leaves Malgudi and Raman both. She could not behave otherwise. She is unable to make that obeisance to traditional authority without which. Narayan believes, love can never be other than a capricious and a destructive emotion, and she cannot do so because she has committed her life to a cause that requires her to view such authority as an obstructive and antiquated set of prejudices.

Like Waiting for the Mahatma, The Painter of Signs is both a novel and a fable. It is a novel about a love affair that goes wrong, and a fable about Sanjayism. At the end of Waiting for the Mahatma Sriram and Bharati prepare to marry and accept responsibility for the upbringing of 30 orphans. The life that they embark on so happily is Gandhi's proper memorial, for this achievement was to instil in his followers a sense of social responsibility, of the duty a man owes his fellows, that, before Gandhi, had scarcely figured as a part of the Hindu tradition. But Narayan could celebrate Gandhi's success only because it had been accomplished without disrupting that subtle interweaving of familial duty, proverbial wisdom, custom and religious law which constitutes the authority that guarantees the most precious of human freedoms, the freedom to love. At the end of The Painter of Signs Raman, abandoned by his aunt and abandoned by Daisy, cycles towards the Boardless Hotel, "that solid, real world of sublime souls who minded their own business." That is, I think, the only bitter sentence in the whole of Narayan's oeuvre. Daisy is left to devote her life to the express on of a social concern unschooled by love, and such a concern breeds inevitably hatred and violence. Raman is left with the shrunken view that the sublimest state to which a human being can aspire is that of minding his own business. It is a personal tragedy for Raman and Daisy, but it figures a national tragedy for India.

Shiva Naipaul, V. S. Naipaul's brother, ends a vitriolic assessment of Sanjay Gandhi's achievement by quoting these sad words spoken by a sociologist at Delhi University:

"Sanjay did express a certain dark side of the Indian personality. I recognize that darkness in myself. Sometimes," he said slowly, deliberately, "when you look around you, when you see the decay and the pointlessness, when you see, year after year, this grotesque beggarly mass ceaselessly reproducing itself like some … like some kind of vegetable gone out of control … suddenly there comes an overwhelming hatred. Crush the brutes! Stamp them out! It's a racial self-disgust some of us develop towards ourselves … that is the darkness I speak about…."

Daisy is a zealot not a Kurtz, but for all that there is much in the anonymous sociologist's words to remind us of The Painter of Signs. One thinks, for example, of Daisy's ill-concealed contempt for the villagers whose lives she is trying to improve. That it is a racial contempt is lightly indicated by her name, and by the impudent transformation of her mentor into a Christian missionary. But Narayan is less concerned to apportion blame than he is to lament the outcome of a story in which Daisy and Raman are both of them the losers.

It is odd that V. S. Naipaul, who, in recent years, has travelled the world as a self-appointed missionary intent on the destruction of all human illusions, and has found everywhere material to feed his capacity for bleak and unforgiving disdain, should find in the Emergency glimmers to inspire a wan hope, whereas Narayan, whose temperament seems of all major modern writers the sunniest, should contemplate the same events and arrive at last at a mood very like despair.

The contrasting responses are the product of profound differences between the two men. They are differences of temperament and of religious belief: they are also political differences. "Narayan," William Walsh insists "is not a political novelist," and there is obvious truth in his contention. Raman speaks for Narayan in finding Daisy's lack of humour wearing ("Why shouldn't we also laugh a little while preventing births?") and a lively sense of humour does not fit easily with disciplined political commitment.

Political writing characteristically flattens language in an effort to render it a medium fit to communicate unambiguous meaning. Narayan loves language for its playfulness, its mischievous tendency to subvert the flat, univocal intentions of its user. "QUIT INDIA," writes Sriram on every available wall. What message could be plainer—until a passing Indian asks why he is being asked to leave his own country, and another, troubled by the uproar that Sriram's arrival has caused, suggests that he add an "e" to his message, and appeal instead for a little quiet. Raman is an artist in his way. Calligraphy is a joy to him: he delights in "letters, their shape, and stance, and shade." Narayan shares with his hero the belief that art has an intrinsic value as unrelated to any extrinsic purpose the artist might serve as Raman's pleasure in his craft is to the motives of the businessmen who commission his signs. When Raman abandons all his other trade and binds himself to the endless reproduction of Daisy's single message, he is, among other things, a type of the artist who puts his talent at the service of a political campaign, and Narayan feels any such decision as constricting. But George Orwell reminds us that for a writer to choose to be nonpolitical is itself a political act; and it seems clear that in Narayan's case the rejection of politics is the expression of a deep-rooted conservatism, a comprehensive hostility to radical change.

Narayan's novels begin when Malgudi is threatened by some newcomer, which may be the Mahatma or the movies, a taxidermist or a dancing girl. Narayan flirts with the danger, but the novel ends only when the threat has been removed, when it has been blunted by the repressive tolerance of traditional India, or when it has been exposed as a rakshasha, an evil demon that, because it is evil, necessarily destroys itself. The admiration that Naipaul felt for such a writer was never likely to be other than fragile, puzzled, for Naipaul's achievement is as clearly built upon his sense of himself as deracinated, his painful and proud insistence on living in a free state, as Narayan's is founded on his participation in the values, the prejudices, the culture of the society that he depicts.

The vision of two writers so essentially opposed could never tally. We can ask of each only that he submit his vision honestly to the test of an undoctored reality. In Waiting for the Mahatma Narayan studiously, and with considerable flair, avoids so difficult and dangerous a procedure. In The Painter of Signs he does not. There is reckless honesty in his refusal to counter Daisy's statistics with anything more substantial than Raman's dogged insistence that starvation is perfectly compatible with glowing good health. And there is honesty, too, in the flimsiness of the consolation he offers—to himself, to his readers, and to those suffering from the ministrations of Daisy and her less scrupulous real-life colleagues. It is written on a ribbonwide slip of paper, and offered for sale at a price of five paisa by a "professor" who sits each day by the fountain outside the Malgudi town hall. It consists of just three words, "This will pass."