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Elective English—III

Notes There are fourteen novels in the oeuvre – enough to create a world. Enthusiasts of his work will
read them all and return to them repeatedly.
Narayan’s life spanned the 20th century, which meant that he belonged to both an old world and
a new. At the time of his birth in 1906, the British Raj, that astonishing imperial conceit, was
firmly in place, as were those iron-clad notions of caste that were to prove so difficult to shrug
off. The British presence in India had brought with it a large civil service, an educational system,
and railways – to all of which institutions the people of the subcontinent took with enthusiasm.
However, it had also brought with it a language, and the literature, which that language created,
and it is this, which proved a most productive legacy.
Although Narayan did not draw attention to his personal life, he did write a memoir, My Days,
which tells us a great deal about his boyhood years and the inception and development of his
literary career. His childhood was typical of that of a middle-class boy of the time. His father
was the headmaster of a school, a somewhat stern figure in his professional life, and this
connection with the world of education is very much apparent in the earlier novels, where
schools, colleges, and the whole business of becoming educated play a major role. His father’s
job required mobility, and Narayan spent a number of childhood years living with his
grandmother in Madras. Eventually, though, he joined his parents in Mysore, where he attended
the school presided over by his father. He became a voracious reader, wading through the books
and magazines, which arrived on his father’s desk for the school library.
As he wrote in My Days:
My father did not mind our taking away whatever we wanted to read – provided we put them
back on his desk without spoiling them, as they had to be placed on the school’s reading-room
table on Monday morning. Therefore, our weekend reading was full and varied. We could
dream over the advertisement pages in the Boys’ Own Paper or the Strand Magazine. Through
the Strand, we made the acquaintance of all.
English writers: Conan Doyle, Wodehouse, W.W. Jacobs, Arnold Bennett, and every English
fiction writer worth the name . . . Through Harper’s and the Atlantic, and American Mercury we
attained glimpses of the New World and its writers.
This sense of distance, of being a participant in a culture and yet not being of it, is a familiar
feature of the literature of what is now the British Commonwealth and it is vividly portrayed in
Narayan’s novels. Colonialism hurt and damaged those subjected to it, but it would be inaccurate
to portray the process as being a simple matter of subjugation and humiliation; it was far more
complex than that.

Narayan remained in India – an Indian writer who was happy to be read by those outside India
but who remained firmly within the world into which he had been born. The young Narayan
was not a great scholar. Having failed his university entrance examinations, he spent a year
reading and writing before he eventually succeeded in being admitted to the BA course at
Maharaja’s College.
During this year he acquired a copy of a book called How to Sell your Manuscripts and started to
send his literary efforts off to magazines in London. He met with no success, encountering for
the first time those pieces of paper so familiar, and yet so devastating, to the aspiring writer – the
printed rejection slip. In due course, he completed his studies and graduated as a Bachelor of
Arts. There then followed various attempts by his father and others to secure him a position.
These were mostly unsuccessful, although they eventually bore fruit in the shape of a teaching
post where he was immediately required to teach Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur to a class of burly
and uncooperative boys who had no interest in poetry. His teaching career was a dismal failure
and shortly afterwards he walked out of the school and returned home. That was that: he would
become a writer. How many have made that decision, and how many have failed. And how
many aspiring writers have written their first novel in the belief that it is fiction, only to

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