u - - - - - I ‘ffi_-_-_j

A STUDY OF REPRESENTATIVE
lNDO-ENGLISH NOVEUSTS

Thesis for the Degree of Ph. D.
MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY
UMA GANVESAN PARAMESWARAN
1972

“4%

g.)
. LIBRARY

Michigan State
University

   
   
    

 
 

This is to certify that the

thesis entitled

A STUDY OF REPRESENTATIVE
INDO-ENGLISH NOVELISTS

presented by

Uma Ganesan Parameswaran

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

Ph .D . 11ng in English#_

[ 9 162m 2/ ML

Major professox

Date February , 19 72

0-7839

     

E: ‘ v
alumna av "

HM ,& SINS‘
BM‘W INC.

LIBRARY BINDERS

@gws‘

ABSTRACT

A STUDY OF REPRESENTATIVE
INDO-ENGLISH NOVELISTS
BY

Uma Ganesan Parameswaran

Indo-English literature, an offshoot of the
British Raj in India, came into being early in the nine-
.teenth century in the eastern province of Bengal. Three
stages are discernible in its development. Early Indo-
English literature is characterized by imitation of the
English Romantics and early Victorians. The second stage
consists of natively nurtured writers who were either
naturally or intentionally inclined to creating an Indo-
English idiom and atmosphere in their work. 'The third
stage, which overlaps the second to a greater degree
than the second overlaps the first, comprises writers
who earlier or later became so anglicized as to be
alienated from the heartbeat of Indian life.

In south India, Indo-English writing followed the
same basic pattern of early writers--native-talents--

native-aliens mentioned above, but since writing in

English started only in the last decades of the

Uma Ganesan Parameswaran

nineteenth century, the first stage is short. This dis-
sertation is a study of representative south Indian
novelists.

The first chapter is introductory, giving a
brief survey of the origins, development, and future
of Indo-English literature. In the second chapter a
representative early writer, T. Ramakrishna, is
analyzed, and it is seen that his historical romances
owe much to Sir Walter Scott and also to regional folk-
lore. It is a major characteristic of early writers to
adapt regional tales and folklore to create a novel
modeled on Scott's hiStorical romances.

The third chapter is focused on R. K. Narayan,
the best-known of Indo-English novelists. The thesis is
that Narayan's work is a combination of native genius and
poor craftsmanship. This chapter, the longest in the
dissertation, is in three parts. In the first part,
Narayan's literary output is evaluated by applying
general criteria of literary analysis; in the second

part is analyzed waiting for the Mahatma where the

 

quality of poor craftsmanship is more in evidence than
the quality of native genius; the theme of paternal love
is traced in the third part and it is seen that Narayan
is at his best when handling this theme.

Native-aliens, such as Kamala Markandaya and

Balachandra Rajan who are studied in the fourth chapter,

Uma Ganesan Parameswaran

have more expertise than any of the other writers but
they fall short in native genius. The later novels of
Kamala Markandaya unmistakably show that she has lost
contact with the Indian setting and way of life.

The fifth and last chapter considers Raja Rao
who transcends all categories mentioned above. His
three novels are like a trilogy on the Blakean idea of
Innocence, Experience, and Higher Innocence. Raja Rao,
more than any other novelist, has realized the potentials
of Indian writing in English. It is an irony that English
should have been ousted from India by politicians just

as Indo-English literature was coming into its own.

A STUDY OF REPRESENTATIVE

INDO-ENGLISH NOVELISTS

BY

Uma Ganesan Parameswaran

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1972

© Copyright by
UMA GANESAN PARAMESWARAN

1972

Dedicated to

My Mother and My Daughter

ii

AC KNOWLEDGMENT S

I sincerely thank
Professor C. David Mead for his guidance,

Professor Walter E. Swayze for his interest
and encouragement,

The Canada Council for a doctoral award,
and

My husband who has paid heavily for this
degree.

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter Page
I. INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . 1
II. NOSTALGIA: THE HISTORICAL ROMANCES OF
T. WAKRISI-INA . C O C C O O C O C C 23
III. NATIVE GENIUS: R. K. NARAYAN . . . . . . 42
IV. NATIVE-ALIENS AND EXPATRIATES: KAMALA MARK-
ANDAYA AND BALACHANDRA RAJAN . . . . . . 116
V. THE LONE SURVIVOR: RAJA RAO . . . . . . 183

BIBLIOGRAPHY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232

iv

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

The story of Indo-English literature is similar
to that of many other literatures that were born in the
wake of the colonial and missionary expansions of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is a bastard
child of Britain and a British colony, having, charac-
teristically enough, Christian missionaries as foster-
parents. What makes Indo—English culture different from
many other offshoots of the colonial and missionary
empires is that it is only a minor facet of the complex,
crystalline structure that characterizes Indian civili-
zation. Likewise, Indo-English literature is only a
minor chapter in the history of the country's literatures.
Sanskrit and Tamil had a written literature long before
the beginning of the Christian era and an oral tradition
predating the written by a thousand years. Indo-English
writing seems immature and insignificant when placed
alongside India's classical literatures. Even compared

to the modern vernacular literatures which have made

rapid and remarkable strides in the last hundred years,
Indian writing in English is only a minor unit. And com-
pared to the promise of its beginnings and the fine
achievement of contemporary writers, the future appears
bleak, offering little but the prospect of extinction.
Even so, Indo-English literature is worth critical study
because it is a distinct entity and has produced writers
of great caliber, such as Rabindranath Tagore and Raja
Rao.

Like other Anglo-colonial literatures, Indo-
English literature was until recently ignored by Britain
except for occasional patronizing criticism, and dis-
claimed if not ostracized by the native people. But
within the last decade the tide has turned in favor of
Commonwealth literatures. They have become the focus of
interest among critics and casual readers. More signifi-
cant contribution has been made in the creative and criti-
cal fields of almost every Commonwealth literature in the
last decade than in the ten decades preceding it.

However, unlike other Anglo-colonial literatures,
Indo-English literature seems destined to die young.
This Cassandrian prognostication about its imminent
extinction is based on a realistic appraisal of current
political trends and educational statistics, not on
baseless pessimism. Indo-English literature has owed

its existence to a peculiar concatenation of political

circumstances, and the political scene today precludes
any optimism regarding the continuance of English.

The early missionaries had introduced English
education to bring more converts more quickly into the
Christian fold; the British had subsidized English edu-
cation in order to consolidate their power through
native loyalists. Both had claimed altruistic rationales.
Similarly, Indian politicians of today have banished
English, ostensibly on such high-sounding principles as
strengthening of national identity and perpetuation of
regional sub-cultures, but their policy is rooted in
practical selfishness that seeks to consolidate their
own power. That they have erected a Babel and set in
motion a process of divisiveness seems to be of minor
importance.

A brief survey of certain landmarks in Indian
history will throw light on the origins and future of
Indo-English literature.

The two most significant dates in this context
are March 7, 1835, and September 14, 1949. On March 7,
1835, the Council under Governor-General William Bentinck
passed a Minute on Education making English the medium
of instruction in government-subsidized schools; in
effect the Minute made English the official language
of British India. This administrative move was the

culmination of a social movement which in turn had been

set in motion by the political fact of British paramountcy
in the sub-continent. At the head of the social movement
stood Raja Rammohan Roy (1774-1833). A titan among men,
Rammohan Roy ushered India into a new age. He regenerated
Hinduism by breaking down outdated traditions, revolution-
ized social values by condemning polygamy and widow-
immolation, advocated far-reaching fiscal reforms,
championed the freedom of the press, and what is most
relevant here, urged the introduction of English edu-
cation. His energetic canvassing for the cause of
English education drew the support of Thomas Babington
Macaulay. As President of the Committee of Inquiry into
Public Instruction, Macaulay's voice carried the issue,
and the Orientalists who had been advocating Arabic and
Sanskrit education were defeated. Macaulay's speeches
on the subject exhibit the idealism and rhetoric for
which early Indo-English writers admired him; they also
show the qualities of self-interest, political fore-
sight, altruism, and arrogance which characterized the
British attitude towards their colonies. All of these
traits, except self-interest, are present in the con-
cluding lines of Macaulay's speech to the British House
of Commons in 1833:

It may be that the public mind of India may expand

under our system till it has outgrown that system;

that by good government we may educate our subjects

into a capacity for better government; that, having
become instructed in European knowledge, they may,

in some future age, demand European institutions.
Whether such a day will ever come, I know not. But
never will I attempt to retard it. Whenever it comes,
it will be the proudest day in English history. To
have found a great people sunk in the lowest depths
of slavery and superstition, to have so ruled them
as to have made them desirous and capable of all the
privileges of citizens, would indeed be a title
to glory all our own. The scepter may pass away
from us. . . . But there are triumphs which are
followed by no reverse. There is an empire exempt
from all natural causes of decay. Those triumphs
are the pacific triumphs of reason over barbarism;
that empire is the imperishable empire of our arts
and our morals, our literature and our laws.1
Indian writing in English had started a generation
earlier but now, after the country-wide introduction of
English education, it gathered considerable momentum.
Bengal led the way. Today its star is set, but let it
not be forgotten that between 1800 and 1940 this eastern
province produced more numerous and greater writers,
leaders, reformers, artists, saints and thinkers than
the rest of the country put together. Among those who
wrote in English are Henry Derozio (1809-1831), Romesh
Chunder Dutt (1848-1909), Aru Dutt (1854-1874), Toru
Dutt (1856-1877), Rabindranath Tagore (1861—1941),
Manmohan Ghose (1867—1924), Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1950)
and Sarojini Naidu (1879-1949). The writing of these
earlier figures is characterized by Victorian ideals and
Romantic diction even though several of them lived well
into the twentieth century.

Partly due to certain educational policies and

Partly due to the innate Indian reverence for tradition,

Victorians held the field in India long after they had
been eclipsed in their native England. As late as the
1930's Indian orators continued to speak in the vein and
vocabulary of the old masters--Macaulay, Carlyle, Burke;
Indian writers continued to model themselves on Scott
and Dickens. It was only after the 1920's that such
writers as Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao discarded the
highflown diction of the earlier generation and started
developing an Indo-English language that transmitted
the flavor of the vernacular, but these writers could
also command the King's English if they so wished. Some
other good writers, such as Balachandra Rajan and Kamala
Markandaya, adhered for the most part to correct English
usage. Still others, like R. K. Narayan and K. Nagarajan,
did not consciously cultivate either of these styles but
rather wrote in the language naturally spoken by the
average educated Indian. The language used by their
characters, and occasionally by themselves, has cliches,
officialese, Babuisms and picturesque translations of
vernacular phrases and idioms. However, these writers
differed from Anand and Raja Rao in that theirs was not
conscious experimentation but spontaneous naturalness.
While the major writers of the entire two-hundred-
year span have had a knowledge of the language and of
their art, the minor writers have fallen short of one

or the other. The minor writers till the 1930's wrote

pleasing, correct English even though their art was imi-
tative and mediocre. After the 1930's there was rapid
deterioration in the standard of English, and we have a
plethora of fiction that falls outside the pale of liter-
ature even though it is classified in libraries as liter-
ature. This deterioration was due to the growing antago-
nism for the language of the rulers; the national movement
was gathering impetus during the thirties, and the boycott
of the language was in line with the boycott of everything
British. When India gained independence in 1947, this
antagonism culminated in the abolition of English in

the schools, and the imposition of Hindi. On September 14,
1949, the Constituent Assembly, after several days of
acrimonious debate, passed Clause 343 of the Constitution
which made Hindi the official language of the Union.
English was to be concurrently used till 1965.

During the fifteen-year period granted for the
transition from English to Hindi, there were periodic
debates and demonstrations by pro-English, non-Hindi-
speaking groups. Today there is silence on this front
because the fervor for English has been replaced by
frenzied fervor for the regional language and fanatic
antagonism toward Hindi. Tamilians, who were the
staunchest supporters of English, are now busy throwing
out all languages other than Tamil from Tamilnadu (Madras

State). It is difficult to decide which is the more

absurd and impractical step--the current trend in Tamilnadu
to substitute unknown but pure Tamil words for long-
accepted, simple English words (for example, "perundu"

for "bus") or lexicographer Raghuvira's Hindi in which
long-accepted English words are given their exact meaning
in simple Hindi by means of long compound words (for
example, "electric bulb" being translated as "light-
throwing-round-egg" and "necktie" being rendered as
"loincloth-for-the-neck").

English, then, has been discarded by government
and the masses. Though it continues to survive, the end
obviously is near unless some radical political upheaval
changes the trend. It is periodically pointed out that
some of the best works in Indo-English literature have
been written after independence. David McCutchion, for
example, begins his volume of critical essays with the
words, "By a strange irony, Indian literature in English
has been flourishing since Independence more successfully
than it ever flourished before."2 It is not at all
strange; on the other hand, it is most natural and
could not have been otherwise. In the earlier decades
there were weighty issues to be taken up--a nation to be
aroused, freedom to be won--and all talent went into the
more urgent cause of nationalism. Another factor is that
higher education spread to smaller towns and villages

only in the 1920's and 1930's, and this was the period

in which some of the best writers of today had their
education. Let us remember that all the successful
writers of today were born in the days of the British
Raj, and even the younger writers have had English as
the medium of instruction in school and university. Once
the pre-Independence generation dies, as generations
must, we might still have a few Indians writing in
English, but they are likely to be even more alien to
the heartbeat of Indian life than today's expatriate
writers. Once English is ousted from schools, and it
has been ousted from numberless areas already, the
shade of Joseph Conrad (frequently conjured up by
McCutchion and others) notwithstanding, the chances of
a thriving Indo-English literature are slim indeed. That
is why I set 2,000 A.D. as the dirge date for Indo-English
literature. I hOpe time proves this prediction wrong.

Whatever the future may hold for Indo-English
literature, enough works of merit have been published
in the last hundred years to warrant study. This dis-
sertation is an attempt to evaluate and document certain
representative South Indian writers of Indo—English
fiction.

By "South Indians" are meant writers in English3
whose linguistic origin lies within the geographical bounds
of the present states of Tamilnadu (formerly Madras),

Kerala and Mysore, the regional languages of which are

IO

Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada respectively. Since most
of the writers studied here are Tamilians, occasional
references to vernacular works are drawn from Tamil
literature.

By "Indo-English"4 fiction is meant fiction
written in English by Indians; this term is not the
same as "Anglo-Indian" fiction, which denotes fiction
written by Englishmen who spent a fair part of their
lives in India and set a fair proportion of their
novels in India. John Masters, for example, is an
Anglo-Indian novelist.

Fiction published in newspapers and magazines
is not included in this study.

Indo-English writers may be said to fall into
one of four categories: early writers, native-talents,
native—aliens, and a fourth group which consists of
writers whose work transcends chronological or national-
istic categorization. The early South Indians, born
before 1880, were of the first generation in the south
to take up English education. Genuinely grateful to the
British for having introduced them to the literature and
philosophy of the west, they felt impelled to justify
the ways of men to the new gods, to build the bridge

of which E. M. Forster speaks in A Passage to India,

 

the bridge that has never been built, between the

British and Indians; the writings of these early

ll

novelists give us conducted tours of India, past and
present, in a language copied from the works of the
English Romantics and Victorians.

The second group of writers, most of whom
happened to be born between 1895 and 1910, had their
early education before the struggle for independence
had initiated any antagonism for the English language.
When they started their literary careers, circumstances
encouraged them to speak in their natural voice; they
were not overly anxious to write for the British reader
because the growth of English education assured them an
audience from among their compatriots. They did not feel
compelled to build bridges because the increasing momentum
of the national movement precluded the necessity, and
even the possibility; they were not inclined to imitate
English writers or to use King's English because they
realized that Indian literary traditions could be adopted
and adapted to let them express themselves in a language
that was now one of the many Indian languages. In short,
native-talents, as I call these writers, are unanglicized
Indians who write best about unanglicized Indians.

The third group of writers are somewhat younger
than those in the preceding set. These, too, had their
education during the British Raj, but, unlike them,
these writers went abroad early in life. Partly due to

their foreign education, to their own inclination and to

12

the fact that their families had already been anglicized
to a greater extent, these writers became alien to the
heartbeat of Indian life and, at best, have only a
cerebral awareness of it. They may be called native-
aliens. Most of them, Kamala Markandaya, Santha Rama Rau
and Balachandra Rajan, to name only South Indians, are
expatriates. Raja Rao is the only expatriate who cannot
be called a native-alien. Though he left India at the
age of nineteen and has spent much of his life since then
outside India, he remains essentially Indian. Among
South Indians he stands alone, the only writer who has
transcended categories--chronological, generic and
national.

This study is, basically, a critical introduction
to the works of certain representative authors in these
categories. The develOpment and organization of material
varies from chapter to chapter, depending on the area
that has been covered by critics on the particular
writer under scrutiny. Where critical sources are
non-existent, as in the case of Ramakrishna, a seemingly
disproportionate amount of background material and direct
textual quotation is included. The approach is expository
more than analytic. In the second chapter, for example,
the literary and historical milieu are introduced at
length, and the storylines are spelled out. Since the

works of Ramakrishna are not readily available for a

13

reader's reference, direct quotations are used extensively
to convey the author's style within the dissertation itself.

Where primary sources and background material
are readily available but critical sources are negligible,
as in the case of Kamala Markandaya and Balachandra
Rajan, the development is different. The background
is not stressed, nor is the social milieu which, inci-
dentally, appears in the novels themselves; rather, what
is attempted is a critical introduction that covers the
entire canon of their literary work and deals with
exposition and analysis of such aspects as central
themes, conflicts, techniques, images and diction.

In the case of major writers, such as R. K.
Narayan and Raja Rao, the development and organization
are different in yet another way. Their literary achieve-
ment is considerable; so is the amount of scholarship that
is available on the introductory and interpretive aspects
of their fiction. Therefore, in the study of Raja Rao,
whom I consider the foremost of Indo-English novelists,
the introductory approach is omitted altogether in favor
of direct thematic analysis. Since total coverage is
impractical, this study includes an expository essay on
the theme of Shakti in his novels and an analytic essay
on one of his novels.

The approach to Narayan is basically the same,

i.e., there is an in-depth analysis of one of his novels

14

and an expository essay on the theme of paternal love in
his novels and short stories. However, in addition to
these there is a section that gives a general evaluation
of Narayan's art. This section attempts to cover ground
that has not been covered by other critics and also to
re-evaluate certain facets of Narayan's art that have
won somewhat indiscriminate admiration. The tendency to
give disproportionately high admiration for an author is
due to the inability of literary criticism to break away
from a complex syndrome that makes up a country's search
for national identity and international status. Without
in any way discounting the importance of such facts as
progressively better literary output and more discrimi-
nating readership which would naturally inspire a greater
volume of laudatory literary criticism, it must be
recognized that literary criticism of most Commonwealth
literatures is not yet wholly impartial. Just as there
was a proneness, born of a sense of inferiority, for
native critics to downgrade these literatures during the
British Raj, there is a tendency now, born of a sense of
confidence and assertiveness, to lionize leading figures.
This is perhaps the natural course in any country when
it first takes its place in the comity of nations. Like—
wise, foreign criticism, which in earlier times tended
to be somewhat patronizing even when sincere now tends

to be somewhat generous even though sincere.

15

In the case of Indo-English literature, this
issue of objectivity is further complicated by the fact
that it is only one of many literatures and that it is

written in a language that has been expelled, ostensibly

in the interests of national identity. A brief survey of
the progress of scholarship and criticism might help to
bring out these points more clearly.

Till 1940 there were only sporadic reviews in
newspapers and lectures. The pioneer in the cause of
systematic criticism is K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar. A
leading reviewer through the thirties, Srinivasa Iyengar
published two volumes in the forties that formally
turned the sod for Indo-English criticism. These two

volumes--Indo-Anglian Literature (1943) and The Indian

 

 

Contribution to English Literature (l945)--are priceless

 

bibliographical sources in the study of lesser writers.

His latest volume on the subject, Indian Writing in

 

English (1962), is a basic and indispensable reference
book. One must keep in mind, however, that Srinivasa
Iyengar is a generous critic; he has a word of praise

for everyone. Any unfavorable comment he has is tempered
with a favorable one. More serious is his questionable
choice of quotations because of which some writers
(Manjeri Isvaran, for example) suffer. Another short-
coming in this indisputably useful volume is that his
critical lens not only sees some good even in the most

mediocre of writers but is colored by his admiration

16

for the poetry and philosophy of Aurobindo, the composer

of the modern epic, Savitri. This last quality has been

lambasted out of all proportion by certain Indian critics

such as P. Lal, Nissim Ezekiel and Jyotirmoy Datta in

their reviews and references to Srinivasa Iyengar's books.
Between 1945 and 1965 there was a sharp division

of opinion among both critics and writers about the

worth of Indo-English literature. Several writers

turned to the vernacular, repeating the sentiments of

Michael Madhusudhan Dutt (1827-1873) who said:

Let those who feel that they have springs of fresh
thought in them fly to their mother-tongue.5

Interestingly enough, a comparison of the English and
Tamil works of such novelists as Shankar Ram and K. S.
Venkataramani shows that they were more successful in
Tamil though they started their literary careers with
English writing. One of these bilingual writers, Masti
Venkatesa Iyengar, is now a strong activist in the anti-
English lobby and advocates that English be rooted out
altogether because it has stifled regional languages.
Generally, those who maintained that there is no
worth in Indo-English literature were more voluble and
loud than those who attempted to justify it. Indo-
English literature was suspect for several reasons.
There was the charge of anti-nationalism as already
mentioned. There was the charge that these writers

were profiting from the prestige gained by India after

17

independence in the comity of nations and on the eagerness
of Americans to pay handsomely for anything Indian, the
more legendarily Indian (that is, the more full of
nautchgirl-maharaja or poverty-sacred bull motifs) the
higher the price. There was also the charge that the
style and vocabulary of Indian writing in English was
borrowed or colorless. Chalapathi Rau's caustic comment
is representative of this group. He says:

Writing is close to life, but the Indo-Anglians have

little to do with life, its lustiness . . . its

gorgon splendors. The Indo-Anglians crawl about

like the crabs and jellyfish and earthworms of our

intellectualism; they are singers of self-praise.

. . . Indian writing in English is at its best,

composition, and the best of it is translation.

. . . we have no prose; we have strings of words,

gawkishly arranged like beads. There is no rhythm;

there is at best a street-Walker's gait.6

On the other side we have supporters of Indo-

English literature who through articles and university

courses promote the cause. One such group consciously

coming together under a banner is writers workshop.

 

Founded in 1958, it consists of
a group of writers who agree in principle that
English has proved its ability, as a language,
to play a creative role in All-India literature.
On yet another side we have those who, either
through ignorance of vernacular literatures or through
error of judgment, feel that English writing is and will

be superior to other Indian literatures. M. E. Derrett,

author of one of the very few full-length volumes on

18

any aspect of Indo-English literature, exemplifies this

view when she says:
Expression in English can bring a sense of release
to the Indian intellectual as he endeavors to
express the deepest turns and twists of his own
mind. . . . Whatever its future form, it seems
certain that the Indian novel in English will
surpass its counterpart in the regional languages.
By 1962, when the above was written, it was evi-
dent that English, and consequently the Indo-English
novel, was to be ousted from India, and also that the
major vernacular literatures were drawing abreast of or
had already outstripped Indo-English literature. The
modern novel which had been launched by vernacular
writers in mid-nineteenth century had attained a
superior degree of achievement as early as the 1930's.
To name just a few of the well-known writers, we have
Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (1838-1894) and Saratchandra
Chatterji (1876-1938) in Bengali, Prem Chand (1880-1936)
and Mahavir Prasad Dvivedi (1868-1938) in Hindi, and
R. Krishnamurthi (1899-1954) and R. Mahadevan (1913-1957)
in Tamil. It is true that all these novelists were in
varying degrees indebted to English literary traditions
but their work shows that the vernacular novel had come
into its own earlier than the Indo-English novel. A
study of these and more recent novels shows that because
of the rapid adaptation of literary experiments conducted

in western literatures and because of their contact with

the essential Indian life, the contemporary and future

19

vernacular novel is likely to be more prolific and popular

than the Indo-English novel and at least as good.
Comparative merits apart, the Indo-English novel

is an interesting entity and therefore worthy of study.

It is encouraging, therefore, that despite the wrangling

over its merits, there has been steady progress in

serious Indo-English criticism.

Indian journals such as Quest, The LiteraryACri-

 

 

terion and The Literarngalf-Yearly give a prominent
place to the critical aspects while publications such

as Writers workshgp and Illustrated weekly of India

 

emphasize both creative and critical writing in English.

In recent years several volumes of essays have appeared
from India, the more outstanding ones being Critical

Essays on Indian Writing in English, Essays Presented

to Amy G. Stock and Indian Writing in English. Outside
India, there is a growing market for critical articles
both in popular and scholarly periodicals, but the approach
of essays published in them is more introductory than
interpretive because the average reader of such journals

is unfamiliar with the subject. One of the very few
periodicals in which in-depth analyses appear is The
Journal of Commonwealth Literature; the annual bibliography
published in it is the most comprehensive available and is
adequate for research on contemporary writers. Among

organizations for the promotion of critical research in

20

the area of Commonwealth literatures, the foremost is

the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language
Studies (ACLALS) which issues a periodic bulletin on such
issues as work in progress, new journals, news from mem-
ber associations and outline of Commonwealth Literature
courses offered in universities.

The concept of "Commonwealth Literature" is gain-
ing ground, and with it Indo-English criticism is making
some headway. However, among South Indian novelists,
only R. K. Narayan and Raja Rao have been studied in
these publications and study-groups. Of the five other
novelists scrutinized in this dissertation, no critical
work has been done on four; only two full-length articles
have appeared on Kamala Markandaya, other than my own.9

Briefly to sum up the aim and sc0pe of this dis-
sertation, it is a study of representative South Indian
authors from the four categories into which Indo-English
writing may be divided: the early writers who imitated
the style and form of English predecessors to write Indian
historical romances, native-talents or unanglicized
Indians who are more natural and native in their diction
and development, native-aliens or anglicized Indians who
are more sophisticated in their art and diction but less
in contact with the pulse of Indian life, and a fourth

class that consists of those who transcend categories.

21

The following chapter studies a typical Indo-
English historical romance by a typical early-writer.
The historical romance is the first genre to have been
attempted by South Indians. The reason is, probably,
that the nove1--with its emphasis on characterization--
is an import into India where the usual prose form was
a sort of travelog that combined the narrative elements
of a Decameron with the didactic elements of an Aesop's
Fables. Thus, the historical romance, combining as it
does action and moral codes at a simple level, would
naturally be the first form to be assayed by the first
Indo-English writers. It is seen that these romances
combine the form and structure of typical Scott romances
with plots and folklore-patterns drawn from the native
tradition.

The decades during which the early writers pub-
lished their work corresponds to the period in which the
British Empire in India was at its zenith. This political
fact has much to do with the adulatory attitude of the
early writers towards the British. The times about which
he wrote are historical eras which evoke a sense of nos-
talgia and patriotism in the South Indian mind. There-
fore, it is in place here to speak about the times in
which Ramakrishna wrote and the times of which he wrote
'before studying the literary aspects of Ramakrishna's

contribution .

FOOTNOTES

1The Miscellaneous works of Thomas Babington
Macaulay, ed} Lady TrevéIyan (London, 1907), XIX, 192-193.

2David McCutchion, Indian Writing in English
(Calcutta, 1964), p. 3.

3In order to avoid the more cumbersome form—-
"South Indian writers who write or have written in
English"--I use the term "South Indians." However,
where "south" is used merely in its geographical sense,
it is not capitalized.

4K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar popularized the term
"Indo-Anglian" because it can be used both as adjective
and as substantive. Contemporary Indo-English critics use
both terms, "Indo-English" and "Indo-Anglian"; however,
all seem to agree that a distinction should be drawn
between "Anglo-Indian" and these terms.

5Quoted in McCutchion, Indian Writing, p. 20.

6M. Chalapathi Rau, "The Indo-Anglians," The
Illustrated Weekly of India (Bombay) (May 26, 1963), p. 45.

7From the backcover of Writer's Workshgp: A Mis-
gellany of Creative Writing, a bimonthly published from
Calcutta.

8M. E. Derrett, "Why Write in English?" Times
Literary Supplement (August 10, 1962), pp. 584-585.

9"India for the Western Reader: A Study of
Kamala Markandaya's Novels," The Texas Quarterly (Summer,

22

CHAPTER II

NOSTALGIA: THE HISTORICAL ROMANCES

OF T. RAMAKRISHNA

"India likes gods."
"And Englishmen like posing as gods."
--A Passage to India

 

With all the fervor and rituals attendant upon
the installation of an icon in a shrine, statues of
British royalty and heroes were erected all over India
in the decade following the 1857 mutiny (or first
National Struggle, as modern historians would term it.)
Wellesley, with drawn sword on horseback; benevolent
Bentinck, at his desk; Hardinge, Cornwallis, Clive,
they stood in marketplaces and public squares, martial,
noble, triumphant.

Of all these icons, none was more devoutly hailed
than a familiar sculpture of Queen Victoria that appeared
in every city and numberless towns. Victoria Regina
Imperatrix, by the grace of God, Queen Empress of India,
the symbol of the invincible might, the awe-inspiring
majesty, the accepted permanence of the Empire; on a

straightbacked throne atop a stone pedestal she sat,

23

24

in royal regalia, orb and scepter in hand, robe billowing
to the ankles, a somewhat small crown perched on a veiled
head, a broad forehead, chiselled nose and mouth, a
second chin in the making, imperious-yet-rather-tired
eyes surveying her vast empire on which the sun never
set. Mother-worshipers by nature, Hindus readily made
their obeisance to this image, heavy, solid, eternal.
Certainly no one would have thought of moving her then,
though she was to be shuttled about in the thirties and
forties between extreme nationalists who dunked her by
night into the city tanks and British loyalists who
retrieved and reinstated her (also by night, in order

to avoid riots). Later still, the Congress regime of
independent India, with iconoclastic zeal, removed her
altogether from public view. But in the decades follow—
ing the empire-wide celebration of the golden and diamond
jubilees, the British Crown seemed eternally powerful and
infinitely benevolent to many Indians, especially to
those whose imagination had been stirred to life by
contact with the literary and scientific wealth of the
west. Their attitude of reverence, gratitude and loyalty
is obvious in the writings of this age. Their minds
responded actively to certain kinds of English literature
and philosophy such as romantic idylls, philosophical
treatises, idealistic putpourings, reenactments of

history. This accounts for their avid interest in

25

Scott, Dickens, werdsworth, Carlyle, Ruskin and Macaulay,
and their imitation of them.

Writers consciously or unconsciously imitate
predecessors who come nearest their own genius. While
the social reformers and political thinkers copied the
language and styles of Ruskin and John Stuart Mill,
novelists turned to Sir Walter Scott, the perfect model
for the two Indian enthusiasms; story telling and nos-
talgia for an idealized past. In the novel genre, as
in most others, Tamil writers have adapted English
literary techniques to their own literary tradition
and produced literature that surpasses the work of those

who write in English. Kalkil in Ponniyin Chelvan, for

 

example, reconstructs the golden age of the Cholas with
authenticity and vivid dynamism, while Chandilyan, in
his romances, exemplifies writers who use the historical
setting without concerning themselves with research of
fact and social history. Indo-English writers, like
their Tamil counterparts, used the Scott model but built
on and around it with indigenous material. All these
writers are essentially Indian and often essentially
regional, but one can almost see them at work surrounded
by shelves of leather-bound, gilt-edged copies of the
complete works of the Master of Abbotsford. Their novels
have all the familiar Scott silhouettes--high romance,

barehanded struggles, feats of prowess, protestations

26

of lifelong love, songs and poems within the novel, bards
and seers, omens and talismen, tales of old retold and
relived, damsels in distress and knights errant, loyalty-
unto-death followers. An analysis of Ramakrishna's
Padmini reveals all these qualities plus the Indo-English
quality of combining these with native literary tradition
and folklore.

My choice of T. Ramakrishna (Thottakadu Rama-
krishna Pillai) is dictated by several factors. He is
the first South Indian to have published a novel. Rajam
Aiyar's Vaeudeva Sastry appeared serially in 1895-96,
but it was not published as a volume until 1905. Also,
Ramakrishna was born earlier than Rajam Aiyar. Moreover,
Ramakrishna's romances show, more clearly than other
romances, the combination of Scott and native tradition.
They also show an attitude towards the British that was
typical of many English-educated South Indians at the
turn of the century. Yet another factor calling
attention to Ramakrishna's work in this context is the
fact that he sets his romances in the south. A. S. P.
Ayyar, the most prolific of South Indian writers, has
written more and better historical romances but all of
them are set in the north.

Like the Bengalis of the mid-nineteenth century,
Ramakrishna started his literary career with translations

of Indian tales into English. Then he wrote two interesting

27

historical romances--Padmini (1903) and A Dive for Death

 

(1911). Both are subtitled "An Indian Romance," and

this is what they basically are. A Dive for Death is

 

the story of Devamani, daughter of a Tamil Chieftain,
who falls in love with a poor, unknown stranger, Vijia.
Vijia survives fistfights and intrigues, defeats a rival
in an Erroll Flynn sequence at the edge of a cliff and
then gallantly risks his life to save his rival's, and
disappears into a chasm. Three years later, true love
is rewarded and the lovers are united. True to the
tradition of romances, Vijia turns out to be a prince
driven out by a usurper, and, of course, the usurper
is defeated next and the lovers live happily ever after.

Padmini is the story of a tyrant-king's love for
Padmini and her steadfast rejection of him in favor of
the impoverished but noble Chennappa.

The historical event from which these tales
spring, like many other romances in modern Tamil, is
the Battle of Talikota in 1565 which ended forever all
hopes of Hindu paramountcy in the south, just as the
second Battle of Tarain in 1192 had shattered Hindu
power in the north. A digression into history is
necessary here to bring out the nostalgia associated
with this date, 1565.

Muslims invaded north India as early as 637 A.D.,

and sporadic "holy wars" to spread the Prophet's creed

28

and to loot the legendary wealth of Ind had been fought
and won by the Muslims since the very inception of Islam.
Muhammad of Ghor, incensed by his initial failure in 1191
to overcome the Rajputs, returned in 1192 and on the same
battlefield of Tarain, seventy miles north of Delhi, won
a decisive victory and established a Muslim foothold in
the subcontinent which grew in time to encompass all of
northern India. The Vindhya and Satpura mountain ranges
running east-west about the Tropic of Cancer divide India
geographically into the northern plain and the Deccan
peninsula. These natural barriers initially confined the
Sultans of Delhi, but only for a time. The invaders
established themselves firmly in the north and led
periodic campaigns south of the Vindhyas. Constant
threat from the Muslims resulted in a Hindu resistance,
and the Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar came into existence
in 1336. Under the generous patronage of its benevolent
despots Vijayanagar became a center of culture and com-
merce. Of the wealth and martial prowess of Vijayanagar,
Domingo Paes, a Portuguese visitor is said to have written:

Its king has much treasure and many soldiers and many

elephants. . . . In this city you will find men

belonging to every nation and people because of the

great trade which it has and the many precious

stones there, principally diamonds. . . . This is

the best provided city in the world.2
The Empire had 300 seaports, and as the art of shipbuild-

ing had been perfected several centuries earlier, the

empire had invincible command of the seas.

29

Vijayanagar was the stronghold of Hindu culture.
Literature of merit was produced in all four languages--
Sanskrit, Telugu, Tamil and Kannada. Temple architecture
reached new heights of achievement, as evidenced by the
existence of musical pillars and halls of perfect acousti-
cal proportions in temples surviving from the period. In
contrast to the Muslim tradition of confining women in
purdah, the women of Vijayanagar actively participated
in political, literary and social life at all levels.

The kings were liberals in matters of religious tolerance.
Edoardo Barbosa, who visited India from Portugal about
1516 A.D. writes:

The king allows such freedom that every man may

come and go and live according to his own creed

without suffering any annoyance, and without

enquiry, whether he is Christian, Jew, Moor or

Hindu.

The Vijayanagar Empire was its zenith in the
first half of the sixteenth century. But came the bar-
barian onslaught and razed the achievement of two cen-
turies. On January 23, 1565, the combined army of the
Muslim rulers of the north routed the forces of Rama

Raya. For six months the pillage continued. Robert

Sewell, in his monumental work, A Forgotten Empire,

 

records the ravage perpetrated by the invaders, ending

Never perhaps in the history of the world has such
havoc been wrought, and wrought so suddenly, on so
splendid a city . . . in the full plenitude of
prosperity . . . seized, pillaged and reduced to
ruins, amid scenes of savage massacre and horrors
beggaring description.4

30

T. Ramakrishna is a spiritual descendant of the
minstrels who, for decades and centuries after this
Troy, stirred into renewed enthusiasm those who hoped
for a resurrection of the glory that had been. But the
cry for action became, with time, a nostalgic dreaming
for a never-to-be-regained past.

Ramakrishna's Padmini is set in the seventeenth
century when hope had not yet been atrophied into nos-
talgia. The location is one of the many principalities
that had risen on the ruins of Vijayanagar to which fre-
quent mention is made in ballads within the romance. As
with Scott, there are references to specific historical
events in the romances. Though there is no historic
truth to the particular story narrated in Padmini, an
air of probability permeates the plot and reanimates
the setting.

Unlike Scott, Ramakrishna plunges into the action
without long introductions or preamble. Salwa, an
ambitious minister, has usurped the throne of Chandra-
giri and imprisoned its rightful king, Venkataraya, who
is-a descendant of Rama Raya, the last emperor of
Vijayanagar. The story opens with Salwa being almost
moved to remorse by a young minstrel who urges him to
restore the throne to Venkataraya; Salwa's mood swings
from remorse to anger and he orders that the youth be

killed. The minstrel, reminiscent of Thomas Moore's

31

"Minstrel Boy," breaks his harp so that it may never be
used by traitors. His dying prophecy is that the
usurper has called down the doom of his entire race:

Of whom none shall this throne of high renown defile
None to point where thy body crumbled to the dust.5

Salwa sends his trusted servant, Obalu, to kill King
Venkataraya and his family, all of whom are imprisoned
in a dungeon. Then follows a typical Scott scene but,
and this is characteristic of this novelist, it has
distinctly Indian atmosphere. Obalu, on seeing imprisoned
royalty, is stricken with compunction, but he has sworn
fealty to Salwa and cannot but execute the command. The
deposed king, with a magnanimity typical of romantic
heroes, offers to help him out by enjoining his married
son to kill his own family while he, Venktaraya, under-
takes to kill his younger sons, his wife and himself, if
Obalu would kill the princess, his only daughter. All
die except the second son, Srirangaraya, who is spirited
out of the dungeon in a washerman's bundle. The device
of escape is typically Indian; in folklore and in history
we find instances similar to this. For example, Sivaji,
the greatest of Maratha leaders, escaped from his Moghul
prison, in 1666, in a basket meant for fruits.

On his arm the twelve-year-old prince wears a
ruby, the signet stone of the royal house of Vijayanagar.
Needless to say, this proof of his royalty plays an

important role in the denouement.

32

The third chapter takes us ahead in time. Salwa
has established himself securely on the usurped throne.
Hearing of the matchless beauty of a village maiden,
Padmini, he sends his messengers with a proposal of
marriage. But Padmini, a child of nature, opts to con-
tinue her village existence under her parents' roof.
Undeterred, Salwa shifts her parents' roof to his own
grounds by making Padmini's father a court-official.

Ramakrishna's ornate similes are always explicit
though not always syntactically flawless:

Like the stately lotus sprouting out the unsightly,
uninteresting clay, she was born in an uninteresting
and obscure village, and like the servant of the
royal household that comes to a distant place to
pluck the flower and take it to adorn the palace
chambers, she was taken to the palace of Chandragiri
to shine there as a woman among women, and like that
same flower breathing sweetest fragrance when
fiercest beat the sun's rays, the beauties of her
character shone brightest by the rays of royal
favor beating on her at all hours of the day, and
her rugged virtue was shown the most when fiercely
she was attacked with requests and importunities
for marrying her. (P, p. 41).
This simile is one of many instances of the author's
proneness to lengthy, descriptive, Victorian sentences.
It is also an instance of a common flaw in early Indo-
English writers--that of losing sight of the main
parallels.

To facilitate his wooing, Salwa makes Padmini a

lady-in-waiting to his queen, Ambiga. In Ambiga, he

has a loyal and eloquent pleader who importunes Padmini

to accept Salwa's suit. Instead of nurse or older woman,

33

to have one's own wife as a proxy in the wooing might
seem odd to the western reader, but it will strike a
responsive chord in Indians, who are familiar with the
psychological and social acceptance of polygamy even
though the present law of the land forbids it for Hindus.
Ambiga extols Salwa's valor and recounts his singlehanded
encounters with wild boars and with villains. But Pad-
mini is unmoved. She believes in the motto, "I wed whom
I love." To convince her, Ambiga resorts to stories of
Hindu heroines who loved whom they wed. Here Ramakrishna
draws from the wealth of the Mahabharata and of Tamil
folklore. No matter how often they are retold, Indian
readers respond warmly to stories of these ideal wives--
Sita who followed Rama into exile, Savitri who regained
Satyavan from the god of death, Chandramati who helped
Harishchandra adhere to Truth, Kannaki who razed Madurai
to the ground in her blazing anger at the unjust indictment
of Kovalan. Some of Ramakrishna's most uncontrolled out-
bursts of enthusiasm occur when he talks of the Hindu
ideal of womanhood; for example,

Man has thus admitted himself to be the inferior of

the woman. . . . He took care to keep her at the

highest, and exacted from her a higher order of

human virtue, purity and love. Blessed be the

daughters of Ind. (g, p. 47).
Such authorial philosophizing is typical of Ramakrishna,

who himself is typical of Indo-English writers of his-

torical romances.

34

Both his heroines, Padmini and Devamani (A Dive

for Death), stand up to these high standards. Padmini

 

falls in love with a poor village youth, Chennappa, who
bravely retrieves Salwa's treasured diamond from Echanna
Naik, a refractory Chieftain nefariously plotting
against Salwa. Padmini sees him, falls in love and
is steadfast in her love for this obscure youth. Love
here is in true Indian style. The lovers seldom meet,
and when they do, they do not converse directly with
each other, and they certainly exchange no kiss or
caress. Though she has seen him only once, Padmini
mentally plights her trouth and vows to stay a virgin
all her life if death should snatch away Chennappa.
Several temptations, intrigues and nine chapters after
their first meeting, Padmini weds Chennappa, who turns
out to be Prince Srirangaraya of the second chapter.
The plot is simple and eminently predictable,
even on such points as suspense and accident. So is the
characterization. Echanna Naik is a stereotype villain
just as Chennappa is a stereotype hero. Salwa's is the
only characterization of any complexity. His minstrel
and his wife bring out his innate nobility while Naik
serves to show that Salwa is an efficient ruler who
maintains law and order, and is always prepared for
military and conspiratorial emergencies. Ambiga's love

for him and his treatment of Padmini reveal him to be

35

an honorable man where love is concerned. But in other
spheres of activity he is ruthless and selfish.

The style, too, is predictable. It must be
granted that however stilted some of his descriptions,
there are many landscapes in his novels that are effec-
tively painted. His heart is in the lowlands of Tamilnad,
and some of his best lyrics are about the countryside
near Madras; for example,

A deep sunk vale, 'tween verdant hills
That in eternal friendship seemed to hold
Communion with the changing skies above.
To say that Ramakrishna was imitating the English
Romantics in his descriptions, and eighteenth century
novelists in his narrative style, is not the whole truth.
For he was also drawing on Indian classics. One cannot
draw the line in the following passage, for example,
between English and Indian influence:
Where rivers meet, where, in the awful chasm or
cleft of a mountain, interesting ice formations
resembling sacred symbols appear; where, from
great rocky heights, waterfalls have been coursing
down incessantly; or where nature puts forth her
best forms; or where the earth from her womb gives
birth to precious stones of rich luster and hue;
in such places such interesting circumstances
directed the genius of the people to architectural
memorials in the form of temples to the Most High,
whose vastness and symmetry and whose real beauty,
even in the minutest parts, find no parallel in
any other country in the world. (3, p. 72).
It was mentioned in the first chapter that the

earlier Indo-English writers desired to build bridges

between India and Britain. Ramakrishna is typical on

36

this score as well. He makes an effort to act as inter-
preter between the ruler and the ruled. He takes it on
himself to introduce India to the British. For example,
he explains at length some Indian habits such as chewing
betel leaves. Again, he starts nine of the seventeen
chapters in Padmini with commentaries on the historical
or social setting, and weaves in a philosophical or
mythological theme. Some of these thoughts are well-
expressed, as in Chapter II where he compares life to
the soil, insipid in itself but potentially responsible
for beauty; some are blatantly nostalgic, as in Chapter VI,
where he speaks of Hindu aesthetics which inspired men
to build temples (not pleasure palaces) in settings of
sublime beauty; some are flagrantly didactic, as a
passage in Chapter III which is a tract on the goodness
that is found even in evil men; some are interpretive as
the opening paragraph of Chapter XIII, where the ideals
of asceticism are dwelt upon. In Chapter IV he gets so
carried away by the Hindu ideal of womanhood that he
devotes a third of that chapter to extolling the
heroines of mythology, and in the rest of the chapter,
Padmini and Ambiga are made to continue discussion of
these ideals.

Besides these lengthy authorial commentaries, we
have other eighteenth century characteristics such as

chapter headings and subheadings that outline the content

37

of the chapter, authorial digressions into philosophy,
and generally a flowery vocabulary that was outdated in
England long before Ramakrishna's time.

It was earlier stated that some of these writers
had admiration and gratitude for the British. Rama-
krishna is representative of that stand as well. One
of the first decisions that Padmini and Chennappa take
on coming into their own (of course the prince gets his
throne) is to reward an Englishman, Francis Day, who had
helped and protected Padmini when she fled from Salwa.

Francis Day is a historical character. He was
a Member of Council at the English settlement of
Armagham, sixty-five miles north of modern Madras.

Salwa had refused him permission to erect a fort on the
coast for their trading post. But Chennappa lends a
sympathetic ear not only because Day had helped Padmini
but because his astrologer, like Hiawatha counselling
his people to welcome the white man, tells him that the
the white man would one day rule the whole land, and that
Chennappa should therefore welcome and honor Day.
Deny them not this request. The bird is outside the
gate, asking for shelter. It is destined soon to
come inside the central hall of the house and to
become master of it, and to eat and drink of the
best things therein, and the glory and the honor
will be yours among future generations, that you
first gave shelter to the future lords of the
country. (2, p. 142).

The astrologer's counsel is an independent repetition of

the encomium made by the last Queen of Vijayanagar before

38

she immolated herself at the defeat at Talikota. Her
prOphecy is recalled by the author in conclusion:
there will come from
The far off ends of this vast globe of ours--
A little island planted in the sea--
A handful of a noble race to trade,
And shall from thee ask for a plot of land,
And they shall prosper for their valor and
Shall be exalted for their righteousness.
They shall befriend the helpless and the poor,
And like the streams that seek the ocean broad,
The chickens that run to their mother's wings,
The maidens helpless and forlorn, that court
The succour of the chivalrous and the brave,
The orphans poor, the bounty of the kind,
All men of Ind, all races and all creeds
Shall to their banner flock, to live in peace
And amity . . .

Thus was laid the foundation of a great empire.
The rest is history. (2, p. 180).

Yes, indeed, the rest lg history. English builders with
native workmen built Fort St. George on the Coromandel
coast; English traders with shrewd business sense built
up the city of Madras around it; English soldiers with
their unending supply of ammunition conquered the
territory around the city; astute English administrators,
with cunning and diplomacy, made native rulers sign away
principalities and kingdoms; and the Union Jack fluttered
triumphantly all over the peninsula and the northern plain.
Fool, traitor, sycophant? Not exactly. Rama-
krishna was writing in the 1900's, a decade of renewed
pledges of loyalty to Crown and Emperor occasioned by
the death of the Queen-Empress, she who with orb and
scepter and tired, imperious eyes surveyed her empire

which never saw the set of sun.

39

The sage-astrologer who counsels Chennappa is not
content to eulogize the English for their virtues. He
goes on to compose apologias for their legendary stand-
offishness and snobbery. He exhorts his compatriots to
imitate the British and to be grateful for their presence
in the country:

we want men like the English to wake us from our
sleep and to rouse our latent energies, that we
may imitate their virtues and cultivate them for
our good. (g, p. 197).
Thus, Ramakrishna voluntarily accepts the image that the
British wanted the colonials to have of the English
nation--that of benevolent rulers who conscientiously
and at great personal sacrifice shouldered the white
man's burden. Macaulay's spirit would certainly rejoice
if he could read the early writers of whom Ramakrishna is
fairly typical:
He (Day) belongs to a nation whose pride and manliness
and courage and chivalry will prevent them from
mingling freely with us who possess virtues no less
important. Dogged stubbornness, endurance, and
desire to help the weak against the strong, and to
grant equality of political rights to those who are
not as physically great as themselves, these masculine
virtues characterize such nations. On the other hand,
we possess the softer virtues of humility, mild for-
bearance, kindness and mercy to all living things
on earth. (P, p. 196).
This comparison of British and Indian traits,

with its corollary that Indians should learn from the

British, is typical of early Indo-English writers.

40

Indeed, this may be taken as one of the criteria for

distinguishing between early writers and native-talents.
Native talents, one of whom is studied in the

next chapter, are not interested in imitation, whether

of social values, way of life or literary techniques.

They are more concerned with writing about contemporary

conditions and delineating the everyday life of ordinary

people, and with using the English language in a flexible,

natural way so that it started evolving into a "dialect

that will some day prove to be as distinctive and colorful

as the Irish or the American.6

FOOTNOTES

1"Kalki" was the pseudonym of R. Krishnamunthi,
and "Chandilyan" is the pseudonym of T. Bhashyam.

2Cited by R. C. Majumdar, H. C. Raychaudhuri,
Kalikinkar Datta, An Advanced History of India (London,

1958), p. 374.

3Ibid., p. 379.

4Robert Sewell, A Forgotten Empire (London, 1900),

p. 151.

An Indian Romance

ST. Ramakrishna, Padmini:
For the

(London, 1903), p. 5. Hereafter cited as P.
second and subsequent quotations from work? studied at
some length in this dissertation, the page reference is
given in parentheses after the quotation, preceded by

an abbreviated form of the title.

6Raja Rao, Kanthapura (New York, 1963), Foreword.
The novel was first published in 1938.

41

CHAPTER III

NATIVE GENIUS: R. K. NARAYAN

writers with native talent natively nurtured form
a large and significant category in South Indian writing.
The best of them show how well an English literary form
can be adapted to develop Indian themes and how effec-
tively the English language can be transmuted to express
and convey Indian thought-sequences. The leading names
in this group are R. K. Narayan, K. Nagarajan, K. S.
Venkataramani, Manjeri S. Isvaran1 and S. Y. Krishnaswamy.
All of them were born, educated and spent their formative
years in the South; their professions took Isvaran and
Krishnaswamy to other parts of the country, but their
writing has little to say about it; Narayan and Nagarajan
have been abroad, but only after their literary style
had been developed; Venkataramani and Shankar Ram are
truly writers of the southern soil. All belong to the
Brahmin community, an interesting fact though it does not
have as significant a bearing on their work as it did in

the case of earlier writers such as Madhaviah. Narayan,

42

43

especially, carefully avoids all reference to caste,
though most of his central characters are Brahmins. All
these writers were born between 1890 and 1910 and there-
fore had their schooling at a time when English was well
established but had not yet met with any nationalistic
antagonism. In youth, all of them were aware of Gandhi
and the national movement and they were influenced to
various degrees by them.

Of these authors Rasipuram Krishnaswami Narayan
(born 1906) is the best and most representative. He
has published ten novels and four volumes of short

stories, has been an irregular contributor to The Hindu

 

and has in recent years written for magazines as varied

in their content as Ladies' Home Journal and Playboy.

 

Some consider him the foremost of Indo-English novelists.
Although such a judgment is unwarranted, he is, undeniably,
a major writer and few have made a more significant con-
tribution. He is a phenomenon because in his work the
whole is very much greater than the sum of the parts.
This chapter considers Narayan's novels.

The chapter is divided into two sections, the
first dealing with a general evaluation of Narayan's
work and place in Indo—English literature, and the
second with a deeper look at a smaller area of his total
work. More critical work has been done on Narayan than

on any other Indo-English novelist. As elsewhere in

44

this dissertation, the amount of available scholarship
has helped decide what aspects will be focussed upon
and what given a more cursory handling. The idea is
to draw upon all sources but mainly to complement them
so that a total evaluation of Narayan is made possible
by putting together all these sources.

Available criticism on Narayan falls into three
categories. First, there are the reviews. The reviews
in newspapers and popular magazines have been unduly
laudatory and an image has been built up making Narayan
an Indian Chekhov. Discounting these as generally
unreliable, we have the more serious article-length
reviews in literary periodicals which deserve to be
sifted because of the insights and perceptive assessments

in such reviews as those of William Walsh in The Journal

 

of Commonwealth Literature (JCL), and even in the

 

usually oracular statements of reviewers such as David
McCutchion and in the extravagantly adulatory reviews
such as those of C. D. Narasimhaiah.

Second, there are full-length studies of Narayan's

work in periodicals such as JCL and The Literary Cri-

 

terion. There is even a doctoral dissertation by

Nirmal Mukerji on Narayan's fiction. These are intro-
ductory in the sense that they are chronological surveys
of his fiction mainly consisting of detailed plot sum-

maries and a general commentary. For instance,

45

V. Panduranga Rao's "The Art of R. K. Narayan"2 has
certain perceptive critical comments but is essentially
a general handbook on Narayan's novels, while Nirmal
Mukerji's doctoral thesis3 is an expanded version of
the same contents as in Srinivasa Iyengar's volumes.4
In the same category, but having a different structural
approach, is M. E. Derrett's The Modern Indian Novel in
English (1966).5 This volume is a compendium of quo-
tations from Indo-English novels, Indo-English novelists,
critics and sociologists. The complex structure of the
work, with its frequent jumping from one novel to another,
makes it difficult for one to get a cohesive picture of
what is said about any one author. Also, the comparative
approach requires generalizations to connect the suc-
cession of quotations, and these generalizations are
not always valid. On the whole, the project is too
ambitious to be practical. An example of its basic
shortcoming can be seen in the following statement
that introduces the chapter, "Characters in the Indian
Novel in English":
Works by authors differing widely in background and
ability will be used as illustrations with no
deliberate choice. . . . What follows is an illus-
tration of the Indian approach to characterization,
rather than a critical review of the skills of the
authors. The same approach will be found in the

succeeding chapters.6

Obviously one cannot draw totally valid conclusions on

the Indian approach without relating such factors as

Oil;

3
can

rot

’9‘

I v

or
UH

‘1‘

1n

46

background and ability to the actual writing and relating
the quotations to the context from which they are taken.
Even a thorough familiarity with the novels from which
the quotations are taken is not enough to make this
volume a cohesive study because the spotlight shifts

too frequently. However, like Srinivasa Iyengar's

Indian Writing in English, this work is a very useful
source.

The third category of criticism has only recently
been introduced. It consists of essays which take the
approach advocated in the opening chapter of this dis-
sertation, ylg. of entering without lengthy preambles
into the study of particular themes or patterns or
stylistic or technical characteristics of an author.
Rajeev Taranath's "The Average as Positive" in Critical

Essays on Indian Writing in English is an excellent

 

example of the kind of approach required to strengthen
the field of Indo-English criticism. Taranath traces
the common elements in Narayan's characterization of his
major characters and draws the conclusion that though
Narayan does not overly take sides on moral issues, he
does imply that the "average" person is the one who sur-
vives.

This approach of studying themes and patterns is
adopted in the sections subsequent to the general evalu—

ation of Narayan. There is a section that studies

47

Waiting for the Mahatma and this is followed by a section
that traces the theme of paternal love in Narayan's

fiction. Waiting for the Mahatma is, in my opinion,

 

his weakest novel. Other critics do not think so.
Indeed, it is usually considered one of his best novels
and is frequently seen on the curriculum of Commonwealth

Literature courses. Waiting for the Mahatma has been

 

chosen for critical study because it highlights certain
traits in Narayan's style, technique and approach to

his art that are found in all his novels. Waiting for

 

the Mahatma also shows weaknesses that are present in all

 

his novels, but which are counterbalanced to different
degrees in them by his strengths.

The most striking quality about both Narayan's
work and Narayan himself is unpretentiousness. Narayan
meandered his lone, unrewarded, unrecognized way for
twenty-five years before his novels won a reading public
large enough to bring in any monetary returns. Between
1928 and 1953 he "lived off the fat of the joint-family
system"? and did the only thing he wanted to do--he

wrote. Once The Guide (1958) was sold to the celluloid

 

world, fame and fortune came in good measure, but
Narayan continued to be his old quiet, unpretentious
.self. Since this study is not about Narayan the man
IDut about Narayan the novelist, no more need be said
Gaxcept that one of the best pen-portraits of the man is

tho be found in Ved Mehta's article cited above.

48

Narayan's novels too are unpretentious. The
most noteworthy quality about his work is that he knows
his limitations and seldom ventures beyond them. This
quality makes many of his weaknesses into qualified
virtues.

As a preamble to this section, which is a general
Study of the qualities and characteristics of Narayan's
work, a series of statements are first given and then
the statements are expanded, justified and substantiated
in the light of Narayan's fiction and certain standard
criteria of prose criticism.

Narayan is a storyteller, nothing less and seldom
more. His plots are thin and there is nothing spectacular
or distinctive about them. There are seldom any subplots.
But he has what E. M. Forster calls "the primitive power
of keeping the reader in suspense and playing on his
curiosity."8 A serious shortcoming in his art is that
in seven of the ten novels the plot breaks midway, never
.quite managing to resolve the incongruence between realism
and fantasy which are its main components.

Narayan's characters and setting are drawn from
the urban middle class of South Indian towns. The setting
is vivid and, as K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar says, Malgudi
143 the hero of Narayan's novels. Narayan's characters

alre mostly one-dimensional and his cast in each novel

1&3 limited. Narayan does not identify himself with his

49

characters nor does he evoke reader-identification. Of
his insight and craftsmanship one may say he deftly
catches the atmosphere of the Malgudi marketplace but
fails when he tries to follow anyone into the lanes

that branch off the Market Road; he has breadth but

no depth; his prose is clear and correct but lacks
poetry. It is the prose of the plains, not the prose

of the gushing Ganges of the Himalayas as found in Mulk
Raj Anand or Raja Rao. It is the prose of the southern
plains in April when the rivers are streamlets standing
still in the torrid blaze of the tropical sun, appre-
ciated by passersby not so much for what they contain

as for what they represent, not so much for their meagre
beauty but for the sheer fact that they are there, still
surviving under the summer sun. The same metaphor might
be applied to Narayan's early work in general. It is
appreciated for the sheer fact of its existence at a
time and place when the literary climate was dry and
barren.

To take up these statements on narrative skill,
style, characterization, plot, setting, theme and
literary devices at greater length and depth, one
IHight start with the statement, "Narayan is a story-
txeller, nothing less and seldom more." In the context

CrE'native talents we have to bear in mind the Indian

SC>cial and literary traditions as well as the fact that

50

these writers consciously use the novel-form which is a
western import. The traditional story-teller, like the
minstrel in the European medieval tradition, occupies
a place of respect and popularity in the community. His
job is to entertain and also to instruct through his
entertainment. Like the traditional story-teller,
Narayan has an easy flow of words and speaks at a
basic level, and needs an essential receptivity on the
part of the audience. Narayan certainly entertains but
not at a brisk, rollicking pace. On the other hand the
laughter he evokes is not recorded laughter edited into
the video-tape but genuine and simple laughter. And like
the traditional story-teller, Narayan instructs in a mild
general way. However, he does not have the force of the
story-teller, perhaps because he does not draw upon the
story-teller's sources--the epic tales and epic heroes.9
Judging Narayan on the basis of the western novel
form is another matter altogether. A modern novelist is
expected to do more than tell a story. Many renowned
critics in the field of prose criticism hold that the
modern novel is and should be a medium for moral question-
ing and enlightenment. Lionel Trilling says the novel
"is a perpetual quest for reality," and is "the most

effective agent of the moral imagination."10

Philip Rahv
extends the novel's horizons still further, endorsing the

Goncourt brothers who say the novel is

51

a great, serious, impassioned living form of literary
study and social research [and that] by means of
analysis and psychological inquiry it is turning
into contemporary moral history.l
Steven Marcus, tracing the role of the novel in modern
society, says the novel should give us
an adequate notion of what it is like to be alive
today, why we are the way we are, and what might be
done to remedy our bad situation.12

The only generalization possible on Narayan's
moral vision (if one can use so profound a term as
"moral vision" for Narayan's fiction) is to say that he
affirms the average. I disagree with Srinivasa Iyengar
who says Narayan

seems to see the world as a complicated system of
checks and counterchecks, the net result being the
enthronement of the Absurd.13
The final position at the end of each novel is not the
enthronement of the Absurd but the triumph of the common
in spite of the invasion of it by the eccentric.

This vision is positive, and that, perhaps, is
Narayan's contribution to modern fiction. Leslie Fiedler,
with his usual flamboyant energy, insists that in order
"to fulfill its essential moral obligation, such [serious]

fiction must be negative."14

Perhaps Narayan's paradoxi-
cal answer is that fiction can be valid even when it
portrays and affirms middle-class life through the use

of a non-committal lighter vein. Narayan's affirmation

is not a thunderous one. It is found only if one looks

for it.

52

So, judged by the critics' demand for nothing
less than salvation, Narayan is not a good modern
novelist. There is no overwhelming moral conviction
communicated in his stories. He is not passionately
concerned with any social or spiritual ideal. He has
no Open Sesame password to salvation. He is seldom more
than a story-teller. Arguments could be advanced to
show Narayan's concern for the spirituall5 and the

seriousness of his satire against those that form such

groups as the movie world (Mr. Sampath) and local poli-

 

tics (Waiting for the Mahatma.) But any serious pursuit

 

of such patterns might lead to the Procrustean-bed school
of criticism.

Returning to the basic rationale of the state-
ments by Marcus and others quoted above, should these
standards be applied? Are we to condemn a major section
of novelists as alienated people "resting in a kind of
comfortable empiricism . . . entirely unaware that any
larger problem exists,"16 merely because they deal with
a traditional literary form in which novelists concerned
themselves with particular, limited human and social
situations?

However, this limitation, if it is a limitation,
of not having an overriding message, becomes, like many
other Narayan qualities, a qualified virtue. Narayan may

not speak impassionedly from the podium of social reform

53

as Mulk Raj Anand does, or from the pulpit of spiritual
contemplation as Raja Rao does, but neither does he ever
lapse into soap-box orations as K. S. Venkataramani
occasionally does and minor writers of the Gandhian

era invariably did.

Narayan's significant achievement is to be found,
not in his message or in his control of the art form but
in the eminent success of his creation of a typical South
Indian town--Malgudi.

All ten novels and most of the short stories are
set in Malgudi. Various critics have attempted to
identify the original of this mythical town. Srinivasa
Iyengar speculates that it might be Lalgudi on the River
Kaveri or Yadavagiri in Mysore. To these speculations I
might add my own, that Narayan's Malgudi is Coimbatore
which has many of the landmarks—-a river on one side,
forests on the others, the Mission School and College
and all the extensions mentioned in the novels. However,
one is not likely to arrive at any definite answer as to
its geographical location even if one sifts all the
references to the town in the novels including such
specific allusions as that Malgudi is almost a day's
journey from Madras. The simple reason is that Narayan
has not drawn any map or framework of consistency for
his Malgudi as Faulkner, for example, did for his Yokna-

EDatawPha or Hardy had in mind for his Sussex novels.

54

Others have done this for Narayan. Nirmal Mukerji has
appended a map of Malgudi to her doctoral dissertation,
"The werld of Malgudi"; Srinivasa Iyengar has three
pages of careful description of Malgudi and its environs.17
The points to note about Narayan's delineation of
Malgudi are that he makes it reflect the changes undergone

by a typical South Indian town between 1935 (Swami and

 

Friends) and 1967 (The Sweet-Vendor), and that this back-

 

drop is always excellently done, often better than the
characterization, plot or prose-style. The setting comes
alive in every one of Narayan's novels, whether it is the
beauty of River Sarayu in the evening, the carefree
atmosphere of Albert Mission School and Albert Mission

College in Swami and Friends and The Bachelor of Arts,

 

 

the crowded locality around Srinivas's press in Mr. Sam-
path_or the awesome silence around Mempi Guest House in
The Guide. As Srinivasa Iyengar suggests, Malgudi might
be called the real hero of Narayan's novels.l8

Indeed, Malgudi is the only "character" that
grows, changes, reacts to time and circumstance, has a
spirit, a soul. Other Narayan characters do not grow.
They are essentially what E. M. Forster would call "flat
characters."

Minor flat characters are delightful. Narayan has

a felicity for caricature, not for character-development.

So the most interesting people in his fiction are what

55

W. J. Harvey calls "Cards," whose distinguishing feature
is "relative changelessness, combined with a peculiar
kind of freedom."19 For example, the Adjournment Lawyer,

a figure who recurs in Mr. Sampath and The Man-Eater of

 

 

Malgudi, and the Cousin in The Sweet-Vendor are cards.

 

Their actions are predictable, but one does not tire of
them because they slither around and into new shapes
though the basic putty is the same.

The major characters, also, are essentially flat
even though they undergo experiences that would normally

result in change. For example, Vasu in The Man-Eater of

 

Malgudi descends on Nataraj like a cyclone, but Nataraj
simply picks himself up, shakes the mud off his sleeve,
so to speak, and goes back to his printing routine. Vasu
himself is not changed either, and his death is violent
as his life was, without any dramatic revelation pre-
ceding it.

Narayan's art of characterization may be summed
up in a parallel--his main characters are like the
weighted, inflatable toys that bob up on their feet no
matter how they are pushed. Vasu remains a villain until
death and beyond it, Margayya the financial expert, Raju
the Guide and Mr. Sampath remain rogues; Krishnan the
English Teacher and Chandran the Bachelor of Arts remain
romantics. Only in the earliest two novels and in the

last do the main characters change within the novel.

56

Swami leaves childhood behind as he bids farewell to
Rajam, Jagan takes the step towards positive "vana-
prasthashram," the ascetic life of non-attachment
enjoined in the Hindu scriptures for those who have
gone through the other three stages of child, 95227
macharya (celibate studentship) and grahasta (house-

holder), and Savitri of The Dark Room surrenders.

 

The Dark Room has not been given the critical

 

attention it deserves in Narayan scholarship. Though
the story is thin, the underlying theme is profoundly
realistic, as are the little details about everyday
life. This novelette clearly shows that Narayan's
forte lies in portraying middle-class life with its
mediocre monotony and occasional digressions.

The characterization is stronger in this novel
than in most others because Narayan shows a causal
sequence in the characters' inter-personal relationship
and in the outcome of their behavior. The story is about
marital disharmony and Narayan, with an artistic con-
scientiousness not often in evidence, plants incidents
and thoughts that show the lack of positive harmony in
the marriage even before the actual breach. Both Savitri
and Ramani are well-portrayed and consistently-drawn
characters. Ramani is finicky about his dress and
appearance, fond of exhibiting his status, snobbish

and above all, assertive at home and at his office.

57

Savitri is a young woman, married long enough for life

to sink into a rut and for beauty to fade, but not long
enough to have had her desire for activity and indi-
viduality killed. There are various incidents, in
themselves trivial, that show the discordant notes in

the domestic orchestra. One of these, the repeated
shielding of her son, Babu, from Ramani's reprimands,

is made the cause of a major quarrel, and the reconcil-
iation that follows foreshadows the defeat Savitri will
suffer at the end with Savitri's aborted attempt at
suicide and her humiliated return to her old routine.
Narayan prepares the ground for both the final rebellion
and the final defeat right through the novelette. Savitri
periodically rebels but Ramani simply looks through her
acts of resentment, as he does in the end, neither giving
her the satisfaction of upsetting him nor the remorse
that a loving reconciliation on his part would have
caused. The novel ends poignantly, the battle over,

with Ramani the victor and Savitri the doubly vanquished.
Their family life will thenceforth be harmonious, but
the harmony will be the result of all instruments but
one--Ramani's assertiveness-~having been muted.

In The Dark Room the point of view, though

 

finally non-committal and remote as in all other novels,

is Savitri's. Also, it is, as in all other novels,

58

a single point of view. we are not told or given any-
thing from Ramani's point of view.

All his novels, except The Guide, are straight

 

narrations, uncomplicated by chronological disjointedness

or multi-points-of-view. The flashbacks in The Sweet-

 

Vendor and Mr. Sampath are clear and involve no Joycean

 

acrobatics, while the chronological sequence in The
Guldg, though slightly more difficult to tabulate, is
simple enough. The point-of-view adopted in the various
novels is similar. Wayne Booth classifies narrators
into three main types--implied author, undramatized nar-
rators and dramatized narrators--and further divides the
last group into observers and narrator-agents. He
defines narrator-agents as those "who produce some
measurable effect on the course of events."20 Narayan

has narrator-agents in The Man-Eater of Malgudi and

 

Mr. Sampath. Srinivas in Mr. Sampath and Nataraj in

 

 

The Man-Eater of Malgudi are, like Nick Carraway in The

 

Great Gatsby, characters who help us understand the main

 

character through their comments. Both novelS'are
interesting in that Srinivas and Nataraj play a more
important role than Nick Carraway. Each is, in a way,
the main character in his novel until the realistic plot
breaks to give way to fantasy.

Through his narrator-agents, Narayan gives us his

affirmation (if so serious a term may be used for Narayan's

59

fiction) of middle-class life. As Mark Schorer says in
"Technique and Discovery," a novelist expresses his
values and his attitude towards the world and by the

device of point-of-view.21

By making Srinivas and
Nataraj not only withstand the onslaught of the eccentric
and irrational Sampath and Vasu but return to their old
routine after the storm, Narayan is expressing his faith
in the predictable and relatively sane world of the

common man .

In six other novels--Swami and Friends, The Dark

 

Room, The Bachelor of Arts, The Financial Expert, Waiting

 

for the Mahatma and The Sweet-Vendor--there is "indirect

presentation" to use Percy Lubbock's terms.22 Lubbock

 

 

mentions that one of the effective types of presentation
is to have the narration in the third-person where, though
the author does not delve into the subconscious or uncon-
scious of his characters, the action is unfolded as seen
by or happening to the main character.

In The English Teacher the narrator is himself the

 

protagonist. First-person narration usually gives a cer-
tain measure of authenticity to an experience (as recog-
nized and exploited by the writers of cheap nurse-doctor
and true-romance stories), but the authenticity of The

English Teacher stems from the deeper source of auto-

 

biography. However, this same autobiographical quality
is the reason for the failure of one of the major scenes

in the nove1--the scene in which Susila contracts typhoid.

60

Narayan has given the autobiographical basis of
the novel to Ved Mehta:

My father-in-law was quite well-to-do, wanted to
settle a house on Rajam, and one day he came up
from Coimbatore and we went round searching for a
place. We looked through a number of remodelled
houses, and late that afternoon we happened upon
one that seemed suitable. It had the solidity of
an wold [sic] house and the bright cleanness of a
new one. _thle my father-in-law and I were can-
vassing the land, Rajam went into the bathroom, an
outhouse, to wash. She did not rejoin us. I got
worried and walked back to the bathroom. Rajam

was pounding away at the shut door, screaming,
'Someone open it! Someone open it!‘ I gave the
door one or two hard kicks and Rajam fell out in
my arms. She was convulsed with sobs, and her face
was feverish red. She cried out that it was the
dirtiest place she had ever been in. She said a
fly had settled on her lips. I took her home, but
she wouldn't yeat [sic] anything. She kept washing
herself, time and tIfie again. By the evening she
had temperature and she remained in bed with typhoid
for twenty days. It was 1939, and no one had heard
of chloramphenicol. Rajam died. A fly had killed
an almost five-year-old marriage.23

That a writer should write as blunt an autobiography,

true to details even to the point of abstaining from
embellishing the realistic but repugnant latrine scene,

is a strange but perhaps not rare example of self-therapy.
Seen from the autobiographical side, Susila's contraction
of typhoid virus in a dirty latrine is extremely pathetic;
but viewed from the artistic point of view, as a device
whereby the heroine feels the touch of Death on her lips,
I think it fails. The scene, in the novel, has enough
realism to convey a mixture of repugnance and horror,

but not enough force or drama to carry us onward without

being conscious of the ludicrousness of the experience,

61

a consciousness enhanced by association with Narayan's
hallmark of humorous realism which characterize his
terse descriptions of the dirt and filth of Malgudi's
marketplace and sewers, or the animal stench in Nat-
araj's attic or the fly-infested store next to which
Margayya sets up office. In the immediate context the
whole scene--with Susila falling into Krishnan's arms,
her repeated washings at the tap, the contractor's
apology about passersby using the outhouse as a public
convenience--appears to be no more than, in Krishnan's
words, "a sad anticlimax to a very pleasing morning."
Perhaps it is unfair of us to expect from a Narayan the
supreme potency of "Out, damned spot! out I say! What!
will these hands ne'er be clean? . . . Here's the smell
of the blood still . . . " but looking at the whole
cycle of Krishnan's tragedy, there is no denying that
the chapter does not bring out the stark poignancy of
the fact that a fly can, and did, end a happy marriage.

The English Teacher, despite the beauty and pathos

 

of the total experience, shows in its parts that Narayan
is not capable of portraying heights and depths of
emotional experience. On this point, as in others,
Narayan knows his limitation and does not often venture
into areas which require forceful delineation. But no
novelist can get away from the necessity of using words

‘to communicate the basic action and the more vital

62

qualities of tone and atmosphere. Narayan has not only
the reticence of a middle-class person to explore or
express deep emotional experiences but an incapacity,
as artist, to develop, command and control a powerful
and versatile prose style.

In studying prose style, one runs into the problem
of definition. According to the simple definition that
prose style consists of how a writer uses diction and
form, Narayan's style is weak. Judged by the wider
definition that relates the use of form and language to
matter and pattern, Narayan's style is acceptable.

All that we can legitimately ask of a novelist in

the matter of language is that it be appropriate

to the matter in hand. What is said must not stand

in a contradictory relation to the way it is said.24
Since all Narayan characters are middle-class persons and
all his stories are straight narratives, one can say that
there is no contradiction between his narrative and his
pedestrian diction.

But the basic criterion of readability and interest
surely is not to be underestimated. To take a simple
definition, M. H. Abrams says:

Style is the manner of linguistic expression in prose
or verse--it is how a speaker says whatever he says.
The characteristic style of a work or a writer may

be analyzed in terms of its diction, or characteristic
choice of words, its sentence structure and syntax;
the density and types of figurative language; the

patterns of its rhythm and of its component sounds;
and its rhetorical aims and devices.25

63

Applying this to Narayan, his style is found to be dis-
concertingly plebeian. His usual style is characterized
by a stringing together of subject-predicate-object
sentences. "Simple" and "lucid" are words his admirers
use for this pedestrian monotone that lacks color, music
and strength. His admirers see this simplicity as a vin-
dication of the Indo-English language. C. D. Narasim-

26

haiah's article, "R. K. Narayan's The Guide" is typical

 

of a kind of criticism that has lionized Narayan. Five

pages of this encomium on Narayan and The Guide are

 

devoted to praising Narayan's prose style. The irony
is that many of the passages quoted do not really
exemplify the statement that goes with them. The
critic's choice could be held partly responsible, but
the fact is that it is not easy to find examples of
"fluent, flexible and vigorous" prose or the capacity
to "juxtapose the solemn and the vulgar" or the "virtues
of educated Indians' speech--now colloquial and racy, now
literary and refined" or prose that "glows and glimmers
and soon is silent." Here is a passage from that
article; it says something about critic and author:
Is it fast-moving action? He is equal to it too:
"There was a clapping of hands. The band struck
up, the engine whistled, the bell rang, the guard
blew his whistle and the men who had been consuming
refreshments climbed into the train."27

The last two phrases, especially the words "consuming"

and "climbed into" are typical of Indian-English, but

64

they certainly have no positive merit of any kind except

that they are in Narayan's natural voice. Narayan fails

in his authorial commentary and narration though he some-
times excels in his dialogues.

"Do you want him to write like a Cambridge don?"
these critics ask, or "like some who have stayed too long
in the west?" These two phrases recur in Indo-English
criticism published in Indian periodicals. The barb is
unmistakably aimed at Balachandra Rajan, Cambridge

tripos-holder and author of Too Long in the West. No,

 

one does not expect or wish Narayan's language to be
highly polished or artificially gilded. However, though
realism demands that his characters be made to speak as
the man-in-the-street would, one expects the author to

be master of a wider vocabulary when the novel is written
in third-person narrative. That Narayan has a wide

vocabulary is proven by his Dateless Diary (1960), but

 

for some reason, probably intentional unpretentiousness,
it never appears in his novels. As V. Y. Kantak in his
discerning essay says:

He does not seem to be interested in exploring the

fuller, deeper possibilities of the language he is

using. . . . werd or phrase rarely glints with com-

pression or suggested meanings.28

The problem faced by the Indo-English writer has

been succinctly expressed by Raja Rao:

We cannot write like the English. We should not.

We cannot write only as Indians. We have grown
to look at the large world as part of us. Our

65

method of expression therefore has to be a dialect

which will some day prove to be as distinctive

and colorful as the Irish or the American.29
But Narayan writes only as an Indian, and a non-literary
Indian at that. He neither explores the variety and ver-
satility of English as Balachandna Rajan does, nor the
possibility of transmuting the wealth of the vernacular
as done by Raja Rao and Mulk Raj Anand. Raja Rao and
Anand have shown that one can experiment with the Indo-
English dialect in numberless ways. Both use literal
translation of vernacular idioms, e.g., "why do you make

30 both use literal translations of

our stomachs burn?";
ejaculations, expletives and interjections, and nicknames.
For example, Anand characters frequently use "brother-in-
law," a common ejaculation in Hindi, and long abuses
such as
. . . you illegally begotten! You, eater of dung
and drinker of urine! You, bitch of a sweeper woman!
I will show yen how to insult one old enough to be
your mother.
Raja Rao in his first novel, translates the nicknames by
which various women characters are identified, e.g.,
'"Nose-scratching Nanjamma," "Waterfall Venkamma," "Corner-
House Narsamma." Such transmutations are not always

effective, it is true, but they animate the world of

Kanthapura and The Untouchable with a breath of novelty

 

 

(if the reader is unfamiliar with the vernacular) or
authenticity (if the reader is familiar with the ver-

nacular.) Narayan does not experiment with words. Some

66

critics feel that Narayan's diction is, nevertheless,
effective. Kantak himself goes on to say, "And yet this
one-stringed instrument (like that ukelele-like thing one
sees farmers selling to city children) suffices for
Narayan's purpose." I do not think it suffices. The
comparison to the ukelele-like instrument, however, is
extremely apposite. That is exactly what Narayan's

prose is--a one-stringed violin fashioned out of coconut
shells and bamboo. The vendors who sell these are
remarkably facile with the instruments; one can recog-
nize the tunes they play; one even smiles with remembered
pleasure because of the drolly effective mimicry. But

it is not music, and never can be.

The simile can be used further. One smiles with
remembered pleasure--the listener contributes sub-
stantially to the effect of the one-stringed violin.

The listener has heard the tune before; it is a familiar
one, a popular one, and it has all the charm of familiar
and loved things. This is the source that Narayan taps--
the endless storehouse of associations and remembrances
that a reader brings with himself. Narayan's catalog
descriptions, and his one-line characterizations--such

as of the adjournment lawyer's, and the importance of

the cricket match in Swami and Friends and the description

 

of the eavesdroppers around the Financial Expert, to

mention just a few examples--strike home because they

67

deal with incidents, people and places the average
reader, regardless of his background, knows. Narayan's
Bachelor of Arts is an example of this. In the first
half, which is the humorous half, Narayan has capitalized
on the reader's knowledge of college life. But it has
only to be compared to any other novel of youth and uni-
versity life and much of its credit will be depleted.

To compare it with a novel by another South Indian,

P. M. Nityanandan's The Long Long Days (1960) is one

of the best, perhaps the best, Indo-English novel on

the lighter side of youth. Written in a flamboyant
style, it radiates the exuberance of an imaginative

mind. One-volume writers tend to unload their entire
arsenal in a single book, often in the first few chapters.
But Nityanandan is a talented writer who seems capable

of writing several novels in the same vein as the first

and still hold his readers. Nowhere in The Bachelor of

 

hghe_can one come across phrases that combine atmosphere,
observation and color, as, say, Nityanandan's description
of the tediousness of convocation exercises: "you wait
and wait, swathed in umbrella cloth and listening to

your beard grow," or of the bus conductor: "To hold his
job, he had to combine the agility of a performing
octopus with the patience of a prematurely requisitioned

midwife." A taint of inept bombast is present in many

68

of his phrases, but they are so picturesque one prefers
them to Narayan's unvarnished correctness.

The limitation of his vocabulary is accentuated
by his proneness to economize on words. But there are
passages that are spectacularly successful because of

this very quality. The opening chapters of The English

 

Teacher (titled Grateful to Life and Death in the American

 

edition) are a striking example of Narayan's effective
economy of words. He communicates an atmosphere without
having said anything abstract. We are told of Krishnan's
daily routine that is punctuated with lovers' quarrels
and lovers' reconciliations over such mundane issues as
grocery-buying, and yet what is transmitted is not
monotony but an ethereal sense of total fulfillment.
Susila is, in life as in after-life, a presence that
comforts and delights not only her husband but the
reader as well. Narayan's unadorned prose proves
adequate for a profound moment of experience when
Krishnan, while returning with Susila from their house-
hunting expedition, says, "'It is God's infinite grace
that has given me this girl!‘ The jutka was filled with
the scent of jasmine in her hair and the glare of the

indigo-coloured saree."32

"Indigo" is not an aesthetic-
sounding word and "glare" is rather inappropriate both
in itself and in the coupling of scent and light, and

jyet within the context the reader instinctively feels

69

this is a moment of transcendence where Krishnan realizes
that the spiritual fragrance of Susila's presence per-
meates his being as wholly as the jasmine sweetened
the air in the buggy; the reader also knows that it is
a high point which portends a separation.

Sometimes Narayan's economy of words succeeds
in rapidly and effectively summarizing a passage of time.

The Guide offers several examples: Raju's self-education

 

from the books at the railway book stall, or still bet-
ter, Chapter IX, which traces Raju coming into his true
color, which is that of a vainglorious rogue who with
the gaining of wealth and stature becomes not only a
snob but a possessive villain who stifles Rosie more
callously than Marco had.33
Even more interesting examples of Narayan's

excellence at reportorial description are his compressed

cataloging of fraternal animosity and the sharing of

patrimony in The Financial Expert and The Man-Eater of

 

 

Malgudi (pp. 8 and 9 respectively.) These catalog
descriptions, as I call them, are a characteristic
that appears right through Narayan's fiction. One
of his very earliest stories is about a delightful
youngster, Dodu:
Dodu's office was his dealwood box with the lid
open. . . . When he wanted to do a bit of serious
thinking, he would open the lid and squat into his

box amidst its contents. . . . Every evening Dodu
would make a circuit round the house to gather

70

'things' as he vaguely called them. The w.p.b. in
his father's room gave him a steady supply of attrac-
tive book jackets, brown wrapping paper, large
envelopes, charming catalogs, and pieces of brown
thread. From under the window of his big brother,
he picked up yellow packets of goldflake cigarettes
. . . razor blades, cardboard boxes. When his
sister was not at home, he opened her box and
appropriated bits of colored thread.34
But, in general, Narayan is careless. There are
numberless sentences in every Narayan novel that could be
markedly improved by simple changes in syntax or diction.
The truth is that he never rewrites, never revises, as
he himself has admitted to Ved Mehta:
"I am an inattentive, quick writer who has little
sense of style," he said candidly. Once he has
written the first few pages of a novel, he seldom
retouches a sentence, believing that writing is a
"dovetailing process," which means that a novel
well begun writes itself.35
No doubt some of the most spectacularly effective
pieces in literature have been written in that fashion,
or to put it in Wordsworth's phraseology, have been a
spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, but as a
rule, artistic creation takes its toll of blood, sweat
and toil. For unrevised drafts Narayan's novels are
commendable but as completed novels most of them lack
not only the polish of revised prose but, more funda-
mentally, an internal unity.
Here, as in judging all other qualities in Indo-
English fiction, one has to remember that the Indian

story-telling tradition is of an episodic nature and

that little attention is paid to the nuances of

71

characterization and unity of action, and that fantasy

is a common quality in stories. Also, as Northrop Frye

and Maurice Shroder point out in their discerning essays,36
"romance" and "novel" frequently overlap within the same
work.

Narayan uses both fantasy and realism in eight
of his ten novels, but they are not properly balanced.
The first half often has excellent, realistically drawn
setting, characterization and action. About halfway
through the novel there is a distinct break and fantasy
takes over.

Fantasy as an adjunct of comedy is a legitimate
and effective device in a novelist's canon. In Narayan's
novels it serves its purpose within the immediate context
but becomes incongruous in the larger context which

includes realistic persons and realistic situations.

Every novel except Swami and Friends and The Dark Room

 

 

has the two factors of realism and fantasy very loosely
threaded together. There is a realistic hero (the word
"hero" is used for lack of any other suitably short term)
and a fantastic villain; the hero is portrayed realisti-
cally against a middle class background whereas most
things about the villain are fantastic. The two ele-
ments could be handled deftly, but Narayan merely places
them side by side. That part of the hero's life which

is affected by the villain is insulated, so to say.

72

Srinivas's life, for example, is steered by Sampath into
a fantastic venture, but we do not hear enough of the
effect it has on Srinivas's private life. Similarly
Nataraj's experience with Vasu is almost traumatic, but
only a part of his life is shown to come into contact
with Vasu's outrageous behavior. This is not to say

the characters do not come alive. What is missing is
the follow-through, the plumbing of the depths. Not
only does Narayan not enter his characters, he is very
reticent even in talking about them. Only in the charac-
terization of Jagan the sweet-vendor is this silence

effective. Even in The Sweet-Vendor, which is one of

 

his best novels, the plot gets out of hand. The fantasy
that goes out of balance here is not Jagan's meeting with
the sculptor but Mali's fantastic story-writing machine.
Fantasy is used as an adjunct of satire here, but some-
where along the line Narayan misses the links that would
make the plot cohesive. As they are, most of his plots
break into two disparate plots, the realistic vein being
carried alongside the fantastic and then dropped altogether.

T. D. Brunton, commenting on the "original com-
pound of fantasy and realism," says that when "the vein
of fantasy predominates, his writing slips into escapism
and triviality."37 I disagree with Brunton. For one

thing, if there were a "compound" of fantasy and realism,

I would call it successful, but what we have in Narayan

73

is a mechanical mixture, not an organic compound. Also,
when fantasy predominates, Narayan's writing does not
slip into escapism and triviality but into incongruity.
Brunton's view that Vasu's decision to shoot the temple
elephant is trivial and unconvincing is not justified; I
feel that Narayan slips into incongruity because the
decision is not consistent with Vasu's character. It

is consistent only with one facet of his character, his
ruthlessness, but essentially Vasu is a careful villain
and this intrigue, even if it had succeeded, would have
meant too much trouble. Vasu, it is obvious, is not one
to let greed dictate strategy because he had strategy
enough to draw in all the profit he wanted. The incon-

gruity in The Sweet-Vendor is of another kind. Jagan is

 

realistic and more of a whole, distinct character than
Srinivas, Nataraj or even Margayya, and it is a pity
that Narayan obtrudes the ridiculous fantasy of story-
writing machines into a finely portrayed realistic situ-
ation of alienation between father and son.

Narayan's plots fall apart but not due to the
improbability of events, as Brunton holds. Perhaps racial
and cultural background has something to do with the
comprehension or miscomprehension of this aspect; I do
not see the events leading to the denouement in various
novels as improbable. "Might as well drown myself in

the river," and "Might as well renounce the world and

74

wander as a sanyasi," are not only common idioms in Tamil
but not uncommon occurrences, and so Savitri's suicide

attempt in The Dark Room and Chandran's renunciation in

 

The Bachelor of Arts are entirely credible happenings.

 

Belief in planchets and supernatural communication such

as we find in The English Teacher is present all over the

 

world, and in India it is not unusual even for educated
men of letters and of science to have implicit faith in
such things. Similarly, Raju the guide becoming a fake-
swami is quite probable, as is the drought and the
peasants' faith that the swami can end it.

That a familiarity with the Indian background is
an important requisite in the understanding of these

”fantastic" events is seen in the reviews of The English

 

Teacher. And what Narayan said to Ved Mehta about the
adverse comments of the reviewers is relevant to this
re-evaluation of fantasy and realism:
"Of course," Narayan said gleefully, "the reviewers
did not realize that the whole story was auto-
biographical-~that I myself had been a witness to
the experiments. But what's the use?" he sighed.
"You don't believe it either."38
It is necessary then, to differentiate between

what is fantasy and what is realistic in the apparently

fantastic events in each novel. Mali, in The Sweet-Vendor,

 

setting up a story-writing machine is fantastic but Raju,

in The Guide, becoming a fake-swami is quite probable as

 

is the drought and the peasants' faith that the swami can

end it .

75

Brunton is of the opinion that The Guide is radi-

 

cally flawed because

. . . the career of Raju himself is too fantastic for
Narayan's essentially realistic mode to cope with,

and the book cannot overcome its inherent improba-
bility.39

On the contrary, The Guide is the only one of

 

Narayan's novels which comes close to having a perfect
unity and a "compound" of realism and fantasy. In The_
ghlee, Narayan uses the literary device of ambiguity to
get this compound. The concluding section of the novel
is a fine example of effective use of ambiguity.

Every critic who has published anything on The
ghlee feels that Raju is transformed into a genuine saint
during the fast he undertakes to call down the rain-god.
My thesis is that the effect of his experience on the
third night of the fast is not lasting and that his
essential character does not change. He only takes on
another role--of saint--and sets out to enjoy it as he
had enjoyed his previous roles of guide, lover, manager,
ascetic.

The novel ends with Raju going down to the river
on the eleventh day. He hears the frantic appeal of the
doctors and the government to break his fast and continue
it after recovering some of his lost strength. He
smiles. Then he asks Velan to help him to the river.

"He stepped into it, shut his eyes and turned towards

76

the mountain, his lips muttering the prayer." Then he
says it is raining in the hills and collapses.
This is a masterly stroke of ambiguity on
Narayan's part. Does it rain? Does Raju die? What
effect does the telegram have upon him? Does he really
pray or are his lips muttering only wordless sounds?
C. D. Narasimhaiah infers that the story ends in Raju's
self-sacrifice as a supreme expression of his spiritual
ascent, a greater-love-hath-no-man-than-this apotheosis.
And that "Raju's death, viewed symbolically, means that
the individual by losing his life brings rain (and life)
to his fellowmen, and his death is just 'death by water'--
which is not really death but a means of self-purification
and self-realization. It is the triumph of the traditional
way of living over natural and manmade catastrophes."40
Panduranga Rao makes a similar conclusion about Raju's
conversion. "For once, Raju's decision does not waver
because it is a true decision made in an effort towards
self-abnegation. He now faces death rather than abandon
this unique experience of selflessness. Death for Raju
is thus the culmination of life."41
I prefer to pay tribute to Narayan's ambiguity
and art by speculating that this risk, though imposed on
Raju and not planned by him, pays dividends; that he

recovers from his swoon and graciously accedes to the

humble requests of disciples and government and allows

77

glucose-saline injections to reinvigorate his bloodstream
while his halo shines brighter than ever in the eyes of
the myth-loving rustics and sensation-loving urbans.

The Guide shows that Narayan, despite his limi-
tations, can produce good literature if he would but
make an effort. It also shows that Narayan does not
make a sustained effort at good writing. He takes his
art too easily, carrying over to the novel what Keats
says about poetry, "if Poetry comes not as naturally as
the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all."
Narayan's muse seems to need no single-minded worship.
One might be tempted to say Narayan is typically South
Indian in that his literary muse occupies but one of the
many shrines in the temple of life. But this is not
true. Narayan's muse is enshrined in the sanctum-
sanctorum of his life. He has, as he confessed to
Mehta, only two interests in life--his daughter and
his writing. And yet he turns out novels that are far
from well-written, and lapses into less-than-mediocrity
time and time again in every novel.

Waiting for the Mahatma shows all his weaknesses.

Unlike The Guide, which reveals his strengths as well as

 

shortcomings, Waiting for the Mahatma has very little in

 

its favor. It is a Gandhian novel. Technically, Sriram
is the hero of the novel and the plot revolves around
him; but the predominant figure, even though he is seldom

on stage, is Gandhi and the theme is Gandhism.

78

Mahatma Gandhi--there is magic in the name.

What political POWer that "half-naked fakir"42

wielded,
what spiritual halo surrounded that bald and toothless
head, what supreme benediction radiated from those
serene eyes, Indians of this century will not lightly
forget, and future generations not readily believe. As
Einstein said of him, "Generations to come, it may be,
will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in
flesh and blood walked upon this earth." It is natural
then that Gandhi would be a recurring figure in con-

temporary Indian literatures.43

It is natural, too,
that readers should be predisposed to a favorable
response whenever Gandhi or Gandhism is mentioned in a
story. In spite of this the novel fails. Not only is
the portrait of Gandhi weak and uninspiring, but the
novel is lacking in characterization, development,
meaning, technique and language. Prof. Srinivasa
Iyengar, with characteristic mildness, says Narayan's
art in this novel "betrays unsureness and perplexity"
though it is an "ambitious effort and an impressive

feat."44

There is no need to mince one's words.
Narayan's reputation is well enough established for

us to give credit and adverse criticism just where they
are due without being either patronizing or apologetic.
Narayan is a good story-teller. As with his own Nambi,45

stories flow out of him and hold his listeners' interest,

79

whether or not they remember anything later. Narayan is
a middle-class man who writes about middle-class men in
middle-class Indian-English. Simplicity, his greatest
virtue, becomes his greatest shortcoming once he steps
out of the middle-class world. He is proficient at
animating middle-class urban life in South India, but

is ignorant of the lives of the rich and the rustic.

He is fine at bringing out the eccentricities and vices
of common men, and excellent at portraying rogues because
his rogues are common men in whom the streak of roguery
is more pronounced than in most people;46 but he is
uninteresting when molding good men, and positively

out of his depth with supermen. Mahatma Gandhi was a
superman. Sriram, the hero, is a good man. And so we

have in Waiting for the Mahatma a failure.

 

It is a regrettable weakness in Narayan that
whenever he sets out to sketch a virtuous character he
ends up sketching a near-moron. Sriram is, without
reprieve, moronic. However, what is even more regrettable
is that Narayan very nearly makes Gandhi in the same mold
as Sriram. He takes certain familiar characteristics
and incidents associated with Gandhi and he sticks them
in haphazardly at the first Opening he gets. It is well
known that Gandhi always used simple and lucid language,
that he started most public meetings with bhajan (choral

prayer), and that he sometimes mentioned that he expected

80

to live one hundred and twenty-five years. But the way
Narayan inserts them within minutes of bringing Gandhi

on the scene is inartistic. Neither his language nor his
organization help to mend matters. Here is what happens
at the first public meeting addressed by Gandhi:

Gandhi raises his arms and "instantly a silence
fell on the gathering." He claps his hands rhythmically
and says, "I want you all to keep this up, this beating
for a while." Then they start a choral chant of Gandhi's

favorite bhajan, Raghupati Raghava Raja Ram.

 

It went on and on, then ceased, when Mahatmaji began
his speech. Natesh interpreted in Tamil what Gandhi
said in Hindi. At the outset Mahatma Gandhi explained
that he'd speak only in Hindi as a matter of principle.
'I will not address you in English. It's the language
of our rulers. It has enslaved us. I very much wish
I could speak to you in your own sweet language, Tamil;
but alas, I am too hard-pressed for time to master it
now, although I hope if God in his infinite mercy
grants me the longevity due to me, that is one hundred
and twenty-five years, I shall be able next time to
speak to you in Tamil without troubling our friend
Natesh.‘4

Note the weakness of language, the many Babuisms and
ignoring of connotations in "you all," "this beating,"
"went on and on," ”at the outset," "very much wish"; and
the contradictions involved in the latter part of the
last sentence where he casts aspersions on God's justice
and God's mercy by yoking them together: if longevity
depended on God's mercy, obviously it could not be man's
"due"; and if a century and a quarter is "due" a man, it
speaks little of God's justice to speculate that he might

curtail it.

81

The same indiscriminate inclusion of Gandhi's
well-known ideas and habits mars every scene in which
Gandhi appears, e.g., Gandhi distributing Municipal
Chairman's treasured oranges to Harijan children,
Gandhi's brisk morning walk, Gandhi's last appearance
before falling to an assassin's bullet. Subjective
responses evoked by Gandhi's presence are even more
weakly handled; take, for example, Gandhi's gentle
rebukes which, general though they were, had the
effect on guilty people of being individually addressed
to them. This is neither objectively nor subjectively
described; the author does not comment on this ambiguity
nor does he bring it out effectively through the char-
acters; he merely drops Gandhi's statements like bricks,
and only a very sympathetic reader will appreciate the
ambiguity supposed to be there behind the abruptly-
expressed incidents on pages 24 and 51.

As a contrast to this pedestrian delineation of
the Mahatma's effect on peOple, let us consider Raja

Rao's handling of Moorthy's conversion in Kanthapura.

 

The circumstances are almost identical. Moorthy, a
university student, indifferent and ignorant, pushes

his way through crowds and volunteers to the dais, and
there gets his vision. Here is masterful use of ambiguity:

we do not even know how much of Moorthy's "vision" took

82

place in reality. And here is simple monosyllabic
language that rises to heights of inspired and sublime
music:

Then came a dulled silence of his blood and he said
to himself "Let me listen," and he listened, and in
listening heard, "There is but one force in life and
that is Truth, and there is but one love in life and
that is the love of mankind, and there is but one
God in life and that is the God of all," and then
came a shiver and he turned to the one behind him
and said, "Brother," and the man took the fan from
Moorthy and Moorthy trembled back and sought his

way out to the open, but there were men all about
him and behind the men women, and behind them carts
and bullocks and behind them the river, and Moorthy
said to himself, "No, I cannot go." And he sat
beside the platform, his head in his hands, and
tears came to his eyes, and he wept softly, and
with weeping came peace. He stood up, and he saw
there, by the legs of the chair, the sandal and the
foot of Mahatma, and he said to himself, "That is
my place.”9

Everything that Narayan has tried and failed to convey in
the novel is here in this single passage so rich in objec-
tive, symbolic and subjective descriptions--the milling
crowds of common people with their bullock carts, the
feeling of brotherhood that links all in the presence

of the Mahatma, pellucid prose befitting Gandhi, the
quintessence of profundity behind the utter simplicity

of the words, and above all, the entire movement of
conversion from initial indifference to curiosity (not
included in the quoted passage) to the abstract influence
of Gandhi's presence to concrete rational appeal to

resistance (reminiscent of St. Paul and Vivekananda) to

83

self-surrender (with its symbolic connotations of the foot
and sandal associated with Lord Rama) to the peace that
passeth understanding.

Narayan's characterization of Gandhi is weak from
the very start but he is far more effective in his initial
characterization of Sriram. Sriram is introduced as a
type of person who recurs in many of Narayan's novels--

a goodhearted, somewhat-spoilt, lazy and purposeless

young man. Like many other Narayan characters, Sriram

has been a poor student and has plodded his way through
high school. On his twentieth birthday his grandmother,
who had devotedly reared this orphan child of her soldier-
son, turns over to him the accumulated military pension

of years, and Sriram finds himself lord of Rupees 38,
500-7-6. He celebrates the occasion by buying a seven-
rupee canvas-chair on which he spends most of the next
four years.

One April evening,50 at the market, he sees a
young woman collecting money for Gandhi's visit, and
straightway he wishes he could marry her. But Sriram,
unlike some other Narayan heroes--Chandran in Bachelor
of Arts or Krishna in "The White Flower" or Ravi in
Mr. Sampath (published in the United States as The_

51--is not a

Printer of Malgudi) or Narayan himself
romantic lover who falls in love at first sight and

forever. The impression she leaves on him is not lasting

84

as proven at the public meeting where he takes a place
next to the women's enclosure so he can stare through
his dark glasses at young women speculating "what type
he would prefer for a wife." Only when he sees Bharati
on the dais does he remember that he had fallen in love
with her at first sight! With unwonted intelligence
(that is never in evidence after him) he shoves his
way through the crowd and gains access to Gandhi's hut.
There he makes Bharati's acquaintance and decides to
become a Gandhian in order to win her. He joins Gandhi's
entourage. At this point the lazy, good-hearted, average
young man starts turning into a purposeful adult, an
obedient disciple and devoted lover. And it is at this
point that Narayan's characterization begins to lose con-
viction.

When Gandhi leaves the south, Sriram joins one
of the Gandhian centers that had been established near
Malgudi. Then, for no conceivable reason, he takes his
abode in an abandoned temple and lives there for an
unspecified length of time, having Bharati visit him
occasionally. Why he could not visit her or express
his love for her is not understandable, and even less
realistic is it that a young woman belonging to a big
group should walk unescorted several miles into the hills

to meet another member of the group.

85

It is late 1942; the Cripps offer of March-April
has been turned down (TEE, p. 104), and Gandhi has been
in jail since August (TEE, p. 92). One day Bharati
comes with a can of paint, a brush and an order that
Sriram is to write Quit India (in English) all over the
district.

He sets out to do this, walking through villages
and townships in the area. His meeting with several
school children is amusing, showing once again that
Narayan is excellent at describing comic confrontations.
But shortly after, Sriram falls considerably in stature.
This is not because he is meant to; the plot, theme, and
authorial commentary elsewhere show that Sriram is meant
to be a Gandhian hero in formation. The only conclusion
one can draw is that the author is either out of his
depth or careless. The statements that Narayan puts
into Sriram's mouth make him a stupid, ignorant young
man rather than the dedicated disciple that he is
probably meant to be. Occasionally the narrator himself
does scant service to the hero. For example, "He lost
count of time. He went on doing things in a sort of
machine-like manner." (Egg, p. 101).

When someone asks him why he goes on painting
those words, he replies, "I'm merely carrying out an
order." This will not do at all. It becomes more and

more obvious that Sriram has not understood what the

86

whole non-violent, non-cooperation movement is about;
his is an inferior path altogether--the path of blind
obedience. Gandhi is a Mahatma. Mahatmas must be
obeyed. Therefore do what Gandhi says without questioning
or comprehending. Because he does not understand the
ABC of Gandhism, he is its worst advocate. Repeatedly
he is stumped for an answer; to the school master who
says the time to start the freedom struggle is after
the war, Sriram says, "Be careful. You will be
beheaded when Britain leaves India. We have a list

of everybody who has to be beheaded." (TQM, p. 97).

To the astute timber contractor who contributes
to the War Fund as well as to the Harijan Fund he has no
argument at all, but a weak request that he pray to
Gandhi's picture "that he may inspire you with reasonable
thinking." His visit to the white plantation owner,
Mathieson, shows Sriram's ignorance unequivocally.

When Mathieson says it is a pity the Cripp offer was
rejected, Sriram is silent. "Such intricate academic
technicalities refused to enter his head." "'It is just
an eyewash,’ he said remembering a newspaper comment."
(TEE, p. 105).

When he meets someone less literate and more rustic
than himself, he becomes a braggart as seen in the Solur
teashop incident. The clinching proof of Sriram's

moronic incomprehension is the way he is taken in by

87

Jagadish. Jagadish, a prosperous photographer, is a
terrorist leader who exploits Sriram and the location of
the abandoned shrine in which Sriram lives. He gives
Sriram a Special radio set that receives Netaji Subhas
Chandra Bose's broadcasts to the underground workers
of his Indian National Army. Sriram faithfully tran-
scribes the messages, never doubting that all those
exhortations that Indians should arm themselves and
resort to violent means in their fight for independence
formed part of a program that had Gandhi's total sanction.

At no time do we get even a passing impression
that the spoilt twenty-year-old idler of the first page
is growing into manhood. When we leave him on the last
page, he is well past the age of thirty, and yet he is
as helpless and childish as on the first. Not Gandhi,
not a decade of experience, not his love for a mature,
idealistic woman has matured him any. Towards the end
of the novel, he tells Gandhi, "Bharati went away to
jail and there was no one who could tell me what to do."

Sriram's love affair, even more than his nation-
alistic activities, shows his immaturity. Here again,
the author's probable intention--as seen in the denoue-
ment--is to show how love and admiration can transform
an average person into a hero.

With Bharati he is always a child, sometimes

petulant, sometimes willful, sometimes pathetic, but

88

always childish. His first meeting sets the tone for
the entire relationship. At first he is a braggart,
a little boy on an adventure, immensely proud and
vaunting. Then he is a pathetic little boy, feeling
lost and scared on alien ground. His speech and manners
are not those of a man of twenty-four but a boy of ten.
His love, too, smacks of a small boy's intense calf love.
Once he starts living in the abandoned temple
several miles from Koppal Village, each of Bharati's
visits is a repetition of the first--full of petulant
demands on his part, and stinging wit followed by
affection and tenderness on Bharati's. The whole inci-
dent of his outburst, "No one can stop me and you from

. 52
marrying now.

This is how gods marry" (TTT, p. 122)
is weakly handled and makes him more a wilful child
than an importunate lover. "He rested his head on her
bosom and remained silent." Even his fevered ritual
before the broken image exudes an air of theatricality
more than a "positive and dynamic" love he is supposed
to feel, and it ends with him "pathetically" blinking
and talking "childishly."

Later, when Bharati sends a message from jail
that his grandmother is dying, Sriram, who has not
thought of his grandmother all these long years though

he has been only fifty miles away, returns home and is

told by his old friend and neighbor, Kanni, that his

89

grandmother had died earlier that night. Sriram's grief
is unconvincing. He goes over the house, checks his old
trunk and sees that everything is just as it had been.

A similar scene in The Bachelor of Arts where Chandran

 

finds that his mother had kept his room meticulously
clean in his absence is effective whereas this scene is
utterly lacking in poignancy. Instead, it serves only
to make Sriram quite heartless. He sobs for a while,
and then tells Kanni that he is hungry and that there
is nothing in the kitchen.
"How can there be anything? She was ill so long;
those ladies were bringing her milk and gruel."
"I'm very hungry, Kanni," Sriram said again
pathetically.

Narayan's portrayal of Sriram is such that the
reader's sympathy is not evoked; rather, one feels
repulsed by this character who turns to ask about his
grandmother's last days only after satisfying his hunger.

After this the story takes a fantastic turn.

In this novel the occasion that breaks it is even more
fantastic than usual, and strangely incongruous in the
context of Narayan's general realism. The old woman
starts breathing again at the cremation ground; since
the crowd believes that disaster would overtake the town
if anyone due to be cremated was brought back into the

walls of the city, she is kept in a house just outside

the city limits. With all this publicity, Sriram is

90

recognized and arrested. He spends the next few years
in jail and is released early in 1948.

Back in Malgudi, he visits Jagadish, who writes
a long love-letter to Bharati on his behalf. Bharati
replies asking him to join her at Birla House in Delhi.
Sriram reaches Delhi, is warmly welcomed by Bharati, who
is taking care of refugee children; together they meet
Gandhi on the evening of January 30, 1948, and get his
blessing to be married. The over-simplistic dialogues
here are not worthy of being ascribed to Gandhi's last
hours on earth. His premonition that he may not be
present at their wedding next morning retrieves the
atmosphere somewhat despite being a stock character-
istic, but the last two sentences fail to transmit the
magnitude and drama of the tragedy: "The Mahatma fell
on the dais. He was dead in a few seconds." This is a
crowning example of the inadequacy of the "simplicity"
of Narayan's prose that is so much talked about. Narayan's
simplicity of language, his limitative vocabulary and
unvarnished narration cannot rise to the challenge of
crises in the narrative. As V. Y. Kantak says in his
perceptive essay, Narayan's is a one-stringed instrument
that serves a purpose much of the time but "his language

53 Perhaps the ending

does so seem to miss a dimension."
would have gained in effect if the last three sentences
had been replaced by a simple "Hé Raml", Gandhi's last

words.

91

It is not in the main story or the main characters
that we can find artistic or literary worth in Waiting
for the Mahatma. There are several sensible and humorous
arguments, it is true, but they are marred by the author's
reluctance to enter his characters. All those who express
conservative or counter-revolutionary views, the obverse
of the Gandhian coin, so to say, could have been made
electrically alive however brief their appearance, but
the author has developed neither these characters nor
these ideas. Examples of potentially rich scenes are:
Gorpad's impatience at the rampant blackmarketing,
Mathieson's gentle reminder that his thirty-year stay
in India has made him feel as much love and responsibility
for the country as any Indian, the Solur rustics' bland
pledge of loyalty to the British government which seemed
nearer and more relevant than Gandhi's men, the prisoner's
forthright denunciation of political prisoners who come
to jail out of self-interest as he says, "I've seen all
those Gandhi's followers in prison, and they think they
are honoured guests . . . in a bungalow with a cook and
pocket money and . . . books to read and sherbet to
drink."

Those who do hold our attention are the common
people with their gossipy tongues and malice-tinted views
and their basically good hearts--Kanni, the shopkeeper

with his scrupulous account-keeping, who nevertheless

92

is a good neighbor in time of need, the smooth-tongued
Fund Office Manager who later provides for Sriram's
grandmother so that she can be comfortably off in
Banaras, unscrupulous Jagadish who exploits Sriram but
helps him trace Bharati, Chairman Natesh who has scrounged
upon the Corporation but is nevertheless so human as to
be incoherent with nervousness in Gandhi's presence,
those common people with their common malice and envy
who pass snide remarks at the public meeting--these are
the people who are given animate and eloquent identity
by Narayan.

Waiting for the Mahatma, then, may be said to

 

provide examples of the levels that Narayan's art cannot
reach. Usually Narayan is careful to avoid scenes and

plots which require dynamic delineation; Waiting for the

 

Mahatma is one of the few novels where he has omitted,
intentionally or unintentionally, to take this pre-
caution. He does not use the devices that are his
forte--ambiguity, unsentimentality, humor and a light-
ness of spirit. All these and more are used in his

latest, and possibly best, novel--The Sweet-Vendor.

 

Between Waiting for the Mahatma (1955) and The Sweet-

 

 

Vendor (1967) Narayan published two novels, The Guide

 

(1958) and The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1962). Each of

 

the three last novels is a meritorious work of creation

though all have their shortcomings. One can see the

93

author's progressive control of the medium with which he
is working. These novels are comparatively more ambitious
in conception and more effective in execution. The uneven
mixture of fantasy and realism is still present, but both
qualities are so well manipulated that they can be
accepted as a characteristic of Narayan's writing that

is not always detrimental to the total effect.

The Sweet-Vendor is worth a comprehensive study

 

for its literary and thematic virtues. What follows is
not a study of the novel as an entity but of a theme
that runs through Narayan's work and culminates in The
Sweet-Vendor. In this novel Narayan shows the point at
which fatherly love needs must stop if father and son
are to ascend to a higher plane of fulfillment.
Paternal love is one of the more significant
refrains in Narayan's fiction. From his earliest stories,
for example "Forty-five a Month," in which the usually
servile Venkat Rao decides to defy his irascible boss
in order to spend his evenings with his child, this
sentiment is highlighted as one of the most beautiful
experiences in life. There is no character in Narayan
so vile that he is not moved by love for children, at
least his own. Even morons like Kali in "Sweets for
Angels" find a kind of spiritual ecstasy watching
innocent children. And Narayan's rogues become lovable

because of their ready response to children. Pickpocket

94

Raju in "The Trail of the Green Blazer" pays dearly for
this emotion but he also wins us over. A delightful
predecessor to Raju the Guide, this pickpocket stalks
his prey (a man in a green blazer) through the fair
and waits while he haggles vociferously with a balloon
seller over a balloon for his "motherless boy." At an
opportune moment Raju swoops down on his quarry. It is
a rich find and Raju is mighty pleased--till he comes
upon the balloon tucked away in one of the flaps of
the wallet.
Raju almost sobbed at the thought of the disappointed
child--the motherless boy . . . perhaps of the same
age as his second son. Suppose his wife were dead
(personally it might make things easier for him, he
need not conceal his cash under the roof) . . . it
would make him very sad indeed and tax all his
ingenuity to keep his young ones quiet.54
The Green Blazer looked a ruffian; he would probably
beat the child if the child asked him for the balloon
that night. Raju decides that the motherless boy must
have his balloon. And in trying to put the wallet back
into Green Blazer's pocket, Raju is caught! He comes
out of jail eighteen months later a wiser man. "For
now he believed God had gifted the likes of him with
only one-way deftness.“ He would never again try to
put anything back.
Kannan, the gambler in "Wife's Holiday" is also
of Raju's mold; he feels very guilty as he breaks open

his son's piggy bank. But he has to face only his wife's

anger, not prison.

95

In the novels, most of his major characters are
devoted fathers. Even Ramani, the bossy, bullying head

of the house in The Dark Room is genuinely concerned

 

about his children. Srinivas (in The Printer of Malgudi)

 

though fanatically in love with his tabloid to the
exclusion of all other interests, from time to time
feels the wonder of fatherhood. Chandran's father

(in The Bachelor of Arts) belongs to an earlier and

 

more undemonstrative generation; he says nothing very
effusive when Chandran returns just as he said nothing
when Chandran ran away, but he ages in those eight

months. One of the best points about The Bachelor of

 

hghe is this relationship, the wordlessly intimated
bond between parents and son--the sorrowing father not
tending the garden, the fond mother keeping Chandran's
room spotlessly clean.

The other fathers make no secret of their delight

in their children. In The Ehglish Teacher, Krishnan's

 

love for his daughter, Leela, is fully in keeping with
his romantic temperament. On the other hand, we see

a whole new side of Sampath, the Printer of Malgudi,
when he appears as a father. Instead of the quick-
witted, bossy efficiency expert, we see a typical
father, inordinately proud of his children, insistent
about showing off their accomplishments, and crooning

over their abilities. In a way it is incongruous, but

96

in the larger context it shows Narayan's insight into
human beings. Vasu, the Man-Eater of Malgudi, is the
only major character who dislikes children, and he
happens to be the only total villain in Narayan's
fiction. Narayan seems to say, The man that hath no
paternal love in himself is fit for treasons, stratagems
and spoils.

In Margayya the Financial Expert and Jagan the
Sweet-Vendor we see paternal love carried to the point
of imprudence. Both have only two overwhelming interests
in life and for both one of the interests is their only

son. The first part of The Financial Expert is a fine

 

delineation of the wonderful experience of fatherhood.
Balu, though utterly spoilt, is a lovable little scamp,
and all the scenes between father and son are very
evocative ehe realistic--the child's enthusiastic
reception of his father every evening, demanding toys--
"a tiny engine, tiny cows, tiny tables, tiny everything,
of the maximum size of a mustard seed,"55 his cunning
blackmail of his parents when he is hurt, his engaging
prattle, his stubborn tantrums one of which results in
Margayya's precious account books literally going down
the drain--all these are vividly and sensitively
described, as are Margayya's various responses of

love, wonder, anxiety and ambition for his young son.

For example:

97

His mind gloated over visions of his son. He would
grow into an aristocrat. He would study, not in a
Corporation School, but in the convent, and hobnob
with the sons of the District Collector or the
Superintendent of Police or Mangal Seth, the big-.
gest mill-owner in the town. He would promise him
a car all for himself when he came to the College.
He could go to America and obtain degrees. . . . He
would buy another bungalow in Lawley Road for his
son, and then his vision went on to the next gen-
eration of aristocrats. (ET, p. 24).
Part II that carries Margayya to success and riches
through the publication of "Bed Life" (rechristened
Domestic Harmony), and Balu to his thirteenth year, is
again, full of excellent and humorous pictures of this
relationship. In Part III, the bond breaks up as it
must with all that over-indulgence. Balu fails his
high school examination several times and Margayya,
despite every effort at sympathetic communication, is
rebuffed by his teenage son.

Echoing his first rash act of throwing Margayya's
account book into the Vinayak Mudali Street sewer, Balu
throws his high school transcripts into the same gutter
and closes yet another chapter in Margayya's life. The
alienation between father and son is rather hastily
scanned. But the thread is taken up with all the former
verve once Balu runs away. Margayya covers up for his
son. He tells people Balu has gone to Bombay and Madras

to see a bit of the world. "What is there in Matricu-

lation? I have no faith in our education. Who wants

98

all this nonsense about A squared plus B squared. . . .
Boys must learn things in the rough school of life."
(fig, p. 122).

Later, when people crowd in on hearing Balu is
dead in Madras, the business side of his mind can think
only something as outrageous as "If an entrance be
charged, we might earn lakhs." Nevertheless this
Shylock too loves his offspring with frenzied love
and his lostness is pathetic as he contemplates the
unavoidable visit to the evil metropolis, Madras.

The resolution of the mystery of Balu's supposed
death is far too simple and implausible to be anything
but fantasy typical of Narayan. An observation that
bears repetition is that most of Narayan's novels are
a mixture of realism and fantasy; the mixture is not
always in optimum proportion and frequently breaks the
plot into two disparate pieces. However, in this novel
the fantasy is not intrusive though it is a stock-in-
trade.

After his return Balu's fall into bad habits
and bad company is swift. His Madras escapade has
assured his parents' silence; they are willing to
tolerate any and every thing he does. There is hardly
any exchange of words between father and son, pleasant
or unpleasant. Marriage does not mend matters any

except that Margayya, for a brief while, feels the

99

happiness of knowing his son happy. Balu is not the only.
one responsible for the subsequent alienation. Margayya
becomes too absorbed in making easy money to bother about
his son, and he does not even visit his grandson. It

is only when he loses his ill-gained wealth to the last
rupee and is poorer than when he started that paternal
love as genuine and without strings as the love he had

for his infant son returns. However, Margayya ends
exactly where he started. Rajeev Taranath feels, "At

the end of the novel, he is apparently back at the
position he started from; but with an altered and enriched
kind of awareness. In other words, he has ceased to be

anonymous to himself."56

Impressive though this hypothe-
sis is, I feel it reflects the sensitivity of the critic
more than any intrinsic pattern in Narayan's philosophy.
Margayya has not, after all, learnt anything from several
other experiences; his self-imposed discipline of worship
did not improve him any, because it was not a discipline
at all but merely ritual; the rise to wealth did not
affect him, and his reflections about money automatically
bringing recognition and status turn out untrue; money
can bring him nothing because he does not know how to

use money; he still lives in his bare, old-fashioned
little house with its single file of four rooms, and

the small room he builds upstairs houses dust and

currency notes. Except for a new umbrella "he gave

100

no outward sign of his affluence. . . . He walked to his
office every day. His coat was of spun silk, but he

chose a shade that approximated to the one he had worn

for years so that no one might notice the difference.

He whitewashed the walls of his house inside only . . . "
(ET, p. 119). He does not even buy an oil lamp for his
office. Indeed, his miserliness becomes disgusting at

this point. Even later the only comfort he indulges

in is a car, and that is more in self-defense than for
comfort. He learns nothing from Balu's flight, supposed
death, and return; he is more cowed and a little more
willing to part with money to keep Balu near, but the
episode has not made him EEEEE of anything--neither

values nor human hearts nor human suffering. Even the
birth of his grandson, the one sure soft spot in dynasty-
loving egoists, does not move him. At this point he has
lost all paternal love, it seems to me, and I do not see
his attack on Dr. Pal the way Panduranga Rao does; Pan-
duranga Rao says, "He punishes Pal and thunderously
exhibits his resentment against lewd life. But the

beating he administers to Pal is something more: it

is a revolt against a world that ever keeps him unhappy."57
I disagree with this critic because I do not see any evi-
dence that Margayya is unhappy or "caught between the two
civilizations of modern India." It seems to me that

Margayya is blissfully happy in his profession right

101

from his banyan tree days to his financial wizardry. He
is a very practical businessman as his deft manipulations
show, especially the astuteness with which he divests

himself of the notoriety of Domestic Harmonijith a

 

thundering profit to boot; he does not sell his part-
nership out of any sudden moral awakening; he had three
very practical reasons:

He detested his office and the furniture. . . . He
liked to keep his knees folded and tucked--that alone
gave him a feeling of being on solid ground. And then
his table and all its equipment seemed to him a most
senseless luxury.

"well, to let you into a secret, there is not
much of that either; the figures are falling off;
sales are not as good as they used to be."

And then it hurt his dignity to be called the
publisher of Domestic Harmony. (FE, pp. 95-96).

 

These are the real, prosaic reasons, and the rest--about

Domestic Harmony's harmful influence and his wish to keep

 

Balu pure--is sheer rationalization, if not outright
hypocrisy.

As for his revolt against Dr. Pal's moral turpi-
tude, let us not forget that Margayya's conscience has
not been overly troubled by Pal's questionable ethics
at any time even though he has been cognizant of it
from their very first meeting at the idyllic pond.
Moreover, Margayya exploits Pal as much as Pal exploits
him. To quote but one example, in his 20 per cent-
guaranteed-interest project his "instinct was right in

choosing Dr. Pal as his tout." (FE, p. 158).

102

Yet another reason why I disagree with these two
critics--Panduranga Rao and Taranath-—and maintain that
Margayya does not reach a higher plane is because I
cannot ignore the significance of the sentence:

Later in life Margayya often speculated what would
have become of him if he had started back home after
speaking to his daughter-in-law a little earlier and
missed Dr. Pal's Austin that night, or if he had
remained in the shadows and had allowed Pal to go
off after dropping Balu, whom he might probably

have tackled with more circumspection and diplomacy:
he might even have shared his property with him as
he demanded: that would have saved him at least

the rest of it--and prevented thegdoctor from doing
what’he did} (Eh, p. 174, italics mine).

 

Margayya works his own ruin, all right, but he does not
bring it about for any moral principles, nor does he go
unrepentant into the limbo of bankruptcy. Neither as

a father nor as a businessman does Margayya "find" him-
self. If a sequel were to be written, it would essen-
tially be a copy of the same script.

But Jagan is different. He starts from the same
point as Margayya, with two overwhelming passions, one
of which is his son, but he finishes on a higher plane;
both as man and father he finds himself, not fully for
most discoveries are sudden in perception but slow in
realization; Narayan's growing artistic maturity has

realized this and contributes to making The Sweet Vendor

 

his best novel to date.
The parallels between Margayya and Jagan are

numerous. Both are essentially misers who have hoarded

103

a huge fortune and do not wish to spend a penny of it.
For both, their only child is a child of many prayers.
Both express their gratitude to the deity of their
prayers by making an offering of their son's weight

in gold and silver; Margayya, we remember, took care

to be prompt in fulfilling the vow and he "had not been

a day too soon in weighing the youngster in gold as he
showed a tendency to grow heavier each day." (Th, p. 132).
Both have inordinately high hopes for their son and heir.
Both are ruined by the son they have spoilt. Both novels
show only the father's feelings for his son and make no
mention at all of the relationship seen from the son's
point of view. In both, the sons cannot really be called
"adult" even though Balu is nineteen and Mali about thirty
years old when their fathers are ruined. Both, Margayya
and Jagan, have a core of romanticism, and repeatedly go
back to pleasant memories. Especially similar is the
thrill each gets reminiscing about the time his wife

was a young bashful bride and himself a virile lover;
Jagan's nostalgic reminiscence towards the end of The

Sweet-Vendor is about the finest piece Narayan has ever

 

written. Both men are themselves the product of funda-
mental change in the traditional family pattern; the

joint family system, so basic to the Hindu way of life,
has been broken in their youth, and each lives with his

immediate family in a relatively isolated domestic world;

104

Margayya's isolation is fanatically intentional (the
division of property described on p. 8 is very typical

of Narayan's blend of humor and satire, and it is similar
to the description of the disintegration of Nataraj's
family in The Man-Eater of Malgudi, p. 8).

The Sweet-Vendor dilates upon the stage of the
father-son relationship that was skimmed over in The
Financial Expert, namely, the growing lack of communi-
cation that starts in the son's teens. The nuances of
the relationship-~always seen through the father's eyes

and mind--are better handled in The Sweet-Vendor; the

 

inarticulation of a fond father in an undemonstrative
family setting is brought out admirably, and only
rarely does ludicrousness supersede pathos. Both,
Jagan and Mali, come out in sharper relief than most
Narayan characters; in this novel we can discern a
distinct improvement in the manipulation of the finer
aspects of vocabulary and art; instead of Narayan's
usual pencil-sketch characterization we have a hero who
is painted in color, with clear details of physical
appearance, habits, moods and thought-processes.

Like many other Narayan characters, Jagan is an
eccentric. His Gandhian precepts, including tanning,
are described at length; the ambiguity in which the
method in his madness is wrapped up shows yet another

significant advance in Nara an's art. Ja an has an
9

105

elaborate logic for his various habits such as using only
twenty drops of honey per day instead of sugar, using
only margosa twigs for brushing teeth, only ten watt
bulbs in the house. . . . We never come to know whether
his philosophy is a rationalizing of his thrifty nature
or whether it has been formulated out of genuine moral
or hygienic convictions. Margayya's shrewdness evokes
the reader's admiration but his miserliness is as
unequivocally clear. But with Jagan, Narayan builds

up the reader's sympathy by surrounding his miserliness
with ambiguity and endowing him with unquestionably
virtuous qualities. Jagan is genuinely loyal to Gandhi;
he has, after all, been spinning Theel for his own
clothes, and wearing only acceptable Gandhian footwear,
and has been using unadulterated foodstuffs in his shop.
That Jagan is not as obsessed with money as Margayya is
also unquestionable. He loves the sound of money and is
as reluctant as Margayya to spend any of it, but he does
not stint when it comes to keeping his two loves--the
purity of his sweets and the welfare of his son. He

is liberal with his son's lunch-money allowance and he
does not feel robbed when Mali extracts ten thousand
rupees from his loft. Whereas Shylock places equal
stress on the loss of his child and his ducats, Jagan is
concerned only about his child, his ducats becoming

purely incidental. Even when asked to shell out fifty

106

thousand dollars, he is more concerned about his son's
rashness than about the money. And when, at last, he
awakens to the futility of profit-making he reduces the
price of his sweets, and later he leaves his entire
fortune without a backward look. His genuine love for
his shop prompts him to ask his cousin to keep it going,
but he himself is through with the whole dreary routine of
being "a money-making sweet-maker with a spoilt son."58
It considerably enhances Jagan's stature and the author's
that the change of heart precedes Mali's arrest.
Essentially Jagan, the father, is naive, naive
to the point of stupidity at times, whereas Margayya is
never naive. Both Margayya and Jagan are motivated by
a desire to save face when they cover up for their sons'
abandoning of their studies--both use almost the same
words "he wants to educate himself in the school of life."
Later too, to save face, Jagan lies to Grace regarding
Mali's correspondence with him. But only Jagan's plight
arouses genuine pity because he is essentially too naive
to conceal his feelings and fears successfully. He is
too naive to see the obvious difference between Mali's
"brusque, disconnected or imperious" letters and Grace's
long, chatty, informative ones; too naive to see why
Nataraj can rush Mali's prospectus through the press in
a week while his own Nature Cure and National Diet has

languished for years at Nataraj's office.

107

But as a sweet-vendor Jagan is certainly not
naive. He handles the Bombay Anand Bhavan eelh and the
delegation with seeming naivete, but it is actually
suavity par excellence that makes him repeat many
banalities and trivia without committing himself an
iota. And later, if he does reverse his decision about
the price of sweets, it is not because he is intimidated
by his compeers but because of his new awareness that
his own peace of mind is more important than anything
else. This is the "awareness" that Jagan reaches, the
philosophy the novel embodies--Let each man work for
his own salvation, his own, nobody else's. Thus Jagan
passes through several stages of perception before he
finds the proper focus for the good life. In the begin-
ning his focus is on his son and his business. Then
the son moves out of focus once he walks out of Albert
Mission College, and Jagan endeavors to place him back
in focus through a subjective process with the help of
letters. When Mali returns from America, Jagan realizes
that the lens of communication is completely fogged over
and he tries to clear it through Grace. Even so, the
focus is irreparably blurred, and then he concentrates
on his business though Mali and Grace still form part
of the composition. Then his son's constant nagging
tilts the camera in a completely new direction and Jagan

suddenly sees a whole new vista. This is the point at

108

which he reduces the price of his sweetmeat packets. The
visit to the ruined garden with the hair-dyer stirs a
desire in him to focus on this new landscape. It is
only a desire, and at this point the lifelong habit of
focussing on his son still binds him.

His long reminiscence at the foot of Lawley
Statue is his long-overdue editing of the reel. As the
reel of his life is projected on his mental screen,
Jagan discovers that the entire reel is now irrelevant,
something to be reviewed once and then shelved away in
the closet of obsolete home movies. The realization
comes only during the viewing which is unpremeditated.
He relives his bachelorhood and his marriage, the long
years of marital orgy while books lay unread, exami-
nations unpassed; then the longer years of barrenness
resulting in a kind of emasculation when he "felt
fatigued by all this apparatus of sex, its promises
and its futility, the sadness and the sweat at the end
of it all (g!, p. 172); then the hours of prayer on
Badri Hill at the Santana Krishna shrine, and then at
last the sprout gladdening a long-barren earth.

The sprout had become a sapling, the sapling was
now a tree. And he, Jagan, the sower, had thought him-
self the gardener personally responsible for its growth.

This attitude had directed the entire relationship. For

109

Jagan, Mali at all times was a helpless, motherless boy
to be protected and indulged:
Poor boy, poor boy, let him be. . . . I wonder

what God has in store for him . . . must give him
more time. (g!, p. 23).

All right, I'll come to your college and speak
to those peOple. (gy, p. 29).

He had assumed that he was solely responsible for getting
Mali out of scrapes and that he could put everything
right. Now, at the foot of Lawley Statue, he realizes
that he was not the gardener; there was no need to
rebuke himself for having thought otherwise because
it was immaterial now, just as it was immaterial to
judge whether he had been a good gardener or a bad
one; the tree had grown, it would probably have grown
anyway, perhaps better, perhaps worse, and that too was
immaterial because it was past. The sower and the seed
were two different units. Jagan was now responsible
only for himself, and Mali for Mali. "Who are we to
get him out or to put him in?" (g1, p. 190). "I am
going somewhere, not carrying more than what my shoulder
can bear. . . . I am a free man." (ST, pp. 190-191).
With these realizations Jagan ascends to a new level
of perception.

He was responsible only for himself. He had
neglected his foremost responsibility--his salvation--
all these years. He had to find the right focus. What-

ever the focus should be, it was neither the shop nor

110

Mali. Perhaps it should be the five-headed goddess
Gayatri coming out of the stone that had lain in the
river at the foot of the ruined garden. Perhaps not.
Jagan is nowhere near completing the picture.
But he has perceived the framework, somewhere within
which is the object that ought to be focussed upon.

And the day is clear and bright.

FOOTNOTES

1For a critical appreciation of Manjeri Isvaran's
fiction, see my article, "An Indo English Minstrel: A
Study of Manjeri Isvaran's Fiction," Literature East and
west (Winter, 1970), pp. 43-67.

 

2V. Panduranga Rao, "The Art of R. K. Narayan,"
Journal of Commonwealth Literature (July, 1968), pp. 29-40.

 

3Nirmal Mukerji,'The World of Malgudi: A Study
of the Novels of R. K. Narayan.” (1960) An unpublished
doctoral dissertation.

4K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar, Indo-Anglian Literature
(Bombay, 1943), The Indian Contribution to English Liter-
ature (Bombay, 1945), and Indian Writing In Enin h YNew
York, 1962).

5M. E. Derrett, The Modern Indian Novel in English:
A Comparative Approach (Brussels, 1966).

 

 

 

6Derrett, Modern Indian Novel, p. 57.

 

7Ved Mehta, "The Train Had Just Arrived at Malgudi
Station," The New Yorker, XXXVIII, 30 (September 15, 1962),
p. 83.

 

8E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (New York,
1961), p. 53. First publiShed in 1927.

 

91n the opening pages of his Gods, Demons and
Others, an anthology of retold tales from the epics,
Narayan speaks at length about the traditional story-
teller who draws upon the treasure-house of the epics
which is an unfailing source of interest and instruction.
In Mehta's "The Train Had Just Arrived," Narayan is
quoted as saying he "can't write a novel without Krishna,

 

lll

112

Ganesa, Hanuman, astrologers, pundits, and devadasis."
(p. 54) But the truth is that there is no serious

reference to mythology, religion or epics in Narayan's
novels and very little mention of them even in passing.

 

loLionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination
(London, 1961), pp. 212 and 222 respectively. First
published in 1950.

 

11Philip Rahv, The Myth and the Powerhouse (New
York, 1965), p. 34.

 

12Steven Marcus, "The Novel Again," Partisan
Review, XXIX (1962), p. 190.

 

 

13Srinivasa Iyengar, Indian Writing, p. 294.

14Leslie Fiedler, No! in Thunder (Boston, 1960),
pp- 4-5.

15

For example, William Walsh, "The Spiritual and
the Practical," The Journal of Commonwealth Literature
(July, 1968), pp.7I2l-123 and Panduranga Rao, op. cit.

 

16w. J. Harvey, Essay§ in Criticism, XIII (Jan-
uary, 1963), p. 59.

 

17Srinivasa Iyengar, Indian Writing, pp. 281-284.

 

18Ibid., p. 284.

19W. J. Harvey, Character and the Novel (London,
1965), p. 61.

 

20Wayne Booth, "Distance and Point of View,"
Essays in Criticism, XI (1961), p. 67.

 

21Mark Schorer, "Technique as Discovery," Hudson
Review, I (Spring, 1948), p. 72.

22Percy Lubbock, Craft of Fiction (New York, 1931),
p. 69. First published in 1929.

23Mehta, "The Train," p. 62.

113

24Philip Rahv, Fiction and the Criticism of
Fiction (New York, 1965)? p. 58.

25M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms
(New York, 1971), p. 165.

 

26C. D. Narasimhaiah, "R. K. Narayan's The Guide,"
The Literary Criterion (Summer, 1961), pp. 63-92.

 

27Ibid., p. 87.

28V. Y. Kantak, "The Language of Indian Fiction

in English," in gritical Essays on Indian Writingiin
En lish, ed. M. K. Naik, S. K. Desai and G. S. Amur
(Dgarwar, 1968), pp. 148-149.

29Raja Rao, Kanthapura (New York, 1963), Foreword.
The novel was first published in 1938.

 

3°Ibid., p. 3.

31Mulk Raj Anand, The Untouchable (Bombay, 1933),

 

p. 15.

32R. K. Narayan, The English Teacher (Mysore,

1963), p. 70. First published in London (1946). Pub-
lished in the United States as Grateful to Life and Death
(East Lansing, 1953).

 

 

33Marco has had scant justice at the hands of
critics. It is my thesis that he is scrupulously honest
in his relationship with Rosie. Raju's relationship with
her is tainted with his own commercial ambition, whereas
Marco's only fault is that he expects physical fidelity
from a wife. Marco is genuinely overwhelmed when he
realizes Rosie's infidelity whereas Raju is not really
upset when Rosie leaves him.

34R. K. Narayan, Dodu and Other Stories (Mysore,
1943), p. l.

 

35Quoted by Mehta, "The Train," p. 79.

36Northrop Frye, "The Four Forms of Prose Fiction,"
Hudson Review II (Winter, 1950), pp. 582-595. Maurice Z.
Shfader, "The Novel as a Genre," The Massachusetts Review
(1963), PP. 291-308.

 

114

37T. D. Brunton, "India in Fiction," in Critical

Essays, p. 59.

38Quoted by Mehta, "The Train," p. 62.

39Brunton, "India in Fiction," p. 60.

4oNarasimhaiah, "The Guide," p. 91.

 

41Panduranga Rao, "The Art of Narayan," p. 35.

42Winston Churchill's description of Gandhi.

43Chapter XIV of Srinivasa Iyengar's Indian
Writing in English is a very good basis for the study
of Gandhiana in Indo-English Literature.

44ibid., p. 293.

45The story-teller in "Under the Banyan Tree,"
in The Astrologer's Day and Other Stories (Mysore, 1947).

46Except for Vasu the Man-Eater of Malgudi, who
is as black as Chaucer's Friar, Narayan's rogues are
varying shades of gray like Chaucer's other pilgrims,
and delightful for the same reason.

47R. K. Narayan, Waiting for the Mahatma (East
Lansing, 1955), p. 23. Page references for subsequent
quotations are given in parentheses, preceded by an
abbreviated form of the title, TTT.

 

48Bourgeois Indian-English phrases and usage.

49Raja Rao, Kanthapura (New York, 1963), p. 33.

 

50On New Year's Eve, i.e. April 12 or 13, for
New Year's Day usually falls on April 13 or 14.

51See Mehta, "The Train," pp. 67-72.

52 . . .
Narayan invariably uses the incorrect sequence,
"me and you."

115

S3Kantak, "The Language of Indian Fiction,"

p. 150.

54R. K. Narayan, Lawley Road (Mysore, 1956),

 

p. 11.

55R. K. Narayan, The Financial Expert (East

Lansing, 1963), p. 7. First published in London (1952).
Page reference for subsequent quotations are given in
parentheses, preceded by an abbreviated form of the
title, Th.

56Rajeev Taranath, "The Average as the Positive:
A Note on R. K. Narayan," Critical Essays on Indian
writing in English, p. 366.

57Panduranga Rao, "The Art of Narayan," p. 34.

58R. K. Narayan, The Sweet-Vendor (London, 1967),

p. 122. Page references for subsequent quotations from
this novel are given in parentheses, preceded by the
abbreviated form of the title, gy,

CHAPTER IV

NATIVE-ALIENS AND EXPATRIATES: KAMALA

MARKANDAYA AND BALACHANDRA RAJAN

South Indian writers have been divided, in this
dissertation, into three main groups. It is relevant
here to summarize the distinctions among the three.

The early writers chose to write in English
because the British Empire was at its zenith in their
time and they were inspired by the wealth of literature
and philOSOphy that came to them by the medium of the
English language. But their roots were deep in Hindu
culture. They were bilingual, often trilingual, knowing
Sanskrit in addition to their mother-tongue and English.
Hindu scriptures, mythology and folklore formed part of
their basic education; they were conversant with Sanskrit
and Tamil classics, and they were familiar with Greek and
Roman classics in translation. Several of them, such as
A. Madhaviah and K. S. Venkataramani in the south, were
intensely conscious of social problems and had to resolve
personal conflicts of loyalties and values--east and west,

old and new--without having any precedents as guidelines.

116

117

The native-talents shared the same background as
the first group. Certain things, however, were made
easier for them. Various degrees of anglicization had
taken place, and therefore they did not have to make
radical adjustments in their personal life; India was
coming into its own as a nation, and so they did not
feel compelled to explain or apologize for India. Cer-
tain basic reforms, such as the Sarada Act banning child-
marriage, and educational programs, had been effected,
and so they were not impelled to use the novel as a plat-
form for their views. They felt free to follow their own
native genius, and a new pride in vernacular literature
made them adapt native themes and evolve their own .
literary techniques and forms. In short, while early
writers consciously tried to imitate and impress, or
to write with a missionary purpose, native talents
spoke naturally and in their own voice.

The native-aliens, on the other hand, differ
markedly from the other two types. They are more angli-
cized in their social, behavioral and educational pat-
terns. Educated in mission schools, they picked up not
only more anglicized accents of speech but adopted, even
at home, a more anglicized routine--in eating, dressing,
pastimes and all that goes with what is termed "way of
life." Most of them completed their education outside

India. Among South Indians, Santha Rama Rau matriculated

118

from St. Paul's School, London, and graduated from
Wellesley College in the United States; Kamala Markandaya
toured Europe before graduating from Madras University;
Balachandra Rajan took his advanced degrees, including
the Ph.D., from Cambridge, England. Today all three are
expatriates in actuality as they have long been in their
way of life.

These expatriates have fluency in and knowledge of
the English language and literary techniques far superior
to that of the native-talents. (However, it must be noted
that they are unilingual, English being the only language
which they can use for purposes of serious communication.

They are not as rooted in Hindu culture as the
native-talents or early writers. This is why the term
native-aliens seems appropriate for them. Whereas the
early writers were themselves immersed in Hindu tradition,
and the native-talents either in their own routine or in
their parents' were in close touch with Hindu scriptures
and rituals, native-aliens were reared in an atmosphere
once removed from the typical Hindu routine. Their parents,
and often grandparents, were of the second generation of
anglicized Indians. This background is clearly brought
out in the most authentic works of all the expatriates;
in the case of the South Indians, it is delineated

specifically in Santha Rama Rau's Remember the House,

 

Kamala Markandaya's Some Inner Fury and Balachandra

 

Rajan's The Dark Dancer.

 

119

Though not wholly valid, what Mara in Nayantara

Sahgal's Storm in Chandigarh says of her anglicized

 

group could apply to South Indian expatriates as well:

I knew as much as any Catholic child about the
Catechism when I went to school at the Convent,
and since then I've learnt more about the Bible
than I shall ever know about the Shastras, and
except through your grandmother, who said her
prayers everyday and went to the temple now and
then and told you stories from the Ramayana, what
do yeh know about your religion?1

This superficial knowledge of the Hindu scriptures
and customs is most noticeable in the works of Santha Rama

Rau. Her travelogs and her novel, Remember the House

 

(1956), though very well-written, reveal an almost
immature nostalgia for the sights and sounds of Hindu
festivals which had been celebrated at her grandmother's

home. In her most recent novel, The Adventuress (1970),

 

Santha Rama Rau has totally dropped India both in setting
and in cast. The same shift is in process in Kamala

Markandaya's latest novel, The Coffer Dams (1969), where

 

the action, though set in India, is seen through the eyes
and experiences of an Englishwoman. The interesting
thing about Kamala Markandaya is that despite her super-
ficial knowledge of and scant research into the customs
and traditions of the Hindu way of life, her novels are
successful.2

With Rajan there is a difference. Though he too

was initiated early into the anglicized world of British

India, he is more conversant with Hinduism. His attitude

120

towards the rituals and routine is neither nostalgic as
in Santha Rama Rau nor a literary device as in Kamala
Markandaya, but detached and cerebral, and sometimes
sarcastic or facetious. However, one has only to read
The Dark Dancer with an open mind to see that beneath

the scorn that the hero, Krishnan, expresses for Hinduism
is a blood-consciousness that responds more than aesthe-
tically and cerebrally to the magnificence of temple
gopurams and sculptures.

None of the South Indian native-aliens are as
markedly anglophile as Nirad Chaudhari, but they appreciate
and admire British tradition. Kamala Markandaya's char-
acters are torn between loyalties; their ambivalence is
seen not only in the love-hate relationship the Indian
develops for the British, as Lady Caroline points out

in Possession, but in the love-hate relationship that

 

Indians have for India. This relationship is more

marked in Rajan's The Dark Dancer.

 

Kamala Markandaya and Rajan, who are studied in
the following sections, do not have much in common out-
side the above-mentioned common elements shared by all
expatriates. The former is a novelist by profession
while the latter is a scholar who happens to have pub-
lished novels. Rajan is neither as conscientious about
the novel-form or as interested in it as Markandaya. Not

much critical scholarship has been done on either, but

121

in the little that is available it is seen that both have
been overpraised by non-Indian critics and over-denounced
by Indian critics. Rajan, especially, has been singled
out for severe criticism by Indians. In summary, their
criticism may be said to hinge on two points--the lack

of Indianness and the artificiality of his prose style.
The latter point has some validity, for Rajan has a
tendency to lapse into incongruent flippancy or facetious
gravity that is acceptable in a light novel such as his

Too Lopg in the West but not in a serious work such as

 

The Dark Dancer. As for the other charge, one feels

 

"Indianness" needs to be defined correctly. Krishnan
is as Indian as Indo-English literature is Indian. Both
are representative only of a small minority, but that
does not in any way invalidate their right to be called
Indian. These charges are answered at somewhat greater
length in the last section of this chapter, but what is
mainly attempted there is the interpretation of The Dark
Dancer in the light of the central image in the novel.
The approach in both sections--on Kamala Mark-
andaya and on Rajan--is introductory and expository more
than analytical; this is consistent with the guideline
followed throughout this dissertation regarding the study
of authors on whom no significant critical scholarship
is available. There is scope, in Markandaya's novels,

for analytical studies of such aspects as structure,

122

use of dialogue, sociological verity and use of symbols.
These and other aspects are mentioned in the following
study, but as with all studies that break ground in a
yet-unexplored area, they are not pursued to their ulti-

mate source or implication. The Coffer Dams is omitted

 

because it is, as mentioned earlier, a turning point in
the author's canon. It indicates that there might be a
distinct cleft between the first five novels and any

others that might follow The Coffer Dams, which is her

 

sixth novel. Either a lapse of time or another novel is

necessary to place The Coffer Dams in its proper per-

 

spective.

Kamala Markandaya belongs to the generation of
writers born and educated in the old order who could
have been the pioneers of an offshoot language with
its own characteristic themes and idioms if a group of
politicians with misconceived notions of patriotism had
not come to power. The most prominent feature in her
writing is her simple and effective language. Unlike
Mulk Raj Anand's which courses down tempestuously, or
Raja Rao's which meanders tortuously, her language flows,
even and beautiful, like the Ganges in the plains. Theirs
is a translated language. The fluent, unending stream of
abuses so characteristic of Anand's Coolie and the

involved loquaciousness of Raja Rao's Kanthapura are

 

literal translations from the vernacular. The reader

123

who knows the author's vernacular recognizes and enjoys
this style but others--and these form a majority in India
itself where there are fourteen major 1anguages--find it
confusing and laborious. Kamala Markandaya's is not a
translated language. She does not attempt to adapt the
vernacular idiom or tone; her language is always unobtru-
sively pure. Yet she succeeds in bringing out the texture
of the social classes by varying the degree of simplicity
and articulation.

A pattern emerges when Kamala Markandaya's first
five novels are studied as a unit because they present a
cross section of Indian society. Each novel has three
facets--a personal story, a wider conflict, and a social

background. Nectar in a Sieve is the story of a peasant

 

woman, Rukmani, whose rustic life is shattered by the

intrusion of industrialization. Some Inner Fury has as

 

background the westernized upper class with its conflict
of loyalties: Mira falls in love with an Englishman,
her brother Kitsamy upholds the authority of the British
Raj, and her brother Govind seeks to overthrow the Raj

by terrorist activities. In A Silence of Desire we see

 

a representative of that most inarticulate of Indian
groups, the lower middle class, caught between different
values--old and new, eastern and western, religious and

agnostic. Her fourth novel, Possession, leaves the

 

Indian backdrop. Lady Caroline Bell discovers artistic

124

genius in a goatherd and whisks him off to England where
her dedicated effort skyrockets him to success but his
soul is twisted in the process. In her fifth novel, 5
Handful of Rice, the setting is Madras, and we see a
drifter, Ravi, made into a traditional householder by
his love for a tailor's daughter. we, more than the
characters, are left to wonder if it was worthwhile for
Ravi to exchange the hazards of Bohemian life for the
monotony of bourgeois morality.

Certain stylistic traits run through all five
novels. The plots unweave at a sure and swift pace.
There are no secondary plots, no political or philOSOphi—
cal digressions, no lyrical descriptions, or extraneous
characterizations. The narratives are continuous and
the lapses of time between incidents are often dismissed
in a phrase. This gives forward-surging motion to the
stories. The author's art does not have much depth but
her strokes are broad, bold, and singleminded.

The first four novels are, effectively, first
person narratives. Each novel is as organized as a
classical play. A microcosmic equilibrium is upset
giving rise to conflicts; the focus is always on the
main character, the plot is unfolded step by step, there
is a rapid denouement after the climax. Some classical
"machinery" also is used. There are symbolic forewarn-

ings in each story. In Some Inner Fury Mira places the

 

125

garland meant for her brother around the neck of Richard
Marlowe. The significance is obvious--one of the most
important rituals in a Hindu marriage is the garlanding
of the bridegroom by the bride. This custom dates back
to ancient times when a princess chose her husband from
assembled guests by garlanding the man she desired to

wed. Similarly, the first object mentioned in A Silence

 

of Desire which centers around the differences in religious
attitudes is the tulasi plant which Sarojini worshiped
and Dandekar did not.

As in the classical plays the story is complete
in itself and the few threads are neatly drawn and tied,
but other questions remain:

Is not the soul enriched by the spirit of
acceptance that levels down both pleasures and pains
into a balanced harmony?

Can a conflict of loyalties ever be resolved
without suffering and destruction?

Is it perhaps better to have faith and die than
to live on vacillating between different sets of values?
Can there be effective articulation between an average
man and his wife, or is there a wall built between them
by the very emotions of love and loyalty that bind them?

Can flight from material pleasures regain for
man the pristine simplicity of his soul?

What use honesty?

126

Unlike the classical plays these novels do not
have an omniscient commentator with specific answers.

But the discerning reader sees the pattern-—as long as
one has roots one survives. The novels seem to say that
if one's roots are injured or absent one dies. Nathan's
roots are scarred when he is evicted from his land; he
dies. But Rukmani's roots are in her children, and
therefore she lives. Premala's roots are scorched

when she is taken away from her traditional way of

life and asked to be a society-lady; she dies. Kit dies
because he has no roots; he is only a vine clinging to
the British Raj. But Govind's roots are deep in his
native soil, and therefore nothing, not all the violence
of his hatred for the British, not all the disappointment
over his unrequited love, can destroy him. Sarojini's
roots reach the very bowels of primitive pantheism, and
so she survives. Caroline is rooted in autocratic self-
confidence and, like Scarlett O'Hara, feels that tomorrow
she can regain what was lost today. Ravi, a transplanted
villager, grows new roots but they are precariously
shallow.

The delineation of the roots of different classes
of Indian society is Kamala Markandaya's continuing theme.
She has artistic instinct enough to know where the roots
are but not the artistic care to keep in constant touch
with her subject. Her chief merit lies in that she pre-

sents Indian ways of life without authorial commentary.

127

Nectar in a Sieve is the story of the faceless

 

peasant who stands silhouetted in the unending twilight
of Indian agrarian bankruptcy, the horizon showing
through the silent trees now with crimson gashes, now
with soul exalting splendor, always holding out the
promise that the setting sun will rise again after the
night, the night ever approaching yet never encompassing.
. . . It is easy to wring tears of pity for the plight
of the peasant, underfed, uneducated, exploited, and
easier still to rouse anger and contempt for the super-
stitious and slow moving masses. They stand there vul-
nerable and open to every attack, be it indifference,
contempt or emasculating charity. But to evoke admir-
ation, even envy, for the simple faith and unswerving
tenacity they hold needs sympathy and skill. Kamala
Markandaya has both.

Fact after fact is presented within the story
without commentary or criticism; one gets an idea of
how life flows in an Indian village standing at the
periphery of urban civilization.

Rukmani (TS) is a child of the transition between
the insular, autonomous village life of old and the new
village dependent upon urban civilization and in constant
contact with it. Rukmani's father is the village head-
man, a position that once carried much power and prestige

but which now with changing times has lost both. As a

128

result Rukmani's wedding was not half as colorful as her
sister's had been. A bride at twelve, Rukmani is a
mother at thirteen, mother of six children at twenty-
four, old at forty. Put bluntly in this manner the

ages shock one; but Kamala Markandaya weaves the facts
so evenly into the story that one sympathetically
realizes that tropical flowers in their natural state
blossom early, wither soon, and yet retain a clinging
fragrance.

"A woman, they say, always remembers her wedding
night . . . but for me there are other nights I prefer to
remember, sweeter, fuller, when I went to my husband
matured in mind as well as in body"(T§, p. 11). It is
an ideal marriage. Kali's and Janaki's is happy enough.
Kunthi's is not. So it is everywhere, no matter the form
of betrothal and the age of the bride, some marriages
turn out very well, some break up, and most follow a
mediocre monotony of compromise. Rukmani's marriage is
not without crises. But it is something richer than com-
promise that saves it when Rukmani learns of Nathan's
infidelity with Kunthi. Rukmani understands and forgives
Nathan, for she knows that Kunthi has fire in her body
so that "men burn before and after"; their marital bonds
are strengthened by her acceptance.

Time and again the story tells that a spirit of

acceptance strengthens one in times of suffering. The

129

rainstorm ruins their huts and floods out their fields.
They accept Nature's anger, wait for wind and rain to
abate, and then build their huts anew and plough their
fields afresh. Ira's husband brings her back to her
parents five years after the wedding because she is
barren. "I do not blame him, he is justified, for a
man needs children. He has been patient." Nathan him-
self waited seven years for his first son, but he does
not rebuke his son-in-law. He accepts his daughter's
fate resignedly, as he accepts, though he does not for-
give, her later prostitution. And, when Ira has a son,
she accepts his albinism and guards him from the world's
inquisitive gaze. It is when one sheds this passive
spirit of acceptance that one is ruined. Raja refuses
to accept the working conditions in the factory; his
rebellion results in his death. Rukmani accepts even
this shattering blow with the same passivity with which
she accepted the departure of her elder sons for Ceylon.
But passivity does not signify absence of emotion. Her
reaction to Raja's death is one of the most poignant
passages in the book:
They merely laid hands on him, and he fell. . . . But
why should others lay hands on him? They told me, but
the sense of their words escaped. They told me, but
I could not remember. They repeated themselves
again and again, but I kept forgetting. . . . I think,
the eyes must be closed, though death has glazed
them, and I do so; the jaw must be tied, for it is

sagging, I put a bandage about it; the body must be
washed and I wash it. (NS, p. 123).

130

The spirit of acceptance, born of simple faith, does not
break down even when the deities in whom Rukmani and
Nathan repose their faith remain unmoved by their
prayers: "That year the rains failed . . . I took a
pumpkin and a few grains of rice to my goddess, and I
wept at her feet. I thought she looked at me with com-
passion and I went away comforted, but no rain came"
(Tg, p. 101). Like her unvarnished language, her faith
too is unpolluted by doubts.

The dumbness and passivity of these people might
annoy readers accustomed to a more dynamic outlook on
life. Each of the three main characters in the first
three novels--Rukmani, Mira and Sarojini--surrenders
herself so unquestioningly and wholly that one feels
that she cannot possibly survive once her prop is taken
away. But when the crisis comes, the strength of this
attitude is proved, and we realize that if she had not
bent like the grass she would surely have broken. Ruk-
mani's surrender of her interests and independence to
her husband and children is total. A time comes when
her husband cannot support her and her older children
are gone from her. Without the least break or imbalance
of body, mind, or spirit, she lives on, now supporting
her husband and her younger children. Mira (STE) sur-
renders herself to Richard. The storm of "your people-

my peOple" sweeps over her, but she springs back, as

131

complete and instant in her reconciliation to the parting
as in her surrender to the love of an alien. Sarojini
(g9) places all her faith in the Swami, surrendering her
meagre wealth, her time, even her will power, to him.
Yet, when he leaves, she does not break. She accepts

his decision and returns to her old routine.

The total surrender on one hand, and the seem-
ingly callous indifference to death or parting on the
other seem paradoxical but both are born of an inner
strength. This strength is spiritual in essence and
it tightens family bonds. It also sublimates extra-
marital relationships such as exist between Rukmani
and Kenny, Premala and Govind, Sarojini and the Swami.
There is a strong and obvious element of sex in their
relationship, and yet there is as strong and obvious an
element of asexuality.

No word or touch of love passes between them.
Rukmani, Premala and Sarojini are absolutely faithful
in thought, word and deed to their husbands. Sex does
not figure in their action or desires in their dealings
with the men they hold so dear, and in the case of Ruk-
mani and Sarojini one sees that it is a bond in the con-
sideration of which sexual thoughts and acts are irrele-
vant; yet it is a bond that would not exist if they did
not belong to opposite sexes. Their relationship might

seem unnatural to some, but in their social and cultural

132

setting it is not uncommon or incomprehensible. They
move, as it were, on a different plane of chastity.
This spiritualized love is finely brought out in

Nectar in a Sieve. From first to last Rukmani is bound

 

to the English doctor, Kennington. He attends on her
dying mother. He Operates on her so that she may con-
ceive. He helps Ira similarly, and though the conse-
quences are unfortunate, Rukmani bears him no ill will.
Her indebtedness is increased when he makes Selvam his
assistant. But it is not just gratitude and sympathy
that bind them but mutual admiration and friendship.
Her joy at seeing him is spontaneous. When she learns
that he has returned after a long absence she drops her
marketing and flies to him, garland in hand, as a beloved
would to a lover. Yet, the plane of their affection is
unmistakably elevated.

The love between Govind and Premala (STE) is
not as devoid of sexual attraction. Starved of her hus-
band's understanding, inhibited by generations of Brahmin
discipline, Premala is unable to accept Govind's love
even though her heart responds. Govind's love is not
as exalted as Rukmani's, and therefore he suffers and
is punished by having his secret trumpeted to the world
by Hickey over Premala's dead body.

The love that Sarojini bears the Swami (S9) is

even more ethereal than Rukmani's feeling for Kenny. But

133

its consequences are more material because her husband

is drawn into the vortex of the attachment. Though she
is just one of the scores around him, Sarojini is deeply
and individually involved with the Swami. Her faith in
his powers of healing is implicit and unquestioning.

His touch on her head, she believes, will dissolve away
the tumor in her womb. A look, a smile, a word from him
is enough to strengthen her. She behaves like a woman
who is carrying on a passionate liaison. She ignores her
house, her children, her daily routine. She upsets the
equilibrium of her married life. She steals from the
family silver to contribute to his fund. Then she

throws caution to the winds and becomes completely indif-
ferent to her family, spending her days at his ashram

and her nights in solitude and prayer. Yet it is not
physical love. Dandekar wishes it were, for that is
something human, and therefore combatable. Dandekar
realizes that Sarojini lives in a world of supercon-
sciousness, but he is a common man desiring only the
monotony of common existence. In his plea to his boss,
Chari, he confesses to what he is--a mediocre mind yearn-
ing for mediocre pleasures with a stubborn intensity:

"I want my world back, my children happy, my floors

swept--"
"Is that important too?"
"Yes, yes, yes," he cried. "In the world I'm in it's

important, all the small things are important, and I
know it's small and petty but I'm a small and petty
man..." (82, p. 221) o

134

Because of Chari's investigations the Swami leaves the
town. The prop that sustained Sarojini's soul, and even
her health, is taken away. But she bears it with such
stoic calm that Dandeker wishes he could recall the Swami
and absolve his sense of meanness. He who has been con-
sorting with prostitutes to relieve his physical urge
can well imagine how much more difficult it must be to
find relief for a spiritual urge. But Sarojini does not
need the Swami's material presence which, she realizes,
has taken on a value that is against the essence of his
teaching. When Dandekar asks her what she intends to do
without the Swami, she replies, "Nothing. What should I
do? I formed an attachment, it is broken, that is all.
One must accept it. . . . It would be sinful to batter
oneself to pieces because one refuses to recognize that
another's life is his own. If the Swami chose to go, it
was his decision. One must accept it in good heart"
(SD, p. 244).

Since India is a land where mysticism walks side
by side with realism, most novels with an Indian setting
include a pious man steeped in the scriptures, and Indo—
Anglians, eager to woo and win the western reader,
invariably add an eremite to the dramatis personae. It
must, however, be granted that of all the swamis in Indo-
Anglian literature the swami of A Silence of Desire is

one of the best portrayals.

135

He is a true ascetic; he has no attachments,
though his followers are ready to follow him to the ends
of the earth. He does not claim to be a healer. He
claims to give solace, and no one who meets him is dis-
appointed. He argues and comforts without too many words.
Dandekar who goes to accuse finds himself accusing him-
self. Feeling the power of the swami he tries to get
away. But he is held by the ascetic personality.
Pathetically he asks the swami to return the silver
vessels that Sarojini has donated to a fund which feeds
and supports the maimed and diseased.

"I can't do it, it's asking too much of me, from
ordinary people like me, I--"

"I know." The Swami's low voice halted his
frenzy. "I do not ask."
"But you take," cried Dandekar. "Sarojini gives

and gives and you do not stop her."

"If I were to compel her not to give, I would
also be free to compel her to give. . . . Compulsion
is the beginning of corruption. . . . It is an eating
away of the spirit of whoever does it, and whoever
has it done to him. Is that what you want?" (eh,

p. 175).

From this genuine ascetic to the charlatan of

Possession is an incredible drop. One wonders how the

 

same author who created this spiritual giant could have
later created a ludicrous effigy and passed it off as

a real spiritualist. The Swami of Possession is, as far

 

as I am concerned, a quack. Too often he evokes only
disgust. He is not meant to. The author's intention
is to make him a sage and a seer embodying the spirit

of Indian philosophy, a Vasishta incarnated into the

136

twentieth century, a beacon lighting Val's life and
bringing him safe to shore after his voyage on the
perilous seas of love and fame. Kamala Markandaya fails
very badly in this; the Swami rings hollow, though,
ironically, he is typical of the many such pseudo-eremites
in India who have enough scriptural knowledge to impress
laymen, and not enough self-control or detachment to keep
away from commercial ambitions. The secondary plot of
the novel could well be a satire on this racket, for
unintentionally Kamala Markandaya has exposed the group
of self-styled Swamis who are exploiting the people who
yearn for absolute values and faith in a dizzily fast-
moving world. Since the author did not intend to be
satirical, her characterization of the Swami is the

worst defect in her worst novel.

When the Swami is not obviously hollow he is
obviously comic. we first see him in meditation, " . . .
a thin, muscular figure with not an ounce of spare flesh
anywhere, not a stitch of clothing on his body." When
he saw Suya and Caroline "unhurriedly he rose, felt for
his loincloth and wound it round him. . . . (g, p. 27).

When Val asks him if he should go away with
Caroline, the Swami says he must, "because if you did
not you would have no peace . . . for the sound of chafing
is like the croaking of bullfrogs, it has little charm"
(a, p. 29) . Beauty and charm rate high in his code of

values.

137

When Val seeks reassurance as to whether he will
like the new life, the Swami gives a superficial, all-
embracing answer, "You will and you will not," and his
"eyes were like a woman's." When Val takes leave he
hastens him on. "The voice was steady, but its edges
were raw." (Br p. 33).

The Swami seems too much in and of this world to
be genuine!

Val is not his only bond. He holds many strings
and he is loth to let go of even one. The lonely hilltop
guarded by two shaggy outcasts is only his headquarters,
not his permanent abode. He is a globe trotter; we see
him in Delhi, London, European and American capitals,
everywhere surrounded by material comfort and fashionable
women.

His platitudes are unattractive: "One can never
be a misfit in the service of God." "Everyone makes
mistakes." His excuses are inexcusable. He says he
realized after meeting Caroline that there were lessons
that he had yet to learn from the world and therefore he
returned to the world, "What else should I be doing among
you ladies here but sitting at your feet learning my
lesson?" There were "denials and delightful murmurs
from his audience."

0 charlatan, charlatan, too crude even to cloak

charlatanism in a veneer of authenticity!

138

Whatever lesson it was he learned at the feet
of women it certainly was not detachment. He returns to
the village. Val follows him. Caroline follows Val.
Caroline and the swami fight for the prize and the
swami wins. But his woman's eyes are troubled when
Caroline confidently says that a time will come when
Val will leave him and return to her.

Possession is a failure in other ways also: The

 

characterizations are neither realistic nor impressive;
the plot is farfetched, and the theme is flimsy. In
the other novels the strong story interest makes the
reader gloss over the sketchiness of certain sections,
but in this one there are too many gaping holes and
skeletal outlines in the narrative for one to extenuate
the author's short comings.

However, Possession contains an excellent com-

 

mentary on Indo-British relationship. This aspect in
itself is justification enough for a literary study of
the novel.

.Lady Caroline Bell is an autocrat, typical of the
British Raj in India. She sets about getting possession
of Val with the same dedication and ruthlessness with
which the British subjugated India. She molds him into
a man, an artist and a lover after the image she has in
mind, and in the process ruins him, depleting him of
independence and spiritual strength, though in her

opinion he gains more than he loses.

139

Caroline does exactly what she wants, and the
others do exactly what she wants them to do. Within
minutes of seeing Val's crude paints and fine paintings
she decides to make him a successful artist. Nothing can
stop her. She moves into the headman's house, and he
goes elsewhere. She besieges Val's family with her propo-
sal, day after day. The villagers serve her as they would
a feudal lord. She fared "needless to say, extremely well.
Wherever the British go, as the whole of the East knows,
they live on the fat of the land, though the British them-
selves have no inkling of it. Simply by taking it for
granted they have the hypnotised natives piling it onto
their plates" (E, p. 17). She buys Val from his parents
for five thousand rupees. She whisks him off to Madras.
There she protects him even though it means social
ostracism for her. To escape the formal schooling which
English law demands, she exiles herself to Switzerland
and returns to England with Val when he is sixteen. For
his sake she moves from her Belgravia residence and takes
a house in Silvertown East. With singleminded dedication
she works for him, tolerating his moods, forgiving his
lapses, and wheedling publicity men in the art world.

Her ruthlessness is prompted by her love and
ambition. She does not allow personal jealousy of Ellie
to overcome her, but when Ellie's pregnancy threatens

Val's career, Caroline silently and unscrupulously drives

140

Ellie to suicide. With terrible finesse she eliminates
Annabel from Val's life. At the point when Val is about
to desert her and his artistic career in favor of Annabel,
Caroline reveals with studied casualness the fact of
Ellie's suicide. Val, whom she has kept in ignorance,

is stunned; and Annabel, unaware of Val's innocence, is
shocked out of her love.

Annabel is eliminated, but Val does not return to
Caroline. With typical British obduracy she follows him
to his village. Val is adamant. It is the Swami's hour
of triumph, but Caroline has the last word: "There is
still one thing to be taken into account: Valmiki is
yours now, but he has been mine. One day he will want
to be mine again, I shall take care to make him want me
again, and on that day I shall be back to claim him"

(3, p. 249).

Caroline speaks of Val as of a possession to be
transferred from hand to hand. This attitude demands
submission and gets it till the resentment of people like
Suya flares up and wins independence. The Suya-Caroline
relationship is yet another symbol of the Indo-British
world.

Suya is a prototype of the class of educated
Indians in close contact with the English, admiring them
and resenting them at the same time. She admits that

Caroline came of "a breed that never accepted defeat,"

141

that she has qualities that command admiration. She
gives her admiration reluctantly. Suya's attitude has

a little of each of the main characters in Some Inner

 

Thgy. She resembles Kitsamy in that her romance with
British culture is not a cheap flirtation but a deep
understanding. Like Roshan, she has many English friends
and moves familiarly in high society without herself
conforming to its superficialities. Like Govind she
nurses a resentment against the British for their
domination and arrogance.

Her defensive veneer of resentment protects her
from admiring Caroline too much and from being hurt by
Caroline's callousness. Numerous comments and incidents
spotlight this attitude.

Suya meets Caroline at Jumbo's party. Jumbo is
an ex-ruler who throws lavish parties just as he used to
when he had his kingdom and the British ruled India.

His British friends gave him this name "not because of
his size, but because it was the custom for people of

his class to be given nicknames . . . so that Bingos,
Beppos, Binkies and Roys abounded in the luminous upper
strata of erstwhile British India." Caroline speaks to
Suya without a formal introduction. "She spoke directly,
with the clear forthrightness just this side of insolence

which the English upper middle class use in speaking to

142

anyone who is not English upper middle class, and which
would be insolence but for their serene unconsciousness
of it" (E, p. 4).

Caroline and Suya agree to meet at the station
at nine o'clock. Caroline asks, "Nine o'clock Indian
time?“ and Suya resents this barb at the proverbial
Indian unpunctuality.

Her resentment grows stronger as Caroline fastens
her hold on Val, but mutual admiration also grows. In
a conversation, Caroline puts the Indo-British relation-
ship in words, " . . . we go out of our way to meet, and
we squabble every time we do. It's a sort of love-hate
relationship, don't you think? Like the kind Britain and
India used to have" (T, p. 75).

It is exactly that, though Suya does not admit it
then. Caroline is Britain, Suya is India. The analogy
continues throughout. When Caroline follows Val to India
she needs Suya's help. Suya insists that everything is

over, that she intends leaving Val in peace.

"Whose peace?" she said with cold scorn. "His?
or yours?"

Caroline could, as she always had been able,
position a splinter between a man and his conscience
with which he had lately been at peace.

Divide and rule. It was a formidable inherited
skill (g, p. 242).

Suya does what Caroline wants her to do. She guides

Caroline safely past the crones who guard the Swami‘s

143

seclusion. Caroline's expression of gratitude is
typical of her arrogance, "You're nothing any more.

I don't mean to be offensive."

Suya shoots barbs of sarcasm and resentment at
Caroline and the British. At the same time there is
ample evidence of deep love and esteem. Incongruity
is the due exacted from anyone stepping outside the
bounds set by birth, she muses as she flies back to
Bombay. It worked impartially on British and Indian
alike, yet the results were not always dismal. "Given
courage they could rise beyond grotesquerie to become
unique and splendid like the British in India" (g, p. 93).
She hopes Val will achieve that splendor. But Val does
not. Cut off from his moorings he floats, flounders and
then saves himself for the nonce by striking out for
his native shores. He is determined to wash his hands
of Caroline and England. But it is implied that this is
not going to be easy. The love-hate reaction has set in.

In Nector in a Sieve the same love-hate relation-

 

ship exists within Hickey and Kenny. However, Hickey's
feeling is not so much for India as for his goal. He
would face the same anywhere because he is a missionary
interested in ideals and not in people, in the outcome
and not in the work itself. He loves his villagers~

because they are raw material for the establishment of

144

his ideal. He hates them because they often refuse to

be molded. Kenny, on the other hand, loves the people
and the place in a human manner. He works in the present
for the present. He identifies himself with the place.
When Rukmani asks him why he lives and labors in a
country not his own he answers that he had always

thought that India was his country. Yet he hates India
and Indians; he hates their submissiveness, their abject
acceptance of misfortune:

"Times will not be better for many months. Mean-
while you will suffer and die, you meek suffering
fools. Why do you keep this ghastly silence? Why
do you not demand--cry out for help--do something?
There is nothing in this country, oh God, there is
nothing!" (Te, p. 63). '

"Acquiescent imbeciles," he said scornfully, "do

you think spiritual grace comes from being in want,
or from suffering?" (Te, p. 155).

"I work among you when my spirit wills it . . . I
go when I am tired of your follies and stupidities,
your eternal, shameful poverty. I can only take you
people in small doses." (pg, p. 99).

The English, in Kamala Markandaya's novels, are insulting,
arrogant, impatient with Indians, but they are also
endowed with sterling qualities and the Indian char-

acters pay tribute to them, reluctantly like Suya or

readily like Mira, in Some Inner Fury, who admires the

 

British.
Every Britisher in the novel is upright and does
what he considers his duty. The Scottish superintendent

of the jail where Roshan is imprisoned has known and

145

liked Roshan since her birth, but he arrests her just

the same for what he believes are anti-social activities.
Hickey is fanatical and bigoted, but he does his missionary
work with single-minded dedication. Richard, though his
customs permit physical intimacies and though he has
yearned four years for her, does not possess Mira till
the tenth day of their vacation when she asks him to
take her.

British discipline is most evident and admirable

in the last few incidents of Some Inner Fury. Anti-

 

British demonstrations sweep across the town. Yet the
annual Government House party, a British tradition in
itself, is held with all due pageant and éclat. The
guards and guests move about casually even though they
know what is in the offing. "I looked upon the faces of
men bred in another country, another tradition, and they
were fearless; and if this fearlessness was begotten

of insensitivity in some, it was not so brutishly sired
in others, for one of these men I knew well, and loved"
(§l§, p. 206).

The same unfaltering courage is seen when Indian
crowds break into the law court where Govind, a terrorist
leader, is standing trial for manslaughter. Around
Hickey, the principal witness, the English "had formed
themselves tightly, protectively, and those faces were

fearless still, but grim, with that dawning of cruelty

146

which comes to Englishmen who see the codes of decent
conduct broken, the rules of fair play flung aside . . . "
(§£§, p. 251).

That is how Mira sees the British, and from the
novels one gathers that Mira's view approximates the
author's. Kamala Markandaya aligns herself with the
moderates who tilted the scale in favor of the British
because their personal experience had been pleasant. She
knows the English in India better than she knows the
peasants and clerks of India. The English belong to the
world in which she has lived whereas Rukmani, Dandekar,
and Val belong to a world which she loves but which lies
on the other side of the wall. For the un-Anglicized
Indian she has the affinity of sympathy; for the British
in India she has the affinity of association; for the
Anglicized Indian she has the affinity of personal
knowledge and identification. That is why the setting

of Some Inner Fury rings truest.

 

Mira's father was a member of the English Club
"because it provided amenities such as no other place
did . . . infinitely better kept than the ones belonging
to the Oriental Club which a small group of Indians,
tired of being blackballed from the English Club, had
recently started" (ngJ p. 24). It is interesting to

note that nowhere in Kamala Markandaya's novels do we

147

meet anyone who would have belonged to the Oriental Club.
They belong to a social limbo with which one, author or
not, does not consort.

The life led by the Anglicized Indians of the

English Club type comes alive in Some Inner Fury. This

 

select group worked conscientiously for the British
Government and the Government graciously allocated for
them a place in the hierarchy just this side of the red
carpet, and both British and Indians behaved as though
the red carpet were not there but each knew just how far
one could move into the other's territory.

However, compared to the rest of India, they
lived well. They had big mansions with gardens and lawns,
chauffeurs, butler, gardener, washerman, watchman, house-
boy, and other odd-job men. In summer they went to the
cool of the hills. Their daily routine was the same
wherever they were posted. The men were at their
office "from ten till five, played squash or golf,
depending on your age, later; then there were drinks,
and afterwards you dined with someone, or someone dined
with you, or you went to whichever club you belong to
for bridge or billiards, or more drinks at the bar" (glh,
p. 127). Every few days there were parties or dances;
there were several parties, like the Resident's or the
Governor's, which were of social significance, and every-
body who was anybody was invited, and if somebody was not

invited he became a nobody.

148

It was a dichotomous way of life, especially for
the women who were society-ladies and traditional house-
wives at the same time. As her husband's consort a
woman played the role of a fashionable hostess in a
westernized society. As a Hindu housewife she saw to
it that the household deities were propitiated, festivals.
and holy days observed, children brought up in an Indo-
English discipline, and the servants ruled over in feudal
style. They had servants waiting attendance all over
the house yet did such chores as buying groceries and
tending babies. They had liquor and meat served to
guests but themselves partook of traditional food after
traditional prayers. They encouraged their children to
dress and be educated in English ways but took care to
follow conventions regarding their morality and marriage.
Their own marriages were eminently successful because
the partners compromised, the men respecting and joining
the religious rites and the women accepting and adjusting
to their husbands' westernizations.

The next generation would not compromise. Kit,
though prompt to rise in defense of Hinduism against
Christian missionary activities, could not bring himself
to participate in Hindu rituals; Premala though patheti-
cally eager to please Kit failed in her social obligations.
Whereas Kit's parents had two sets of rooms in their house--

one furnished in the western style and one in the

149

Indian--Kit's house was furnished entirely in the English
style with Wilton carpets, wing chairs, cocktail cabinets,
and English bone china. It is symbolic of their marriage
that there is no room for compromise. Govind's philosophy
has no room for compromise either; he hates everything
British.

Compromise, the author seems to say throughout
her novels, compromise so that the best traits may mingle
and produce a better race. Her idea of compromise, as
mentioned before, consists of assimilating a large portion
of British culture as spread in India. This attitude
introduces a veil between her and those of her characters
who are taken from a social class different from her own.
She moves sympathetically through the world of clerks,
housewives, swamis and freedom fighters, but when it comes
to identification she veers away and at best becomes non-

committal. For example, the Swami in A Silence of Desire

 

leaves the town. Is it by his own choice, or is it
imposed by Chari and Ghose who start an investigation
into his activities? In other words is he genuine or

is he a charlatan? After building him up as a noble and
true hermit the author becomes noncommittal and leaves

the answer ambiguous. Similarly, in Some Inner Fury

 

Hickey swears that Govind killed Kit. Govind pleads
innocent. It is a test of the impartiality of British

justice. On the witness stand Mira, an Indian, says she

150

had her arms around Govind at the time, and Hickey, an
Englishman, says he saw Govind throw the knife that killed
Kit. It is an Indian's word against an Englishman's.

What verdict will British justice give? At this point

the crowd swoops in and carries Govind away, and British
justice is saved the ordeal. It seems to me that this is
symbolic of the author's stand--she does not wish to put
British integrity to the test.

Nevertheless, unintentionally the author throws
an unfavorable light on the Indian image. The Indian gets
the freedom he deserves but he gets it in a way that is
not altogether creditable, whereas the English come off
well.

Kamala Markandaya's themes are not new but this
weakness becomes a strength because the Indian setting
still has the attraction of novelty for the western
reader, and universal themes set against an Indian back-
drop are welcome. In her plots the author uses thick bold
strokes, but in painting her backdrops she resorts to
mosaics. A one-line comment here, a passing observation
there, a casual description elsewhere--and a fine picture
emerges. The western reader gets an inside view of
Indian life. It is only a view, not a profound under-
standing, but it is clear.

A Silence of Desire is her best novel so far as

 

artistic finesse is concerned and her worst in artistic

151

lapses. The mosaic bits form a realistic picture of
apartment life in Bombay--the eight-story apartment
block has only one water faucet, the rooms will hold
no more than two beds, framed tableaux of gods and
goddesses look down from kitchen walls, Dandekar eats
off a plantain leaf and his wife dines only after he
has eaten, they have many neighbors but no friends.
Even more admirable than the material description is
the sensitive manner in which the inarticulation of
the middle class is brought out.

When first Dandekar suspects his wife of having
a lover he tries to prove his masculinity and ownership
by trying to possess her. Night after night she with-
draws into her shell and he refrains from thrusting him-
self upon her. He is unable to ask her the reason:
" . . . brutal insistences like these, as much as physi-
cal ones, were beyond his nature." Earlier, he knows that
he should get the matter of the photograph cleared, but
he cannot steel himself into expressing his suspicion
in so many words. His silence is not motivated by
ostrich-like stupidity that thinks the facts will
dissolve into nothingness if one refuses to see them
but by sensitivity. He has the middle-class sensitivity
towards intimacies; he flinches from seeing the nakedness
of her soul just as he flinches from seeing the nakedness
of her tear-stained face. He feels that he is intruding.

on her privacy.

152

Dandekar is thoroughly middle class. He loves
monotony and security and fears emotional scenes. He
is content to be a clerk, a husband, and a father. But
middle-class sensitivity is raw-edged, easily hurt, and
Dandekar is driven to anguish and self-torture. Lower-
middle-class life offers no cathartic escapes. Sensitivity
gives rise to hurts. Hurts pile up unarticulated and
inarticulation always builds a wall be it inarticulation
of love and loyalty or of suspicion.

Dandekar, like other Markandaya characters, is
a type, and here again a weakness becomes a strength
and for the same reason. Indian types are still so
little known that these characterizations do not pall.
Dandekar is the nearest Kamala Markandaya comes to
creating an individual. His portrait shows that the
author has come a long way from the type-characters of

Nectar in a Sieve and Some Inner Fugy. But not far

 

 

enough. Like Dandekar she has a self-conscious reticence
that forbids her from baring the soul of her characters
as they stand poised on peaks and abysses of emotional
experience.

Kamala Markandaya's understanding of personalities
deepens progressively in the first four novels, but her
alienation from the Indian scene widens with the years.

Numerous examples can be cited from A Silence of Desire.

 

Obvious incongruencies such as putting the name "Dandekar"

153

in the same linguistic or regional group as "Chari"

could have been avoided; it is like coupling the names
"Chang" and "Johansson"; a time may come when they do
belong to the same linguistic group, but it was not so

in the India of 1957. More important, Dandekar, a clerk
earning a meagre monthly salary of one hundred and twenty
rupees lives altogether too comfortably to be true to

life. A Handful of Rice shows evidence not only of

 

alienation but of the author's limits. Here she portrays
a milieu that is unfamiliar to her, a world of violence
and unscrupulousness combined with humdrum temptations
and dry-as-dust daily routines. To sketch a temptation-
assaulted Ravi caught in the sound and fury of today's
urban scene requires a pen that has been dipped in the
bloodstream of chaos and endless night.

Suya's comment that incongruity is the price one
pays for stepping outside the bounds set by birth can be
stretched a point further. Incongruity is the price one
pays when one returns in thought, or even actuality, to
the land one has long left behind.

The later novels employ weak devices that subju-

gate artistry to plot technicalities. In Possession,

 

for example, in order to give proof of the Swami's love
and care Madras is made to have all its hotels occupied
to the last room, a contingency that simply could not

arise in a metropolis such as Madras. It is not just

154

the good hotels that have no vacancy; Suya and Caroline
try even the seediest. This exaggeration is unfortunate,
particularly because the preceding paragraph builds up
such a fine atmosphere of rejection by society as repre-
sented by the aristocrat, Jumbo, and middle class Suya.
Late in the search Val tells them of the name and location
of a charity hall that the Swami had given him foreseeing
this predicament.

Another example of the author's willingness to
throw realism to the winds in order to highlight a point

of character or plot is seen in A Silence of Desire.

 

The plot requires that Dandekar start suspecting his
wife of infidelity. A photograph treasured in secret
by a wife is a common but not inexcusable device. Dan-
dekar has to find the photograph. The immediate cir-
cumstances leading up to the discovery are ludicrous.
Dandekar suddenly remembers that an old footlocker con-
tains, along with silver cups and mementos, a history
text used in his schooldays which has a chapter entitled
"Benefits of British Rule," and Dandekar does not want
his children to think that the British had bestowed any
benefits on India. To get this book and destroy it he
asks his wife for the locker key; she pretends to have
misplaced it. Later he finds it, opens the footlocker,
and discovers the photograph. The whole sequence is

much too far-fetched and contrived.

155

Kamala Markandaya limits herself to a small canvas
in each novel and effectively brings out certain social
foibles and certain emotional conflicts faced by average
human beings. She has a facile pen and a sympathetic
attitude. But she does not go deeply into any problem or
situation despite her keen insight and her eye for details.
She races on and the casual reader is carried away. A
closer study, however, shows weaknesses in plot and char-
acterization, and also holes in the realistic setting.
The first three novels reveal progressive improvement
in her grasp of human reactions to events, but her later
novels bear evidence of increasing alienation from the
Indian setting.

In the final analysis, Kamala Markandaya emerges
as a conscientious novelist. Whatever her limitations,
she takes her art seriously and she has turned out six
eminently readable novels, some of which deserve closer
study than has been given here.

Balachandra Rajan, another of the major South
Indian expatriates, is not as conscientious about being
a novelist nor is he as consistent in style, quality or
quantity as Kamala Markandaya. Born in 1920, Rajan was
educated in England, like the hero of his first novel.

In his own life he reversed the sequence of the careers
that he cuts out for Krishnan by joining the Indian civil

service first and then turning to an academic position.

156

He is better known for his scholarship on Milton and
Eliot, and rightly so, than for his two novels--The
Dark Dancer (1958) and TOO Long in the West (1961).
However, within Indo-English literature his novels

are significant contributions, especially to what is
called the field of expatriates and native aliens who
explore or echo the growing alienation of western-
educated Indians from their native culture and life.
Both novels Open with the central character returning

to the ancestral home in India after several years at

a foreign university. But the experiences they encounter
as they fall into the Old pattern Of conformism are very
different.

TOO Long in the West is a hilarious comedy, a

 

spoof Of the absurdities in Indian and American social
codes, of arranged marriages, and Of the foibles and
eccentricities Of individuals. Everyone and everything
is caricatured and made an occasion for laughter, except
Nalini, who is the only failure in this delightful comic
strip.

The Dark Dancer, on the other hand, is an intense
story Of the self-division and maturation Of an indi-
vidual and of a nation, of the cyclic phenomenon of
fratricidal war and its message transmitted in the
blood-consciousness of a people, that Kurukshetra was

not and never shall be fought in vain. Everything and

157

everyone is on a higher-than-normal key; most characters,
including minor ones, strain under the effort Of their
solos, and sometimes they tend to balance precariously
or too long on their special note. There are different
instruments and different players but all are controlled
by a brilliant conductor who is, however, a little too
high-strung to sweep into total identification himself,
his orchestra or his audience. The work has the mark
of brilliance, though not Of genius. But then, how
many geniuses can literature boast? Indo-English lit—
erature has a visionary in Aurobindo, a bard in Tagore,
a lyricist in Sarojini Naidu, an eloquent socialist in
Mulk Raj Anand, a compassionate humorist in R. K. Narayan,
an anguished pilgrim in Raja Rao . . . but a genius? NO,
not yet.

It is interesting to note that Rajan's hallmark Of
prose brilliance has come under fire more Often than any
other quality Of his writing. Frederic Morton, reviewing

The Dark Dancer, comments that Rajan has "a lyric way
4

 

with words" that "turns into an uncertain blessing."
David McCutchion is surprised that the critic of Paradise
heeh and editor Of Teeee_should have published The Dark
Dancer under his own name "because of the astonishing
insensitivity to language it reveals."5 Prema Nandakumar

feels, ”The main weakness of the novel [The Dark Dancer]
6

 

lies in the uncertainty Of its style." V. Y. Kantak

158

quotes from the Opening chapter of The Dark Dancer to

 

illustrate the inadequacy, in his opinion, of Rajan's
"mannered prose." "The effort to load the language with
significance becomes a constant strain. It distracts
attention from the Object itself. What is being rendered
hardly seems to count, as though all that mattered was to
elicit admiration for the brilliance of the rendering."7
C. D. Narasmmhaiah, one of Rajan's most violent critics,
uses Nandakumar's words to reinforce his Opinion: "TO

pass from Rajan's TOO Long in the West to Raja Rao's The

 

Segpent and the Rppe is to move from a wash-basin in
one's flat to the Ganga at Benares."8
Looking deeper into these and other comments,
one sees two factors at work. The first is that con-
siderable stress seems to be placed on the necessity Of
simplicity and an Indian flavor in language. It is true
that some Of the best works in Indo-English literature

contain these two elements, for example, Raja Rao's

Kanthapura and most of Narayan's novels. But the essential

 

point is that all three novelists are successful because
each speaks in his Own voice, an injunction Rajan has
repeated in articles and in his novels.9 Narayan's
prose style is frequently pedestrian to the point Of
reader-frustration, and yet he is successful because
essentially he speaks in his own voice--a raconteur's

voice of effortless narration. Outside his characters',

159

Rajan too speaks in his own voice-—with a scholar's
naturally high flow of vocabulary. Whereas Narayan
seldom gets into the skin of his characters, both Raja
Rao and Rajan do, and this accounts for the burnished

gold in their prose. In Kanthapura, Raja Rao's style

 

is eminently successful because he transmits the lilt
of vernacular idioms and the thought flow Of the village

narrator. In The Serpent and the ROpe, the prose is

 

tortured and complex because the central character is a
tortured and complex personality. SO is Krishnan of

The Dark Dancer. Indeed, the tone and language of these

 

two novels run parallel to each other as do the themes
and characters. And this brings me to the second factor,
that however small in extent Indo-English literature
might be, it does not warrant comparisons between two

entirely different types such as TOO Long in the West

 

and The Serpent and the Rope. It is far more relevant

 

to compare The Dark Dancer with Raja Rao's masterpiece

 

even though Raja Rao is a far superior novelist, and Too

Long in the West with one of Narayan's novels. Rajan does

 

Often load every rift with ore in The Dark Dancer, but

 

the style is consistent with the introspective, inhibited,
intellectual, snobbish character Of the hero through
whom we see most of the happenings. On the other hand,

in TOO Long in the West the style is "all Jest and

 

youthful Jollity, Quips and Cranks and wanton Wiles,

160

Nods and Becks, and wreathed Smiles," consistent with the
tone and theme of this comedy.

TO read the comedy as "a story about the clash
Of Indian and American cultures. . . . Nalini, fresh
from an Open society in which she has learnt to think
for herself, is caught up once again in the traditional
village life-—advertised for marriage and exhibited

10 is to

before a miscellaneous collection Of suitors,"
misconstrue the novel and the milieu. Nalini's life at
Mudalur, and the intentionally exaggerated misadventures
that take place, are very far indeed from traditional
village life. The novel is a fantasia woven around an
eccentric assemblage Of parents, suitors and rustics.
Realism and satire are thrown in for good measure but
only to enhance the lively tempo. Thus, the mild satire
against the American way Of life in the second chapter
is very perceptive but essentially humorous:
She herself joined in this universal ritualized
insanity, inched furiously through five miles in
four hours and desperately drove two hundred in
three and a half. . . . She was drawn to the many-
sidedness of New York, to the turbulent harmony of
its tongues and races, to the mammoth stores that
refused to be undersold and the small shops per-
petually pretending to go out of business. . . . She
liked the people with their welcoming, decent vul-
garity, their worship of children and cheesecake,
their demented escapes into weekend mirages, their
homely dedication to the twenty-one inch dream.ll
Similarly, every characterization has a kernel Of
realism or human sympathy, but essentially the figures

are caricatures, purposely exaggerated out Of all

161

proportion, except Nalini who is the only failure. She
is too idealized, without however being shown as ideal.
Her flashes of repartee are more interesting and apparent
than the "immemorial wisdom Of her body." During her
first days in New York, she is by turn too-Obviously
naive and too-Obviously sOphisticated, too-obviously
ignorant and too-Obviously knowledgeable to be appealing.
But the others are delightful.

Sambasivan, for nine months of the year, is a pot-
bellied, mild-spoken, henpecked professor who has long
emptied his rooms and his mind to their bare essentials;
but every summer he becomes a minor god ruling over the
days and destiny Of Mudalur. "He looked at his kingdom
and considered it good." He is not God, but a minor
deity, and this "was not presumptuous, since in the
wisdom Of his country all but the greatest gods were
less than rishis." He thinks Of himself as a benevolent
despot though there is nothing despotic or powerful about
him as the durbar under the marquee shows.

His wife, Lakshmi, is a vain, proud, ambitious
woman who feels satisfied with the morning if she has
successfully pressed out a blackhead, but she tOO is a
breathing human being as she muses on her children:

"And for Nalini, who inherited her hopes, the sacred
fire would soon have to be lit. . . . They were growing

up." "When she thought of Nalini as her unachieved

162

self, the passion Of a lost dream reached through her and
she couldn't bear to think Of her daughter being given
away."

There are the other idlers of Mudalur--Murugesan,
an "artist" who solves problems Of village economy by
printing currency bills; Guruswamy, the swindling steward,
who refuses to work because he "has served tea to eminent
Englishmen"; Kesavan the carpenter who fills Hillview
with needless furniture, and the other rustics who are
easily roused by invectives but relapse into passivity
because they cannot think Of a life where one has to
work more than five hours a day. Delightful caricatures
all.

The four suitors are even more like cartoon
figures. There is Satyamurti, a cyclist who comes like
"a calamity out of the rain," who provides uproarious
comedy with his exaggerated version Of Indo-English
officialese: "You are author of advertisement in hlhee
of fourteen ultflmo? Indicating availability Of daughter,
presumably virgin." Kalyanasundaram, the researcher into
arranged marriages, is full Of grandiloquence, as is
Kubera, owner Of Cosmic Cosmetics; both think Of improv-
ing the entire country with their talents. Equally self-
conceited is Viswakarman, a journalist in search of a
father-in-law who will present him with a linotype

machine on which to print his manifestoes and tracts.

163

For some reason Viswakarman is described as both insolent
ehe frightened; his insolence is not a mask for his dif-
fidence as in Satyamurti's case. TOO many qualities are
attributed to him to make this characterization good.
"His face had the frightened, unnaturally brilliant
look of one who by some weird negligence had been in
his suit when it was sent to the cleaners." A picturesque
description, but what does it mean? To his self-conceit
the authOr adds another quality that apparently annoys
him considerably--the Indian proneness to imitation and
emulation. Viswakarman is a master at imitating the
masters Of English literature, and he is shocked when
Nalini tells him to listen "to the sound Of your own
voice." Like the other suitors, he talks arrogantly and
long. Indeed, when the rivals' dominant qualities are
noted we see a sameness in their attitudes, actions and
speech, and this includes the other two suitors, Ernest
Hamilton-Jones, who joins the race because he is American
and therefore cannot pass up a competition, and Raman,
who is forced despite himself into the tournament. All
talk endlessly, and all think highly of themselves:
"First class, right through," the young man

proudly proclaimed. "Highest marks for the last
ten years in my district." (Kalyan, TLW, p. 65).

"I am not simply a reporter but a master Of
style. In fact I am a master Of many styles."
(Viswakarman, TLW, p. 89).

TAsk any question you want. My name is Satya-
murti, meaning 'truth-teller'." (TLW, p. 34).

164

”You think you have met me already. You have, and
so have tens of thousands Of others. . . . I am a man
of good taste." (Kubera, TLW, p. 108).

"You can't be wholly beyond redemption," he said.
"After all, you showed that you were not without taste
by selecting me." (Raman, TLW, p. 226).

"Marry me and make it all come true. The two Of us
can reform the world together.” (Ernest, TLW, p. 149).

All of them speak in the same way, the same exaggeration,
bossiness, even the same kind Of jokes. The poses and
repartees have an Oscar Wilde touch, and as in Wodehouse,
there is no difference between speakers--any Of them
could have said any or all of these:

"She has behaved," said Sambasivan, "exactly as
the daughter Of her father should."

The young man peered at him dubiously.

"Very well, I will not prejudge." (TTT, p. 33).

"You talk like a file," she said. "Sideways, you
happen to look like one also."

"You are extremely ill-mannered. A Brahmin girl
should strive to be like a cow. She should furnish
the household with everything but impertinence."
(MI p0 88) -

"Nothing, but nothing, compares with Attar Of
Darkness . . . exquisitely nationalist, quintessen-
tially Indian, made rigorously to a sacred, secret
formula Older than history, newer than nuclear physics."

"You won't catch me living up to that," said
Nalini.

"You will marry me," he insisted. "Some women
achieve greatness. Others have greatness sprayed upon
them." (TlT, p. 111).

"If you want to get married you might learn not to
walk over an apology."

"And you might learn to deliver one with grace."
(m: P. 75) 0

"You haven't come in answer to the advertisement,
have you?"

Ernest's tone was reproving. "I never read
advertisements. My function in life is to make
people healthier." (ThT, p. 120).

165

In a comedy like TOO Long in the West such super-
ficial homogeneity is acceptable. But in a serious novel

like The Dark Dancer12 this quality is intrusive. The

 

major characters tend to speak alike in the same voice--
flippant outside while intense thoughts race on within,
considering pros and cons, hopes and despairs, suffering
the anguish of inhibition-caused inarticulation. And
still deeper is the inmost voice questioning, desperately
wondering if what it wanted to say has been said or
whether the outer voice and words have fallen short.
Often a character stops short, leaving a sentence unfin-
ished or regretted, feeling that the words have not con-
‘veyed the meaning or sentiment adequately, e.g.:

She paused, pursing her lips. She hadn't meant to
be patronizing, but it had happened that way out of the
stubbornness of language. (Kamala, 22! p. 49).

He had made the last remark straightforwardly, out
Of his respect for Kamala, not intending it to carry
the weight Of a large meaning. (M.O., 22, p. 279).

It was the first time she had spoken of wanting
him, and she said it tautly, as if admission hurt a
little . . . (Cynthia, 92! p. 95).

He had meant it as a reminder Of the practical,

a declaration of necessity. But when the words came

out, they sounded only defeatist. (Krishnan, 22, p. 96).
HOWever, Krishnan is the only one who chronically runs
irIto this inarticulation. Occasionally, the "explanatory
fOotnote in his voice" as he calls it fails to come through,
anui the articulate misgivings about his inarticulation

Searve no purpose. Especially when he wants to commiserate

with someone, he sounds disgustingly patronizing. For

166

example, to Vijayaraghavan, who is in love with Kamala and
so rails against Krishnan: "I know how you feel," said
Krishnan reassuringly, wishing he could say something a
little less inadequate" (22! p. 184). The same condescend-
ing tone comes across in his last meeting with Cynthia.
Similarly with Pratap Singh, who is full Of anger and
bitterness as he talks Of the Rawalpindi massacre Of

Hindus and Sikhs. And yet again when he turns to his
guests on hearing the radio announcement that August 15

is to be Independence Day:

"Seventy-two days," he said, "Seventy-three days
to freedom. It didn't sound exactly the way it should
have" (22, p. 113). Here, in addition to the total inade-
quacy of the statement and speculation, one feels that per-
haps the author himself periodically feels a qualm that he
has not effectively communicated what he wants to; a need-
less qualm. As for Krishnan's misgivings, most Of the
time, the instant retrospection is effective, and we feel
the effort and helplessness behind the words, for example:
To Kamala, who intuitively asks about Cynthia, he quickly
explains they had been undergraduates together. “He had
meant to reassure her about the past but he had done it
at the cost of unsettling the present. It must have gone
down deep, it must have taken root in him, for it to come
out that way in the nuances" (22! p. 86).

Krishnan is quick to respond, especially to his

own shortcomings; but his response is intellectual,

167

dialectic, detached. Thus, he sees the absurdities Of

elaborate marriage festivities, but he also sees the
social and spiritual need for a carnival that "helped to
loosen for a moment the rigid and priest-like compulsions
of austerity which seemed to claim even the wealthiest of
his community" (22, p. 21). He dissects himself with the
same ruthlessness. The Opening chapter, that has fallen
flat for some critics, is, in my Opinion, an excellent
introduction tO the character of the arrogant yet sensi-
tive hero. His detachment as he walks back to his
ancestral home behind the massive Cudappah pillars is
seemingly unnatural, but it is a poignant expression of
the utter alienation he feels on the realization that

his response is only intellectual, that his heart has
ne'er within him burn'd as home his footsteps he hath
turn'd from wandering on a foreign strand. He knows

that an intellectual response is not enough, but he

does not know how else he can respond. This is his
tragedy. Krishnan is one who has rejected his beginnings
and then discovers that his inmost yearning is to belong.
The Dark Dancer is the story Of this search.

The predominant images in this voyage Of discovery
are the gopuram and the Dark Dancer. The latter image
recurs in South Indian literatures just as the Ganga and
Shakti recur in all Indian literatures. It is invariably
used as a symbol of supreme beauty and mystery; its

emotional and aesthetic associations for the South Indian

168

are very rich. The pose (see 29! 28) itself is very
familiar and is reproduced in numerous temples all over
South India and even the Far East--Old Cambodia, Siam,
East Indies. And yet it is above monotony. As Rajan
says, "Again and again, century after century, thousands
of times in city or in village, the molten metal would
settle into solidity and the craftsman gazing upon it
would feel the strange light Of a vision not his own"
(22, p. 28).

The other main image in the novel is the gopuram,
the four-sided pyramid built above the gates of temples
and above the inner shrine. For Rajan, it symbolizes

lonely but steadfast defiance. In Too Long in the West,

 

this image is seen in Mahavir Peak, "an impenitence of
the earth, an object of awe and desolation. Its shape
was aloof, disturbing, satisfying. One found a challenge
and then a repose in its loneliness" (ThT, p. 2). In The
Dark Dancer, Krishnan sees in the gopuram "the marriage
of solitude with the unknown." It is symbolic Of man,
for each man at the core is an island entire unto himself,
a thrust of earth in an alien and unfriendly ocean, "how-
ever blunted, frustrated, upheld unyieldingly from the
obstinate earth, the blunted thrust giving aspiration
solidity and earthiness." The stress Of the blunted top
is significant. The enmity Of the sky and environment

exerts ceaseless pressure on the lonely, upthrust

169

(a favorite word with Rajan) tower, but a gopuram-like
individual resists the pressures and stands on, lonely,
defiant, beautiful.

In another sense, the gopuram image is linked
with the image of the Dancer. It is symbolic of Hin-
duism. The four faces Of a gopuram are closely packed
with carved figures "vaguely similar yet never exactly
the same, brown stone proudly declaring the earth's
promise, so that in the apparent riot of diversity one
felt the presence, not Of a pattern but of a unifying
force, straining upward into the spiritual, penetrating
down into the sensual, until the borders of division
melted away and the two worlds were extensions of each
other” (22, p. 166). It contains and answers every need
Of spirit and body and intellect, for each man to par-
take Of as he wishes and is able; his to decide whether
he wants to enjoy the architectural perfection from out-
side, Or whether he wants to walk through the outer
gopuram doors and pray to the myriad deities who have
their shrines within the walls, or whether he wants to
walk to the inmost shrine under the central gopuram and
there contemplate and worship the Dark Dancer.

Krishnan's Brahmin background places him in the
last group, necessarily the smallest in any social
structure. Not only the path Of bhakti, Of rapt ador-

ation; not only the path Of karma, causal reward and

170

punishment; not only the path of gnana, Of actively
striving for knowledge, but a stricter code encompassing
all these and more--right action for its own sake, with-
out consideration of reward or punishment, cause or
effect. The Dark Dancer is an appropriate image for
this concept, this abstract superhuman perfection that

a human being can perceive and merge into. Like the
gopuram, the Dancer is infinite power and infinite
serenity.

Krishnan gets his vision of the Genesis in his
marriage pandal, though he does not comprehend its mean-
ing.

In the beginning was rhythm, not the word. Not dark-
ness but moonlight and the radiance of creation.
There had never been nothing without form and void
but always form in its essence, everlastingly chang-
ing. . . . Nataraja, one leg arched in that supreme
expression of energy, the dying smile of the demon
beneath the other's lightness, all that infinite
power Of destruction drawn back into the bronze
circle of repose . . . the intense union of power
with tranquillity, not captured but liberated in
that eternal dancing. . . . Creation, Destruction.
Two concepts but one dance . . . asserting the law
invincibly, ecstatically, the drums beating . . .
raise me, raise me into the mystery's centre.

(22' p. 28).

But one is not automatically raised. One is lost
in the mazes of the motion, the mystery, the meaning.
Krishnan's subconscious is always conscious of the Dancer
but only in fragments. He intellectually knows there

is a whole but he perceives only parts. At his nuptials

he can hear only the remorseless beating of the drums,

171

"the tattoo blurred like an ancestral memory." The novel
is the story of this consciousness, now growing, now
darker, and towards the last, brighter than ever before
in his life. He chooses Kamala because he does not want
the tranquillity of compromise that most men want and
get out of arranged marriages. "Was there a place for
contentment in the temple's heart, in the kindling core
of the mind where Siva dances?" Not contentment but a
sense Of belonging is what he seeks. And instinctually
he feels that Kamala would lead him to that deep commit-
ment which is part Of belonging. "She would not change
him. She would accept him. She would leave him nothing
but himself, no masks, no pretense, no illusion. Without
harshness, perhaps without love also, she would lead him
to the precipice of belonging, the point Of no return and
no escape." And there he would create his island because
creation is an act inspired when one cannot escape.
Bondage and liberation, like creation and destruction,
are antithetical yet complementary forces in the cosmic
dance of Siva.

Krishnan's instinct about Kamala's inner strength
is right, and she would have led him to the supreme
realization, but the way would have been long and
arduous. Krishnan is not strong enough to make that
kind of pilgrimage, and he chafes impatiently seeing

her tranquillity as inertia and not as strength of

172

spirit. The national changes within India parallel this
change. The invincible but slow strength Of Gandhi's
non-violent movement is impatiently speeded up, and
India moves to its ruin even as Krishnan does to his.

India's movements and Krishnan's parallel at
every step henceforward in the novel. The day he meets
Cynthia is the day Of the Rawalpindi carnage, the day Of
foreboding that sets with a pall Of inevitability. India
that has been patiently pushing its icon Of freedom within
a resplendent Juggernaut up the steep hill to the new
temple now gives the Juggernaut an impatient push and in
that impatient heave it loses its breath for a costly
moment; the Juggernaut slips back ever so little, but
it is a Juggernaut and therefore kills those who inad-
vertantly or purposely touch it without reverence. India
shudders at the touch of the slipping Juggernaut and then
rallies with reinforced breath. "It was still possible
that it might not be," but the heavy pall of inevitability
has already fallen. Similarly, Krishnan is chafing at
the slowness of his journey to "belonging." Cynthia's
arrival catches him in that vulnerable state of impatience,
and though he rallies, feeling it was still possible it
might not be,a new chain of causation has been set roll-
ing-—in the wrong direction.

Kamala, Hinduism, the Dance--all are one. Cynthia

and her ideas are the Opposite of all these. She cannot

173

give without expecting an equal return. "You've no right
to give less than you receive. If you couldn't give
everything, then you ought not to have started it" (22'
p. 175). She cannot conceive Of a fusion Of the Dancer's
"infinite energy and infinite repose. She can see and
represent and identify herself with only a fragmentary
aspect Of the Dance--the aspect of energy and motion and
liberation, none of which is of the Dance without the
complementary aspect of stillness, repose and the circle
that encompasses all. Krishnan is attracted because he
too is at the moment responsive only to a fragment.

A fragment Of the Cosmic Dance is not as fragments
of terrestrial wholes where parts bear the qualities Of
the whole, and fractions add up to one. The Cosmic Dance
is Whole; fragments are worthless, meaningless, nothing.
One has to see the whole or he sees nothing, though he
may think he sees the best angle. Cynthia is the very
antipode Of Krishnan's destination. She does not want
him to belong but to be (22! p. 97). She cannot perceive
that the bronze circle encircles the universe; she sees it
only as a cage. And because Krishnan has veered away from
Kamala he too starts seeing himself as a caged animal,
an image that has never come to his mind till Cynthia's
advent. When with Cynthia or thinking of her he is a
caged animal. But with Kamala he is man striving to be

god, "raise me, raise me into the mystery's center."

174

Kamala is a gopuram, her tranquil brown eyes are "where
the gopuram's shadow leaned in." In her the borders
between the spiritual and the sensual melted away and the
two worlds became extensions of each other. But Cynthia
appeals only to Krishnan's intellect and not to his spirit.
Because he is intellectual, he responds eagerly, grate-
fully. "His mind opened and the wave swept into him,

the riptide of her sensuality seeming to wash it clean

so that he was conscious only Of the thrust of her love-
liness, lingering and lissome." But satiation of body
and mind alone are not enough. Fragments Of the Dance
add up to nothing. And even in his first embrace Of
Cynthia, Krishnan knows that "it wasn't a beginning,
there were no stones to stand on, no welcoming soil to
wade to with relief. He hadn't the sense Of liberation

. . . only of a strangely frightening freedom, all the
more desolate because no longer hemmed in" (22, p. 129).
There is no bronze circle to give the movement the sweep
of completion.

Krishnan has by now lost even intellectual contact
with the Dark Dancer. He is an animal prowling about the
cage, turning over the coin, calculating the plus and
minus. Cynthia is worth ten aunts, twenty uncles and
forty-seven grandmothers. Maybe, but he is not aware
that the equation balances only because the sum total

of zeroes is zero. He continues to love Cynthia and

175

even gets happiness out of the relationship because man,
unlike the Dark Dancer, can live in fragments, and mind
and body add up to a substantial fraction Of a whole
even though the fractions do not have anything to do
with the Essence.

Once Kamala leaves for Madras, Cynthia becomes
very like Kamala. There are sentences which sound as
though they refer to Kamala:

. . . the loveliness came out Of a core of

loneliness, and when he touched her now he could
feel the core's profundity. (22, p. 127).

That was what fascinated him: the vivid and
quite deep Indianness, and underneath it, yet in
harmony with it, the exotic core Of stubborn
individualism, which he wanted to see take root
in his reality. (22, p. 132).

When Krishnan expresses his qualms about inflicting suf-
fering on Kamala, Cynthia behaves exactly as Kamala would
have. He has chosen for himself and he must continue
alone so that he may grow (22! p. 137). When Kamala
leaves for Shantihpur, Cynthia initially behaves like

an efficient Englishwoman, phoning the police and bustling
about, but later she frequently becomes like Kamala when
seen by Krishnan:

What was it, he wondered, that made her so
reassuringly self-sufficient, so that she was able
to tend the private garden of her happiness, not in
obliviousness to the world outside but with a renewed

and personal understanding Of its problems. (22,
p. 162).

He had chosen her against all pressures, in his
obstinate, lonely act of self-assertion, and out of
the exactions of sorrow and of chagrin there had to
come something Of the truth in himself. She was the
receiver of the only pure commitment, the act had

176

been free, it was himself uncompromised, and in the
reality which it planted, the meanings that he sought
could stand and grow. (22, p. 179).

She had chosen him, not abandoning herself, but

letting his possession Of her shape him, revealing

the certitude and clarity Of her own strength. . . .

In the end she had made him go back to himself.

(22, p. 180).
She is too like Kamala for us not to stop and wonder what
is happening to Krishnan. In his despair at having lost
both Kamala and Cynthia, has he lost sight Of the dis-
tinction between the two? Have they merged in his mind?
Or has he been idealizing both, seeing only what he wants
to see, endowing both with qualities they do not possess,
making each the bulwark of his commitment because he
needed the idea of a bulwark and would make one despite
reality? That is a possible but not plausible specu-
lation, for we have seen and heard both Cynthia and
Kamala, and seen Krishnan's interaction with them.

Obviously Cynthia does not have all these

qualities that are attributed to her. She is not the
only receiver of his only commitment, she is not very
Indian particularly in the remarks she makes just before
Krishnan calls her one, his choice was not an act of
self-assertion but almost fatalistic acceptance, and
she had made him go back to himself only in a momentary
loss of self-control that she very soon regretted.
Whereas all these qualities not only could be but

have been attributed to Kamala, who has proven that

she deserves the tributes; of Kamala whom he had

177

chosen in an act Of self-assertion against family
pressures and astrological verdicts he has said:
(italics mine)

She looked steadily at Krishnan with an intense

tranquillity that seemed the dispassionate mirror
of His loneliness. (22, p. 32).

 

"Kamala's Indian, intensely so, not simply in
what She knows and’does but deep down, in a way I
can only sense and don't even want to understand."
(all: P0 81) .

 

 

Kamala accepted with an undeceivable innocence,
as if she knew better than the giver the character
of his gift, better than the demander the roots of
his demand, as if by the force Of her receiving she
might bring what she accepted to its essential
nature. (22, p. 19).

 

Are those musings about Cynthia perhaps rationalizations
of a man who just realized that he has exchanged a pearl
beyond price for an inferior stone?

For, in between these encomia, Krishnan does feel
a nagging awareness that something vital is being short-
circuited in his relationship with Cynthia. At Cambridge,
their intellectual communions had been a satisfying
experience but perhaps only because tousle-headed, slim-
hipped Keith had been there between them to protect
Krishnan from any physical commitment. It is signifi-
cant that their physical commitment is made on a physical
level, not on the spiritual-sensual level it has always
been with Kamala. Cynthia looked "at him possessively.
. . . Her tongue flicked out, moistening the curve of

her mouth. Then her arms reached up to him . . . circling

178

his indecision with finality, pulling him firmly, irre-
vocably down" (92, p. 155). He enters this relationship
with a greater sense Of fatalistic doom than he felt that
nuptial night when with the weight Of resignation he was
compelled "into the prescient darkness," which was "making
hbm that which he was doomed to be" (22, p. 32). In
Cynthia's encircling arms the figure of the Dark Dancer
is seen, motion within a circle, but it is distorted
like an anti-Christ figure. It is also significant that
when Kamala leaves for Shantihpur the bronze replica of
the Dark Dancer leaves with her. The day she returns
from Madras, as she stands at the dresser with the
figurine in her hand, Krishnan is given darshan of the
parallel, that Kamala bears within her the vital essence
of the Dance, but Krishnan does not perceive. Like an
undeserving Nanda he stands at the portal Of the shrine
where Nandi has moved aside to give him a vision of
Nataraja, but he is too preoccupied with himself to
receive the vision. And then Kamala leaves, taking with
her all possible contact with the Dark Dancer.

Krishnan's affair with Cynthia runs its course
as it must, and ends as it must in a blind alley. Krish-
nan next sees the bronze figurine at Shantihpur. While
the wind sweeps through the room, and through Krishnan
and India, the god himself

. . . was still, as if the quintessence of motion
were repose, as if only the reflections moved and

maimed, and as if, beyond them, shaping them, dis-
carding them, one could reach the source Of change

179

and its serenity. . . . It was not the catharsis Of
art--there was no purgation, no refinement, no trans-
mutation Of the strength Of darkness. It was as if
one were raised into the mystery's center . . .

(22, p. 225).

It is another abstract but illuminating flash, and it
brings Krishnan nearer to the understanding of his
beginnings, the beginnings in the Brahmin ethos and
Hindu scriptures that he had earlier rejected. Through
the ensuing traumatic experiences of communal bloodshed,
sacrifice and bereavement, Krishnan becomes growingly
aware Of some basic values; from the M.O.'s fierce dedi-
cation and Kamala's silent strength he learns something
about the Indianness and sense of belonging for which
he has yearned all his life; and beyond that, something
about detachment and right action for its own sake.

Parallel to this is the fratricidal struggle
in India soon after Independence. Kurushetra was not
and never shall be fought in vain. A meaning will
emerge from the waste and carnage, and India shall rise
again. The backward rolling of the Juggernaut will be
stopped and then the chariot will be pushed up to the
top Of the mountain and India will worship at the newly
dedicated shrine.

On the personal level, Krishnan's ordeal by fire
is over. "Out Of the ashes, he knew, would come more than
ashes," and not only for Kamala. The rain has not yet

come. But it will. V. S. Krishnan, five-seven,

180

brown-eyed, slim-waisted, nearing thirty, sets out from

the Wasteland back to the strength Of his beginning.

FOOTNOTES

1Nayantara Sahgal, Storm in Chandigarh (New York,
1969), p. 110.

2For further examples Of Kamala Markandaya's
ignorance Of Hindu customs than are given in this chapter,
refer to Shyamala Venkateswaran's article, "The Language
of Kamala Markandaya's Novels," in The Literarinriterion,
IX (Winter, 1970), 57-67.

3Nectar in a Sieve (New York, 1954), hereafter
cited as he; SomepInner Fury (New York, 1955), hereafter
cited as SIF; A Silencelpf Desire (New York, 1960),
hereafter cited as g2; Possession (New York, 1963),
hereafter cited as P; A Handful Of Rice (New York, 1966);
and The Coffer Dams-(New York, 1969).

 

 

 

 

 

4Frederic Morton, "New Truths, Old Values," NYT
Book Review (June 29, 1958), p. 6.

5David McCutchion, "Le Style C'est L'Homme,"
Writers Workshop (May-June, 1961), p. 21.

 

6Prema Nandakumar, "The Achievement Of the Indo-
Anglian Novelist," The Literary Criterion (Winter, 1961),
p. 160.

 

7V. Y. Kantak, "The Language Of Indian Fiction in
English," in Critical Essays on Indlan Writin in English,
ed. M. K. Naik, S. K. Desai and G. S. Amur Dharwar, 1968),
p. 156.

8C. D. Narasimhaiah, "Why this Animus?" The Lit-
erary Criterion (Summer, 1966), p. '

 

9See TOO Lon in the West pp. 58-59 and p. 89;
The Dathancer p. 5’; and The Illustrated Weekly of
India (February 24, 1963), p. 58.

 

 

181

182

loAnon., "Indian Ink," TLS (May 19, 1961), p. 313.

11Balachandra Rajan, Too Long in the West (Lon-
don, 1961), p. 62; hereafter cited as TLW.

12Balachandra Rajan, The Dark Dancer (New York,
1958); hereafter cited as 22.

CHAPTER V

THE LONE SURVIVOR: RAJA RAO

From time to time we hear of memorial pits being
dug by people who fear a nuclear cataclysm and wish to
leave intact forever and a day some relics of our present
civilization. In a deep pit they bury a select number of
articles, treasures garnered from various arts, crafts
and scientific inventions, that represent a part or
whole of national or world-wide cultures. If such a
pit is dug and filled to preserve anything of what is
called Indo-British civilization, and one had to choose
just one novelist from Indo-English literature to be
represented in the collection, one could without hesi-
tation narrow down the choice to Mulk Raj Anand and Raja
Rao. The choice between the two is not easy to make.
Anand has written more; his writings survey more spheres
of Indian life; his fiction tells us more about Indo-
British civilization; he is more consistent in his
literary output and in quality. Yet, in the final
analysis, Raja Rao comes out several steps ahead of

Anand. Raja Rao's novels transcend the times they

183

184

portray. Even Kanthapura, which is very much a product

 

of its times and deals with topical issues, transcends
chronology and belongs to the ages.
Prawer Jhabvala has rightly said that the as-yet-
unwritten ideal Indian novel
. . . would be bits of prose-poetry, anecdotes, lots
of philosophizing and musing, and oblique kind of
wit, and an ultimate self-surrender, a sinking back
into formlessness, into eternity . . .1
Raja Rao's novels come nearest to this ideal. His later
novels, especially, have this paradoxical quality of
serenity and inconclusiveness that comes with ultimate
self-surrender. At the end of each novel, the main char-
acter reaches a transcendental level of experience but
it is not conclusive. The words, "ultimate self-surrender,
a sinking back into formlessness, into eternity," most
aptly sums up the experience of both reader and character
in his later novels. As Raja Rao himself said, the last
page of a novel is not the end. The reader's mind con-
tinues to react even though the hero has reached the end
of his journey. A good novel should have several blank
pages after the last written word so that the reader,
turning over the blank leaves, reaches a kind of serenity.2
Raja Rao will endure.
And because he will endure and be the subject of
many more studies than he has been so far, no attempt is
made in this study to give a general or chronological

introduction to him or his fiction. Two aspects of his

185

novels are discussed--the theme of Shakti-worship in his

fiction, and an allegorical reading of The Cat and

 

Shakespeare; that is, the first part treats one of the

 

themes that runs through his writing, and the second
part interprets one of his novels through in—depth study.

Raja Rao has published three novels, Kanthapura

 

(1938), The Serpent and the Rope (1960) and The Cat and

 

 

Shakespeare (1965). Each is a great work of art. Kan-

 

thapura is relatively simple in its plot, structure,
language and philosophy. It is set in the 1930's, in
Gandhi's golden decade, when the spark of genuine
nationalism and awakening, typically Indian in its
yoking of social and spiritual values, swept through
the country, razing all barriers--communal, religious

and intellectual. The Serpent and the Rope and The Cat

 

and Shakespeare are far more complex. Raja Rao has moved

 

from simple narration to complex analyses and metaphysi-

cal musings. The Serpent and the Rope, more clearly than

 

any other novel, tells us the distinctive qualities of
the Indo-English novel and warns us that the usual stan-
dards of prose criticism cannot be applied to Indo—English
writers.
David McCutchion, in his critique of the novel

asks:

Is this a novel at all? . . . All the central con-

cerns of the western novel are absent--social

relations, psychological motivation, characterization,
judgement, a passion for the concrete. . . . 3

186

The answer is in Raja Rao's foreword to Kanthapura. He

 

says the Indo-English novel often uses the traditional
Indian form of story-telling where
. . . we have neither punctuation nor the treacherous
'ats' and 'ons' to bother us--we tell one interminable
tale. Episode follows episode and when our thoughts
stop our breath stops, and we move on to another
thought.4
The same is true of characterization. Characters in Indo-
English novels are seldom defined and would be called
caricatures by the standard criteria of prose criticism.
But, as Prawer Jhabvala says in the context mentioned
earlier, there is not much interest in individual char-
acterization because "here we are all part of one
another and beyond and above that part of God."5
However all Indo-English novels are written in
full consciousness of the western novel-form. we need
to remember both these points, the Indianness and the
borrowed form, in any criticism of Indo-English fiction
and neither exonerate nor praise either quality to the
exclusion of the other. The finest examples of this syn-
thesis of forms is found in Raja Rao's work.
Several explications and commentaries have been

published on The Serpent and the Rope and The Cat and

Shakespeare. Since criticism should be cumulative, the

 

rest of this essay does not go into summaries and general

criticism or even into the main metaphysical contemplations

187

and conundrums in these novels but, instead, traces a
vital theme in Raja Rao's fiction, the theme of Shakti
or the Female Principle.

"To worship woman is to redeem the world."

"The husband does not love the wife for the wife's
sake, the husband loves the wife for the sake of the Self
in her."

Taken separately the first statement epitomizes
the ancient Earth-Mother cult and the second epitomizes
the Advaita philosophy that all things in the universe
are but projections of the Self which is One and Absolute.

Taken together these two sentences from The Serpent and

 

the Rope6 summarize the attitude towards womanhood and
love that is developed in Raja Rao's short stories and

novels. Rama, the hero of The Serpent and the Rope, is

 

basically an Advaitist, a follower of the Hindu creed
that may be defined in Vivekananda's words: "As a man
you are separate from woman, as a human being you are one
with the woman; as a man you are separate from the animal,
but as a living being the man, the woman, the animal,
the plant are all one; and as existence you are one with
the whole universe. That existence is God, in Him we are
all one."

Applied to human love in Raja Rao's work the
credo that emerges is: I am the Eternal Self even as a

drop of water has exactly the same composition as the

188

ocean. Anything that helps me realize this, is good
and therefore to be pursued. Blessed is he who finds
such love.

Raja Rao's heroes see, in the women close to their
hearts, Wbman--mysterious, powerful, sensual, sensuous,
compassionate, child-mother-bride-whore in one. Small
wonder that the Freud-oriented westerner is moved to
extravagant tribute or caustic contempt.7

This attitude of idealization is developed through

successive novels till in his latest, The Cat and Shake-

 

speare, Shantha becomes Woman not only in peak moments of
philosophical contemplation or physical ecstasy but
remains WOman throughout. This unquestioning and whole-
hearted acceptance of woman comes only after a long and
soulful search by Rama in Raja Rao's second and best

novel, The Serpent and the Rope. However, Rama never

 

gets the complete vision of WOman that Ramakrishna Pai

of The Cat and Shakespeare gets; in his tortuous wander-

 

ings through the mazes of his vast intellect Rama sees
fleeting glimpses, and his imagination and idealism
build upon these visions so that he sees in each woman
who moves within his orbit a manifestation of Shakti,
Earth-Mother. He goes beyond his personal experience
and reinterprets mythology, history and politics in the
light of his ideology. How far we can go along with

him depends on our knowledge of the Hindu background

189

and our understanding of this strange philosopher-
sensualist, but none of us is likely to go with him the
whole way.

In this study I shall not comment on the impersonal
generalizations8 made by Rama or by other Raja Rao char-
acters but shall confine myself to the picture of woman
that emerges out of their minds and experiences.

As a student in France in the 1930's Raja Rao
wrote several short stories which were published in 1947

under the title The Cow of the Barricades. The stories

 

are not worth republishing in book form. In the Preface
he says apologetically that he accepts authorship of

them because one ought not disclaim one's children.

Well, a considerate father ought not expose his crippled
children to the critical eyes of the world, nor ought a
good author foist his immature works on his readers after
establishing his renown, but that is not the point at
issue: although the stories are not worth reading as
stories they are worth some attention as foils to his
later fiction.

Of relevance to this paper are three stories in
this volume, "The Cow of the Barricades," "Javni" and
"Akkayya." They contain the nucleus around which his
idealistic attitude towards woman was to develop. The
title story is about Gauri, a cow that gives its life in

the cause of the non-violent nationalism that Mahatma

190

Gandhi had started in the thirties. Gauri is symbolic of
the power of love; the story is centered around not only
the literal affirmation of the words, Greater love hath
no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his
friends, not only an affirmation of the belief that both
"the speechful and the mute" are animated by the same
divine spark of love that "Sweeps thro the dull dense
world, compelling there, All new successions to the forms
they wear" but around a more fundamental and familiar
symbol to which Hindus respond readily, the cow as the
Mother, Mother India and Shakti. To worship woman is
to redeem the world, and Shakti never did betray the
heart that loved her. She suffers with and for man
that he may be redeemed.

"Javni" is an idealized portrait of an old
retainer. Javni was a "little wrinkled beneath the
lips and with strange, rapturous eyes. Her hair was
turning white, her breasts were fallen and her bare,
broad forehead showed pain and widowhood." Javni's
characterization is typical of Raja Rao's technique
which has remained basically the same from the begin-
ning. It is not through her actions that we see her
strength and devotion but through the narrator's
reaction to her presence. In his later work Raja Rao
evokes the reader's identification with the narrator;

he fails to do so in this short story. We see only

191

a pitiable old servant though the narrator sees Woman.
His sister, too, shares the halo. She has more in common
with the servant than with her husband or brother. She
says, "Men can never understand us. . . . You are too
practical and too irreligious. To us everything is
mysterious. Our gods are not your gods, your gods not
our gods." This sense of mystery that separates the

sexes but exalts both is carried over to The Cat and

 

Shakespeare where Ramakrishna Pai does not understand
Shantha but by being aware of the sense of mystery comes
near to worshiping her gods by worshiping her.

In "Akkayya," Akkayya is an old woman who was

widowed in girlhood. In The Serpent and the Rope we see

 

her again as Aunt Lakshamma. "She was married to a min-
ister once, and he died when she was seven or eight. And
since then my uncles and their daughters, my mother's
cousins and their grandchildren, have always had Aunt
Lakshamma to look after them, for an orphan in a real
household is never an orphan" (SR, p. 9).

To the village woman the household extends to the
whole village. She knows the personal problems of all
its inhabitants, their idiosyncrasies and their weak-
nesses; the single street along which the village houses
stand is her courtyard, and there she works and harangues,
there she joins the other members of the "household" in
their rejoicings and lamentations, for all that is theirs

is hers.

192

Achakka, the narrator in Kanthapura, is just such

 

a village woman, and Kanthapura just such a household.
Achakka is more articulate than her predecessors, indeed
her garrulity is ear-splitting if taken in large doses;
her narrative style is the novel's crowning charm and
also the greatest threat to its success. Those familiar
with the vernacular and with the circumlocution of Indian
speech habits will be delighted with Achakka's narrative
style and its gossipy digressions.
Then there was cholera. We gave a sari and a gold
trinket to the goddess, and the goddess never touched
those that are to 1ive--as for the old ones, they
would have died one way or the other anyway. Of
course you will tell me that young Sankamma, Barber
Channav's wife, died of it. But then it was not for
nothing that her child was born ten months and four
days after he was dead. Ten months and four days,
I tell you! (5, p. 3).

Voluble, with an infinite capacity for love and
for passing malice, quick to spark into enthusiasm and
into cynicism, the women of Kanthapura are more human
than those created by Raja Rao elsewhere. They become
WOman at certain times but there is no incongruity between
their action and the author's claim. One realizes that
the immanent Shakti rises in every woman at certain
pivotal points of life.

Different forms of Shakti are manifested through
the women of Kanthapura. Shakti's indomitable spirit

possesses them in their Satyagraha (non-violence) pro-

cession against the British government. When the police

193

ill-treat them with their sticks and boots, the women
think, move and act as one for they are one. More dis-
tinct and pervasive is the devotional aspect. Woman
as the Eternal Devotee, Shakti kneeling in rapt adoration
in front of Siva, reveals herself through them as they
listen to Jayaramachar retelling epic stories and to'
Ramakrishnayya reading passages from the Scripture.
The most touching example of their edifying faith is
the narrator's musing on the ruins of Kanthapura. She
dreams of a happy ending to a modern Ramayana where Rama
(Gandhi) will return from his exile (visit to England)
with Sita (India) who had been captured by Ravana (the
British) and as he returns to Ayodhya (Delhi) Bharata
(Nehru), who has been reigning as regent, will welcome
him and there will be celestial flowers showered upon
his aerial chariot.

From the simple-hearted, loud-mouthed, easily-

enthused women of Kanthapura to the reserved, cold,

 

intellectual Madeleine of The Serpent and the Rope is

 

a big leap, but an understandable one. Raja Rao travelled
a long and lonely way during those twenty-two years, and
his second novel is autobiographical to a large extent;
Rama's spiritual anguish and metaphysical questionings,
his search for happiness and his yearning for a teacher
echo Raja Rao's own sojourn in France, his return in 1940
to India and his long search that ended at the feet of

Swami Atmananda, who became his spiritual mentor.

194

The Serpent and the Repe is more than autobio-
graphical. It is allegorical, it is an intellectual
treatise on East-west cultural tensions, and mainly,
it is a metaphysical contemplation on life as experienced
by a sensitive intellectual, Rama, and expressed in
Advaitic terms of the serpent and the rope, central
symbols for illusion and reality respectively. How-
ever, what is of relevance here is that it is a probe
into the meaning of womanhood and marriage. In his
search for the meaning of womanhood Rama does not have
to travel far because the answer is within himself. His
attitude towards womanhood is subjective, and he builds
upon his preconceived ideal and never faces objective
analysis. There is no room for disillusionment because
there is no interaction between his subjective view and
objective reality. He sees WOman in all the women who
move within his orbit, and those who do not reflect
Shakti are thrown out of his orbit. No matter how they
look, act or talk, his intensely personal love endows
look, act and speech with an ethereal glow. He never
sees them as they are; he sees only the qualities that
he wants to see; even if facts are brought before him
he dismisses them as appearances, and claims to see
beyond what is to what REALLY is. In other words, his
faith endows reality on his fancy, somewhat like what
Keats says of Adam's dream of Eve and what the Greek myth

tells of Pygmalion's deep desire animating Galatea.

195

Sincerity and faith in their divinity make Rama's
women divine. But only for him. we, the readers, see
them as all too human, for Rama records their characters
faithfully though he himself is blind to their human
failings. Often we get impatient with his halo-weaving
imagination; and unless we see his attitude in the light
of the Shakti cult we will misunderstand him (as some
reviewers have done) and see him as a lecherous, inces-
tuous hypocrite who for some incomprehensible reason
is made out to be a hero.9 If the following passages
are read without adequate background, who can say which
of the four women addressed is the mother, which the
bride and which the sister?

Saroja's presence now obsessed me sometimes, like
one of those nights with the perfume of magnolia.
. . . I was intoxicated with Saroja' presence, like
a deer could be before a waterfall, or an elephant
before a mountain peak. . . . What a deep and rever-
ential mystery womanhood is. I could bow down
before Saroja and call her Queen. (SR, p. 52).

. . . in that blank, that silent, wise blank
between books and behind them I felt the presence,
the truth, the formula of Savithri. She was the
source of which words were made, the Mother of Sound,
Akshara-Lakshmi, divinity of the syllable; the night
of which the day was the meaning, the knowledge of
which the book was the token, the symbol-~the
prophecy. (SR, p. 169).

. . . and taking me into myself, I transpire as
the truth, as though touched by itself, like the
wave that sees itself to be the sea, like the earth
that was spread out and was called Madeleine. But
when I want to call her Madeleine, I have to say
Rama-~her lips are mine turned outward, her flesh
mine turned inward . . . (§§, p. 161).

196

She it seemed was my inmost center, the mirror of
my life. With no word, or sometimes with just a
word, she understood the curvatures of my silences
and thoughts. (SR, p. 236).

One may well ask how one can sympathize with a man who
goes almost straight from the bed of Madeleine whose
flesh was his turned inward to the arms of Savithri with
whom his union, he claims, was so perfect that he could
not say he loved her “because it was like saying 'I love
myself'," and who on next meeting Madeleine says of her,
"She was the tabernacle of my habitation."

In order to appreciate Raja Rao it is essential
to understand Rama's emotional constitution. Each of the
apotheoses could have been addressed to any of the four
women because all four are essentially one and the same.
Rama addresses the Woman in each. Saroja, Savithri,
Madeleine and Little Mother are at different times dif-
ferent facets of Shakti.

But not for us, alas! not for us. In this con-
text of characterization, one is reminded of D. H. Law-
rence's dilemma in Sons and Lovers, where there are what
may loosely be termed two Lawrences, one of whom is a
reporter recording incidents and the other a man empath-
ically identified with the hero. This split is most
noticeable in Lawrence's delineation of Walter Morel and
Miriam and his reinterpretation of them through Paul. In
The Serpent and the Rope, Rama is both reporter and inter-
preter though he himself is often unaware of the purport
of his reports and observations. This is most evident

in his relationship with Saroja and Savithri.

197

Saroja, his sister, is a rather opprobrious char-
acter who resents her step-mother and has vituperative
and satirical phrases for all around her. The Saroja we
see is mean and prejudiced and stubborn, but the Saroja
that Rama sees is entirely different. She is Shakti in
her most primordial form--the waiting WOmb. In her pre-
sence he feels as though he were in a temple sanctuary,
as though Saroja carried within her the sacred rivers,
Ganga and Yamuna, at the touch of which golden wheat
would sprout on barren fields. "When a girl would become
woman," he tells Catherine, "there's a whole universe
that rebels in you, as though a kingdom, a sovereignty
were to be lost, as though some demon were at your cavern
door, and you would lose the all, in fear, in blood, and
in anguish" (SR, p. 157). Thus he sings his encomium
on puberty and virginity, and in doing so he feels
exalted. What does it matter if Saroja is, in actuality,
a vain and pompous creature? She is the medium through
which Rama sees a manifestation of Shakti, and it is Rama
with whom Rama is concerned.

In Little Mother, Shakti appears in her gentle,
passive form, far more compassionate and pureiminded than
in her Kanthapura manifestation. Little Mother is a
tender portrait and even one less prone to metaphysical
visions than Rama can feel the divinity of womanhood in

her presence. Her capacity for love, loyalty, worship

198

and understanding is boundless. The third wife of an old
man, she accepts her husband unquestioningly, "A woman
has to marry. . . . Her womb is her life, and we cannot
choose our men" (S5, p. 260). She bears a son, and
within a year is widowed. With childlike trust she con-
signs her husband's ashes into Mother Ganga's hands, and
it is only when she crosses the bridge that takes her
away from the sacred river that she feels widowed and
weeps for herself and her orphaned child. But not for
long does she despair. Her husband has left her with
certain responsibilities and she feels she can revere
his memory only by shouldering them bravely. Saroja
accuses her of being self-centered, as usual without
offering any example or explanation. But here is
Little Mother writing to Rama, "But it gives me such
pain in the heart, I know not why. Saroja somehow thinks,
and it is a natural thing to think for a girl of her age,
a girl and a step-daughter, that I am her enemy" (SR,
p. 236). She worships Rama with a devotion that one
could misinterpret as sexual love if one is alien to a
culture where the head of the house is idolized.
Savithri, like Saroja, is idealized out of all
pr0portion. Here again appearance, conduct and speech
do not warrant worship. However, Savithri does not jar
upon our moral sense, only our aesthetic sense is some-

what jolted. Like Rama at their first meeting we are

199

repulsed by this too-modernized Indian who smokes cig-
arette after cigarette, fixes dates and dances, and
obstinately flouts her parents. She refuses to accept
Pratap, who has been chosen by her parents as her pro-
spective husband, for no reason except that she wants

to be wilful. Rama's repugnance changes to ardent love
but ours does not. We cannot go along with this homely,
chubby, short-sighted, talkative Cambridge undergraduate;
we cannot imagine what is so scintillating in her looks
or speech that a group of brilliant fellow-students would
follow her and consider it a privilege to bring back her
mislaid purse or spectacles from pubs where she has had
beer with Communist companions. "Here is a very clever
person, but she never says anything that really matters,"
Rama thinks at their first meeting; one wonders what
alchemy there is in Rama's eyes and ears that so trans-
forms a clod of earth into a heavenly being. Rama the
faithful narrator records numerous facts that make Savithri
a most unappealing female, but Rama the idealist-lover is
stone blind to the facts and sees only woman--beautiful,
virtuous, perfect.

Savithri is a plain-looking young woman, plump and
myopic. She is clumsy and forever about to drOp or trip
over something. She has the "sweep and nervousness of
the modern girl," the narrator records. The lover says,

"Even when she went to speak on the telephone one felt she

200

had a rich, natural grace, and one longer for her to be
back" (SR, p. 33). She spoke rapidly, and, as far as we
can see, inanely if not crudely. There is no music in
her speech as there is in Rama's and Madeleine's.

"I enjoy being in Europe. I love the activity,
the singleness of purpose, the sense of freedom," she
said and laughed. "But I am such an inveterate lazer
that when I sleep I almost need a red-hot needle to
awaken me. To me sleep is the most important of
biological phenomena."

"I am sorry it is so late," I said.

"Nonsense, I meant that when I sleep I sleep.

So, don't expect me before nine in the morning. I

shall sleep like a buffalo." (SR, p. 134).
The same raucousness is present even in the most intimate
scenes. Yet Rama says, "She spoke rapidly, and in between
her amusing chatter was a space of sorrow, large as her
eyes; you could almost breathe and know that this came
from no single act or thought, but from some previous
karma, the sorrow of another age" (S3, p. 124).

She had the humility of a saint, he says, but we
never see it. We see only her callous brushing away of
extra male friends to each of whom she had promised a
date for the same evening, and her proud rejection of
Pratap. "Savithri always talked of Pratap as one talks
of one's secretary. . . . If she talked of him with a
touch of condescension it was not because of social dif-
ferences, it was just because she liked to be kind to
something . . . such as a lame horse in the stable or it

might be an old bull, fed in the palace yard till it

dies" (SR, p. 199). It was of this person that Rama

201

thinks, "Savithri had such a sense of reverence for things--
were she picking up a spoon, or holding your pen in hand
. . . " (SE, p. 176).

Once Lakshmi, Savithri's friend, tells him to see
Savithri objectively, "I cannot understand how Savithri
can go about with so many men at the same time. You'll
hate me for saying it, but she's such a flirt" (SR,

p. 189). Rama silences her with the words, She is a
saint.

Savithri has numerous male admirers and seems as
flirtatious an undergraduate as ever walked the halls of
Girton College. But it was this woman, Rama claims, who
made him see into the center of Silence and perceive the
orb of centripetal sound which explains why Shakti is
the daughter of Himalay. They go through a symbolic
marriage, and he says, "We were not married that morning,
we discovered, we had ever been married" (SR, p. 215).

To him Savithri is the manifestation of Shakti in her
entirety, and she makes him Siva. "There is only one
woman, not for one life, but for all lives." It is a
profound Hindu belief that Shakti, parted from Siva,
has been incarnated on earth many times but her spirit
is eternally with Siva and her body, even when earthly,
has never been another's. Raja Rao extends this to say
that Shakti appears in mortal women from time to time,

but since she is Siva's from all Eternity to all Eternity

202

the mortal man with whom she unites is also for the time
being an incarnation of Siva. Or in other words, when
the divine in a woman rises, the divine in her man also
rises, and thus a man is made Siva by the Shakti in his
woman. This idea is more explicitly brought out in The

Cat and Shakespeare.

 

The quality that characterizes Rama's relationships
with women is the utter lack of interaction at an external,
objective level. Rama's Midas-touch imagination makes them
the personification of womanhood for him. There is so
little interaction that they never come to know the extent
of Rama's worship, and he never comes to know how deserving
or undeserving they are of it. It is only with Madeleine
that Rama comes near interaction. Madeleine too is highly
idealized, but the idealization springs from a more sub-
stantial basis. Rama sees many aspects of Shakti in her,
and she is at different times child, mother, bride and
mistress; always she evokes a spiritual response from him.
He seems to have the insatiable lust of a Casanova and
the spiritual yearning of a Donne. Even in the tremulous
stretching out of physical climax he is a devotee crying
out to God, "Except you enthrall me, never shall be free/
Nor ever chaste, except You ravish me." His physical
frenzy is imbued with spiritual overtones:

The night has ended, the dawn has not yet broken.
It's the time for ablutions, for the murmur of

prayers and the road to the temple by the river.
The God knows you and you know the God. . . . For a

203

moment you had gone beyond the body, and Oh, how

sad it is to come back--to bear this heavy limb.

. . . I give it to you Madeleine, but you are where
you are, and I am but nowhere. . . . Oh, give it to
me, give it, give it! Oh, give that! Madeleine

do not cry. Oh Madeleine, do not suffer . . . let me
squeeze the juice out of you, let me lick you like

a dog . . . let me smell you, smell the you of me and
the I in you. . . . Why do you cry so Madeleine, did I
hurt you, did I awaken you, did you rise and did I
fail? (SR, p. 161).

Love in all its brutal inadequacy is here:

A woman hates a male when he withdraws. She cannot
accept his defeat--his defeat is the defeat of her
womanhood . . . and she lifts him up and takes him
into herself, like a mother a child. Then you want to
take a cactus branch and beat her and scratch her all
over. You want to bite her lips and pull the breast
away from her chest, and taste the good blood of her
wounds. (SR, p. 165).

And there is protectiveness:
I pressed Madeleine, on those nights, with the warmth
and tenderness of a mother for her child--I would
have suckled her if I could . . . (SR, p. 243).

and rededication:
Beloved, my beloved, don't you see, I am near you?
That which is within you is mine; I am mine and you,
Madeleine, are--a chunk of truth, a reality . . .
(SR, p. 244).

and a sense of lostness:
She was not mine, maternity had given her an
otherness. . . . I wondered what I had done. (S3,
p. 237).

Aching or brutal, tender or beseeching, there is always an

overtone of worship. Madeleine once writes to him, "I

spoke especially of the respect you show to me--for you

a woman is still the other, the strange, the miracle.

204

You could never show the familiarity European men show
towards their wives. You worship women even if you
torture them" (SR, p. 100).

Through Madeleine Rama comes near experiencing
man's highest state--that of Self-Realization. Spirit-
ualizing of physical union is a step towards realizing
that as a man he is separate from woman, but as a human
being he is one with woman. Fulfillment of spiritualized
love leads to the next step, "the wind blows, wave after
wave of it, and mountains move. . . . I transpire as the
truth, like the wave that sees itself to be the sea, like
the earth that was spread out and was called Madeleine
. . . " (SR, p. 161). Here he realizes that as a man he
is separate from the animal, but as a being, the man, the
woman, the animal, the stone are all one.

In Madeleine Rama sees WOman in various forms.
Why then is their marriage a failure? The answer is not
far to find though Rama never finds it. Marriage involves
interaction and Rama's essential weakness is that he
cannot survive interaction. Rama lives within his
illusory realm, a snake-charmer piping tunes to serpents
that dance as and when he wills them to. Madeleine is
the rope, the only reality that intrudes upon his insular
world. He builds a romantic image of her also, but the
very state of cohabitation makes continuous idealization

impossible. This trait in Rama's characters precludes

205

ideal marriage, and since he would not have been satisfied
with anything less, no marriage could have brought him
happiness.

Marriage with Madeleine proves doubly exalting
and doubly disastrous because she is a forceful per-
sonality in herself. Given Rama's romantic sensibility
and Madeleine's metaphysical propensity they could not
but be attracted to each other; equally inevitable is
the alienation. Madeleine's preoccupation with theologi-
cal questions catalyzes the reaction and gives their
marriage a strange and psychic ending. What divides them
is not the difference in cultural background as casual
readers and reviewers hastily conclude but their own indi-
vidual attitudes. The minutiae of their relationship is
fraught with numerous ironies. The pervading irony is
that of their antipodal views on basic values.

They have diametrically opposite views of woman-

10 and the idea of Original

hood. Madeleine is a Catholic
Sin is so deeply imbued in her that human love can never
be pure for her. She is attracted to Rama because of her
misconceptions about Brahmanism and India. India is a
cause to be loved and Rama is a symbol of the cause, a
means of identifying herself with the cause. She was a
virgin when she met Rama and she was ready to surrender

her virginity to him only because he was a Brahmin and

she knew that Brahmins were disciplined to revere the

206

sense of touch. True, Rama has the brahmanical reverence
for the body, but he also has the idea that physical

union is divine, that love, be it physical or spiritual,
within or outside marriage, can never be impure. Madeleine
does not understand this. Her Catholic morality sees only
bestial sensuality in his ardor; after being transported
to spiritual ecstasy when Rama asks with enraptured
solicitousness, "Madeleine, did I hurt you, did I seek

you too far, and too long?" she rejects him peremptorily,
"Leave me alone. I do not belong to the man kingdom."
Madeleine is essentially a nun. We are not surprised

when she drifts towards Buddhism and becomes a Buddhist
novice.

It is ironical that just when Rama, moved to
admire Catholicism, says, "To wed a woman, you must wed
her God," Madeleine starts moving from Catholicism to
Buddhism, which she thinks, ironically enough, makes her
more Brahmin! Rama hopes that marriage with an intel-
lectual equal would give him a companion. Madeleine
marries a Hindu because "I like to be tortured and to
be made your slave." Ironic too that a sensuous, life—
loving devotee of Shakti should be wed to a marble Diana,
and wed academically to the study of the Cathars who
abhorred sex and committed individual and racial suicide.

Madeleine is essentially, as mentioned before, a

nun. There is no place in Hinduism for a nun. In

207

rejecting man, a woman rejects Womanhood and Creation,
and thus condemns herself. Once, an epic lore tells us,
there was a contest of prowess between Shakti and Siva.
They were equally matched, and for every exhibition of
power, beauty and creativity by one the other had a
fitting reply. Suddenly Shakti said, "I am Supreme.
Shakti can live without Siva but Siva cannot without
Shakti." And she turned away from Siva and even as she
turned she fell dead. In accepting Buddhism Madeleine
turns away from marriage and in doing so turns towards
death.

Though she adopts a negative attitude towards
her own life, her contributions to Rama's life are
positive and potentially great. She is the medium
through which Rama invokes and is visited by Shakti.
Through interaction with her Rama could have reached out
for Self-Realization. In his serpent world Madeleine
for a time was a rope, the only rope, but Rama ignored
it. In Madeleine's serpent world there was no rope at
all at any time.

"Without the Mother the world is not," says Rama-

krishna Pai, Rama's alter ego in The Cat and Shakespeare.

 

 

Pai has gone a step farther than Rama. He knows. What
the s0phisticated intellect of the scholar-sensualist
consciously aspired for and failed to grasp, the poor
Revenue Board clerk in Trivandrum knows as a matter of

course.

208

The primary theme--"Allow the mother cat, sir, to
carry you"--and the story woven around it with a cat giv-
ing evidence in court are so circumambulatory that we
wonder whether it is profound or merely meaningless.
However, the continuing theme of womanhood is unmistakable.

Pai's wife, Saroja, like Madeleine, has rejected
the man—kingdom. But unlike Madeleine who lives in the
spirit-kingdom, Saroja lives in the thing-kingdom. She
is concerned about possessions, attached to her coconut
groves because they brought money, and has scant respect
for her husband because he did not. When Pai was trans-
ferred to Trivandrum from Pattanur, she remained behind
so their daughter, Usha, could finish that school-year at
Alwaye of which Pattanur is a suburb. And when Pai fell
ill at Trivandrum, she and Usha came one morning and,
though Usha remained with her father, Saroja left that
same evening. "She had boat repairs to inspect-—boats
had to carry away coconut shells."11

His transfer to Trivandrum brought Pai freedom.

He could live as he pleased, and he did not have to listen
to Saroja's vaunts about her grandfather who escaped the
dominance of the Dutch who took away their neighbors to
fight or turn Christian. . . . Pai has only total indif-
ference for Saroja, and the few times he feels anything

at all, it is either vague animal violence ("In heat I

strike. I struck my wife only twice and have left marks

209

on her face,") or vague contempt ("My lineage smells of
chilis and cardamom and tamarind as my wife's does of
coconuts. But then my wife's people had two or three
boats that plied the canals, and banditry and pilfering
can make a lot of difference with prices.")

Soon after coming to Trivandrum, a woman comes to
Pai's office in connection with some legal problem that
required files maintained by Pai's section of the Revenue
Board. And she, Shantha, "knew me to be her man the
moment I went and stood against the filing ladder. For
a woman love is not development. Love is recognition."
And soon she became his mistress. "If she became my
mistress it was because she felt wife. She remained a
wife. My feet were there for her to worship. My weak-
nesses were there for her to learn; my manhood, at least
such as I possess, for her to bear children" (Cg, p. 22).

Shantha is Shakti-as-Mother, and has a more posi-
tive and unambiguous role than the mythical mother cat.
Shantha is mother first and mother last. She is pregnant
for the most part of the novel. The cat, actual and sym-
bolic, is always carrying her kittens. And the refrain
of the story is, Blessed is he who finds a mother cat to
carry him. In Shantha's presence Pai feels safe as a
kitten carried by the cat, "The kitten when its neck is
held by its mother, does it know anything but the joy of

being held by its mother?" (ES, p. 9)

210

He does not worship Shantha, Pai claims, it is
the woman who worships the man; only by worshiping her
man does she become a wife; and only when she is wife can
she be mother; and when she is mother man is protected.
"You could not be without a mother. You are always a
child. The wife is she who makes you the child" (ES,

p. 33). For love, protection and strength man looks to
his mother-wife-devotee. And a devotee who has all the
attributes of Shakti, what is she but a goddess? Woman
worships her man. Shakti always worships Siva. Here,
Pai, like Rama, becomes Siva and worthy of worship because
the woman makes him so. "Shantha is not just a woman, she
is woman."

About Shantha's appearance we know nothing except
that she had a "skin that shone like black ivory," a long
nose, and black hair that she wore in a flat chignon.
This is one of Raja Rao's devices to stress the para-
mountcy of the spirit. In none of his novels do we get
enough verbal description to sketch a portrait of any
of his characters except Savithri, and her he makes
plain--short, plump, myopic. His male characters are
no Adonises either. Rama is tubercular. Georges is a
cripple. Lezo is a bulging mass of red flesh. Pai,
though "Brahmin-fair" is stricken with ugly buboes.
Throughout it is the soul that speaks and is spoken
about, even at the acme of physical intercourse, even in

the convulsions of bodily weakness.

211

Shantha's spirit recognizes its mate in the clerk
who rises from his seat to sort out her files. Shantha's
soul (it is his child in her, she says) leads her to him
when he is ill. And Shantha's intuition knows that Pai
wants to buy a house, and so she buys it for him. She,
like other characters in the book, speaks in Sphynxian
language. When Pai asks her where they are to find a
mate for their cat, Shantha answers, "She knows herself
where it is to be found. She knows the self. So she
is the self" (CS, p. 91). Shantha too knows. She has
been beyond the wall, she says, and seen herself seeing
herself seeing herself.

It is significant that she is of the Nair com-
munity. The Nairs have a matriarchal culture and so
Shantha is not worried about marriage. When one is not
guilt-ridden about marriage a new vista of morality opens
out. One becomes a wife in the true sense of the word,
Pai thinks, one gives and gives and gives. Giving is
motherhood, motherhood is Womanhood. All true women
are mothers from birth. Usha is a true woman even though
she is only six years old. She knows that she, like the
ladybird, will one day have eggs; she dreams she is grow—
ing eggs and the next day she is reluctant to go to the
latrine lest she throw out the precious eggs. "Women
feed the child in their womb whether the child be there

or not" (ES, p. 103). When Shantha's baby is born "Usha

212

looks after him as if it were her own child. A child
for a woman is always her own child" (CS, p. 107).

Towards the end of the novel the mystery and
protectiveness of motherhood is embodied in the cat that
Pai adopts. She becomes the representative of Govindan
Nair's mythical mother cat who guides the destinies of
men. The cat leads Pai to an attic one day and there he
was a vision of the supreme stage of self-realization.
Exalted, he sees life anew, and the novel ends with
another symbolic vision of Earth-Mother's endless powers
of procreation. "Suddenly I hear the music of marriage.
I must go."

It is fitting that the novel should end on an

epiphanous note. Like Kanthapura, The Cat and Shake-

 

 

speare is a thunderous affirmation of life in Hindu
terms where life is the merging of the self into the
Self, the paradoxical victory through surrender. The
surrender is not an act of blind faith, though faith is,
undoubtedly, a cardinal virtue that sustains the women
of Kanthapura. Rather, the surrender is the result of
revelation; it is by an intellectual act of volition
that Rama sets out in search of a Guru: it is by an act
of instinctual knowledge that Ramakrishna Pai recognizes
the beatitude of Woman. But whereas Rama strives in
anguish for a revelation, Pai gets it without effort.

This difference in their attitude and experience is

213

the result of the author's own anguished experience that
culminated in serenity under Swami Atmananda's tutelage;
but while the reader can sense the power of the serenity

that permeates The Cat and Shakespeare, he is nevertheless

 

perplexed by the seeming haphazardness of the course of
events in the novel.

In The Serpent and the Rope, Rama is an intel-

 

lectual pilgrim yearning to see into the truth of things,
to understand the meaning and purpose of life. He says,
"If you see deep and long at silence you perceive an orb
of centripetal sound which explains why Parvati is
daughter of Himalay" (SR, p. 171). In his wanderings

he stumbles into depths of spiritual obfuscation and
drags himself through mazes of metaphysical syllogisms
into the Advaitic realization that all things in the uni-
verse are identical in terms of the Absolute and Eternal
Self. Though one may not be able to go the whole way
with Rama, one can understand and sympathize with him
because in his questionings and sufferings he is a

human being, a man aspiring to be God. But it is not
easy to comprehend or go along with the pontifical say-
ings of Govindan Nair or the mystic cryptograms of Pai

in The Cat and Shakespeare. The author and his char-

 

acters sound as though they have looked into the heart
of Knowledge. One wonders whether they have, perhaps,

looked too long at silence and thus lost touch with the

214

language of men. Like the ancient seers and commentators
of the Hindu scriptures, Raja Rao uses language that
abounds in nuances and inner meanings. But one may
wonder at times if Raja Rao is not, after all, building

a facade of profundity in front of a non-existent nucleus,
like the neo-classical writers who came after Panini had
formalized Sanskrit grammar.

The Cat and Shakespeare is like the couplets of the

 

Sanskrit poets where a re-reading with a change of stress
yields the opposite meaning, or like those paintings which
present two different scenes when viewed from two dif-
ferent angles. Within the novel one can find ample evi-
dence for either of two antithetical views--that it is

a stringing together of conundrums and quibbles, and that
it is a meaningful story with spiritual overtones. There
are passages that are admirable for their crisp precision;
there are also crisp statements that are stylistically
overdone. There is a mythical mother cat in whose mouth
men are kittens carried safely from point to point; there
is a real cat that takes over the story midway and splits
the novel, making the second half a parody of the first.
There is flippant handling of weighty experience; there

is high philosophizing of trivia. In short, one could at
first reading dismiss the work as an uneven mixture of
well-written and ill-written passages with no organized

framework, but a careful reading shows that it is a

215

metaphysical work of the highest caliber that has the
bite of satire as well. Raja Rao calls it a "metaphysical
comedy" and "all I would want the reader to do is to
weep at every page not for what he sees but for what he
sees he sees."12
Whether or not we can join Raja Rao in weeping in
spiritual analysis and self-awareness we can and do weep
at the ways of the world that are revealed by his satire.
Exposure of moral corruption stands out from every page.
The venom is all the more potent because of the casualness
with which the characters accept the conditions. The
ration office is a den of bribery. John builds a house
on the proceeds obtained from blackmarketing ration cards
("Two rupees a ration card is the official black-market
price."), though he claims he got the money from his
wife's grandmother. Velayudhan Nair's wife "has an array
of gold bangles on her hands. She inherited some money
from her aunt." Govindan Nair is arrested on a charge of
bribery. By sheer association we are led to wonder how
Pai, a divisional clerk earning about fifty rupees a
month manages to buy a house for seventeen thousand
rupees. Govindan Nair and Pai take others' unethical
practices so calmly that we conclude that bribery and
blackmarketing are accepted in their way of life. The
Ration Office is a microcosm of contemporary society.

Everyone is a victim or beneficiary of this corruption.

216

"Doctors are expensive--even government doctors. They
don't take fees, but they like gifts" (ES, p. 40). We
may well weep at the cancerous organism that is Indian
society.

The tragedy is that all these clerks are essen-
tially good-hearted men, friendly, helpful, considerate.
If they engineer black-market traffic they also make
gifts of ration cards to the needy poor. Many people
claim to have more children than they actually have and
obtain extra rations. These clerks acquiesce in the
fraud. Govindan Nair issues a card to a bawd's dead
husband in a scene that is touching despite its obscenity.
One sees that women, bawds though they be, had to live,
and a single ration quota of thirty-two ounces per week
is not enough for survival. It is the age-old question
in ethics, "Was Jean Val-jean morally culpable?"

There are other institutions which are satirized
unequivocally. Raja Rao idealizes the Nairs and down-
grades the Brahmins. He ridicules some of the attitudes
held by believers; for instance, he relates the story of
the hunter to whom Siva manifested himself because the
hunter accidentally dropped 23133 leaves on an image of
Siva. This is a well-known myth (beautifully presented

in Manjeri Isvaran's Sivarathri) to which Raja Rao gives

 

a caustic twist: "For it's not the way you worship that

is important but what you adore" (E§J p. 7). The British

217

shopkeeper-mentality, the crass Indian inefficiency, the
meaninglessness of marital fidelity are ridiculed pre-
cisely and concisely. His method is impassive; like an
expert axeman he walks into the social forest, fells
institutions with a single stroke, and passes on without
comment or backward look.

Raja Rao's metaphysics is more enigmatic that his
satire. What does he mean by the cat-kitten analogy? Be
like a kitten, Nair says repeatedly, there is no greater
bliss than to be a kitten carried by its mother, all men
are kittens but few realize it. "Some, who are lucky
(like your hunter), will one day know it" (Cg, p. 8).
Here he says that all men are carried by the mother—cat
irrespective of their like or dislike, knowledge or
ignorance. But later his words are: "Learn the ways
of the kitten. Then you're saved. Allow the mother cat,
sir, to carry you" (ES, p. 72). This implies volition
and acceptance.

What, then, is the mother cat? It is not Fate.
Govindan Nair does not advocate fatalism. He wants Pai
to build a three-storied house for Shantha's unborn child
and he takes the necessary steps to realize the desire.
Nair is a man of action despite his declamations. It is
Pai who is the defeatist and fatalist. Pai does nothing
about the purchase of the house, nor even about his

infectious buboes that spout pus all over his body.

218

Nair calls the medicine man. Nair negotiates with the
landlord. Nair helps Velayudhan Nair when his son is
unwell. Therefore if Nair is a kitten, the cat is cer-
tainly not Fate.

Nor is it absolute Faith. Nair does not surrender
himself to any god. Nor does Pai whose claim is that he
does not worship anything, not man, not god, not even
money. When little Shridhar falls ill it is only Shantha
who prays apprehensively. Pai thinks of Shridhar as a
kitten.

What is death to a kitten that walks on the wall?
Have you ever seen a kitten fall? . . . when they
are about to fall, there she is, her head in the
air, and she picks you up by the scruff of your
neck. (CS, p. 66).

Like Rama's, Nair's and Pai's reactions to death
seem callous. When Rama hears that his wife had given
birth to a son who died soon after, he laughs and takes
his sisters to the movies. Pai, while watching the
funeral preparations for Shridhar, says:

The bamboos were already in the courtyard. Death
had come. It spoiled the nice courtyard, with
flowerbeds of roses. (ES, p. 66).
When Bhoothalinga Iyer dies of shock at having Nair's
cat jump on his head Nair affectionately takes the cat
home and later Pai adopts and treasures it as the living
representative of the Mother Cat. This should not be

interpreted as sadism on the part of Raja Rao or the

characters, but as a symbolic way of saying that life

219

is continuous, that death is just one of the doors to the
realization that one exists forever in the Universal Self,
but it is an unfortunate way of saying it. It is by such
artistic lapses that Raja Rao can at times very nearly
forfeit the reader's sympathy for the characters.

When talking of Lakshmi the bawd, Nair tells Pai
that in life one can get all one wants if one knows what
one wants. "Do you really know? Mister, that is the
problem" (ES, p. 51). It is not enough to know that you
are a kitten; you need to be a kitten that knows what it
wants. Ask, and it shall be given. This leads us to
another metaphysical problem. Did John get a house
because he knew he wanted one? Did the Mother Cat give
Velauydhan's wife jewelry because she knew she wanted
ornaments? Is the Mother Cat a "bottle imp," an Aladdin's
genie from beyond the realms of ethics? Or is this an
inconsistency in the writer's thought? If so, the lapse
is more serious than the inconsistency of having Pai's
age as thirty-three at the beginning of the action and
twenty-one a little later. One can see that Raja Rao
moves on, leaving aphorisms and cryptograms in his wake;
we perhaps do him an injustice in assembling the pieces
and accusing him of giving us more pieces than the frame
needs. Raja Rao does not cut the jig-saw puzzle after
drawing the picture. It is more as though he paints

parts of a picture on individual pieces. He is not

220

concerned with the technicalities of novel-writing in
this book, where he is a metaphysician using the novel-
form. He asks his questions through Pai and Nair. Some-
times he arrives at the answer and sometimes he does not;
sometimes he arrives at the answer but does not bother
to elucidate it; sometimes he leaves the answer ambiguous.
It is my conclusion that the identity of the
Mother Cat is to be understood in the light of the
philosophy of ksgms, In its simplest definition ksgms
is causal continuity. As you sow, so shall you reap.
Virtue and vice are cumulative; they are also independent
of each other as far as the reckoning is concerned. Only
a suitable reward can annul the existence of a good act.
Only meet punishment can annul the commission of an evil
act. The cause of every fortune and misfortune is one-
self though the causal connection might not be apparent.
This philosophy satisfactorily explains the most obvious
discrepancy in other theological systems; it explains why
good men suffer misfortune. They are being punished for
acts of evil committed in this or previous lives. This
is not to be taken as fatalism. Fate is blind. The law
of kssms is scrupulously just. Every occurrence is an
effect and at the same time a potential cause. That John
gets a house is the effect of the pssys or merit that he
has accumulated in his past life, or lives; but in the

process he has blackmarketed ration cards and thus caused

221

a future punishment. Pai gets a house because of his
past pssys but since he does nothing either positive or
negative about it, he has only wiped out certain good
acts of the past. Shantha gets a house for her past
pssys but she does positive good in making it a home for
Pai and his daughter and so, though getting the house
has cancelled out some of her merit, she has used it to
replenish her store of merit and thus accumulated future
rewards.

Ultimate salvation, or freedom from rebirth, can
be gained only when one transcends beyond all commission,
good and evil. One has to make oneself superhuman to
reach that stage; most human beings content themselves
with trying to amass as much pssys and as little pshps,
or sin, as possible, so that they can improve their
position in this and future lives.

So, as I see it, the mother cat is ksgms at work.
We are all kittens, that is, ks£ms_controls our life; be
a kitten that knows what it wants, that is, be a man who
knows that his goal is Self-Realization; if you are lucky
you will know that you are a kitten, that is, you will
become aware of the workings of ksgms_and will act in
your own spiritual interests so that ks£ms_must neces-
sarily free you of mortal coils and release you into the
Self.

This is the metaphysical analogy. Raja Rao has

used the novel form to express his metaphysics. There

222

is enough mastery of novel techniques and of philosophy
to make the combination interesting but not enough to
make it successful. The novel lacks cohesion. I am

not referring to the frequent and irrelevant digressions
into abstruse analyses, or the experimentation in style
and language which I View as virtues rather than as
shortcomings; I am referring to the splitting of the
story midway by the introduction of a real cat. Till

the cat comes in, the story is a fine admixture of irony,
metaphysics and a peculiar literary style. It moves
slowly but the pace is consonant with the life and char-
acters portrayed. Pai and Nair emerge as twin personali-
ties; Pai is so greatly influenced by Nair that he speaks
and thinks like him without being aware of it. At other
times he endows Nair with his own traits. For instance
he says that Nair's style of speaking is a mixture of

The Vicar of Wakefield and Shakespeare and quotes as an

 

example: "Hey there, be you there at home?" Actually
it is Pai and not Nair who uses 23 in this manner. Pai
attributes an extravagance of verbal embellishments to
Nair: "He never says come and go. He will always say:
'Gentleman, may I invite myself there? Will I be per-
mitted into your presence?‘ (ES, p. 8) This is not an
apt example because Nair is not prone to extravagance of
words but extravagance of thoughts, as Pai later puts

it:

223

If I said, for example, the bilva tree, his mind would

not think of Shiva and the hunter, as it would occur

to you and to me, but he would think of the manure

the tree must have had . . . and of the man who

planted it and was it morning or evening when it

was planted. (Cg, p. 94).
Pai shares this trait of meandering through associations
and counter-associations of thoughts. Both Pai and Nair
are uninhibited in their language and consecrate earthiness
as innate purity. Their ruminations give the novel its
peculiarly Indian literary style. There are marked
Indianisms in the language. The use of this Indo-English
dialect (called "Babu English" in the lingo of Indian
critics) is obviously intentional; Raja Rao excels in

speaking the language of his narrator. The leisurely,

gossipy pace of Kanthapura is a transmutation of a village

 

woman's vernacular style; in The Serpent and the Rope the

 

scholarship and intellectuality of the narrator is

reflected in his language; in The Cat and Shakespeare

 

the narrator is a "Babu," a clerk, and Raja Rao captures
many of the phrases and usages current in the world of
clerks. In all three novels, and especially in The Cat

and Shakespeare there is a very definite flavor of the

 

Sanskrit masters' seeming simplicity of style:
Water is our best protection against sin. To smell
is sin. To do is no sin. To gulp is sin. To purge
is bounty. . . . Disease is unnatural. Death is
natural. (ES, p. 19).
After reading Raja Rao one realizes why Whitman's

earthy sublimity is so well understood in India. Pai muses:

224

The cattle see me, and urinate. The smell of dung
and urine of kine is sweet to me. Purity is so
near, so concrete. Let us build the house. Lord,
let me build the house. (CS, p. 11).

Continued in this circumlocutory manner around a
static nucleus, the novel would have lacked the traditional
frame but it would have had an essential unity. But Raja
Rao introduces a real cat as though to exemplify Nair's
philosophy and it is made to reveal evidence which acquits
Nair from the charge of bribery. The cat is ludicrous.
John brings it in a rat trap as a gift for Nair. It
becomes the centre of attraction for all the thirteen
clerks in the Ration Office. It runs all over the place
and Nair philosophizes over it. Later Nair enters Iyer's
office with the cat and asks the boss to tell him a story.

"What story?"

"Any story."

"I know no story."

"I'll tell you a story," said Govindan Nair, and

lifted the cat and placed her on his shoulder.

"Once upon a time," he began, and before he

could go on, the cat jumped on to Bhoothalinga Iyer's
head. Bhoothalinga Iyer opened his eyes wide and
said, "Shiva, Shiva," and he was dead. He actually
sat in his chair as if he could not be moved." (gs,
p. 87).

Poor Iyer for no reason I can find, metaphysical
or comic, is made a butt even in death. At the trial
Nair slanders the asthmatic old man who died of a heart
attack caused by his cat. Nair invents a story about a
big-bosomed prostitute who was the object of Iyer's

extra-marital propensities. He swears that Iyer gave

him a hundred and nine rupees to be given to the woman.

225

He invents the story but insists that it is true because
he was a man who "if he saw black and found it brown,
could prove it was brown because he saw only brown" (Q§'
p. 95). It turns out that the documents were in order,
after all, and that Nair was innocent all along. The cat
which is called in by Nair as witness to the transaction
between Nair and Iyer stands witness to nothing. It
merely walks between feet and jumps on the clerk's table.
A mystical aura is built around it just as a slanderous
aura was built around Iyer:

It went right over to the Government Advocate . . . as

if it were going towards itself. . . . One had no

doubt the cat was there. And it knew everything.

(gs, p. 103).
It is not even remotely responsible for the judge finding
Iyer's signature on the document.

The trial scene is comic, no doubt, but it is not
tied in harmoniously to the metaphysical theme, and the
cat seems to parody the Mother Cat idea. Yet the parody
is not intentional, for the cat is meant to be a symbol
of the Mother Cat. Once the trial is over it takes its
place as a symbol. Like a deity it is fed only on the
milk of a white cow, and its finickiness and independence
are respected. In its presence Pai's world Opens out,
as it were, and he is not self-centred any more; he
even visits his neighbours who live on either side of

the long wall on which the cat promenades. The cat

226

becomes a constant reminder of the workings of karma
and in his relations with the world Pai is humane and
friendly.

One day the cat leads him to an attic (symbolic
of Pai's spiritual ascent) and Pai has a vision of the
Self. He explains the experience in these words:

. . . eyes seeing eyes seeing, I saw ears curved to
make sound visible. . . . I could walk into the fire
and be cool, I could sing and be silent, I could hold
myself and yet not be there. . . . I found death was
at my door. I woke up and found that death had
passed me by. . . . Then where was I? Death said

it had died. I had killed death. When you see

death as death, you kill it. When you say, I am

so and so, and you say, I am such and such, you have
killed yourself. I remain over, having killed myself.
(ES—I p. 113) o

Nair once says:

You only see what you want to see. But you must see
what you see. Freedom is only that you see that you
see what you see. (CS, p. 107).
To translate this into the language of common men: Free-
dom is gained when you reach that stage where you see
things as they really are and not as they appear to be
to eyes prompted by preconceptions or desires. Complete
detachment is essential for complete Self-Realization.

The cat leads Pai beyond the world of appearance
to the world of the Real; it shows him for a moment the
point where karma ceases to operate, where all forces,

good and evil, having been wiped away, the grand equation

of reward and punishment stands at zero. This is the

227

realm of the Self, the orb of centripetal sound which
tells you why Parvati is daughter of Himalay.
To sum up Raja Rao's stature, one might say he

has given us a Blakean trilogy with Kanthapura as the

 

day of Innocence where man is sinless and protected, The
Serpent and the Reps as the night of Experience where man
in self-division and anguish nevertheless reaches out

towards unity, and The Cat and Shakespeare as the eternity

 

of Higher Innocence where man is sinless and protected
because he has become as a little kitten held by the
Mother Cat and thereby won for himself the kingdom of

heaven.

It is fitting that this dissertation should end
with a study of Raja Rao for he is the foremost of those
whose work has placed Indo-English literature on the map
of world literatures. He has shown that the English
language can be used successfully to convey the idioms
and speech flow of the vernacular. He has successfully
experimented with the novel form and shown that this
western genre can be adapted to the episodic and meta-
physical narrative tradition of classical Indian liter-
atures. Most important, Raja Rao has proved that the
novel form though intimately related to time and place
at the narrative level is also a medium for the expression

of experience that transcends the limitations of

228

geography and history. These are his most significant
contributions to a literature that started diffidently
and apologetically as an adulatory imitation of English
literature but is now a literature that rings with con-
fidence and individuality.

Political circumstances, which unfortunately have
played a prominent role in the making and breaking of
Indo-English literature, have decreed that this slow-
blooming flower should have its petals nipped just as
they had started to unfurl. Whatever the future holds,
it may confidently be asserted that such writers as
Raja Rao, R. K. Narayan, and Kamala Markandaya, whose
works have been studied in this dissertation, have
already established a respected place for the Indo-

English novel in India and abroad.

FOOTNOTES

lPrawer Jhabvala, as quoted in M. E. Derrett,
The Modern Indian Novel in English (Brussels, 1966), p. 94.

 

2Raja Rao said this in a private conversation at
the Conference of the Association of Commonwealth Liter-
ature and Languages Studies in Jamaica, January, 1971.

3David McCutchion, Indian Writing in English
(Calcutta, 1969), p. 72.

 

4Raja Rao, Kanthapura (New York, 1963), Foreword;
hereafter cited as K. The novel was first published in
1938.

 

5Derrett, Modern Indian Novel, p. 94.

 

6Raja Rao, The Serpent and the Rope (New York,
1960), hereafter cited as S3.

 

7The review in Time (February 22, 1963) makes it
clear that the reviewer's scant sympathy is liberally
punctuated with contempt. Of The Serpent and the Rope
the reviewer says, "The female reader will be pleased}
The western male, however, may feel as mixed up as the
lady who called Rama a 'lecherous eunuch.‘ . . . While
conceding that it (the epigraph) probably sounds better
in Sanskrit the bemused westerner can only reply, 'Sen-
tences are nothing but words. So are novels.'"

 

Lawrence Durrell, on the other hand, praises the
same novel, saying, "You not only do India great honor,
but you have honored English literature by writing in our
language." (Back cover of The Cat and Shakespeare)

 

Gerald Sykes reviewing it in New York Times Book
Review (April 14, 1963) sees in Rama "a Brahmin who is
equally attracted to East and West, commutes frequently
between the two, and dramatizes in his own person their
irreconciliable conflict. . . . He is a man of our own

229

230

time who longs to be a hero." But he cannot comprehend
the psychological workings of Rama's mind. When Rama
"receives word that his wife has had a miscarriage--
which means that no child will now bind him to her--both
he and his creator seem unaware of the cold cruelty which
makes him rejoice at the news . . . "

One of the best critiques of this novel is to be
found in K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar's significant contribution
to Indo-English literature, Indian Writing in English
(Asia Publishing House, New York, 1962), pp. 312F320.

Two other critiques of note are M. K. Naik's
"The Serpent and the Rope: The Indo-Anglian Novel as
Epic Legend," in Critical Essays, op. cit., C. D. Nara-
simhaiah's review in The Literary CriteriOn (Winter, 1962).

8Some of the statements he delivers with oracular
emphasis are:

To deny woman is to deny life and self-reali-
zation.

Buddhism died in India because it became ascetic.

Those who hate woman commit suicide, racial sui-
cide as the Cathars did.

The ascetic world of Queen Victoria disintegrated
into many man kingdoms, the last of which was the one
created by Gandhi who treated women as sisters and
not mates.

Man kingdoms may reach high peaks but the peaks
are barren.

When the Mother of God replaced the Son of Man,
Catholicism became a universal religion.

Nazism failed because Hitler was the representa-
tive of the male principle; Communism succeeded
because Stalin was a representative of the female
principle.

9See footnote 7.

10To those who emphasize that the conflict lies
in the East-West polarities I would say that a similar
conflict would have taken place had Madeleine been a
Roman Catholic of Indian origin. Her ignorance of India
enhances the irony and tragedy of the situation but is
not responsible for its occurrence. The inherent dif-
ferences in the outlook adopted by Roman Catholics on
one hand and Hindus on the other is far more significant.

231

11Raja Rao, The Cat and Shakespeare (New York,
1965), p. 32, hereafter cited as ES.

 

12Ibid., Author's note.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of LiterarysTerms. New York,
1971.

Ali, Ahmed. "Illusion and Reality: The Art and Philosophy
of Raja Rao." The Journal of Commonwealth Liter-
ature (July, 1968), 16F28.

Anand, Mulk Raj. The Untouchable. Bombay, 1933.

 

Booth, Wayne. "Distance and Point of View: An Essay
in Classification." Esssys in Criticism, XI

 

Brunton, T. D. "India in Fiction." Critical Essays on
Indian Writing in English. Dharwar,’l968.

 

 

Chalapathirau, M. "The Indo-Anglians." The Illustrated
Weekly of India (May, 1963).

 

 

Derrett, M. E. "Why Write in English?" Times Literary
Supplement (August 10, 1962).

 

 

. The Modern Indian Novel in English.
Brussels, 1966.

Fiedler, Leslie. No! In Thunder. Boston, 1960.

 

Forster, E. M. A Passage to India. London, 1924.

 

. Aspects of the Novel. London, 1927.

 

Frye, Northrop. "The Four Forms of Prose Fiction."
Hudson Review, II (Winter, 1950).

 

Gokak, V. K. English in India, Its Present and Future.
Bombay, 1964.

 

Harvey, W. J. Character and the Novel. London, 1965.

 

. Essays in Criticism, XIII (January, 1963).

232

233

Iyengar. See Srinivasa Iyengar.

Kantak, V. Y. "The Language of Indian Fiction in
English." Critical Essays on Indian Writings
in English. Dharwar, 1968.

Lubbock, Percy. Craft of Fiction. New York, 1931.

Macaulay, Thomas Babington. The Miscellaneous Wbrks of
Thomas Babington MacafiIay. Vol. XIX. Edited By
Lady Trevelyan. London, 1907.

Majumdar, R. C.; Raychaudhuri, H. C.; and Datta, Kalikin-
kar. An Advanced History of India. London, 1958.

Marcus, Steven. "The Novel Again." Partisan Review,
XXIX (Spring, 1962).

Markandaya, Kamala. A Handful of Rice. New York, 1966.
. A Silence of Desire. New York, 1960.
. The Coffer Dams. New York, 1969.
. Nectar in a Sieve. New York ,1954.

. Possession. New York, 1963.

 

. Some Inner Fury. New York, 1955.

McCutchion, David. Indian Writisg in English. Calcutta,
1964.

"Le Style C'est L'Homme." Review of The Dark
Dancer by Balachandra Rajan. Writers WOrksHop

(May-June, 1961).

Mehta, Ved. "The Train Had Just Arrived at Malgudi
Station." The New Yorker, XXXVIII, No. 30
(September 15, 1962).

Morton, Frederic. "New Truths, Old Values." Review of
The Dark Dancer by Balachandra Rajan. New York
Times Book RéView, June 29, 1958.

 

Mukerji, Nirmal. "The Wbrld of Malgudi: A Study of the
Novels of R. K. Narayan." Unpublished Ph.D.
dissertation, Louisiana State University, 1960.

Naik, M. K.; Desai, S. K.; and Amur, G. S., eds. Criti-
cal Essays on Indian Writing in English. DHarwar,
1968.

234

Nandakumar, Prema. "The Achievement of the Indo-Anglian
Novelist." The Literary Criterion (Winter, 1961).

 

Narasimhaiah, C. D. "R. K. Narayan's The Guide." The
Literary Criterion (Summer, 1961).

 

 

"Raja Rao's The Serpent and the Rspe." The
Literary_Criterion (Winter, 1962).

 

 

. "Why This Animus?" The Literary Criterion
(Summer, 1966).

 

Narayan, R. K. An Astrologer's Day_and Other Stories.
London, 1947.

 

. The Bachelor of Arts. London, 1936.

 

. The Dark Room. London, 1938.

 

. Dodu and Other Stories. Mysore, 1943.

 

. The English Teacher. London, 1946.

 

. The Financial Expert. London, 1952.

 

. GodsssDemons and Others. London, 1965.

 

. The Guide. London, 1958.

 

. A Horse and Two Goats. New York, 1970.

 

. Lawlsy Road. London, 1956.

 

. The Man-Eater of Malgudi. London, 1962.

 

. Mr. Sampath. London, 1949.

 

. Mprateless Diary. New York, 1960.

 

. Swami and Friends. London, 1935.

 

. The Sweet Vendor. London, 1967.

 

. Waiting for the Mahatma. London, 1955.

 

Nityanandan, P. M. The Long Long Dsys. Bombay, 1960.

 

Pandurangarao, V. "The Art of R. K. Narayan." Journal
of Commonwealth Literature (July, 1968).

 

235

Parameswaran, Uma. "An Indo-English Minstrel: A Study
of Manjeri Isvaran's Fiction." Literature East
and West (Winter, 1970).

 

"India for the Western Reader: A Study of
Kamala Markandaya's Novels." The Texas Quarterly
(Summer, 1968).

 

. "Karma at werk: Allegory in Raja Rao's The
Cat and Shakes eare." The Journal of Commonwealth
Literature (JuEy, I969).

 

Rahv, Philip. The Myth and the Powerhouse. New York,
1965.

 

. Fiction and the Criticism of Fiction. New
York, 1965.

Raja Rao. The Cat and Shakespeare. New York, 1965.

 

. Kanthapura. London, 1938.

 

. The Serpent and the Rope. New York, 1960.

 

Rajan, Balachandra. The Dark Dancer. New York, 1958.

 

. Too Long in the West. London, 1961.

 

Ramakrishna, T. A DiVe'for Death: An Indian Romance.
London, 1911}

 

. Padmini: An Indian Romance. London, 1903.

Rao, Rau. See Chalapathi Rau; Panduranga Rao; Raja Rao;
Rama Rau.

Sahgal, Nayantara. Storm in Chandigarh. New York, 1969.

 

Schorer, Mark. "Technique and Discovery." Hudson
Review, I (Spring, 1948).

Sewell, Robert. A Fosgotten Empire. London, 1900.

 

Shroder, Maurice Z. "The Novel as a Genre." The Massa-
chusetts Review (Winter, 1963).

 

 

Srinivasa Iyengar, K. R. Indo-Anglian Literature.
Bombay, 1943.

. The Indian Contribution to English Literature.
Bombay, 1945.

236

Srinivasa Iyengar, K. R. Indian Writing In English.
London, 1962.

Sykes, Gerald. "The Serpent and the Rope." New York
Times Book Review (April 14, 1963).

Taranath, Rajeev. "The Average as Positive: A Note on
R. K. Narayan." Critical Essays on Indian
writing in English. Dharwar, 1968.

 

Times Literasy Sgpplement. May 19, 1961, p. 313.

Trilling, Lionel. The Liberal Imagination. London, 1950.

 

"Truth and All That." A Review of Raja Rao's The Sespent
and the Rope. Time (February 22, 19637?

 

Venkateswaran, Shyamala. "The Language of Kamala Mark-
andaya's Novels." The Literary Criterion, IX
(Winter, 1970).

 

Walsh, William. "The Spiritual and the Practical." The
Journal of Commonwealth Literature (July, 1968).