Imaginary homeland

JUNE GAUR gets to meet friends and acquaintances of R.K. Narayan to try and solve the riddle of the location of Malgudi.

RECENTLY, Penguin Viking published R.K. Narayan's fiction set in Malgudi in a series of four omnibus volumes, each carrying an introduction by S. Krishnan, the editor.

Mr. A. Madhavan, India's former Ambassador to Japan and Germany, reviewed the first two volumes - A Town Called Malgudi and The World of Malgudi - for The Indian Review of Books, Chennai. The Hindu reprinted these reviews in The Sunday Literary Supplement last year. Mr. Madhavan's review of the remaining collections, The Magic of Malgudi and Memories of Malgudi, was published recently by The Indian Review.

Did Mysore inspire Malgudi? Mr. Madhavan, who jokes about having Malgudi coming out of his ears, is quite sure it did. The renowned sociologist, the late Dr. M. N. Srinivas, seems to have thought so too and, H. Y. Sharada Prasad, for many years Information Advisor to the Prime Minister, reminiscing about Mysore in a newspaper article, makes mention of Cheluva Iyengar "who achieved fame as Mr. Sampath".

But there are some who disagree vociferously and speculation over the subject is grist to the literary mill. Mr. Madhavan, a personal friend of R.K. Narayan, explored this and other facets of the renowned writer's work in an interaction with students, teachers and local dignitaries at St. Philomena's College, Mysore, recently.

"After years of diplomatic wandering, I came to live in Mysore. From the beginning I fell for the peculiar charm of Mysore. It seemed to combine urban comfort with the serenity of the countryside. I relished the benign and temperate grace in the air, whatever the month.

In the 1960s, I sometimes saw R. K. Narayan dashing off in his Mercedes. He lived down the road from my wife's parents. Her mother, Mukta Venkatesh, an artist knew RKN and his family. One of my pleasures when in town was to call on the novelist for leisurely chats on everything except his writing, which he never liked to discuss though he sometimes gently satirised the Ph.D. aspirants who approached him to check out their interpretations of his stories.

Narayan disliked people being inquisitive about Malgudi. He once remarked, caustically, that he didn't want anyone to measure the distance from Malgudi to Mysore, or Malgudi to Thiruchirapalli. He wrote chucklingly of an earnest researcher who prepared a town map of Malgudi and discovered a topographical inconsistency concerning Albert Mission School (The Writerly Life).

For many, the town of Malgudi, nestling somewhere in Tamil Nadu between the forested Mempi Hills and the Sarayu river, is the most memorable character in R.K. Narayan's fiction. Mahatma Gandhi once passed that way, but the town has not forgotten Collector Sir Frederick Lawley. Early Five year Plans have brushed past Malgudi, frozen in the mid-20th Century. No TV aerials have sprouted there yet. Time in that ambience tarries, unmindful of sudden change and precise dating.

While RKN conceived Malgudi as a 'miniature version' of India, he was firmly committed to its Southern specifics. When he learnt of the film-director's choice of Jaipur as the setting for 'The Guide', he was outraged. 'My story takes place in South India, in Malgudi, an imaginary town known to thousands of my readers all over the world,' he told him. 'It is South-Indian in costume, tone and content. Although the whole country is one, there are diversities and one has to be faithful in delineating them. You have to stick to my geography and sociology. Although it is a world of fiction, there are certain inner veracities.'

Malgudi pulsates with its dramatis personae. The peculiar flavour of Narayan's fiction comes from the credibility of his characters in interaction: the human tragic-comedy of their fads and struggles for a living, the aptness of the Malgudi locale with its temples, Kabir Street pyols, reading room, The Boardless Hotel, treadle printing presses, jutkas, Gaffur's taxi and the sleepy railway station with its 7-Down train.

Personally, I disagree with those who contend that Malgudi in no way resembles Mysore. I believe there are distinct Mysorean strands in it - both as a fictional space and as a synecdoche for its residents. In the 1960s, jutkas were still rattling along Mysore's streets and the Boardless Hotel on New Sayyaji Road was a favourite haunt of many in those days.

About the origin of the name Malgudi, theories abound. Some say that Narayan took the idea from two colonies in old Bangalore - Malleswaram and Basavangudi. I never got round to asking him about it myself.

Malgudi is a state of mind common to many Indian temperaments, indulgent to both enthusiastic obsessions and passive acceptance, ambition and equanimity, co-existence and co-exclusion. It is like a glass paper-weight which loosens a raging snowstorm inside when lifted, with the flakes gradually subsiding to stasis when set down.

It was perhaps to settle the question of Malgudi once and for all that Narayan made this statement when former American Ambassador, Harry S. Barnes, presented him with membership of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters some years ago:

I didn't consider too long when I invented this little town. It had just occurred to me when I started on my first novel, Swami and Friends in September 1930, that it would be safer to have a fictitious name for the background of the novel which would leave one to be free to meddle with its geography and details as I pleased, without incurring the wrath of any city-father of any actual town or city. I wanted to be able to put in whatever I liked and wherever I liked - a little street or school or a temple or a bungalow or even a slum, a railway line, at any spot, a minor despot in a little world. I began to like my role and I began to be fascinated by its possibilities; its river, market- place, and the far-off mountain roads and forests acquired a concrete quality, and have imprisoned me within their boundaries, with the result that I am unable to escape from Malgudi, even if I wished to.... "

Apart from Mr. Madhavan, C.D. Narasimhaiah said some very complimentary things - "Narayan's Malgudi is a small town in South India but it is every Indian town... more than any individual influence (Mysore), it is a whole tradition that has dictated RKN's work - a triumph of Indian tradition."

Dr. M. N. Srinivas recollected: "One of the pleasures I looked forward to on my brief visits to Mysore was going for walks with Narayan... The walks which I enjoyed particularly were forays into the market area. Srinivasa Stores was a favourite shop for buying the South Indian supari without which Narayan could not write. And then a visit to Sampath, the printer, and then brief encounters with one or more Malgudi characters, which invariably restored Narayan's good humour. Incidentally, one of my fascinating characters from Malgudi is the 'Adjournment lawyer' to reach whose 'office' you had to walk up a ladder which rose from a room occupied by the cotton carder. One walked up to the lawyer's presence, coughing all the way up from cotton dust.

And Syd Harrex had this to say: "Anyone familiar with Mysore has little difficulty in recognising Malgudi's landmarks. The real- life Sampath I once met in Mysore for an interview recorded in 1972. RKN gifted him a copy of Mr. Sampath and autographed the book 'To Sampath the original'.

Readers have grown enjoyably accustomed to Narayan signposting his Malgudi setting and painting familiar portraits - familiar to Mysoreans as local identities like Sampath..."

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