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A Great Writer from India

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2009 Stamp Honoring R. K. Narayan (1906-2001)

The above stamp was issued to honor the 103rd anniversary of the birth of India’s greatest writer of fiction: Rasipuram Krishnaswami Iyer Narayanaswami, better known as R. K. Narayan. Interestingly, he wrote most of his fiction in English. And it was Graham Greene whose influence led to the publication of his first four books.

I have just finished reading his short-story collection entitled Malgudi Days (1942), in which every one of the 30-odd stories competed with all the others for Best in Show. Over the years, I have also read a number of other titles—all of which I loved—including:

  • Swami and Friends (1935) which includes the cricket scene shown on the illustrated stamp above
  • The Bachelor of Arts (1937)
  • The Financial Expert (1952)
  • The Guide (1959)
  • The Vendor of Sweets (1967)
  • A Tiger for Malgudi (1983)
  • Under the Banyan Tree and Other Stories (1985)

Narayan’s fiction is mostly set in a mythical South Indian city called Malgudi. Once you start reading his work, it will seem like home to you.

English Lit—East

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Many people are unaware of the fact that some of the best English literature of the last hundred years or so comes from India. The subcontinent has some 22 officially recognized languages and dialects spoken within its borders. Most people know about Hindi, but what about Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Marathi, Meitel, Nepali, Odia, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Santali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu? Actually, what binds all the various peoples of India together is, believe it or not, the English language, a holdover from British colonial days.

In this post, I will mention two writers whom I have read over the years with great pleasure. First, there is Rasipuram Krishnaswami Iyer Narayanaswami, better known as R K Narayan (1906-2001).

Narayan was brought to the attention of the English-speaking world by none other than Graham Greene. Like William Faulkner with his Yoknapatawpha County, Narayan created a fictional town in Tamil Nadhu called Malgudi and wrote numerous novels and short stories about the people who live there. My favorites among his novels are Swami and Friends (1935), The Financial Expert (1952), The Guide (1958), The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1961), and The Vendor of Sweets (1967).

Another excellent Indian writer writing in English is Anita Desai (born 1937), who currently teaches at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Several times, Desai has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Among my favorites of her novels are Clear Light of Day (1980), Baumgartner’s Bombay (1988), Fasting Feasting (1999), and The Artist of Disappearance (2011).

There are others I can name, but I have not read as many works by them as I have from Narayan and Desai. If you are interested in the many worlds of India, I heartily recommend that you give them a try.