India...R.K. Narayan

R.K.Narayan - The Painter of Signs

Another amazon review:

A beautiful, simply told story that conjures up the sights and sounds of a small town in the midst of change. Ah Raman! What a wonderful character! Torn between the competing demands of his traditional mother and the progressive, demanding Daisy. It might seem perverse to compare him to Dostoevsky's unnamed Underground man, but he really does seem to be part of the same dynamic. A passionate, intelligent man whose education has separated him from the social world within which he finds himself within. Where Dostoevsky is trapped by his circumstances, living within a heightened expressionistic world, Narayan's subtle comedy finds a solution for Raman by, as Monica Ali's helpful and perceptive introduction makes clear, opening him out to a reception of the world where he is no longer able to judge, but must accept and can be a part of. It's a subtle and hopeful celebration of the communal world, as represented by the small town of Malgudi. A wonderful little book.

I came across this is in the Blakehead, a vegetarian cafe and discount bookshop, one of many businesses which is now no longer with us thanks to the combined incompetence of the banking industry and our elected politicians. I'd been discussing Narayan with my wife an evening or so before, so it was a synchronicity which I appreciated (it's not the first such experience I've had where I have a particular author in my head whose work I then unexpectedly find in a charity or discount bookshop).

If I'm gradually becoming more interested in reading more Indian literature (whether that's in translation or an Indian English langauge writer), then obviously that's because I'm now a part of an Indian family through my marriage. Before I met my wife, apart from Rushdie I think I'd read no more than a few novels by Anita Desai and The God of Small Things (which it turns out we both disliked!). Some Rudyard Kipling and Forster's A Passage to India and William Dalrymple's White Mughals, although obviously that's all coming at India from the 'other side' so to speak. The former colonial rulers. I'd seen a few films directed by Satyajit Ray. Black Narcissus. India and Indians must have been a presence within some of the fiction I read and had read to me when I was younger, much of which I've doubtless forgotten. At least one of Willard Price's Adventure series of novels is set in India as are a few of George MacDonnald Fraser's Flashman novels. Tintin? That cartoon version of Around the World in Eighty Days with animals, definitely. Willy Fogg marries an Indian princess, doesn't he? Well, as far as I'm concerned, so did I!

I can still remember a scene in an episode from Jimmy McGovern's Cracker where Robbie Coltrane is questioning a young black girl. I'm paraphrasing the dialogue from long-a-go memory, but it's something like, "You tried to go out with white boys, didn't you? But they just wanted to talk about the 'Black experience', and what it means to be 'Black' in England, whereas you just wanted to talk about David Beckham and music and clothes" The ever tactful Fitz. I understand the point he's making though. And I know that my wife has had at least one well-meaning but ultimately incredibly patronising middle class white male flatmate who somehow felt that he had to apologise for the British Empire. Well, we are in academia... I would certainly hope that I've never been guilty of such a patronising attitude, although of course we've had our conversations about India, colonialism, imperialism and all the rest of it. Well, we're academics aren't we! But one never knows.

Graham Greene famously said about Narayan's work that, "Without him I could never have known what it is like to be Indian." It's quoted on the back of plenty of editions of his novels. Undoubtedly he was being sincere, and he did a lot to assist Narayan in acquiring publishers at the beginning of his career. For me though, what I found with this novel at least is how being an Indian doesn't feel all that different from being an Englishman. The feelings of Raman are entirely explicable to me. He's a character with whom I found it almost too easy to identify with. Of course, the cultures which formed us are very different, but I wonder if what it means to be a human in any culture might ultimately be very similar.