Land of Lime

This fall, I plan to teach a course on the ‘Images of everyday life in South Asia’. My summer project is to locate places where the rhythm of such life is evident, where the ordinary manifests itself patently. To capture the poetics of everyday life, I want to take a couple of thousand photographs on 8-10 sites such as markets or public eating places (from street carts to fancy restaurants), Bus/railway stations and compose photo essays, that could be read along with fiction, poetry, documentaries and films.

When I began to think of a reading list for this course, Malgudi and its creator, R K Narayan loomed large. The reason is simple. There is no better chronicler of the ordinary and the everyday life in India than R K Narayan, in English or in any Indian language. Moreover, he also led what I consider to be an ideal life in Mysore. My favorite paragraph in all of prose is in an essay that Ved Mehta wrote about R K Narayan; here Mehta recounts, in Narayan’s own words, a description of Narayan’s leisurely life in Mysore. Narayan speaks of his conversations in the market with flower and beetle leaf sellers, buying vegetables and fruits, leisurely and relaxed chat over coffee and masaladose with friends in the morning and evening, afternoon siestas, visits to his father’s house for meals, all of which were interspersed with a couple of hours of writing in the morning and late afternoon. What comes out starkly are his keen eye for the ordinary life around him, and of course, his own relaxed, unhurried life. He was a Mysorean alright, and he didn’t even have to go to an office or do any regular work for a living. This born pensioner’s life is something KP, Sunaad or myself would appreciate immensly, having enjoyed such a life for considerable periods of time.

Enough ink has been wasted debating whether Narayan’s Malgudi is actually Mysore. This in my view is an irrelevant question. What is relevant though is a simple truth: he is one of our finest writers, period. Language be damned. He surely is one of my favorite writers. In simple, elegant prose, he told us enchanting stories of ordinary folks and their everyday life in that wonderful little town called Malgudi. He also retold the two epics and stories of epic characters such as Shibi, Savitri and Valmiki for a global audience. There is no second guessing the need to celebrate his life and writings, particularly his association with Mysore on what turns out to be his birth centenary.

Today, KP did a great service by alerting us about Narayan’s birth centenary and I am deeply appreciative of this new conversation that we have begun. Do we want a landmark in Mysore to acknowledge his association with Mysore? Do we want Mysore University, Dhvanyaloka or other intellectual centers of the city to organize conferences and workshops in schools and colleges? Do we want Mysore corporation to organize a festival of letters, music and anything else that Narayan himself appreciated? What else do we want to see happen in the city, as part of birth centenary and also to acknowledge Narayan’s own vision of Mysore city?

Let us discuss all this and then act on what we would like to see happen. Let us do this because we like R K Narayan as a writer and as a human being. Let us do it because we choose to appreciate his life and writings.

Having said this, I must express my dismay at what I can only call as breast beating and blame game. In particularly, I strongly disgree with the tone of Sunaad’s piece as well as some of the comments in Churumuri. I do not understand what URA or his political clout have to do with us appreciating and celebrating R K Narayan. I am an admirer of URA but he doesn’t need to defend him through my blog. I am merely puzzled by the illogical demand here. In the matter of a writer, who touched us through his writing, for whom ‘our’ Mysore was home and ‘our’ Mysore was also the subject for creative work, let us figure out how we want to remember him collectively. Narayan wrote for us, not for English professors! Why do we want to abdicate the responsibility of perpetuating Narayan’s memory to such feeble characters? I must also add that some of the comments - particularly the delusional-fictional one about URA snatching Jnanapith from PUTINA - were not only in poor taste but also nonsensical and counter productive. Let us leave URA, Rajkumar or Kuvempu out of this conversation. And focus on what R K Narayan means to us.

I must admit I have some reservations about Sunaad’s rhetoric and I am not sure what to make of the following:

To think even for an infinitesimal moment that there is no road or circle named after this giant of a man in our great city, no attempt, howsoever feeble, made to perpetuate his memory, to accord him the status he deserved; to show him the respect he ought to have been shown; to pay obeisance at the feet of the literary master; is a sure reminder of the mental dilapidation of the powers-that-be and the absolute unconcern for hoary history, literary or otherwise. …..An indictment of their shameful disdain for literature, other than Kannada.

And should we expect anything profound to happen in our city, which seems to be full of political men and women who warm chairs vested with unbridled power, almost always wrongly used? Pathetic humans who can never go beyond casteist thoughts, nepotism, survival tactics and a pompous sense of self.

I must say that this rhetoric and flourish are not going to take us anywhere. Again, I have no interest in defending our city fathers-mothers or bureacrats. If shortsightedness, nepotism and writing in English were responsible for the non-recognition of Narayan’s stature as a great writer, then he - and all of us - ought to wear that as a badge of honor. Sure, we want the City Coporation to recognize and celebrate Narayan’s association with and indeed his long presence in Mysore and as I suggested above, I want this recognition to go beyond naming a circle.

If we want to celebrate his life, let us demand a festival of letters and culture be organized. Let us buy his works and read them. Let us gift his works to our outsider friends.

If we want to celebrate his life, let our interventions in public policy debates on the future of Mysor and indeed, our responses to Satyanarayana’s suggestions to make Mysore a better city, be informed by a Narayan spirit.

While we are at it, let us also talk about what this Narayan spirit is. I have already stated my admiration of Narayan as a writer and human being. But if he is forgotten, I want to also look for reasons within his writings and life. The strength of his writing - its simplicity, elegance and focus on everyday life - is also its big weakness. The Malgudi spirit is an abstract ideal that I want to invoke and convert into a political value to keep Mysore from becoming an unweildy city, where simplicity and an easy pace of life aren’t valued in a perpetual quest for whatever is the next craze in the global consumption market. But the Malgudi spirit isn’t an easily available cultural argument that can be mobilized by our ‘Kannadiga’ public intellectuals and activists.

Again why is that? Not merely because Narayan wrote only in English. For someone who lived in the city for over seven decades and through some momentous events, how did he respond to collective challenges that Kannadigas (and Indians) faced in the twentieth century? Did his writing respond to contemporary challenges the way Kuvempu’s or URA’s writings or Rajkumar movies did? What did he have to say about Independence, Unification of Karnataka, Emergency?

Narayan need not have responded to these events, publicly or otherwise. His greatness as a writer doesn’t depend on his response to contemporary world in an overtly political manner. But a community remembers those who provide valuable responses to such challenges. It remembers those who seek to provide its self definitions. Narayan’s illustrious contemporary and an equally private Mysorean, Kuvempu did precisely that.

My intention is not question Narayan’s stature as a writer but to offer an appreciation both as a writer and human being. I ask these questions in service of a different kind of conversation that needs to occur especially on the birth centenary of this great writer. I personally think Narayan did contribute substantially, even if he didn’t participate in the cultural conversations of Karnataka the way URA, Kuvempu or Rajkumar did! Our focus could be on that contribution, on his life and works, which is what I seek instead of stale rhetoric.

In that spirit, let me also state what I find appealing in Narayan, personally. Plain and simple, he is a hero of mine. His simple, uncomplicated and unhurried life in Mysore, which he led with great dignity and integrity. The audacity of his ambition to be an English writer nearly eight decades ago, while being in a place like Mysore. The confidence in his own creative instincts and writing to enter into a conversation with Graham Greene. His fertile imagination and keen eye that created Malgudi and its wonderful inhabitants. His charm and grace, that compelled that great recluse, Greta Garbo to befriend him. This is what I carry with me, as my memories and even model lifestyle, regardless of where I live, Mysore, Delhi, Chicago or San Francisco.

Let us not discount the importance of a good productive conversation - virtually and face to face - as a good way to remember him. Let us read him, at home and in schools and colleges. Let us do something in Mysore. I will show up if you want to do something either in July-August or in December. A nice, traditional Iyengar meal wouldn’t be out of place, KP?

You want to name a circle or build a statue. That’s fine too.

But remember. Greta Garbo don’t dig no statues.

And whatever he was, R K Narayan surely wasn’t one. So let us not turn him into just that.