http://jcl.sagepub.com/Commonwealth Literature

The Journal of

http://jcl.sagepub.com/content/34/1/65.citationThe online version of this article can be found at:

 DOI: 10.1177/002198949903400105

1999 34: 65The Journal of Commonwealth LiteraturePatrick Swinden

Hindu Mythology in R.K. Narayan's The Guide  

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

found at: can beThe Journal of Commonwealth LiteratureAdditional services and information for

   

  http://jcl.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsEmail Alerts:

 

http://jcl.sagepub.com/subscriptionsSubscriptions:  

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints:  

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions:  

What is This? 

- Jan 1, 1999Version of Record >>

at UMKC University Libraries on April 12, 2013jcl.sagepub.comDownloaded from

Hindu Mythology in R.K.Narayan’s The Guide

Patrick SwindenUniversity of Manchester, England

Writing in My Days (1975)1 about his early short stories, R.K. Narayanexplained that he &dquo;wished to attack the tyranny of Love and see if life

could offer other values than the inevitable Man-Woman relationship to awriter&dquo;. In order to do this he found &dquo;themes centering around a momentor a mood with a crisis&dquo;. Really there isn’t anything very remarkable abouta short-story writer claiming either of these things as an ambition. The factthat Narayan claims them might go some way towards explaining why hisstories have so frequently, and inexactly, been compared with Chekhov’s.

Contrary to the received wisdom, however, not much of Narayan’s bestwriting is in the short-story form, and in his novels and novellas the &dquo;Man-Woman relationship&dquo; remains a significant presence. Nor do the themes ofhis longer fictions usually centre around a moment or a mood with a crisis.Instead, there are many moments which appear to be crucial, but whichsoon transpire to be something both more and less than that. It mightbe truer to say that in Narayan’s longer fiction a whole life tends to becharacterized as being prone to crisis, but the dramatic incidents that mighthave been expected to constitute the crisis at any particular moment in thatlife confirm a predisposition rather than present a challenge to it. Of course,the character concerned might not have realized what it was to which hewas predisposed, and therefore recognition might in itself constitute a

psychological or moral crisis. Also, the plots of the novels often look as ifthey are leading from and towards crises that take a dramatic form. Butone senses that there is a mismatch, a slither, between the apparent andthe real value attaching to many of the incidents described. At the time, itseems to the reader and the character as if something important, evencrucial, is happening. Then, with hindsight, they both realize it was nothingof the sort, nothing that changes things in any significant or fundamentalway.

at UMKC University Libraries on April 12, 2013jcl.sagepub.comDownloaded from

66

Yet things do change - both in the character’s fortunes and in his life.It’s just that the &dquo;crucial&dquo; incidents aren’t what make them change. In anycase chaage, in these circumstances, often takes the form of recognition ofwhat doesn’t change. The only change is in the recognition of the

unchanging. In this essay I want to argue that this combination of apparentchange and real continuity is unintelligible outside the parameters of Hinduthought that plays such an important role in Narayan’s fiction; and that theplay of that thought over the changes and continuities of his characters’behaviour influences the manner in which their behaviour is representedmore strongly than exclusively Eurocentric interpretations of his practiceas a novelist might have led Western commentators to believe.2 2

Thoughts such as these arise from a comparison between similar eventsoccurring in Narayan’s short stories and his novels. Like his admirer, V S.Naipaul,3 Narayan isn’t a generously inventive writer at the level of plotand incident. He tends to use the same material over and over again inslightly different contexts and in relation to lightly differentiated characters.A feature of this tendency to repetition is his use of the &dquo;sealed letter

motif, where suspense arises out of the reader’s and the character’s

unawareness of what lies concealed in a receptacle of some kind: a bag, ora box, or an envelope. One good example of the motif, where uncertaintyabout the receptacle’s contents is relatively quickly dispelled, is the MarketPlace Professor’s brown paper envelopes in The Painter of Signs (1976),4 4inside each of which is written in four different languages the caption &dquo;Thiswill pass&dquo;. Not much of a crisis here. Instead, the message might have theeffect of warning against too easy an identification of the passing occur-rences of life with a crisis of one sort or another.

In a different category is the envelope that Govind Singh, the gatemenof the short story &dquo;Gateman’s Gift&dquo; (An Astrologer’s Day, 1947),S spendsthe better part of the story and many days of his life being afraid to open.Singh has been employed for twenty-five years by the Engladia InsuranceCompany (the firm Savitri’s bullying husband Ramani had worked for inThe Dark Room [1938]). Now that he has been pensioned off he spendsmost of his time making clay models of buildings and animals, some ofwhich he hands over to the company when he goes to collect his pensioneach month. This is the &dquo;Gateman’s Gift&dquo; of the title. A week after one ofhis visits to the company office, he receives a registered letter. It is the firsttime he has received a letter in the whole of his life, and he daren’t openit. He is afraid he has given offence by presenting the models. Perhaps hispension will be stopped. After several days of anxiety, even madness, hemeets an employee of the Engladia who tells him what is in the envelope.It is a letter of thanks from the General Manager, with a cheque for onehundred rupees as a token of his appreciation. After this Singh continues

at UMKC University Libraries on April 12, 2013jcl.sagepub.comDownloaded from

67

to make his monthly calls at the office to collect his pension, but he makesno more models.

On the face of it what we have here is one of those &dquo;themes centeringaround a moment or a mood with a crisis&dquo; Narayan drew attention to inhis autobiography. The moment is the receipt of the envelope. The crisis isSingh’s inability to open it. The mood is one of frenzied anxiety followedby morose self-withdrawal. So what is the theme?

To fit Narayan’s description, it would have to be something like &dquo;the

bitter irony of life&dquo; or, more specifically (and more wordily), &dquo;things aren’twhat they seem; but by the time you’ve discovered they’re not, it’s too lateto undo the damage&dquo;. Expressed in this way, however, the tale sounds toomuch like a Maupassant short story. It even sounds like one particular storyof his, &dquo;La Parure&dquo;.6 But no sooner does the comparison present itself(which it usually does during discussions of &dquo;Gateman’s Gift&dquo;) than itsfundamental inappropriateness becomes obvious. The two stories do haveseveral points in common. Singh’s mistake over what’s inside the envelopeis rather like the Loisels’ mistake about the necklace, and in each case themistake quite unnecessarily ruins the lives of the characters. But the longerand shorter time-scales of the stories aren’t the only or the most importantdifferences between them. Maupassant’s story is a bitter twist-in-the-tail

exposg of the characters’ misfortunes which is all the more an exposgbecause those misfortunes arise out of a simple combination of the charac-ters’ temperaments and a stroke of fate (or accident). By contrast,Narayan’s story isn’t really an expos6 at all, because what Singh’s mistakeabout the letter &dquo;exposes&dquo;, both to him and to us, is the mistake he hasmade about the whole course and direction of his life - which would havebeen no less of a mistake if he had never received the letter.

The Loisels’ lives may well be spiritually impoverished. But impoverish-ment suits them. It is in their character to be impoverished, and the mistakeabout the diamonds simply brings their material impoverishment into linewith their spiritual one. Singh, though, discovers hidden depths of creativeimagination in his play with his &dquo;toys&dquo;. His tragedy isn’t that he suddenlydiscovers he needn’t have allowed one foolish mistake to ruin his life, butthat the whole of his life was already a ruin long before it was exposed assuch by the mistake about the letter. Unlike the Loisels’, Singh’s inner lifewasn’t what his outer life proclaimed it to be. That is why the mistake overthe letter isn’t as much of a &dquo;crisis&dquo; for him as the Loisels’ mistake over thenecklace was for them; and why a mistake that lasts only a few daysprovokes a much greater spiritual re-assessment (which is &dquo;understood&dquo; inthe story: we don’t hear about it in so many words) than a mistake (in theMaupassant story) that lasted for many years, and had much more damagingmaterial consequences. For Singh, the accident over the letter tells him thetruth about his whole life, and there is nothing now that he can do about

at UMKC University Libraries on April 12, 2013jcl.sagepub.comDownloaded from

68

it. That is why the dramatic crisis of the story doesn’t reflect accurately thecrisis in Singh’s life. Nothing could. All that can happen is the triggering ofa (silent) recognition.

Now let us turn to an apparently similar event in one of the novels -similar because it also makes use of the device of the unopened envelope.Since The Guide is a 220-page-long novel, we would expect Railway Raju’sadventures to be more extensively and minutely described, over a longerperiod of time, than Govind Singh’s are in &dquo;Gateman’s Gift&dquo;. So it is

unlikely we shall find a single event that crucially effects Raju’s fortunes inthe way Singh’s reception of the envelope effects his. But if we persistin the error of looking for one, the arrival of Marco’s letter to Rosie mightbe as good a place as any.

The letter arrives during an uneventful period in Raju’s management ofNalini’s dancing career. Addressed to &dquo;Rosie, alias Nalini&dquo;, and bearingthe address of a law firm in Madras, it must have been sent by Marco. Butwhat is in it? Raju, like Govind Singh, &dquo;felt nervous about opening theletter...&dquo; (p. 181). But he is made of sterner stuff than the retired gateman.In any case, unlike the gateman, Raju can read. So three or four sentenceslater he opens the letter: &dquo;I looked at it with misgiving for a while, toldmyself that I was not to be frightened by a seal, and just cut it open.&dquo; Buttherein lay Raju’s doom. For Marco’s lawyer has enclosed an applicationfor Rosie’s signature, to authorize a bank to release a box of jewellery; andthis presents an irresistible temptation for Raju to forge Nalini’s signaturein order to secure the jewellery for himself. All Raju’s and Rosie’s latermisfortunes spring from his failure to resist this temptation. In conventionalcritical terms, it might be argued, this is a major crisis in their relationship.Therefore it is the crisis of the novel’s plot, in so far as the plot is concernedwith the &dquo;Man-Woman relationship&dquo; - which, we need to remember,Narayan said ought not to be the central theme and value of the novel.

This raises two questions. First, is the Man-Woman relationship thecentral theme and value of The Guide? And second, whether it is or it

isn’t, is the plot of this novel, which has more to do with Raju’s relationshipwith Rosie than with anything else (to put it least contentiously), really themost important thing about it? I shall try to answer the second questionfirst, since the answer I shall provide will, I think, make it unnecessary forme to spend much more time answering the first.

In Aspects of the Novel, written less than two years after he completedhis own Indian novel, A Passage to India, E.M. Forster tended to depressthe importance of plot in prose fiction. Something about his experiences inDewas native state seems to have disillusioned him with what he came tosee as the modem preoccupation with the psychology of cause and effect,which achieved its most satisfactory literary expression in the plots of thegreat European realist novels of the nineteenth and early twentieth cen-

at UMKC University Libraries on April 12, 2013jcl.sagepub.comDownloaded from

69

turies. &dquo;The plot&dquo;, he says, &dquo;is the novel in its intellectual aspect&dquo;, but wemust ask ourselves &dquo;whether the framework thus produced is the best

possible for a novel&dquo;.After all, why has a novel to be planned? Cannot it grow? Why need it

close, as a play closes? Cannot it open out? Instead of standing above hiswork and controlling it, cannot the novelist throw himself into it and be

carried along to some goal which he does not foresee? The plot is excitingand may be beautiful, yet it is not a fetich [sic], borrowed from the drama,from the spatial limitations of the stage? Cannot fiction devise a frameworkthat is not so logical yet more suitable to its genius?7

This reminds me of nothing so much as Narayan’s comments on traditionalIndian storytelling in his account of origins of the Ramayana in his story&dquo;Valmiki&dquo;.8 Valmiki, author of the Ramayana, first appears as a highwayrobber who has stolen a pair of sandals from a Brahmin scholar calledSankha. The Brahmin discovers a vestige of compassion in the robber’sbehaviour, and attributes this to his previous incarnation as a man oflearning. He tells the robber about his karma, and how in the future hewill assume the form of the poet Valmiki. Narayan shows how the robberis transformed into the poet (by covering himself in an ant-hill for thousandsof years and chanting an apparently meaningless sequence of words thateventually developed into the Ramayana). Then he shows how Valmikitaught the poem to the two sons of the hero (Rama) whose activities itcelebrates, and how they returned to their father at his court and sang theRamayana to him. Narayan confesses:

The time scheme of the epic is somewhat puzzling to us who are habituatedto a more horizontal sequence of events. Valmiki composed as if he had apast tale to tell, and yet it was broadcast to the world by Kusa and Lava,the sons of Rama, who heard it directly from the author. One has to setaside all one’s habitual notions of going forwards and backwards and side-ways. When we take into consideration the fact that a king ruled for sixtythousand or more years, enjoying an appropriate longevity, it seems quitefeasible that a character whose past or middle period is being written aboutcontinues to live and turns up to have a word with the historian.... Whatone had all along thought of as retrospective on the part of the poet seemsactually to have been a prophecy as well as a piece of contemporary chron-icling. However, an average story-listener accepts these situations without asecond thought, never questioning &dquo;When?&dquo; or &dquo;How?&dquo; &dquo;Before or after?&dquo;To an ordinary Indian story-listener it seems perfectly natural that eventscould spread over before, after, and just now. (pp. 125-6)

The opening remarks here recall Conrad’s and Ford’s discussions about thetime-shift as Ford recorded them in his account of their collaboration.9 Butthe emphasis on telling rather than writing suggests a different origin, andone entirely appropriate to an author who learned the art of storytelling athis grandmother’s knee and who is now employing it to create a version

at UMKC University Libraries on April 12, 2013jcl.sagepub.comDownloaded from

70

of his country’s myths and legends. The mingling of the poet’s activities withhis character’s also points to native influences, especially where Narayanelaborates on the effect of this simultaneous living and writing of the legendas follows:

The author, Valmiki, watched rather helplessly the conclusions that thecharacters of his epic were working out for themselves. He had a hope thathe might be able to bring his hero and heroine together, help the family toreunite, and thus round off his tale. But the characters managed their affairsin their own way. At the moment when Rama was eager to take Sita back,Sita decided differently. Rama himself decided on a great renunciation. Thecharacters, as they would in any perfect work of art, got out of control.Valmiki let them act in their own way, and returned to his life of contem-

plation. (Gods, Demons and Others, p. 142)Narayan combines here two commonplaces of twentieth-century thinkingabout the novel. First, the movement away from a linear, chronologicalrepresentation of the passage of time, as demonstrated, for example, in thework of Conrad, Ford and Faulkner. (In The Guide, p. 128, Raju’s descrip-tion of Rosie’s narrative technique sounds for all the world like Dowell’sin The Good Soldier: &dquo;I wanted a chronological narration, but she seemedunable to provide it.&dquo;) Second, the freedom of fictional characters from thedominant intentions of their author, as described by too many critics toreward the trouble of naming. But the effect of the theory on the practiceis not at all like that of Narayan’s contemporaries in the West, and thedifference doesn’t lie only in the closeness of his text to oral narration.After all, most of the relevant European and American novels that springto mind - from Nostromo, through The Fall, to Last Orders - also offerthemselves as single or collective oral narratives. Narayan’s distinction liesmore in the way the &dquo;story&dquo; that lies beyond the re-assembled time scheme,and that expresses the &dquo;free&dquo; personality of the novels’ dominant characters,fails to create a plot on the lines of the expected Western model. Characterand event don’t seem to relate to each other, to explain each other, in thecausal and consequential terms appropriate to the novel as we have grownto understand it.

There has always been a pronounced air of storytelling in Narayan’sfiction. In the early novels, though, this was easily accommodated withinthe conventions of a relaxed third-person narrative. Then, in The EnglishTeacher, Narayan chose to speak in the first-person - taking upon himselfthe personality of his protagonist, Krishna, whose misfortunes, he tells us(in My Days), closely followed his own. But there was nothing surprisingin the way he did this. The movement of the prose seemed to have much incommon with what the Western reader expects from first-person narrative- as he has encountered it in the classical novels of his own civilization. Itis important that this familiarity persists into the second half of the novel,

at UMKC University Libraries on April 12, 2013jcl.sagepub.comDownloaded from

71

when Krishna has lost his wife and then finds her again in circumstancesthat would be unthinkable in a contemporary European novel. Narayanhimself discloses (again in My Days) that &dquo;Many readers have gone throughthe first half with interest and the second half with bewilderment and even

resentment, perhaps feeling that they have been baited with the domesticpicture into tragedy, death, and nebulous speculations.&dquo; But he doesn’t saythat this change of attitude on the part of his readers has anything to dowith an accompanying change in his use of the narrative voice. It may bemore helpful instead to describe the change as one from relatively conven-tional plotting (on the picaresque lines of an earlier novel like The Bachelorof Arts) to a relatively plotless series of developments accompanying the&dquo;nebulous speculations&dquo; mentioned in the autobiography.

After The English Teacher, Narayan’s novels sometimes employ third-person and sometimes first-person narration. His most recent novella, TheGrandmother’s Tale, is written in the form of a retelling of his actualgrandmother (Ammani)’s story of her own mother (Bala)’s life. He includeshimself in the story when he mentions how he has already described hisgrandmother’s house in the autobiography (see GT, p. 56). But none of thisproduces a striking change in the reader’s response to an oral narrative,except where the change can be easily accounted for by the author’s matu-ring command of technique and idiom. The success of the piece owes moreto Narayan’s loosening of the hinges and joints of the plot than to dramaticadjustments of the tone of the oral narrative - for instance in letting theprincipal character suddenly die about three-quarters of the way throughthe story; and &dquo;failing&dquo; to explain her change of character after she hassecured a child-husband as a grown-up husband before she returns to her

village. It might be significant that the tale the grandmother tells closelyfollows the story of Shakuntala in the Hindu legend Narayan repeats inSection Four of Gods, Demons and Others.

To account for the distinctiveness of Narayan’s handling of the time-scheme and his approach to character, with its attendant depression of theimportance of plot, we have to look beyond what he might have learnedfrom novelists in the West, and also beyond the varieties of oral narrativehe has used from time to time in both his short stories and his moreextended fiction. Even so, his comment on storytelling and story-listeningat the beginning of &dquo;Valmiki&dquo; remains a good place to start. Really, thepoint about &dquo;getting used to a narrative going backwards and forwards andsideways&dquo; (which is what puts the reader in mind of European comparisons)is less important than the assumptions Narayan makes about an &dquo;average&dquo;or &dquo;ordinary&dquo; &dquo;Indian story-listener&dquo;. To him, it will be remembered, it is&dquo;perfectly natural that events could spread over before, after, and justnow&dquo;. Notice that it is not representations of events, but events themselves,that Narayan says behave this way. So it’s not so much the way he tells it,

at UMKC University Libraries on April 12, 2013jcl.sagepub.comDownloaded from

72

as what it is he tells, that creates the problem, or opportunity, for theuninitiated Western reader.

The reason the narrative keeps changing direction is that events keepchanging direction. A European writer - Conrad, in Nostromo for instance- changes narrators and alters time sequences either because he wants todraw the reader’s attention to similarities and differences between theevents that are being recorded, or because he wants to reproduce mentaloperations that are so extreme or so defective as to issue in a fragmentedperception of their objects. The events are stable. It is the author’s use ofthem, or the character’s perception of them, that makes them seem dis-ordered. But this isn’t what Narayan is saying about Valmiki’s handling ofthe Rama story. That story, Narayan explains, is happening around Valmikiin the process of composition. The time-sequences in it are so fluid, sodeliquescent, because the events to which they relate are at the same timeboth complete and incomplete, finished and unfinished. With the help ofSugriva, Hanuman and others, Rama has defeated Ravana and his raksh-asas, and succeeded to the throne of his kingdom. But then the variedstories of his treatment of his faithful wife Sita have to be incorporatedinto the story. And that involves the birth and upbringing of his two sons- in the ashram of the scholar-poet Valmiki, who teaches them the song oftheir father’s exploits. After he has taught them the song, they travel to thecourt and sing the Ramayana to him - and he makes an effective responseto their performance of his story (within the story). (This is to say nothingof the story of Valmiki himself, both enclosing the story he tells and apart of that story as it is told by succeeding storytellers. One of thesehappened to be Narayan’s grandmother, who told him the story of Rama’sstruggle against Ravana long before he read about it in the epic poem, withthe result that in order to tell it in his turn he has to blend the processesof memorizing her oral narrative and reading the written text [which isitself the incomplete expression of multiple and diverse oral narratives].)

Something similar to this, I shall argue, happens in Narayan’s originalfiction as well as in his &dquo;translations&dquo; of the Tamil versions of the Rama andother legends. He is acquainted with the experimental writing of modemEuropean fiction in the same way as he is acquainted with the variousredactions of the Ramayana story. But also he is able to dissolve the oftenalready hazy and soft-edged time sequences of the epic through his memoryof repeated oral versions of its episodes - frequently related to one anotherin varied, unstable and contradictory ways. For the Western reader (or&dquo;us&dquo;, as Narayan himself admits), this creates peculiarities which referenceback to merely &dquo;novel&dquo; practice fails to resolve. Narayan has learned lessonsfrom European fiction, but he has complemented them with knowledge ofhis own native Indian narrative tradition. And this knowledge is of boththe actual legends and of the characteristic ways of &dquo;organising&dquo; them that

at UMKC University Libraries on April 12, 2013jcl.sagepub.comDownloaded from

73

appears in both the written and the oral versions with which he is familiar.In The Guide, he doesn’t make much use of legendary analogues andparallels. (There is some play made with the story of Devaka, but even thatis more important for the way it is told, or rather fails to be told, than forits subject-matter; and there is something is made of Rosie’s devotion to alittle bronze figure of Nataraj, the god of dance.) But he does dependa great deal on the way not just the telling of the legends, but their narrativesubstance, adapted to a modem subject, can illuminate aspects of thatsubject which an exclusively Western approach would almost certainly keepin the dark. This is more like The English Teacher than some of the laternovels like Mr Sampath. The Man-Eater of Malgudi, or The Vendor ofSweets - novels that do make elaborate use of mythical motifs. But whilethe relatively early English Teacher falls into two halves - the half thateveryone can understand and the half that everyone is puzzled by (onNarayan’ own admission) - The Guide is a complete and perfectly shapedwork of art in which it is impossible to clearly differentiate the Europeanmodernist and Hindu traditional contributions to its theme.

The story of Devaka, or rather the telling of the story of Devaka, is ahinge on which the telling of the story of Raju, the railway guide, turns. Itoccurs very early in the novel, towards the end of the first chapter, wherethe reader flounders in a temporal confusion almost as great as at theopening of Nostromo. In fact the composition of this chapter owes a lot tothe modernist art of the time-shift, which means that although events keepmoving backwards and forwards in time, and this creates the difficulties towhich I have already referred, the &dquo;European&dquo; reader doesn’t feel that hehas entirely lost his bearings. We are used to these kinds of difficulties bynow. They belong to our reading culture and this makes us feel secure evenin our (temporary) bafflement. Raju’s attempt to recall and re-tell hismother’s story of Devaka simultaneously draws the reader’s attention tothe present situation (Raju in the deserted temple ministering to the peasantVelan’s spiritual requirements), and opens a window to his earlier history.It is a good example of Narayan’s use of the time-shift for a purpose Ireferred to earlier: placing side by side two temporally divergent but the-matically convergent concatenatons of events. In this instance the events(key incidents in Raju’s earlier life, and his encounter with Velan in thetemple) converge on Raju’s behaviour as a guide: previously as a touristguide, now as a sort of guru in the eyes of the peasant farmer. From thispoint on the story of Raju’s rise from store assistant to impresario developssmoothly in tandem with the story of the impression he makes on thecommunity near the temple. Indeed the transitions from one time-scale tothe other are so smooth that we probably don’t notice the skill with whichNarayan moves from third- to first-person narration in the description heprovides of Raju’s rise to fame and fortune.

at UMKC University Libraries on April 12, 2013jcl.sagepub.comDownloaded from

74

But he does move in this direction, and all of Chapters Seven (by farthe longest) to Ten, occupying the centre of the novel, take the form offirst-person confessional narrative. They are so absorbing that it comes assomething of a shock to be returned to the situation at the end of theopening chapter: &dquo;Raju’s narration concluded with the crowing of the cock.Velan had listened without moving a muscle... Raju had mentionedwithout a single omission every detail from his birth to his emergence fromthe gates of the prison.&dquo; This means we have become as absorbed as Velanin Raju’s narrative, forgetting for the time being the farmer’s presence inthe foreground of the picture. Raju’s powers of persuasion are renderedentirely credible, through the reader’s retrospective acknowledgement thathe has shared Velan’s rapt attention to what the guide has been telling him.That is an index of Narayan’s skill in what might be described as modernistnarrative art. It incorporates a more traditional art of storytelling, butthat is an art that in the present instance has been subordinated to more

sophisticated narrative requirements.That is a great deal. But is it everything? Does it account for everything

that creates the impact on the reader that this novel undoubtedly makes?I don’t think it does, because it leaves out of account certain aspects of theearlier descriptions of Raju’s behaviour towards Velan in the chaptersdevoted to whatever is happening in the temple; and, more significantly, itignores what happens as a result of Raju’s having made his confession - asthis is recorded in the last chapter of the book. In other words, it accountsfor Raju’s success as a tourist guide and as a false prophet. But it doesn’taccount for his success as a saint.

Immediately one searches for quotation marks to surround that lastword. But then one chooses not to place them there. For there is a sensein which Raju has become a saint, a holy man, a spiritual guide. There iseven an implication at the end that we don’t have to rely on ambivalentdescriptions of Raju’s or Velan’s state of mind to come to this conclusion.We might be able to find objective support for it in the coming of the rains,which was what Raju’s strange behaviour in his last days was intended toprovoke. How, then, does a novelist represent this most obscure and incred-ible spiritual condition, which no-one - including Cervantes, Dostoevskyand Iris Murdoch - has found it easy, or unambiguously convincing, todescribe in fiction?

It can’t be done by time-shifts, because time-shifts relate to experiencesthat are grounded in time - time as it is experienced and organized byhumankind that is held in its toils. Sainthood is a condition that exists outof time. For the saint, the incongruities of living in time collapse under thepressure of duties and obligations that belong to another world, yet whosemanifestations are (barely) perceptible in this one. This other world has tofind a way of getting into Narayan’s fiction, because he genuinely, and

at UMKC University Libraries on April 12, 2013jcl.sagepub.comDownloaded from

75

radically, can’t make sense of this world without recourse to it. That is whythere are so many saints and brahmins and sanyasis in Narayan’s novels.They often make a poor and questionable show. Think of the priest whosetemple Savitri sweeps in The Dark Room, or the dubious pedagogue priestsof The Financial Dealer or The World of Nagaraj. Or see how suspect andself-regarding Chandran is, in The Bachelor of Arts, when he prescientlyemulates Raju’s confidence-trick as he settles down as a sanyasi in thevillage at Koopal. (This also develops from a visit to a barber’s shop.)Nevertheless, they might be true saints, or have the potentiality for truesainthood, lurking somewhere in the nooks and crannies of their egoism.Narayan is writing of his bereavement, and of how he tried to see beyondit in the picture he produced of Krishna’s suffering in The English Teacher,when he insists:

Our normal view is limited to a physical perception in a condition restrictedin time, like the flashing of a torchlight on a spot, the rest of the areabeing in darkness. If one could have a total view of oneself and others, onewould see all in their full stature, through all the stages of evolution andgrowth, ranging from childhood to old age, in this life, the next one, and theprevious ones. (My Life, p. 148)

Fascinating how Narayan uses the same image as Naipaul, in An Area ofDarkness, but with entirely contrary meanings and associations. For

Narayan it is possible to imagine the beam of the torchlight expanded andthe surrounding darkness dispersed, because he sees the restriction of timeas fundamentally an illusion, a consequence of our dependence on &dquo;physicalperception&dquo;. But we exist both in and out of time, as Krishi’s spirit guideproves to him - and as Narayan tells us he also had proved to him afterhis wife’s death in similar circumstances to Susila’s. The crucial statementin this passage from My Days is the one about &dquo;this life, the next one, andthe previous ones&dquo;, because it clarifies Narayan’s belief in the Hindu notionof karma, the rebirth of the individual in different forms but with persistingcapacities for good and ill. It is difficult to understand why belief in karmashould provide the sort of comfort Krishi derives from his experiments inautomatic writing, or Narayan himself derived from a similar experience.The aim of the vanapastra, or sanyasi, is to escape from the machinery ofkarma and the process of rebirths called samsara through moksha(liberation). I think one is expected to imagine an intermediate state inwhich the person who is mourned prepares for re-entry into the world in adifferent form, or is freed from attachment to the material world throughthe exercise of moksha.

Be that as it may, Raju’s aim, if it can be dignified by such an intention-ally active word, is to escape from his karma altogether, and that is whathe must be presumed to be doing in the River Sarayu at the close of TheGuide. Rosie has already told him, at the time of his arrest, &dquo; ‘I felt all

at UMKC University Libraries on April 12, 2013jcl.sagepub.comDownloaded from

76

along you were not doing right things. This is karma. What can we do?’ &dquo;(p. 192). Here, close to the end of the novel, she is echoing Raju’s ownthoughts at the beginning, when, meeting Velan for the first time in theshadow of the temple shrine, he wondered: &dquo;Have I been in prison or insome sort of transmigration?&dquo; (p. 18). At this early stage in his story, thereader is inclined to smile at Raju’s mild fantasizing, interpreting his mannerof expressing himself as a sort of lazy figurative exaggeration. And so it is.At the same time, though, it carries a proleptic truth-charge: his prisonexperiences have changed him, by changing the context in which fundamen-tally stable aspects of his character are made to appear under differentguises. Before he takes up his position at the shrine, the change is scarcelynoticeable, and the phrase about transmigration sounds merely fanciful.But in the light of the account Raju gives to Velan about his earlier life,and later the way he is represented as behaving over the drought and thefasting, the reader retrospectively attributes to it a greater value. Raju’spassing thoughts about transmigration here might foreshadow as much offuture rebirth as Rosie’s warning about karma looks back to past misde-meanours - not only in his present life as a tourist guide but in previousexistences as wicked as Valmiki’s when he was a thief and a highwayman.

Narayan’s extraordinary skill as a novelist lies in the way he brings bothWestern and Indian methods of storytelling to bear on the elucidation ofthis change in Raju’s character. Aspects of structure alone - the time shifts,changes in the point of view, alterations of register - can’t entirely accountfor this. It is also a matter of style. The descriptions of key phases in Raju’sgrowth towards self-knowledge and, ultimately, self-abandonment are

written in a clear analytical prose deriving from the author’s reading ofnineteenth-century and modem English fiction reminiscent of Meredith,Forster, and even James, at their most persuasive. For instance, this is howNarayan describes Raju’s first thoughts about how Velan’s faith has trappedhim into adopting a pose, both physical and pedagogical, from whichnothing he can do will be able to release him.:

He felt that he had worked himself into a position from which he could notget out. He could not betray his surprise. He felt that after all the time hadcome for him to be serious - to attach value to his own words. He neededtime - and solitude to think over the whole matter. He got down from his

pedestal; that was the first step to take. The seat had acquired a glamour,and as long as he occupied it people would not listen to him as to an ordinarymortal. He now saw the enormity of his own creation. He had created agiant with his puny self, a throne of authority with that slab of stone. Heleft his seat abruptly, as if he had been stung by a wasp, and approachedVelan. His tone hushed with real humility and fear; his manner wasearnest. Velan sat as if he were a petrified sentry. (p. 95)

Irony is not quite the word to describe what is going on here - in the spaces

at UMKC University Libraries on April 12, 2013jcl.sagepub.comDownloaded from

77

between Narayan’s placing of Raju’s meditation in the context of Velan’sand the readers’ understanding of his position, and of his own assumptionsabout the movements he will need to take to escape from it. &dquo;He&dquo; is the

subject of almost all of the sentences in the passage, but the more hestresses this fact, the more he shows how dubiously he is the subject ofwhat follows, what little responsibility he bears for the effects of his actions.Everything he does swells &dquo;the enormity of his own creation&dquo; - against hisbetter judgement, which is powerless to influence the issue. And the word&dquo;glamour&dquo; (another Naipaulian favourite, attaching here to a conceptNaipaul understands well, though he has evaluated it differently) is so

carefully chosen, with its hint of the meretricious not quite synchronizingwith the movement from &dquo;pedestal&dquo; to &dquo;seat&dquo; to &dquo;slab of stone&dquo; across it.

These are expressive devices available only to a writer who is finely attunedto the possibilities of English narrative prose, placed in the service ofsomething that is not quite an expos6 of native superstition and corruption,but not quite a celebration of some sort of ineffable religious truth either.

The same applies to Raju’s &dquo;vindictive resolution&dquo; to &dquo;chase away all

thought of food&dquo; when he finally decides - if &dquo;decides&dquo; is the word for it- to occupy the position Velan and samsara and fate have together con-spired to place him in:

This resolution gave him peculiar strength. He developed on those lines: &dquo;If

by avoiding food I should help the trees bloom and the grass grow, why notdo it thoroughly?&dquo; For the first time in his life he was making an earnesteffort; for the first time he was learning the thrill of full application, outsidemoney and love; for the first time he was doing a thing in which he was notpersonally interested. He felt suddenly so enthusiastic that it gave him a

new strength to go through with the ordeal. He ... repeated the litany. Itwas no more than a supplication to the heavens to send down rain and savehumanity. It... lulled his senses and awareness, so that the world aroundbecame blank ... Lack of food gave him a peculiar feeling, which he ratherenjoyed, with the thought in the background, &dquo;This enjoyment is somethingVelan cannot take away from me.&dquo; (p. 212)

Again the prose entangles the pure religious impulse of the sanyasi - &dquo;no

more than a supplication to the heavens&dquo; - with the eye to the main chanceof the tourist guide - &dquo;learning the thrill of full application&dquo;; &dquo;somethingVelan cannot take away from me&dquo;. And again the precise form of wordscombines a sense of supreme spiritual elevation and self-annihilation witha registration of extreme bodily fatigue and mental exhaustion. (Contrastthe fuss Golding makes of something not entirely dissimilar in The Spire.)

However, reference to features of Western literary culture will only goso far. It takes no account of the alternative sources of Narayan’s techniquein his familiarity with the Hindu myths - as these have been passed downto him through the classical texts and his grandmother’s stories. ShirleyChew makes the point in her Routledge Encyclopaedia entry when she

at UMKC University Libraries on April 12, 2013jcl.sagepub.comDownloaded from

78

remarks that &dquo;a reading of The Guide which pursues it as individual

romance, along the lines of the novel form borrowed from the West, pro-duces Raju either as a sinner redeemed or as a supreme fraud. Locatingthe novel within the Hindu tradition, however, produces a reading whichcan entertain Raju as both trickster and swami,... and the concludingscene as mere illusion and yet also a vision.&dquo;’° Here the movement betweenhuman and divine states of consciousness is handled less in the psychologicalmanner than a manner that simply accepts what is given. And what is givenis usually a combination of divine and human characteristics drifting aroundand through the characters with an arbitrariness that would have astoundedthe ancient Greeks, let alone a modem reader who is heir to one or otherof the monotheistic traditions of West.

In the Ramayana and the Mahabharata the dividing line between levelsof natural and supernatural identity is extraordinarily faint and wavering.The title of Narayan’s collection of Hindu stories, Gods, Demons andOthers, is well chosen: those &dquo;others&dquo; enjoy an ambiguous and deliquescentstatus. The list of &dquo;The Gods of the Stories&dquo; immediately preceding thestories themselves simplifies the pantheon by advancing three discrete levelsof divine existence: Narayana (the supreme God); the trinity (trimurti)created by the Supreme Being’s descent to a practical plane in the formsof Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva; and a host of minor gods (devas) whoare sometimes clearly distinguished from the trimurti, sometimes closelyidentified with one (or more) of them. But since there are thirty-threemillion of these minor gods, it can be appreciated that they take up a lotof room. They get mixed up with human figures who in any case mightbecome sexually involved with them or actually born to them. Even thetrimurti have congress with lesser gods, or characters of uncertainly god-like status. And they all have avatars, earthly incarnations, who enjoyvariable and contradictory status. Vishnu, for example, has had nine avatars,the seventh, eighth and ninth of whom were Rama, Krishna and Buddha.All of these figures are attributed different degrees of divinity, the natureof the difference usually depending on which stories about them onehappens to be reading, and in which oral or literary version.

If a highwayman can become Valmiki through a series of transform-ations in his progress according to karma, it follows that a tourist guide canbecome a sanyasi through a similar progress. It isn’t impossible to conceivethat this progress might end in the condition of moksha, or liberation fromthe wheel of samsara, which would be the supernatural mirror imageof the wholly natural exhaustion to the point of death it looks as if Raju isexperiencing on the last page of The Guide. However, since The Guide is anovel and not a myth (or even a magical realist text), Raju’s transformationfrom one condition to the other is unlikely to be effected through hisburying himself in an anthill and waiting for Brahma to arrive a few

at UMKC University Libraries on April 12, 2013jcl.sagepub.comDownloaded from

79

thousand years later. All the power of Western psychological realism hasto be brought to bear on the issue - and then be shown to be inadequate tothe task of fully accounting for it. For since Raju’s situation, understoodfrom an orthodox Hindu point of view, combines a subjective experienceand an objective condition which that experience can never fully accountfor, one is unlikely to achieve a successful description of it by exclusivelypsychological-realistic means. So the appreciation of passages from the textdescribing stages in Raju’s transformation in the manner attempted aboveisn’t irrelevent, but it is incomplete. It is incomplete because it places allthe emphasis on analysis of the registration of mental states, when thosemental states are represented in the text as one side of a condition that hastwo sides. The second side is also face-up for inspection, but invisible to acritical eye that focuses on matters to which literary critics in the West aremore inclined to pay attention.

In his excellent chapter on The Guide,11 William Walsh shows howNarayan’s best work dramatizes the paradox that &dquo;the very conditions ofhuman growth are individual discrepancy and communal collaboration....a person feels himself to be not just a point in a continuous line of humanitybut in some fundamental way at a distance from and set off against therest.&dquo;11 Raju’s situation at the end of this novel demonstrates this mosteffectively. He has realized what is most valuable in himself by submittinghimself to the communal invention of his saintliness. He has brought hisindividual personality into line with what others expect of him. Of courseit could be argued that in doing this he has really achieved the fullestdevelopment of what it was in him to be, because it is precisely this

selflessness - a crafty willingness to subordinate his own wishes, ideas andopinions to the demands of his clients - that made him a successful touristguide. So it is possible to chart Raju’s development from tourist guide tospiritual guru by recourse to occidental notions of psychological develop-ment and the appropriate narrative devices used to represent them.

But this isn’t just a matter of representation. It is also a matter of

judgement. And it seems to me, as it does to Walsh (and I would guessmost of Narayan’s readers), that it is impossible to disentangle the represen-tation and the judgement in the process of reading the novels. The shift inRaju’s position from one sort of guide to another entails a shift fromone plane of existence to another, even though the same psychologicalcharacteristics remain in play. Walsh explains this by contrasting Westernand Hindu understanding of transformations of character that have theapproval of the gods. Western versions, of whatever religious persuasion,always give priority to &dquo;intention, contradiction, sincerity, responsibility,emendation&dquo; - which is to say they emphasize the operation of entrenchedspiritual condition and/or a deliberate exercise of the will. &dquo;But in thetransformation in the Eastern tale the personality is relatively passive,

at UMKC University Libraries on April 12, 2013jcl.sagepub.comDownloaded from

80

the source of change is outside the psyche in some mysterious law of life,and the process itself is much more a matter of illusion as sincerity, of self-deception as much as of know thyself’. 12

At many stages in the unfolding of Raju’s story, it’s not difficult for theWestern reader to appreciate what is happening in ways that make nospecial demands on his patience. There are excellent comic scenes betweenRaju and Gaffur, the Moslem taxi driver, who feels uneasy about the wayhe is being used as a convenience for Raju’s affair with Rosie; or thetensions in the family when Raju brings Rosie to stay in their house inMalgudi; or the first steps in the promotion of Rosie as a dancer at theUnion function. All of these, as one might expect, belong to Raju’s first-person account of his fortunes up to his meeting with Velan at the ruinedtemple. But even in the scenes at the temple (where the turn in Raju’sfortunes occurs as a result of a comic mistake represented through brilliantlyfunny dialogue) there are many openings to comedy which it requires nospecial understanding of specifically Indian, or Hindu, habits of thought forthe Western reader to enjoy.

Even here, though, in the retrospective as well as the present narrative,there are occasions where wry amusement consorts oddly with a certainpuzzlement about motives, aims and effects. For example, Raju’s scene withRosie on the glass-fronted verandah at the Peak House works splendidlyto isolate the pair from Marco and provide the occasion for their first

tentative movements in each other’s direction. But how far is Raju incontrol of the situation? Raju is the one making waves, but they tend toroll back over him in a way suggesting that really neither he nor Rosie isin command of it. &dquo;Here at last,&dquo; she says, &dquo;we have silence and darkness,welcome things.&dquo; But Raju &dquo;couldn’t find anything to say ... I was over-whelmed by her perfume&dquo; (p. 68). The welcome he feels for the night andthe exotic creatures crossing their line of vision somewhere behind the glassis complicated by uncertainty about which animals they are likely to see.When Rosie laughs at his mistake about the lions - &dquo; ’Lions here?’ she saidand began laughing. ’I have read they were only in Africa ...’ &dquo; - he tellshis audience (Velan, the reader) that he had &dquo;slipped&dquo;. But how deliberatewas the slip? The breathless list of tigers and panthers and bears andelephants that follows makes it sound as if this might be, not a specimenof Raju’s grand strategy to detach Rosie from Marco, but another

example of his tendency to passive drifting with the tide of events, the sortof thing it takes an accident in a temple to raise to a higher value andtransform into a spiritual act.

At the end of The Guide, the Western critic can be very clever and pointto the way Raju and Velan have changed places. Raju the confidencetrickster has become the man who has been tricked out of his confidence,

at UMKC University Libraries on April 12, 2013jcl.sagepub.comDownloaded from

81

and Velan the unconfident, humble peasant has become the &dquo;master ofceremonies&dquo; (p. 214), calling all the shots and - who knows? - perhapsgetting a handsome rake-off in exchange. This might be clever, but it is notprofound. It is to respond to Narayan’s representation of what humanconsciousness is consciousness of as if that was the beginning and the endof our interest in it. But what is conscious of us might be worth writingabout every bit as much as what we are conscious of. The difficulty liesin accommodating this insight within the narrow space of our individualconsciousness. The modem novel is adept at describing individual statesof consciousness and relations between people that derive from them. Butthat is largely because the modem novel is the expression of a culturepredicated on the fact that this, exclusively, is the world, conceived in itsethical and metaphysical character. For Narayan, the world is more thanthis. Consequently the fictions he invents in order to represent the worldhave to do more than find a form and a style to incorporate this incompleteversion of it. That is why he has had to supplement his reading of nine-teenth- and twentieth-century realist fiction with his memory of the Indianstories told to him at his grandmother’s knee, sharpened by re-reading andtranslation of their sources in the Hindu classical texts.

Narayan’s novels aren’t like the package Govind Singh didn’t dare toopen in &dquo;Gateman’s Gift&dquo;. Addressing the man from the x-ray institute,Singh pleads: &dquo;They said you could tell me what’s inside without openingit.&dquo; Well, in &dquo;Gateman’s Gift&dquo; we see what’s inside the package, and thatis what puts us more in mind of a Maupassant story than an episode fromthe Ramayana. The Guide, though, is a package unsusceptible to x-rayinterpretation. To read it is to open it, and the opening of it is the substanceof what is read. When Raju decides to open his own packages (first Marco’sCultural History of South India, then the letter from the bank), it occursboth to himself and to the reader that the whole exercise might be a plotto ruin him. Certainly he is ruined - in any of the rational senses of thatword. But whose is the plot? &dquo;What was the man’s purpose in sending itnow? Why this sudden generosity to return her an old box? Was he layinga trap for her, or what was it?&dquo; (p. 182). In view of the court case Rajuloses, and as a consequence of which he goes to prison, it may well be thatMarco has set a trap and Raju has fallen into it. In spite of his apparentmildness, even generosity, there is something threatening, something of therakshasa of the epic tales, about Marco. But that doesn’t feel like the wholestory, which takes Raju far beyond the prison into states of existence strictlyunrelated, in the conventional sense of plot and character, to what has gonebefore.

For who can tell what is the whole story? Who can tell what workingsout of samsara, beyond all the manifestations of individual character, haveproduced the tourist guide and sanyasi that is &dquo;Raju&dquo; in these pages? &dquo;This

at UMKC University Libraries on April 12, 2013jcl.sagepub.comDownloaded from

82

is karma? What can we do?&dquo; Or, as the master whispers to Raja throughthe bars of his cage when he bids him farewell at the close of A Tiger forMalgudi: &dquo;Both of us will shed our forms soon and perhaps we could meetagain, who knows? So good-bye for the present.&dquo; Raja/Raju. Too fanciful?Too neat? There is more in Narayan’s heaven and earth than is dreamt ofin a philosophy that doesn’t ask questions like these.

NOTES

1 R.K. Narayan, My Days, London: Heinemann, 1975, p. 952 This is an exaggeration of a true state of affairs. Exceptions to the rule - of

basically Eurocentric interpretations of Narayan’s novel-writing - are EdwinGerow, "The Quintessential Narayan", Literature East and West, 10, 1-2 (1966),1-18; S.C. Harrex, The Fire and the Offering: The English Language Novel ofIndia 1935-1970, Calcutta; Writers Workshop, 1978; Meenakshi Mukherjee, TheTwice Born Fiction: Themes and Techniques of the Indian Novel in English,New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1971; M.K. Naik, "Two Uses of Irony: VS.Naipaul’s The Mystic Masseur and R.K. Narayan’s The Guide", World LiteratureWritten in English, 17, 2 (1978); and Chitra Sankaran, The Myth Connection,Ahmedabad: Allied Publishers, 1993. None of these critics, however, emphasizesthe influence of Hindu modes of thought on the style and structure, as distinctfrom the themes, of The Guide.

3 For VS. Naipaul on Narayan, see India: A Wounded Civilization, London:André Deutsch, 1977, pp. 18-27 (on Mr Sampath) and pp. 37-54 (on The Vendorof Sweets). Naipaul’s unsympathetic attitude to Hinduism issues in remarksabout its malign influence on the development of Narayan’s career as a novelist.

4 All references to Narayan’s early novels (from The Bachelor of Arts to TheFinancial Expert) are to the Heinemann/Minerva editions. All references to thelater novels (from The Guide to A Tiger for Malgudi) are to the Heinemann/Penguin editions. The World of Nagaraj is published by Heinemann (1990) andMandarin (1991), and The Grandmother’s Tale by Heinemann (1993).

5 "Gateman’s Gift" first appeared in An Astrologer’s Day (1947) and is reprintedin Malgudi Days, New York: Viking; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.

6 Guy de Maupassant, "La Parure", Contes et nouvelles I, Paris, 1974, pp.1198-1206; first published in Le Gaulois, 17 Feb. 1884.

7 E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, London: Edward Arnold, 1927; Pelican1962, p. 104.

8 See R.K. Narayan, Gods, Demons, and Others, New York: Viking, 1964; London:Heinemann, 1965. For references to other aspects of Hindu mythological narra-tive see Narayan’s versions of The Ramayana, New York: Viking, 1972;Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977; and of The Mahabharata, New York: Viking,1978; New Delhi: Vision, 1987. For less heavily abridged translations of thesame texts see William Buck, Mahabharata, Berkeley: University of California,1973; and Ramayana, Berkeley: University of California, 1976. See also J.L.rockington, Righteous Rama; The Evolution of an Epic, Delhi: OUP, 1984.

9 Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance, London: Duck-worth, 1924.

at UMKC University Libraries on April 12, 2013jcl.sagepub.comDownloaded from

83

10 Shirley Chew, "Indian Literature in English", Encyclopaedia of Literature andCriticism, eds. Martin Coyle et al., London: Routledge, 1990, pp. 1181-2.

11 William Walsh, R.K. Narayan: A Critical Appreciation, New Delhi: Allied Pub-lishers, 1983, p. 131.

12 ibid., p. 132.

at UMKC University Libraries on April 12, 2013jcl.sagepub.comDownloaded from