Finding Malgudi: R.K. Narayan's Imagined Town

Reference library · 1000 words

Readers who go looking for Malgudi in south India will not find it, and the search itself is instructive. Over some fifteen books, R. K. Narayan built a small town on a river called the Sarayu, with a Mempi range behind it, an Albert Mission College, a Market Road, a Lawley Extension named for a colonial administrator, and a railway station that connects it to Madras. The topography is consistent enough that people have drawn maps of it. Yet Narayan was firm that Malgudi was not a real place with the names changed. By his account the town arrived in his mind in September 1930, on Vijayadashami, and what he saw first was a railway station, with the name following.

That order of arrival is telling. Malgudi begins as a point of connection to a wider world rather than as a settlement. Almost every Narayan plot depends on something arriving by that line or someone leaving on it: a film crew, a taxidermist, a hoarding, an American, a job in the city. The town is defined by its relation to what is outside it, which is exactly the condition of small town south India in the decades Narayan was writing.

How Malgudi was made

Swami and Friends, published in 1935, introduced the town through a schoolboy's year: cricket, a bullying headmaster, a friendship that fails, a nationalist demonstration that a child joins without understanding. Getting it into print was a near thing. The manuscript had been rejected repeatedly in England before it reached Graham Greene, who recommended it to a publisher and who also suggested Narayan shorten his name to something English readers could manage. Narayan's career was thus enabled by a British novelist's patronage, a fact that sits somewhat awkwardly beside the received image of him as the most purely Indian of the Indian English novelists.

The books that followed filled in the town by profession rather than by geography. The Bachelor of Arts and The English Teacher take the college; The Financial Expert takes a moneylender who works under a banyan tree outside the Central Co operative Land Mortgage Bank; The Printer of Malgudi, published in India as Mr Sampath, takes the press; The Vendor of Sweets takes a sweet shop and a son with modern ideas; The Man Eater of Malgudi takes a printer invaded by a taxidermist. Read together they resemble less a novel sequence than a directory of a small town's trades, each entry given a plot.

The English Teacher is the exception and the hinge. Narayan's wife Rajam died of typhoid in 1939, and he described the novel as very largely autobiographical, with settings moved and names changed. Its second half turns to attempts at communication with the dead through automatic writing. Readers who admire Narayan for his light comic irony often find this section difficult, which is a fair sign of how far he had pushed the form. The town that had been a stage for gentle mockery is asked to hold real grief, and the tonal strain shows.

The comedy and its limits

The Guide, published in 1958, is his best known work and won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1960. Its protagonist Raju moves from railway station tourist guide to impresario to convict to, finally and by accident, a holy man expected to fast until the rains come. The novel's structure withholds the ending: whether the rain falls, and whether Raju's transformation is real or the last and most successful of his impostures, is left genuinely open. Narayan disliked the film adaptation, which departed substantially from the book, and the difference between the two is a useful lesson in how Indian popular cinema of the period handled ambiguity.

What holds the Malgudi books together is a particular comic method. Narayan's characters are almost always men of small ambition who overreach slightly, are punished mildly, and end approximately where they began, having learned less than they think. The prose is unhurried and almost transparent, using an English that carries Tamil sentence rhythms without resorting to phonetic dialect or exclamatory italics. That restraint was a deliberate choice, and it is the technical achievement on which his reputation actually rests.

It also draws criticism, and the criticism should be stated. Malgudi's social range is narrow. Its central consciousness is almost always Brahmin, male and middle class; caste conflict, agrarian distress and the more violent parts of the independence struggle sit at the edge of the frame or outside it. Narayan's admirers read this as focus and his critics as evasion. Both readings can be sustained from the texts, and it is not a debate that will be resolved by finding the right passage.

The town in the world

Malgudi passed into general Indian culture through television. Shankar Nag's serial adaptation for Doordarshan in the late 1980s, using Narayan's stories and shot largely in the village of Agumbe in Karnataka, gave millions of viewers a fixed image of the place, and Agumbe is now visited by people who half know it is not Malgudi. Karnataka's railways later named a station after the fictional town. The layering is neatly absurd: an imagined town, filmed in a real village, then commemorated at a real station, all descending from a station Narayan saw in his head in 1930.

Narayan lived much of his life in Mysore, and the house he built there in the early 1950s later became a museum. Attempts to identify Malgudi with Mysore, or with Coimbatore, or with the Madras suburb of Chennapatna, have all been made and none is convincing, because the town is assembled from parts. The Sarayu is a north Indian river name. Lawley Extension is a colonial naming convention found across the south. Albert Mission College is a plausible composite of a dozen institutions. The result is a town that is recognisably of the Mysore and Madras region without being any single place in it, which is precisely what allows it to stand for all of them.

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