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Chapter IV

COLONIAL AND POST COLONIAL THEMES IN THE SELECTED NOVELS OF

BIRINCHI KUMAR BARUA AND R. K. NARAYAN.

It evacuates the word Colonialism of any implication of an encounter

between peoples, or of conquest domination. Colonialism was not an identical process in
different parts of the World but everywhere it locked the original inhabitants and the
newcomers into the most complex and traumatic relationships in human history. The
process of forming a community in the new land necessarily meant un-forming or re-
forming the communities that existed there already, and involved a wide range of practices
including trade, plunder, negotiation, warfare, genocide enslavement and rebellions. Such
practices generated and were shaped by a variety of writings-public and private records,
letters, trade documents, government papers, fiction and scientific literature. These
practices and writings are what contemporary studies of colonialism and post colonialism
try to make sense of. Colonialism may be defined as the conquest and control of other
people’s land and goods. In this sense colonialism is not merely the expansion of various
European powers into Asia, Africa or the Americas from the 16th century onwards.

It might seem that the age of colonialism is over, and because the descendants of
once-colonized people live everywhere, the whole world is postcolonial. And yet the term
has been fiercely contested on many counts. To begin with, the prefix ‘post’ complicates
matters because it implies an ‘aftermath’ in two senses- temporal, as in coming after, and
ideological, as in supplanting. It is the second implication which critics of the term have
found contestable: if the inequities of colonial rule have not been erased, it is perhaps
premature to proclaim the demise of colonialism. A may be post colonial (in the sense of
being formally independent) and neo- colonial (in case of remaining economically and \or
culturally dependent) at the same time. We cannot dismiss either the importance of formal
decolonization or the fact that unequal relations of colonial rule are rein scribed in the
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contemporary imbalances between ‘first’ and ‘third’ world nations. In the temporal sense,
the word postcolonial cannot be used in any single sense. Formal decolonization has
spanned three centuries, ranging from the eighteen and nineteenth centuries in the
Americas, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, to the 1970s in the case of Angola
and Mozambique. The term ‘postcolonial’ does not apply to those at the bottom end of this
hierarchy, who are still ‘ at the far economic margins of the nationstate’ so that nothing is
‘post’ about their colonization.

It has been suggested that it is more helpful to think of post colonialism not just as
coming literally after colonialism and signifying its demise, but more flexibly as the
contestation of colonial domination and the legacies of colonialism. Such a position would
allow us to include people geographically displaced by colonialism such as Africans
Americans or people of Asians or Caribbean origin in Britain as ‘postcolonial’ subjects
although they live within metropolitan cultures. It also allows us to incorporate the history
of anti colonial resistance with contemporary resistances to i9mparialism and to dominant
Western culture. The term postcolonial is taken to signify an oppositional position or even
desire, as de Ava suggests, then it has the effect of collapsing various locations so that the
specificities of all of them are blurred. Moreover, thought of as an oppositional stance,
‘postcolonial’ refers to specific groups of (oppressed or dissenting) people (or individuals
within them) rather than to a location or a social order, which may include such people but
is not limited to them. Postcolonial theory has been accused to precisely this: it shifts the
focus from locations and institutions to individuals and their subjectivities. Postcoloniality
becomes a vague condition of people anywhere and everywhere, and the specificities of
locale do not matter. In part the dependence of postcolonial theory upon literary and
cultural criticism, and upon post structuralism, is responsible for this shift. So we are back
to the critique articulated earlier-that post-structuralism is responsible for current
inadequacies in theorizing postcoloniality. We will return to this issue when some of the
terms in the debate have been further clarified

Post colonialism is a word that is useful only if we use it with caution and
qualifications. It is necessary to place postcolonial studies within two broad (and
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overlapping) contexts. The first is the history of decolonization itself. Intellectuals and
activists who fought against colonial rule, and their successors who now engage with its
continuing legacy, challenged and revised dominant definitions of race, culture, language
and class in the process of making their voices heard. The second context is the revolution,
within ‘Western’ intellectual traditions, in thinking about some of the same issues-
language and how it articulates experience, how ideologies work, how human subjectives
are formed, and what we might mean by culture. These two revolutions are sometimes
counterpoised to one another, but it is impossible to understand the current debates in
postcolonial studies without making the connections between them. It is obviously difficult
to summaries these developments for they entail not only the history of social sciences in
the West over the last hundred years, but also political movements that cover most of the
globe. However, this section will outline some of the key areas of debate and conceptual
innovation around issues of ideology, language and culture in order to indicate their
intersections with anti-colonial thought and practice.

The term ‘postcolonialism’ is primarily cultural in import- the missionary, new

religious consciousness, the gap between the tribal and the western outlook. If we add the
suffix like ‘ism’, it defines itself as a field that deals with the ‘’effects of colonization on
culture and societies’’, reciprocally affecting both the colonizer and the colonized. The
term ‘postcolonialism’’ first coined in the 1960s to designate the period of extensive
decolonization after World War II. Since then it has become substantially broader in
meaning. During the 19th century, Great Britain emerged as the largest colonizer and
imperial power, quickly gaining control of almost one quarter of the earth’s landmass. For
this all post colonial experiences are to conquer, to subjugate, to occupy and to dominate
another being are all intrinsic colonial stops. This discussion has also been formulated
against issues like identity, hybridity, cultural difference and conflict in a piece of writing.

There was created a new trend in style of writing Assamese novel after the Second
World War. Many of the older writers continue their explorations in new fields of human
experiences. But a new strain has been introduced by a new generation of writers which
combines Freudian Psychology with a Marxist undercurrent in so far as it nurses a never
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easing complaint against almost everything in the social set-up. Traditional as well as
humanistic social values have lost validity in their eyes. The process of disenhacement was
hastened by the gravity of pressing economic distress and as consequence of the new
outlook; realism became dominant tendency in literature, especially in the realm of the
novel and short story. The various imbalances of the post-War society compelled most of
the Assamese writers to become very realistic and so they gave a living portrayal of life in
their writings. On the other hand, in order to produce realistic literature it is essential for
the writer to be acquainted with real experiences of life. This is on account of the fact that
the individual mind and experiences of a writer find expression through his writings.

Most of the Assamese novels written during the post colonial period were
socialistic in nature and the novelists were mostly preoccupied with social realism. The
vital reason for this was that our national life was directly influenced by the outcome of the
two important events, the Second World War and the struggle for independence during the
forties. These two events created a long lasting change in our life, and as such the
contemporary writers found themselves in an entirely new world of reality of which the
romantic writers had no notion at all. Before the writers showed the way, it was impossible
to think that the day-to-day experiences of joy and sorrow of the common man and the
familiar life of the village could be an excellent subject-matter of any important novel.
There are some writers of the romantic period in whose works sometimes find a glimpse of
reality. In the light of Scott and Bankim Chandra a group of Assamese novelists including
Rjani Kanta Bardalai tried to give a graphic description of picture of an ancient society.
Among these novelists, Rjani Kanta Bardaloi and Dandinath Kalita are, however,
exceptional in the sense that even in those early days they reflected the contemporary
social life in their novels Mirijiyari and Sadhana. But it cannot be denied that realism in
true sense of the term have found a secured place in the novel only through the writings of
the post colonial novelists. The writers of this period are, in fact, the pioneers who have
attempted to look at life in its bare reality. As such, through them social realism finds a
wide expression in Assamese literature, it is said that a successful writer should be capable
of representing life in its objective reality without any bias. The essence of life can be
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reflected in literature only against the background of reality. On account of the wide-spread
realistic outlook of the writers, the literature took a different turn. Along with the change of
society the ideological climate had also changed. The upsurge assumed a dynamic
character. Attention was focused on village life.

Assam felt the impact of the British colonizer in its socio-economic life and this
made the novelists socially conscious and more realistic. This becomes apparent in the new
socialistic outlook of the novelists. The post colonial novelists turned away from the
existing historical trend and made an effort to acquaint themselves with the various
problems facing the society. They attempted to interpret in a realistic way the numerous
problems which made the life of the common man miserable. The problems of poverty and
social injustice and the sufferings of lower middle class due to economic hardships
attracted their attention. They took up the problems including those of the rural life and
peasantry for treatment in their novels. The effects of colonialism upon social life, the evils
of modern urban life and other socio-psychological problems became their favourite
subjects. During the post-colonial period the Assamese literature entered upon a new era of
creativity and writers were experimenting with new themes. Most of the contemporary
novels reflect the current activities, thoughts and ideas of the people. Among the Assamese
post colonial novelists Brinchi Kumar Barua is famous for expressing real experiences
through his novels. Not only his novels but the short stories composed by Barua in the post
colonial period are based on real scenario of his contemporary society. Barua’s novels and
short stories contain an authentic picture of various facts of the social life of Assam. The
two novels of Barua Jiwanar Batat and Seuji Patar Kahini are the outcome of his
experiences gathered in his life. It is often called that they mark the beginning of new era
of Assamese social novel in the post-colonial period.

The novel Jiwanar Batat is nothing but the misfortune and sufferings of a village
woman. Jiwanar Batat is a story of a suffering of a village girl namely Tagar before and
after marriage. She was introduced with a young college student from Guwahati. Both
Tagar and Kamalakanta met for the first time in Krishna Dutta’s sister’s marriage
ceremony. Krishna Dutta’s family had a higher status in their locality as Krishna Dutta’s
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father was the Mouzadar or revenue collector of his locality. Just after first meeting
between Kamalakanta and Tagar, both fell in love. As symbol of love Kamalakanta wore a
ring to Tagar as an evidence of love against her will. Tagar opposed thinking about the
traditional rituals in their locality. Giving assurance to marry her Kamalakanta left for
Guwahati. Completion his degree course Kamalakanta appeared in Civil Service
Examination. With the help of Raibahadur Manik Chandra Hazarika, a famous aristocrat of
the town, kamalakanta was selected for the Civil Service. Like many other opportunists
aristocrat people Raibahadur Manik Chandra Hazarika arranged marriage her daughter
Suprabha with Kamalakanta. In this context it may be mentioned that such type of
opportunist nature among some Assamese people grew having affected by colonialism. On
the other hand, Tagar’s father Bapuram Bora arranged her daughter’s marriage with a
weaving master namely Dharani without considering her love affair with Kamalakanta.
Tagar had to spend her life with Dharani master against her will. She had suffered a lot at
Dharani Master’s house due to ill-treatment of her mother in law Ahini till her daugher’s
birth Kamali. In the course of time Dharani Master suffered from Tubercholosis and died.
Suffering of Tagar did not end here. Tagar was suspected by the villagers having any
controversial relation with Golap Doctor. Tager was falsely accused of stealing the ring of
Kamalakanta. The novel is ended with reminiscence of Kamalakanta when he discovered
the ring once wore to Tagar as an evident of his first love.

The main theme of the novel, Jiwanar Batat is expression of suffering of a girl in
our rural Assam. Due to social and traditional responsibilities of the poor class people, the
central character of the novel Tagar had to suffer in her life. The novel beautifully reflects
the real scenario of our Assamese society in the post-colonial period. In the post colonial
period the middle class people held the opportunist nature. That is very clear for the
character of Kamalakanta. Only for his magistrate job he married Suprabha without
thinking about Tagar whom he loved once and consented to marry her. Through the
characters of the novel the novelist focused the village life of common people, the
landscape of the countryside and nature of middle class people usually formed after
colonial influence in our Indian societies. By the realistic imagination the novelist Birinchi
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Kumar Barua presented the society in which his men and women are living. The social
system, manners and customs, passion and prejudices, aims and aspirations of post colonial
Assamese society are reflected in the novel Jiwanar Batat. It reminds us Hudson’s
comments on novel “A novel is really great only when it lays its foundations broad and
deep in the things which most constantly and seriously appeal to us in the struggle, and
fortunes of our common humanity.”1

Birinchi Kumar Barua’s writings are out of influence of romance. His short stories
and the two novels are noticed representation of real life. Realism is a remarkable theme in
the post colonial novels. The characters and the incidents of the novel Jiwanar Batat are
related with the images of positive and negative social tendencies with the society as a
whole. Thus the basic theme of the novel becomes a quintessence of the general issues
transferred to the inner theatre of individuals. In words of famous Assamese writer as well
as critic Dr. Maheswar Neog, “The pictorial element or local colour, whatever it is, has a
resonance that is beyond the scope of the naturalistic embodiment of reality. In this way
the novel, Jiwanar Batat has attained a kind of reality in which the inner is intermixed with
the outer and the whole has a resonance beyond the aggregate of the parts.”2 Though the
novel Jiwanar Batat is based on local colour of society but it also shows a more normative
view of life. In this context it is mentionable that Birinchi Kumar Barua is the first
Assamese novelist who composed for the novel on a trivial theme or subject. For instance,
the theme of the novel Jiwanar Batat is trivial but the the technique of the novelist is very
artistic and hence the novel becomes more popular in modern age also.

The characters of Birinchi Kumar Barua’s Jiwanar Batat are resplendent in reality
and dynamism though the plot of the novel is loose in form. Regarding the novel the
Assamese famous scholar Dr. Maheswar Neog illustrated in this way, “It was before 1948
that there appeared Jiwanar Batat, one of the greatest, if not the greatest, contributions to
the Assamese novel, a novel in which the scenes are as dynamic as they are in the stream

1
Hudson, W. H., An Introduction to the study of literature.
2
Neog, M. and Sarrna, M. M. ed., Professor Birinchi Kumar Barua Commemoration Volume, p. Xlviii.
 114

of consciousness, even though the plot itself is not very powerful in the novel.”3 With the
several external conflicts the novelist Barua has illustrated eternal conflict between our
neglected rural and modern urban societies having colonial influence from Western
culture. These were presented with the activities of the hero, Kamalakanta and the heroine,
Tagar in the novel.

Seuji Patar Kahini, another novel of Birinchi Kumar Barua based on reality of the
incident usually taken places in the Tea garden society. The incidents and the characters of
the novel are based on tea garden society having colonial influence. Though both the
novels of Birinchi Kumar Barua are on the real scenario of his contemporary society, but
there are some differences between the two novels. Written against the background of the
tea garden, the novelist Barua portrays the colourful way of life lived by the tea garden
workers with a humanistic appeal. The keen observation of the novelist, the well-nit
characterization, the fine expression of life of a limited society and an interesting style of
expression- all these happy combinations make Seuji Patar Kahini more interesting not
only the contemporary period of Barua at present also. Seuji Patar Kahini is about running
away of a village boy Nareswar from his home. On his aimlessway Nareswar met Mr.
Seymur, the tea garden manager and his wife Mrs Seymur. They appointed him as ‘boy’ in
the Sahib’s bunglow. In the whole novel all incidents are intermingled with all sorrow and
happiness experiences in the tea garden of Nareswar and tea garden society including the
relation between the owner and labourers of the tea estate.

The story of the novel Seuji Patar Kahini is completely on the real scenario of the
tea garden locality usually found taken place in the tea gardens. According to description
of the story in the tea garden Nareswar met a female character namely Soniya. Soniya is
presented by the novelist as good looking girl having courage to express everything in
distinct. She cares nobody to speak or nothing to think about traditional bindings of her
society. She hated the Britishers because of her birth. She was born due to forcefully
sexual relation of a British person with her mother. Soniya preferred free life style and did

3
Neog, Maheswar, Presidential Address to Forty first Annual Conference, Assam Sahitya Sabha, Mangaldai,
Assam,
 115

not think to enter into the bond like marriage. Though she also loved Nareswar but advised
him to marry any other girl from his locality to be happy in his life. Rejecting the marriage
proposal of Nareswar Soniya declared, “I love you, that is why I am unwilling to marry
you for your good, go back to your village, Nareswar, go and marry a girl from your
village and settle there. Do not make your life unhappy by getting married to an unclean
girl of garden. Do not bring the idea of marrying me to your mind.”4 Dissatisfied with
Soniya, Nareswar left the tea garden. Describing various suffering conditions of the tea
garden labourers in several ways the novel is ended with unsatisfied ending of love affairs
between Nareswar and and Soniya. Suffering of colonized people in hands of colonizer is
clearly reflected through the incidents of the novel Seuji Patar Kahini. The character of
Soniya in the novel Seuji Patar Kahini is an embodiment of result of exploitation of
colonized in hands of coloniser. All labourers as well as Nareswar stand for suffering class
in the society presented in the novel Seuji Patar Kahini.

In Seuji Patar Kahini the novelist Birinchi Kumar Barua cites a real tea garden
society and culture of this society. The novelist is noticed very conscious about the tea
garden society when he writes Seuji Patar Kahini.the tea garden society is generally a hive
of numbers of culture of various race like, Assamese, Bangali, Santhal, Munda, Oraon and
others. Birinchi Kumar Barua presents in Seuji Patar Kahini the realistic expressions of
man’s emotions and passions in the face of various problems of the tea garden, class
prejudices, the clash between the owners and labourers. The creation and solution of
problems is a characteristic feature of post colonial Assamese novel. In this sense, Birinchi
Kumar Barua through the uncommon experiences of Soniya reflects some problems to
which a solution is suggested through her actions and character in Seuji Patar Kahini.

The Assamese novelists including Birinchi Kumar Barua after independence

introduced several new themes into their novels. The outlook of these novelists had its
impact on the form and content of the novel and their efforts to present new themes
through, a novel technique helped in building a firm foundation for the Assamese novel.
The post colonial Assamese novel has its link to the ancient traditions in so far as its
4
. Barua, Rasna., Seuji Patar Kahini, Nalbari: Journal Amporium, 2002
 116

evolutionary art is concerned, yet it has established for itself a distinctive character in the
matter of technique. The post colonial period of Assamese novel is particularly the period
of independence. It was bound to be different from the age of subjugation in the general
social conditions, political environment and the attitude of the common people. The
several problems of the time made a strong impact upon the sensibilities of the novelist
who, from now onwards, began adopting a realistic attitude towards life. Birinchi Kumar
Barua and some other contemporary Assamese novelists tried to project influence of
colonialism among the common people through their writings.

The noticeable aspect of R. K. Narayan’s novels is his commitment to Hindu

ideals. Religious identity in general and caste identity in particular, form and ideological
matrix from which Narayan appears to operate his consciousness as a post colonial writer.
Narayan’s novels are set in an ‘ideological space’, the imaginative South Indian town,
Malgudi. Hinduism and Malgudi demarcate Narayan’s scope, and therefore he speaks as
though from within the four walls of a confining culture, where private or communal is
treated as more essential than the public or national. The confined kingdom of Narayan
thus exemplifies ban underlying ideology which affirms cultural superiority and hegemony
over the subordinate groups, or overshadows them with its blinding presence.

It is noticed in the opening chapter of R. K. Narayan’s The English Teacher that Mr.
Brown gets a shock when he finds that a student of English spelt ‘honours’ without a ‘u’ in
it. An urgent meeting of the Department of English is called to maintain the purity of the
language. Gajapathy, Assistant Professor of English, takes a very serious view of the
situation. But Krishna, the protagonist, views it differently and asks Gajapathy: “Let us be
fair. Ask Mr. Brown if he can say in any one of the two hundred Indian languages: ‘The
cat chases the rat’. He has spent thirty years in India.” But Gajapathy dismisses the
question. It is the irrelevant. Gajapathy and Raghavachar are trapped in the colonial drama.
They have accepted their roles and comfortable positions without bothering about the
political, economic or emotional implications of the colonial situation. At the inaugural
function of the Historical Association Raghavan asserts: “If we were asked what the
country needed most urgently, he would not say Self-Government of Economic
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Independence, but a clarified, purified Indian History”. By which he implies an

interpretation of Indian history favourable to the colonizer.

Krishna however has a questioning self. Unlike Gajapathy and Raghavachar, he is

not satisfied with the traditional role of an English teacher in pre-Independence India. He is
no political activist like some of Ngugi’s characters. His quest is a kind of spiritual journey
taken in order to find out an answer to some ontological questions. His metamorphosis is
the result of a kind of re-education responsible for his spiritual awakening and a realization
of the ideal of selflessness, a state which has been achieved by Govindan Nair in Raja
Rao’s The Cat and Shakespeare. “By rejecting the Western education system, Krishna
rejects the Western intellectual edifice” and gains cultural independence. He renounces all
that he believes in earlier- teaching English, a stable comfortable job, family life and
parental duties and all the other worldly obligations and attachments. This, in turn, lends
him a private world view, a prerogative of the outsider. Krishna’s refusal to see life like his
other colleagues at the college results in a temporary alienation from the group
consciousness. But it is only when he meets the Headmaster of his daughter’s school and
more so when he has had telepathic communion with his dead wife that he is totally
alienated from his people and their society. It is by acquiring the status of an outsider that
he seems to have answered his own question: “What was wrong with me?”

Another outsider in The English Teacher is the eccentric Headmaster of Leela’s

school. He is a Romantic idealist who is trying to replace the colonial system of education
with his own ‘Leave-it-Alone’ system. This is good an assertion of Indian culture as
Krishna’s resignation from his college job. This headmaster, a firm believer in astrology,
however, does not die at the time and date predicted by a hermit. He takes his survival as a
god-sent opportunity to declare his freedom from life. He tells Krishna, “ Leave me
alone… I feel such a freedom now.” For his bewailing wife and children he is dead or at
the most “ one who has taken Sanyasa Ashara”. Though his Sanysa s a joke or at best an
escape from a tyrant wife and vagabond children, he uses it as a label. As a Sanyasi, he is
given licence to follow his idealistic mode of life which for a householder was considered
eccentric and irresponsible.
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Krishna and the headmaster reject the kind of life lived by their fellow human
beings. They have realized the sense of unreality about the world. Both of them have also
defined their identities only after rejecting the traditional roles assigned to them. This takes
away the norms of a rational belief advocated by the colonial western education. Although
they have become sociological outsiders, they assert their cultural roots. Their position in
the community is finally restored as educators who have founded a new anti-colonial
system of education. They thus join the small band of the holy outsiders. Krishna’s
rebellion against colonial society, unlike that of the other outsiders, is totally non-violent.
His ‘definite act’ of resigning the job of a colonial servant, though planned earlier as an
attack on the system, takes on different colouration. Unlike the other outsiders we have
studied, he takes the spirituality. He attains detachment through the telepathic
communication with his dead wife.

R. K. Narayan’s characters are deeply rooted in the Indian tradition. They are
ordinary human beings who live ordinary lives. They do not have the intellectual capacities
of a Ramaswamy or a Kirillov and have not been abroad or even away from Malgudi for a
long time. They have their roots in Hindu religion and Indian tradition. Colonialism for
them is an external fact that does not touch them directly. Unlike Raja Rao’s expatriate
Indians, they do not encounter the West directly and therefore do not flaunt their
Indianness in a proclamatory tone; their lives are completely regulated by the Hindu code
of conduct like the first-person narrating hero of The Man-Eater of Malgudi who tells us :
“My day started before four in the morning. The streets would be quite dark when I set out
to the river for my ablutions..... All along the way I had my well-defined encounters”. He
bathes in the cold water of the river and feels elated. He recites “a prayer to the Sun to
illuminate my mind”. For Krishna’s mother in The English Teacher housekeeping is a
religious affair: “unless I have cleaned the house, I can’t go and bathe. After bathing I’ve
to worship, and only after that I can go near the cows”. Her life is regulated by these
chores, which she performs with religious fervor. The blind landlord of Krishna’s house
reveres him: “I revere college teachers, our Gurus’. Meritorious deeds in previous births
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make them gurus in this life”, and he readily rents out the house to him. He thus relies
heavily on the theory of Karma.

The Vendor of sweets similarly, opens with a religious discourse by Jagan:

“Conquer taste, and you will have conquered the self’ said Jagan to his listeners, who
asked, ‘Why conquer the self?’ Jagan said, I do not know, but all our sages advise us so”.
And Jagan unquestionably follows the advice of the sages in all matters, be they religious
or mundane. He follows the Hindu ‘Verna-Ashram’ system rather in a ridiculously
obscurantist way. He objects to Mali’s marriage with Grace on the ground that she is
‘casteless’ girl and that a Brahmin cannot marry a casteless girl. At sixty he withdraws
himself from the world because “At sixty, one is reborn and enters a new ‘Janma’, and
becomes a ‘Vanaprastha’, a recluse in order to realize God. But the problem with him is
that he is a man of mixed motives and ridiculous obscurantism. Even while he discourses
on the Gita, he keeps his eyes on the cash receipts. He is as much regular in counting his
‘free cash’ (as it is not to be accounted for in the income tax returns) as in offering his
prayers to Goddess Laxmi. He therefore can strive for Saatvik temper in spite of these
contradictions. Saatvik temper, then, is something that goes into the making of a peculiar
Brahminic sensibility of a typical Narayan character. It is a temper wrought by self-
discipline and principled avoidance of excessive indulgence. Acquisition of this kind of
temper, again, is something that binds these characters with their ancestors and makes
them devout Hindus.

Worshiping Hindu gods and goddesses is an important function of their lives.

Srinivas, the hero of Mr. Sampath, carries a Nataraja image with him whenever he goes:
“This was one of the possessions he had valued most for years. It seemed to be a refuge
from the oppression of time”. The image was presented to him by his grandmother, who in
turn had received it from her father. It is thus both a reminder of his ancestral past and also
a symbol of the continuity of tradition. Jagan, the sweet vendor, similarly conducts all his
business under the framed picture of Goddess Laxmi hanging on the wall. The first thing
that he does early in the morning is to place a string of jasmines on top of the frame, light
an incense stick and offer his prayers to the goddess. Nataraj, the hero in The Man Eater of
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Malgudi too has hung up a framed picture of Goddess Laxmi in whose benign presence he
feels safe and secure. Sastri also performs ‘pujas’ every now and then. By participating in
these religious rituals all these characters establish their links with their ancestral past.
Being devout Hindus, they follow their Dharma, the duty assigned to them by their caste,
creed and ancestors. They in fact pride in following the path set out for them by their
ancestors.

Even contemporary reality is interpreted in mythological terms by these characters.

Sastri in The Man Eater of Malgudi compares Vasu with a ‘rakshasa’, or a demonic
creature. He goes on quoting from the Puranas to prove that all demons carry the seeds of
destruction within themselves. Even Ravana in the Ramayana came to a sad end. It is
however, the story of Bhasmasura that fits Vasu’s cap. Like Bhasmasura, Vasu possesses
enormous physical strength, evil genius and strange powers over other human beings.
Again, like a demonic creature, Vasu knows no restraint, and follows no laws, not even his
own. He creates terror among human beings and animals alike. He defiles Nataraj’s press
and neighborhood by collecting dead animals and bringing in prostitutes. He thinks that he
is invincible. But finally the Bhasmasura he is destroyed by himself while killing a
mosquito. As a contrast to Saatvik temper of Natraj, Vasu represents the Taamsik temper
of the Asuras.

The pattern of Saatvik and Taamsik tempers recurs in The Financial Expert where
Margayya obsessed with the idea of acquiring wealth is guided by Dr. Pal, who is symbolic
of the Taamsik temper. Margayya does not know how to save his son from the evil
influence of Dr. Pal: “he was torn between caution and an impossible rage. God knew
where it would lead if he alienated Lal’s sympathies: the fellow might do anything”. Jagan
has a similar fear of his taamsik son, Mali. He simply fails to understand Mali’s intentions:
“Reading a sense into Mali’s actions was fatiguing like the attempt to spell out a message
in a half-familiar script”.

Narayan follows a clear mythical design of order-dislocation of order-restoration of

order through a conflict of the Saatvik and Taamsik characters of the type of Puranas and
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other Sanskrit classics. His tales thus are the tales of the traditional Kathavachak who has a
well defined ethical function of establishing the rule of the dharma in society so that the
social order is not disturbed, and the legends and myths are lived by common people.
Narayan’s novels can thus be interpreted in terms of rewriting of Purana tradition of
ancient India.

R. K. Narayan maintained a superior stance vis-à-vis Western cultural dominance.

He wrote within a continuous living tradition and hence re-creates a picture of their society
through mythology, instead of anthropology. Narayan’s characters follow the classical
Indian pattern of order-disorder-order of the Sanskrit literature. The conflict in these novels
arises from the taamsik and saatvik tempers of the characters, which they represent. But
unlike Ben Jonsoniyan characters, who represent humours, these characters oscillate
between the two gunas. Even Vasu, whom Sastri equates with a demon, has certain
redemptive features. He picks up Nataraj in his jeep even when they are not on good terms.
Margayya shows his love for children even in his bad days. Although Nani is a bully and
Rajam a snob, they are warm and affectionate human beings. Narayan does not simplify
his characters to produce just one-dimensional beings. He is objective their delineation.
The classical Indian pattern of the two gunas interests him.

Raju’s predominantly agricultural community of Malgudi undergoes a

transformation with the arrival of the railways and industrialization. Raju the village boy
becomes Raju the railway guide. His small bookshop helps him get an insight into the
business world to provide him with an opportunity for self-education. His role of the
railway guide brings out his uncommon potential. Like a water-diviner, he develops an
instinct for guiding his customers; he reads their mind and handles them properly,. He
classifies his patrons and instinctively learns that Rosie and Marco could be his lifelong
customers.

Raju’s love for Rosie marks the second phase in the development of his character.
He symbolizes the warmth of life to her and she symbolizes the liberating experience that
real art is. Together they symbolize the “problematic hero” who rebels against society to
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justify his own set of values. The Raju-Rosie relationship becomes acceptable only when
we take these symbols into consideration. After Rosie leaves Raju, he lands in jail. About
Narayan’s handling of the moral dilemma of the protagonist, M. K. Naik in The Ironic
Vision remarks : “It raises overwhelming questions such as the relation between
appearance and reality, the man and the mask, and ends and means, thereby highlighting
the essential ambiguities of the human condition”. Raju’s transformation”from a tourist
guide into a transcendental guru; from ‘Railway Raju’… into recluse Raju: from a forger
into a fakir from a picaro into a pilgrim, and from a fake sadhu into a famous martyr” is
highly complex process of the growth of the character achieved in five distinct stages.
Beginning in comic irony, it ends in tragic irony.

This process of self-knowledge in The Guide is achieved by breaking the linear,

temporal movement of the events by making them swinging forward and backward in
time. Naik has shown that out of eleven chapters in the novel, six deal with the past, two
with the present, and the remaining three mix the past and the present : “the story shuttles
between the present to the past four times in Chapter I, once in Chapter II and twice in
Chapter IV”.

Thus we see that Raju’s “self-awarness is hard earned but not in any way in which
a tragic character earns it, self-wrung, self-strung”. His ‘pilgrim’s progress’ from a
deceitful, self-seeking, immature human being with a fragmentary view of life to a selfless
mature saint with a comprehensive vision of reality, is arduous, and an indicator of the
development of the singular consciousness. It is the victory of the people, as also the
victory of Swami: “Raju becomes significant only as the anonymous ‘Swami’. His identity
is affirmed, but his individuality is annihilated in the will of the people and in the
determined universe” of Hindu ethos.

In The English Teacher, Krishna the protagonist evolves “singular consciousness”,

after passing through various stages and cries. In the beginning Krishna tells us “what was
wrong with me? I couldn’t say, some sort of dissatisfaction, a self-rebellion I might call it”.
Whatever he does, he does it to perfection and yet there always remains “a sense of
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something missing” in his life. Like other problematic heroes, Krishna’s ‘questioning self’
allows him no rest till he rebels against the conventions of society and its well-defined
views. His rebellion is three fold: first, it is against the colonial system of education which
conditions the mind of the colonized so much so that a spelling mistake in the language of
the colonizer is treated as a sin. Secondly, it is against the conventional role of father by
leaving his daughter to the core of his parents. This becomes all the more important when
we learn that he loves his daughter very much. Moreover, Krishna challenges the
irreversibility of death by treating it as a theme of spiritual re-birth.

Krishna’s archetypal quest ends up in his metamorphosis because of the ontological

nature of his problems. But his spiritual quest is within the well-defined frame of the
Hindu asramas. It is a repetition of the theme of man’s journey from attachment to
detachment, from Asakti to Nirasakti as laid down in the Hindu scriptures. Raju is
ironically trapped into sainthood; Krishna achieves it through hard work. Both reach the
same end: detachment, as is done by many other Narayan characters too. Their evolution to
a heightened consciousness, the awareness of the deeper meaning of life, takes them back
to the cultural roots of India in the Dharma, Artha, Kama and Moksha paradigm of a man’s
life on this earth. Thus, in these characters the private agony forming the individual
consciousness becomes communal consciousness and Narayan’s achievement lies in
making their private history move backward “into the main stream of public history”.

R. K. Narayan’s original title for Swami and Friends was Swami the Tate. In the
closing chapters of the book the eponymous schoolboy hero becomes obsessed with an
imminent cricket match, which promises, in the fashion of the best English schoolboy
fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century’s, to bring the action to a climax.
Swami’s talent as a fast bowler leads to his friends nicknaming him ‘Tate’, after Maurice
Tate, the cricketer best known to posterity as Harold Larwood’s fast bowling partner on
England’s infamous line tour of Australia in 1932-33, a defining episode in the sporting
history of the late colonial period. The novel’s attitude to cricket is complex, but at least on
the surface Narayan’s original title would seem to suggest a degree of colonial filiations
likely to find favour with English readers and there is no hint of the hostile reaction that
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England’s departure from ‘fair play’ aroused in Australia. Swami simply identifies eith
Tate and his friends do not question his absorption in the role.

In Swami and Friends, Malgudi is then far more than an anglicized version of
South India and it provides Narayan with a locus that enables him to stage some of the
conflicts and conjunctions that characterised the social world in which he had come of age
during the latter days of the Raj. Although the author of a study of nationalism in Indo-
Anglian fiction refers to Narayan’s 1955 novel Waiting for the Mahatma and a single short
story as his only treatments of the Gandhian freedom struggle, a central chapter in Swami,
chapter12: ‘Broken Panes’, very clearly dramatizes a microcosmic juvenile version of the
struggle, as the boys shout Gandhian slogans and break window panes on a day of national
protest. With typical ambivalence, Narayan frames this within the conventions of the
pranks and escapes of the schoolboy fiction genre and consequently diffuses the episode’s
potential for heavy-handed political statement, but when Swami is beaten by the
headmaster for his part in the vandalism and rushes away muttering “I don’t care for your
dirty school”5, these political activities lead to his leaving the school. In short, his behavior
goes beyond the bounds of the kind of youthful exuberance that his condoned and even
celebrated in most British schoolboy fiction. Narayan renders the school a site of struggle
and subtly subverts the codes of English schoolboy fiction, while ostensibly operating
within its conventions.

R. K. Narayan, the most popular Indian novelist, is a postcolonial writer. His

masterpiece, The Guide, abounds with postcolonial elements. Postcolonial writings are
attempts at reviving the ethnic cultures, traditions, beliefs, languages etc. The postcolonial
literature inculcates pride in one’s own ancient culture and traditions. It abounds in
patriotic feelings. Postcolonialism aims at developing the national identity in the wake of
colonial rule. It deals with the colonized people’s response to the colonial legacy by
writing back to the centre. The indigenous peoples start to write their own histories,

5
Narayan, R. K., Swami and Friends, Mysore: Indian Thought Publications, 1987.
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legacies, using often the colonizer’s language. Looking at India from the Indian
perspective is felt to be a postcolonial deconstruction of colonialism. The continuity and
harmony of small-town India are actually an instance of the Empire writing back.

Narayan’s post-colonialism in The Guide is revealed neither through rejection of

Westernisation nor through celebration of tradition. In the politics of representation, his
position is that of the critical insider who is alive to the need to negotiate the
contradictions of the post-colonial predicament. Narayan is not only aware of the
inevitability of change, but also of the problems that attend the processes of change in a
traditional society. The interface between traditions and modernity is mediated with
characteristic irony. Narayan is interested in looking at the extent to which the cultural
life of the past can be viably integrated with the post-independence reality of India. After
the impact of imperialism a new kind of subjectivity and society emerged in India. Indian
modernity was not just an imitation of western modernity. The aspects of Indian modernity
included enlightenment, rationality, science and western knowledge.

R. K. Narayan’s novels teach what is especially different about Indian modernity. His
books not only reflect the course of India’s recent social and Cultural Revolution, but
actively articulate and arbitrate its various attitudes and stances. The western impact on
Indian life and society is very well depicted in Narayan’s novels. The East-West theme is
thus unavoidable in his novels. But Narayan has not presented this theme in terms of a vast
social, economic or political conflict, nor in terms of a philosophical confrontation. Its
dimensions are ethical, so deep and unobtrusive that one might easily miss it altogether. To
quote O. P. Mathur from his essay The Guide: A Study in Cultural Ambivalenc, “Narayan
gives us the feel of life itself which is neither all white nor all black but the grey, twilight
world of contemporary life quivering hesitatingly between tradition and modernity, East
and West, inextricably mixed up in the minds of individuals . . .” . Narayan ridicules the
exclusive orthodoxy of Indian conservatism and is clearly sympathetic towards modernity.
His ironical attitude itself is largely western; it has few parallels in Pre-modern Indian
authors.
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The Guide is in form of an autobiography. Raju, the hero of the novel, was in turn a rail
road station food vendor, a tourist guide, a sentimental adulterer, a dancing girl’s manager,
a swindler, a jail-bird and a martyred mystic. The story followed Raju along a curiously
braided time sequence. After describing the early life and education of Raju, Narayan
showed how Malgudi became a railway station and how Raju became the owner of a
railway stall and then came to be a tourist guide. Trying to help a rich visitor, Marco, the
archeologist, in his researches, Raju was involved in a tangle of new relationships. Rosie,
Marco’s wife, became Raju’s lover. Abandoned by Marco, Rosie realized, with Raju’s
help, her ambition of becoming a dancer. But Raju’s possessive instinct finally betrayed
him into a criminal action, and he was charged and convicted for forgery. Coming out of
the jail, he cut off all connection with the past. As he was mistaken as an ascetic he was
compelled to lead a sanyasi life. Once again he was caught in the coils of his own self-
deception, and he was obliged to undertake a twelve-day fast to end a drought that
threatened the district with a famine. In vain he told his chief ‘disciple’ Velan the whole
truth about himself and Rosie, and about the crash and incarceration. But nobody believed
that he was anyone other than a saint. He had made his bed, and he had to lie on it. The
reader is free to infer that, on the last day of the fast, he died opportunely, a martyr. Did it
really rain, or was that only Raju’s optical delusion? Did he really die, or merely sank
down in exhaustion? Had the lie really become the truth, or had that been merely exposed?
The reader is free to conclude as he likes.

The story of The Guide develops along a bewildering succession of time shifts. Since
Narayan was in touch with South Indian film industry he could apply cinematic techniques
of jump out, flash back, flash forward and montage in his plot construction. Thus the novel
has an episodic structure rather than the linear plot of the more usual kind of novel, where
the story moves in a singly cohesive curve from the beginning through the middle to the
end. The unconventional plot of The Guide circles freely in time and space, both within
and between chapters, moving from the past to the present and back again, and from
Malgudi to the Mempi Hills to Mangal in a seemingly random way. Modern European and
American novels influenced the novelists of Indian Writing in English and Narayan was no
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exception. Thus the Western fictional paradigms of bildungsroman and picaresque

narrative are evident in The Guide. In fact The Guide is a bildungsroman of a rogue.

Narayan is a citizen-writer and his views and concerns are voiced in a complex manner
through his characters and their conflicts. In his essay The Reluctant Guru Narayan
expressed his resistance to the role of an authentic exponent of the mystic East, a guru or a
sage, a role the people had foisted on him. He was very uncomfortable with that role, but
he could not entirely shake it off. Going by the flimsy evidence of texts like The English
Teacher and The Guide, his audience often demanded doses of Indian spirituality and
mysticism from him. Narayan confessed that he felt himself in the same situation as Raju,
who was mistaken for a saint and began to wonder at some point himself if sudden
effulgence had begun to show on his face. Raju had been called a guide, not a guru,
because Narayan wished to underscore, even problematize, the very difficulties of such a
traditional appellation and function. Rosie, Velan, Raju’s mother and uncle, Gaffur, the
driver, Joseph, the steward of the bungalow where Marco stayed are all characters
exhibiting the traditional Indian culture and ethos. Raju and Marco, on the contrary, bear
features of Western or Modern culture and manners. Thus the conflict between tradition
and modernity or influence of one over the other is evident in the behaviour and
conversation of these characters throughout the novel. Some such situations where
postcolonial elements are visible in the characters are portrayed below:

It was customary or traditional among the Hindus to bow low and touch the feet of
elders and venerable persons. But Raju, after his release from the prison, and sitting lonely
on the river steps, did not allow the villager, Velan to do so. To quote from the text: “Velan
rose, bowed low, and tried to touch Raju’s feet. Raju recoiled at the attempt. ‘I’ll not
permit anyone to do this. God alone is entitled to such a prostration. He will destroy us if
we attempt to usurp His rights’” Rosie, though a post-graduate is never corrupted with
modern and materialistic values. She is a traditional Indian wife, and she longs for
affection and care from her husband. She cannot cope up with the archeological interests of
her husband, Marco. Marco dislikes being disturbed by anyone, even his wife, in his
studies and professional activities. Rather he longs for appreciation of his achievements
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from his wife. This difference in wave-length is the cause of quarrel between Rosie and
Marco.

When Marco deserted Rosie and took train to Madras, she came to Raju’s house for
shelter. Seeing her coming to the house alone in the evening, Raju’s mother was
wonderstruck. To quote from the text: The very first question she asked was, ‘Who has
come with you, Rosie?’ Rosie blushed, hesitated and looked at me. I moved a couple of
steps backward in order that she might see me only dimly and not in all raggedness. I
replied, ‘I think she has come alone, mother.’ The difference in attitude, as well as the
temperament is seen here. Raju’s mother is a traditional Hindu woman who is denied
public exposure. She is prohibited and hence afraid to go out alone, whereas Rosie is a
modern woman. The western influence is evident in her attitude, behaviour and
temperament. She is not all afraid to go out alone.

From the social point of view The Guide not only depicts Indian society, its customs,
traditions, culture, ostentations, superstitions and religious faith, but also presents a conflict
between the traditional and modern values which are symbolised by Raju’s mother and his
maternal uncle on the one hand and by Raju and Rosie on the other. In such conflict old
values have to give place to new values and thus Raju’s mother leaves her home for Raju
and Rosie. “The novel also presents a conflict between the Eastern and Western culture
and synthesises the two through their assimilation which has been symbolised by Rosie’s
transformation in to Nalini. Like Anand, Narayan points out that one has to go to the West
in order to come back to the East”.

When Raju dissociates himself from society and goes after Rosie, he has moral
degradation and he faces unpleasant repercussions. But when he returns to society as a
swami he achieves redemption. R. K. Narayan portrays a South-Indian conservative
society in the village, Mangal. Though the contact of Western culture brought many
changes in the village, castes and traditional occupations continue to exist. Marriages are
still arranged. Astrology is accepted there. Washing the feet before visiting a temple or a
saint as a ritual of purification, pulling the temple chariot along the streets on festive days,
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smearing holy ash on the forehead, reciting all kinds of sacred verse, consulting an
astrologer for auspicious or sacred time, lighting the lamp in the god’s niche, reading the
Bhagavadgita are some of the minor rituals appearing in the novel. Touching the feet of
the saint, making offerings in kind or prostrating before god, are other ritualistic forms.
Raju’s fasting to appease the rain gods and bring rain to save the people is the most
significant ritual in the novel. The people of the village had a clear idea of the fasting ritual
and it is reflected through Velan’s words. “Velan gave a very clear account of what the
saviour was expected to do—stand in knee-deep water, look to the skies, and utter the
prayer line for two weeks completely fasting during the period—and lo, the rains would
come down, provided the man who performed it was a pure soul, was a great soul”.
Referring to the fasting ritual by Raju to appease rain-god, Narayan writes: “He felt
suddenly so enthusiastic that it gave him a new strength to go through with the ordeal.”
Ritual is depicted as an ordeal because this is forced on the reluctant Raju who has no faith
in it. However, the drought and the plight of the villagers have a persuasive effect on him
and so he prays to heaven to send down rain to save the villagers”. Narayan does not
glorify the superstitious rituals. Similarly he does not deny the existence of a strong strain
of faith among the villagers in the native rituals.

Narayan’s novels were written in a bi-cultural perspective. The clash between the
ancient Indian traditions and values on the one side and modern western values on the
other side was visible in many novels. The three major characters in The Guide were
concerned with the revival of indigenous Indian art forms. In the words of John Oliver
Perry: Marco, Rosie’s soon deceived husband, obsessively studies ancient cave art and
thus loses his wife, but ultimately his work illuminates older culture for present audiences;
Rosie betrays her husband in order to foster what she vaguely calls “cultural traditions”
through her inbred, caste-decreed dancing profession, and she is quite successful
aesthetically, personally and socially. Raju’s more irregular successes as a guide to local
cultural sights and to Rosie-Nalini’s traditional dancing lead directly to his virtual
apotheosis as god-man fasting to death to bring villagers’ desperately needed rains.
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Raju seemed to be the psychological projection of the typical individual in Indian social
set up. In the social behavioural pattern, Raju was critical of the age-old institutional
values, albeit he himself was deeply rooted in the family tradition. Rosie’s caste affiliation
was attacked by the general people as ‘public woman’ but Raju negated the prevalent mode
of thinking and asserted that Rosie’s caste was ‘the noblest caste on earth.’ To quote
Gajendra Kumar from his essay R. K. Narayan’s ‘The Guide’: The Vision of Indian Values,
“Time is changed and continuously changing. Now, there exists no caste, class or creed.
Marco too demonstrates his modesty and embraces Rosie as his wife”. Malgudi is a
microcosm of India. Just as the British India sought the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi, the
post-Gandhian Malgudi looked up to Raju as a saviour. As Gandhi fasted in matters of
public interest or concern, Raju also fasted for the redemption of Malguid from drought.
The Guide is a brilliant illustration of Narayan’s artistic talent in creating inner and outer
landscapes balanced by a set of traditional values. There are four major symbols that
constitute the basic structure of the novel. They are: the temple, the village, the town of
Malgudi and the river Sarayu. To quote A. V. Krishna Rao:

The temple’s influence on the democratic consciousness is so profound and efficacious

that it results in the ultimate transformation of Raju. It enables the establishment of the
identity of the mask and the man. The second symbol of the village, Mangal as well as
Malgudi, signifies native strength, continuity of tradition, the ecology of a whole race with
its inescapable influence on the individual consciousness and elemental determinism of
individual destiny. Thirdly Malgudi is the symbol of modern India caught in the throes of
change under the impact of western civilization. Its faith and resilience are effectively
affirmative of the root of a changing tradition. Lastly Narayan’s invention of Mempi Hills
is paralleled in his creation of Sarayu River, thereby completing the image of a whole
country as a structural symbol for the Universe itself.

The coming of the Railway to Malgudi is symbolically the impact of the transformation
of a simple, agricultural community to an urban society. The high values of life give way
to the modern ways and their attendant evils. Raju who grew up in a decent home has now
picked up terms of abuse from the Railway men, and his father’s words ‘Just my
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misfortune!’ sound ominous in the light of the impending disaster. “The Railway meant the
undoing of Raju and his old mother-a small shop keeper’s son becomes a Railway guide
who starts living by his wits and runs into Rosie and Marco, two tourists, gets emotionally
entangled, neglects his old, honest means of making a living, and brings ruin upon himself
as well as a married woman”. In The Guide one finds a clash between castes, classes and
their old values on the one hand and the weakening modern social and moral structure on
the other. Marco only paid lip-service to a casteless, conventionless society that was slowly
taking shape before him by advertising for a good-looking educated young lady regardless
of caste. Old prejudices die hard and Marco for all his erudition looked upon dancing as
just street acrobatics and he killed Rosie’s instinct for life and love of art by denying her
both of them.

Narayan is acclaimed as a Regional or Social novelist. The locale of The Guide is the
small town of Malgudi where Raju has his home, the village Mangal from where Velan
hails, and Madras (Chennai) and other big cities where Rosie is invited to dance. As most
of the Indians live in rural and semi-urban areas, the locale of the novel is almost the
microcosm of India. The world in The Guide is structured along simple binaries—Malgudi
and Mangal, the town and the village, urban sophistication versus rural simplicity,
modernity versus tradition, cynicism versus faith.

Raju’s father did not follow the traditional Brahmin occupation of priesthood. Thus it
became ironic that Raju came back full circle to his caste occupation as a performer of
sacred rites in a most ambiguous way. His father was a worldly man who took the full
advantage of the colonial world trade and commerce. Perhaps his father’s worldliness
might be the source of Raju’s worldliness. It was the railway which brought the outside
world, with its modernity and hybridity to Malgudi. It bifurcated the world of Malgudi
both literally and metaphorically. Western notions of individual choice and self-expression
were thoroughly out of place among the people of Malgudi. The locale that opposed
tradition were the westernized parts of the town where Raju and Rosie carried on their
assignations—the cinema hall, the Taj restaurant, and the hotel. This fast moving,
individualistic, opportunistic world is as familiar to post-colonial India as the centuries-old
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traditions. Paradoxically, it was that newly urbanized rich world of Malgudi, and not the
traditional world that Raju’s mother and uncle inhabit, that fosterd the renaissance of art by
encouraging Rosie to express herself as an artist and classical dancer. The same Rosie who
was shunned as a devadasi by those who swore by their traditional norms (people like
Raju’s mother and uncle), was reborn Nalini, the respected classical dancer, because of the
emergence of an affluent and cosmopolitan class of people in Malgudi. Yet it was the
villagers of Mangal who showed the quintessentially Indian emotional response—the
spontaneous, implicit, unquestioning faith in a person perceived to be a holy man. The holy
man or ascetic was an integral part of traditional Indian society.

In the novel The Guide, Narayan seemed to be particularly fascinated by the ubiquitous
presence of swamis and saints, gurus and guides, charlatans and philistines, cobras and
concubines in India’s colourful society. With his characteristic humour he was able to
capture the spectrum of Indian life, with its superstitions and hypocrisies, its beliefs and
follies, its intricacies and vitalities, its rigidities and flexibilities. The action of the novel
proceeded in two distinct streams, presenting two different aspects of Indian culture.
Malgudi, a miniature of India, presented the rich traditions of classical dances by Rosie-
Nalini and the breath-taking paintings that embellish Marco’s The Cultural History of
South India. Mangal, the neighbour town village presented the spiritual dimension of
Indian culture, presented through Raju’s growth into a celebrated Swami. While Marco’s
aspiration sought their fulfilment in unearthing the buried treasures of India’s rich cultural
past, Rosie’s longing sought satisfaction in the creative channels of classical dancing in the
midst of an ever-present, live audience. Raju was all the time dreaming of an elusive future
till a time came when he was irrevocably committed to a definite future by undertaking a
fast in the hope of appeasing the rain-god.

Many of the structural devices and thematic concerns of the Hindu epics and puranas
are displayed in The Guide. In having a rogue as the hero, there is an element of the folk
tale also. Another indigenous pattern working through the novel is the linear progression or
varnasrama, or the Hindu belief in the four stages of the ideal life-student, house holder,
recluse and ascetic (brahmacharya, garhasthya, vanaprastha and sansyasa). This pattern,
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too, is parodied. Raju is successively a ‘student’ preparing for life in the platform vendor
and Railway Raju phases, a ‘house holder’ and man of affairs in his illegal union with
Rosie and as her corrupt business manager, a ‘recluse’ during his days in prison, and an
‘ascetic’ in his role as the fake guru. Raju’s fasting for the rain, the denouement in the
novel, is a travesty, reminiscent of the story of the sage-king Bhagirath who conducted
severe penance to bring down the goddess Ganga. This story is found in both the
Ramayana and the Mahapurana . The entire ritual by Raju may or may not have brought
rain, but it did help bring peace to the strife-torn Mangal and turn the community back to
religion. Thus The Guide can be triumphantly called a Hindu novel.

Socially the novel brought out the transition in India from an old-fashioned way of life
to a modern and urbanized one, and the character groupings roughly corresponded to these
two areas. Raju’s parents and uncle, and the old pyol school master represented tradition,
orthodoxy, hierarchy and conservative values. The peripheral character who was crucial to
the progress of the plot was Velan. His personality was not drawn in detail, nor was it
required. Velan would not be a credible character in a western setting. Velan was the sole
person responsible for the final plight of Raju. But Velan’s contribution was not merely to
oppress Raju. It was he who built Raju up into a ‘saint,’ and it was Velan’s unshakable
faith that finally enabled Raju to rise above himself. “Velan is a catalyst for Raju’s
apotheosis”

The characters in The Guide can be reduced to symbolic meanings. Velan represents the
psychological reality of the rural ethos. He is the spiritual guide of Raju, the professional
guide. Raju remains professional even in his mask. Raju, Velan and Rosie are the central
characters in the novel. Their implicative or metaphoric roles in the novel make a mythic
triangle which is a triangle with three points, one indicating the height of spiritual-cum-
moral triumph. The point indicating the low, the deep is represented by Rosie, and the
vertical one is represented by Velan. The third point at the level, which seems to be vertical
but is not obviously so, represents Raju. The first two points act upon this one so that the
whole triangle becomes mythical—man facing two opposite-worlds; facing always with
very little chance of a smooth and painless arrival here or there.
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In Hindu thought, a mental or physical act is called Karma. Karma is the sum-total of
a man’s past actions, in the present and the previous lives, which determines his life now.
One can achieve liberation only through spiritual self-realization. In Hindu philosophy
names of individuals do not matter. One’s individuality and character are determined by
his actions. The names of central characters in The Guide are not individualistic. They are
vague and impersonal. The reader is never told either Raju’s or Marco’s real name. Raju’s
spiritual triumph at the end of the novel is a reaffirmation of the satwic potential that is
innate in every individual. The same critical frame work can be applied to Rosie’s
character also.

The Guide ended in a way which is very typical of an Indian story. In a typical Indian
story, the main character narrated his own story to an acquaintance overnight and by the
time he concluded, the cock crowed. In this traditional way of story-telling, the story-teller,
Raju, held the listener. Thus Narayan achieved a supreme triumph through this narration.
To quote C. D. Narasimhaiah from his essay, R. K. Narayan’s ‘The Guide’, “It is not
surprising when we know that at all times Narayan writes not merely with an intense social
awareness of his own age but with the past of India in his bones. Thanks to him our social
sympathies are broadened and our moral being considerably heightened”.

When we come to the end of the novel he is threatened with so many unanswered
questions. Is Raju a real saint or is he a fake? This question had puzzled most readers of
the novel ever since its publication. The question is not so much whether Raju is a willing
saint or not because, like all of us, everyone within the novel notices Raju’s reluctance,
even his unfitness for gurudom. But does that really change who or what he ends up
becoming? So what we have here is a real problem, one that leads us to the crux of
Narayan’s artistry and to his relationship to Indian modernity. It was the belief of village
people of Mangal that it would rain and thus put an end to the drought if a true sanyasi did
genuine fasting for twelve days. That was a belief prevalent among the Hindus as such in
India, whether the people had direct experience of the miracle or not, it did not lessen their
faith in it. Narayan only wanted to portray those beliefs and rites prevailed among his
people. He did not want to glorify or condemn such beliefs. There is no clear hint at the
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end of the novel whether it rained. Rather one has to doubt it based on the description of
the topography.

Though Raju was a fake guru, on whom gurudom had been thrust, he seemed to grow
in stature to fit its mantle. He was willing to sacrifice his life. Since the villagers believed
that his fasting would bring rain he had no other alternative than continuing the fast to the
twelfth day. Raju understood that he could not correct the villagers’ misconception about
him. They considered him as a true sanyasi and hence his genuine fast would bring rain.
Thus Raju was trapped. He had no existence other than a sanyasi’s. He could have saved
himself as the doctors and Velan requested him to stop fasting. But once he stopped fasting
what would the hundreds of people assembled there think about him? Wouldn’t it be a
betrayal of faith laid on him by the people? So he might have thought that it was better and
nobler to die a martyr than live an ignoble life, despised by others. Narayan wanted to tell
the readers that there are many Rajus or fake sanyasis in our society. Despite being so
aware of the dangers of shamming such a serious thing as being a guru, Narayan actually
came out in favour of the institution in the end. He was unable to show the villagers
rejecting Raju, or Velan abusing and unmasking him. He did not want the novel to be a
propaganda tract against superstitious villagers and unscrupulous charlatans. “The Guide is
far from being an expose of phony god men exploiting the gullible masses.

R. K. Narayan did not endorse tradition in a loud or sententious manner. He did not
reject or condemn it but rather created a space for that. He pointed out that in the struggle
between tradition and modernity, tradition won though in a reluctant manner. Raju’s
penance and his ultimate sacrifice were real no matter how painfully flawed his motives
might have been earlier or how ineffectual their outcome. There was ample textual
evidence to suggest that a gradual but sure alteration in Raju’s inner being did take place.
Colonialism to the Malgudians is an external phenomenon. They therefore do not
challenge it linguistically or otherwise. Within their small world, they feel secure and make
a restricted use of English, which satisfies their needs.
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The Indian novelist does not have to discover his past. If anything his past hangs
heavily on him. Born in one of the most ancient civilizations, which could not be destroyed
by colonizers, the Indian novelist is an heir to hoary past. As examined earlier the Hindu
ethos has suffered little dislocation through colonial impact, for no foreign invader could
wipe out the Indian tradition completely. Whenever it was attacked, it tried to absorb
innumerable elements from the invading culture. The integration of the foreign elements
into Indian tradition is done by ‘legitimation’ of change into something old. It is built in
adaptive mechanism for accepting change that has helped India absorb the shocks of
invading cultures. Indian traditionalists in fact try to find evidence in their sacred texts of
scientific inventions and discovers. Discovering nuclear fission and fusion in the Vedas,
for example, is one such effort. By finding evidence in the old texts, the Indian
traditionalists give a ‘local habitation and name’ to new ideas which thus become
acceptable to the whole society.

If we analyse history of some literature we find that the novel develops centering
itself on an urban oriented civilization. In Assam a specific urban society came to be built
only after independence. The condition of the few existing towns was improved and the
urban environment spread. The establishment of industries and the increase of trade and
commerce turned the attention of the people towards the town. The number of educated
middle class increased due to the spread of education. With the development of the urban
way of life individuality began to assert itself and thus the requisite atmosphere was
created for the Assamese novel. On the other hand the hardships experienced by people
due to economic crisis made them realistic. The freedom which they attained after a long
struggle was confined a political life alone and there was no basic change in the capitalistic
system of society. The condition of the people became even more miserable than before.
The socio-economic evils generated by the war seriously affected the social life. A number
of problems arose immediately after independence and economic condition of the people
further down-warded. Various problems arising from economic inequality and social
injustice made people conscious of the existing social condition. This consciousness has
helped in the growth of social novel. In this context we may refer about eminent Assamese
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critic, Sailen Bharali’s comment, “The growths of towns, the development of trade and
commerce and emergence of educated middle class have contributed to its popularity. The
output has increased, the scope and technique have developed and new tendencies have
been revealed. With the attainment of independence new thoughts and ideas came in.”6 the
post colonial Assamese novel with innovations in form and theme has witnessed a deep
and extensive development.

A pictorial depiction of common man, a sympathetic view towards rural life and efforts
to establish socialistic realism-these appear to be the vital subject matter of the post
colonial Assamese novels. The efforts to bring out the latent truth from man’s mind and to
analyse the complex human personalities have led to interesting experiments in technique
and character-study. The new trend of novel with social problems was initiated by Birinchi
Kumar Barua. Based on the conflict between the highest and the lowest class of society
and composed against the background of rural life Birinchi Kumar Barua’s Jiwanar Batat
is the first and the most successful product of post colonial Assamese novel. In this novel,
for the first time, Birinchi Kumar Barua coming out of the old romantic sagas represents a
realistic and psychoanalytic theme. He turns his eyes to those who are neglected by society
and tries to assess their unique social value. The novel, noted for its illuminating character
study in rural background, lucid expression, realistic situation and humanistic appeal
reveals all the features of Assamese social life. After Birinchi Kumar Barua other
Assamese novelists also attempted to reflect various problems of the society in their
novels.

R. K. Narayan is the genial, smiling face of the post colonialism. Without exhibiting the
anger, resentment, or assertive self-consciousness of cultural rationalism, he is still a
representative postcolonial novelist in another way. He boldly exploits and exhausts the
indigenous elements. Though Narayan writes very good English and is perfectly at ease
with his medium, his basic Indianness is manifest at every turn through his use of themes,
vocabulary, proverbs, personae, place and last but least, use of myths which imparts an
additional dimension to his novels.
6
Bharali, Sailen, The article The Modern Assamese Novel