R. K. Narayan Totally Explained

Everything about R K Narayan totally explained

R. K. Narayan (October 10, 1906 - May 13 2001), born Rasipuram Krishnaswami Ayyar Narayanaswami,(Tamil: ராசிபுரம் கிருஷ்ணசுவாமி அய்யர் நாராயணசுவாமி ) (Kannada: ಆರ್.ಕೆ.ನಾರಯಣ್) is among the best known and most widely read Indian novelists writing in English.
Most of Narayan's work, starting with his first novel Swami and Friends (1935), captures many Indian traits while retaining a unique identity of its own. He was sometimes compared to the American writer William Faulkner, whose novels were also grounded in a compassionate humanism and celebrated the humour and energy of ordinary life.
Narayan lived till age of ninety-four, writing for more than fifty years, and publishing until he was eighty seven. He wrote fourteen novels, five volumes of short stories, a number of travelogues and collections of non-fiction, condensed versions of Indian epics in English, and the memoir My Days.

Biography

Birth

R. K. Narayan was born in Madras (now called Chennai), India on October 10, 1906. His father, Rasipuram Venkatarama Krishnaswami Iyer, was a provincial head-master. He was the third of eight surviving children and an elder brother to popular Indian cartoonist R K Laxman. His full name was Rasipuram Krishnaswami Ayyar Narayanaswami.

Childhood

Narayan's mother, Gnanambal, was quite ill after his birth and enlisted a wet nurse to feed her young son. When she became pregnant again, the two-year-old Narayan was sent to Madras to live with his maternal grandmother, Parvathi, who was called "Ammani." He lived with her and one of his uncles, T. N. Seshachalam, until he was a teenager. He only spent a few weeks each summer visiting his parents and siblings. Narayan grew up speaking Tamil and learned English at school.

Education

After completing eight years of education at the Lutheran Mission School near his grandmother's house in Madras, he studied for a short time at the CRC High School. When his father was appointed headmaster of the Maharaja's High School in Mysore, Narayan moved back in with his parents. To his father's consternation, Narayan was an indifferent student and after graduating from high school, he failed the college entrance exam in English because he found the primary textbook to be too boring to read. He took the exam again a year later and eventually obtained his bachelor's degree from the University of Mysore.
One of the few Indian-English writers who spent nearly all his time in India, he went abroad to the United States in 1956 at the invitation of the Rockefeller Foundation. Narayan's first published work was the review of a book titled Development of Maritime Laws of 17th-Century England. Sandeep Sharma of Himachal Pradesh University, in his M.Phil dissertation entitled : "The Guide and The Vendor of Sweets: A Structural Study" (2006), has researched on the oedipal as well as homosocial contents in Narayan's narrative.
There is nevertheless a respectable body of criticism, some of the best of which is listed below.

AFZAL-KHAN, Fawsia, Cultural Imperialism and the Indo-English Novel: Genre and Ideology in R. K. Narayan, Anita Desai, Kamala Markandaya, and Salman Rushdie (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993).

BEATINA, Mary, Narayan: A Study in Transcendence (New York, Washington, D.C./Baltimore, Bern, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Brussels, Vienna, & Oxford: Peter Lang Publishing, 1994 [Studiesof World Literature in English, vol. 3]).

BLOOM, Harold, R. K. Narayan (New York: Chelsea House Publishing, 1994 [ModernCritical Views Series 2]).

GOYAL, Bhagwat S., ed., R. K. Narayan’s India: Myth and Reality (Lahore: South Asia Books, 1993).

HARIPRASANNA, A., The World of Malgudi: A Study of R. K. Narayan’s Novels (Lahore: South Asia Books, 1997).

JHA, Ramā, Gandhian Thought and Indo-anglian novelists: Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, R. K. Narayan, & Bhabani Bhattacharya (Delhi: Chanakya Publications, 1983).

KAIN, Geoffrey, ed., R. K. Narayan: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1998).

LENNARD, John, ‘R. K. Narayan’, in Jay Parini, ed., World Writers in English (2 vols, New York & London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2004), II.385–407.

MISHRA, Pankaj, ‘The Great Narayan’, in New York Review of Books, 22 February 2001 (External Link

) .

POUSSE, Michel, R. K. Narayan: A Painter of Modern India (New York, Washington, D.C./Baltimore, Bern, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Brussels, Vienna, & Oxford: Peter Lang Publishing, 1995 [Studiesof World Literature in English, vol. 4]).

PRASAD, V. V. N. Rajendra, Five Indian Novelists: B. Rajan, Raja Rao, R. K. Narayan, Arun Joshi, Anita Desai (Lahore: South Asia Books, 1997).

WALSH, William, R. K. Narayan (London: The British Council/Longman, 1971 [Writers& their Work])

WALSH, William, R. K. Narayan: A Critical Appreciation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

Bibliography

Novels

Swami and Friends (1935)

The Bachelor of Arts (1937)

The Dark Room (1938)

The English Teacher (1945)

Mr. Sampath - The Printer of Malgudi (1949)

The Financial Expert (1952)

Waiting for the Mahatma (1955)

The Guide (1958)

The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1961)

The Vendor of Sweets (1967)

The Painter of Signs (1976)

A Tiger for Malgudi (1983)

Talkative Man (1986)

The World of Nagaraj (1990)

A Grandmother's Tale (1994)

Collections

The World of Malgudi (2000)

Short Story Collections

An asterisk indicates a collection published only in India.

Dodu and Other Stories (1943)*

Cyclone and Other Stories (1945)*

An Astrologer's Day and Other Short Stories (1947)

Lawley Road and Other Stories (1956)*

A Horse and Two Goats (1970)

Malgudi Days (1982)

Under the Banyan Tree and Other Stories (1985)

The Grandmother's Tale and Selected Stories (1993)

The Watchman

Fruition at Forty

Indian Thought(1941)

Non-Fiction

Next Sunday (1960)

My Dateless Diary (1964)

My Days (1974)

The Emerald Route (1980)

A Writer's Nightmare (1988)

Like The Sun

Mythology

Gods, Demons and Others (1965)

The Ramayana (1972)

The Mahabharata (1972)

TV and Movie Adaptations

The Guide was made into a film in both English and Hindi by Dev Anand. It was commercially a most successful venture, but Narayan wasn't happy with the screen adaptation of his novel. His novel Mr. Sampath was made into a film by S.S. Vasan of Gemini Films. Another novel, The Financial Expert was made into the Kannada movie Banker Margayya. Swami and Friends, The Vendor of Sweets and some of Narayan's short stories were adapted by the late actor-director Shankar Nag into a television series, Malgudi Days. It was shot in the village of Agumbe in Karnataka. This village served as the backdrop for Malgudi, complete with a statue of the British personage. It was serialised and telecast on Doordarshan, the Indian National Television network.

Further Information

Get more info on 'R K Narayan'.

External Link Exchanges

Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:

<a href="http://r__k__narayan.totallyexplained.com">R. K. Narayan Totally Explained</a>

Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned.