by June Gaur
Brand Mysore is set to get a fillip with the restoration of R.K. Narayan’s Yadavagiri bungalow opening up exciting possibilities not just for tourism but also for scholarship, part of the city’s raison d’ etre. Ironically, this comes at a time when Mysureans are locked in a battle to save Chamundi Hill, foremost among “the really worthwhile things” in the city as listed by R.K. Narayan (RKN).
One Vijayadashami, prodded by his grandmother, RKN pulled out a brand new notebook and wrote down the first sentence about his town. ‘It was a Monday and the train had just arrived at Malgudi station.’ India’s best-known fictional town was born.
From this home in Lakshmipuram, he sallied forth every day without fail into “the loved and shabby streets” (Graham Greene) of Malgudi (Mysore). The city of talkers yielded rich material for his characters. His destination was the town centre at K.R. Circle and Srinivasa Stores, from where he got a special kind of lavanga without which he couldn’t write, and M. Krishnaswamy & Sons on Sayyaji Rao Road, who supplied him with the tools of his craft. He made several stops along the way, antennae on the alert for stories. There was always time for stimulating conversation with the people he met. Indeed, as he notes in his 1974 memoir, My Days, many pressing issues of the day, “were settled on the promenades of Mysore.”
A backbencher at the Maharaja’s College from where he graduated, Narayan honed his writing skills and powers of observation working as a stringer for a Madras newspaper, The Justice. The joint family he lived in shored him up financially. When he decided he wanted to be a full-time writer of fiction in English, Narayan knew he was opting for a vocation that had not been heard of in India. In the 1930s, there was no literary tradition he could fall back on; no publisher or audience waiting to receive his first novel, Swami and Friends.
For years the manuscript sat on various publishers’ desks in England. A despondent Narayan gave up hope of ever finding a home for his “ugly orphan” as he called it. Yet somebody other than his grandmother believed in him. That was Kittu Purna, a friend from Mysore studying at Exeter College, Oxford. Purna disregarded Narayan’s entreaty that he “weight the manuscript with a stone and drown it in the Thames.” He did go to London however, and, with a phenomenal heave of the imagination, landed the manuscript, not in the Thames but at the door of one of England’s great writers: Graham Greene. Charmed out of his skin by the sheer theatre of Narayan’s little provincial town and its delightful people, Greene saw to it that Swami and Friends was published in England.
A series of wonderful novels, 14 to be exact, and scores of Narayan’s short stories written over a period of 60 years, are set in Malgudi. For many, the town, nestling somewhere between the forested Mempi Hills and the Sarayu River, is the real hero in his fiction. In its creator’s lifetime, speculation about Malgudi’s exact location fuelled an industry of research and never failed to amuse him. A New York researcher even went so far as to compile a map of Malgudi, a cartographic fiction of course, which pleased the author and was published in his 1981 collection, Malgudi Days.
Did Mysore inspire Malgudi? Most of Narayan’s contemporaries, among them Dr. M.N. Srinivas and H.Y. Sharada Prasad, thought so. Ramchandra Guha thinks it’s the town of Nanjangud while former ambassador A. Madhavan sees typical Mysore signposts of the 1960s in the Boardless Hotel, a popular eating joint of those times, and the ubiquitous jutkas, then the undisputed kings of the road.
While the exercise of matching up Malgudi with Mysore continues to draw the nerds, RKN himself was always non-committal on the subject. Though he did take a BBC crew around Mysore to familiar landmarks such as the Chamarajapuram Railway Station, where his story apparently began, he insisted that Malgudi existed only in his imagination and, therefore, he was free from the constraints that chronicling an actual place would impose. “I wanted to be able to put in whatever I liked and wherever I liked – a little street or school or a temple or a bungalow or even a slum, a railway line, at any spot, a minor despot in a little world. …..I began to be fascinated by its possibilities; its river, market-place, and the far-off mountain roads and forests.”
Despite the ambivalence here, there can be little doubt that many of RKN’s memorable characters were inspired by the real life people he met in Mysore. Syd Harrex, the Australian poet and Narayan scholar, once told me he’d met Cheluva Iyengar, undoubtedly the model for Mr. Sampath, at the writer’s Yadavagiri house for an interview recorded in 1972. Syd recalled that RKN had gifted Cheluva Iyengar a copy of Mr. Sampath – the Printer of Malgudi and had inscribed it so – ‘To Sampath the original.’
Cut to the present and the mammoth task confronting the authorities with regard to converting RKN’s home in Yadavagiri into a fitting memorial for the writer. Ten years ago, when the Sahitya Akademi held a seminar in Mysore to mark Narayan’s birth centenary, scholars visited this intriguing double-storied, cream-coloured house. In the semi-circular first floor study with its eight windows and criss-cross grills, they lingered to let imagination take wing, picturing the bird-like figure of the writer hard at work spinning the Malgudi magic that brings the world to Mysore’s doorstep.
The recent centenary celebrations have reinforced Mysore’s reputation as a University town. No doubt the decision to involve the University in establishing a Research Centre for archival and scholarly materials pertaining to R.K. Narayan will also involve Dhvanyaloka, the Centre for Literature and the Arts set up by the late Prof. C.D. Narasimhaiah (CDN). R.K. Narayan, scholars from India and around the world have always homed onto Dhvanyaloka where Prof. CDN guided countless numbers painstakingly through their research. The tradition has continued with CDN’s family, all English teachers, and CDN’s pupils from the University of Mysore who pioneered research into Indian Writing in English, having picked up the baton.
Among the resources which should be available here are T.S. Satyan’s priceless photographs of the writer, including one of him playing cricket in the compound of his Lakshmipuram house. A Trust run by Satyan’s family now takes care of all his work. However, one hurdle which will somehow have to be circumvented is the fact that all the writer’s manuscripts are with the Boston University Library, preserved in air-conditioned lockers. Only recently, in an expression of goodwill, the US has returned precious artefacts to India. Surely, Boston University can be persuaded to part with at least a fraction of the Malgudi man’s work from their archives. And hopefully, we’ll be able to take good care of this gift.
However, Mysureans looking to perpetuate RKN’s legacy please be a
source: http://www.starofmysore.com / Star of Mysore / Home> Feature Articles / July 13th, 2016
