Word: narayan
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...first term at Oxford, my father wrote and asked me to send him books by R.K. Narayan. The name was new to me. My father was a journalist. He also wrote stories, in English, about our rural Trinidad Indian community; and he was always on the lookout for Indian writers in whose work he might find encouragement. Narayan, writing in English about small people in a small south Indian town, would have been especially interesting for my father. I went to Blackwell's, the Oxford bookseller, and in the secondhand section found three Narayan titles. One was The Bachelor...
...know that opening by heart, and for many years allowed it to play in my head when I was trying to summon up a new book, hoping that what would come to me would be as easy and direct and ironical, as visual and full of movement. Narayan has always struck me as a natural writer, someone who overcomes difficulties by not seeing that they exist; and perhaps it never occurred to him that the way he used English to describe provincial Indian life was magical...
...languages have their own heritage, and English (forgetting American for the moment) cannot easily escape its associations with English history, English manners, Shakespeare, Dickens, the Bible. Narayan cleansed his English, so to speak, of all these associations, cleansed it of everything but irony, and applied it to his own little India. His people can eat off leaves on a floor in a slum tenement, hang their upper-cloths on a coat stand, do all that in correct English, and there is no strangeness, no false comedy, no distance...
...merit and his charm that he wrote from deep within his community. There is, or used to be, a kind of Indian writer who used many italics and, for the excitement, had a glossary of perfectly simple local words at the back of his book. Narayan never did that. He explains little or nothing; he takes everything about his people and their little town for granted; there is no distance between the writer and his material. It is what still distinguishes him from most Indian writers. It is a subtle point, this question of the writer's distance; but what...
...Narayan waited long for proper recognition. He was middle-aged when he began to travel outside India. In 1961 (when, ironically, he published an uninspired book) he was in London, at the end of some kind of foreign tour. A friend in the BBC Indian Service, knowing of my admiration for Narayan, quite unexpectedly brought him one evening to my flat in South London...