India Read Free Page B

prepare me for the distress of India. As a writer he had succeeded almost too well. His comedies were of the sort that requires a restricted social setting with well-defined rules; and he was so direct, his touch so light, that, though he wrote in English of Indian manners, he had succeeded in making those exotic manners quite ordinary. The small town he had staked out as his fictional territory was, I knew, a creation of art and therefore to some extent artificial, a simplification of reality. But the reality was cruel and overwhelming. In the books his India had seemed accessible; in India it remained hidden. To get down to Narayan’s world, to perceive the order and continuity he saw in the dereliction and smallness of India, to enter into his ironic acceptance and relish his comedy, was to ignore too much of what could be seen, to shed too much of myself: my sense of history, and even the simplest ideas of human possibility. I did not lose my admiration for Narayan; but I felt that his comedy and irony were not quite whatthey had appeared to be, were part of a Hindu response to the world, a response I could no longer share. And it has since become clear to me – especially on this last visit, during a slow rereading of Narayan’s 1949 novel,
Mr Sampath –
that, for all their delight in human oddity, Narayan’s novels are less the purely social comedies I had once taken them to be than religious books, at times religious fables, and intensely Hindu.
    Srinivas, the hero of
Mr Sampath
, is a contemplative idler. He has tried many jobs – agriculture, a bank, teaching, the law: the jobs of pre-Independence India: the year is 1938 – and rejected all. He stays in his room in the family house – the house of the Indian extended family – and worries about the passing of time. Srinivas’s elder brother, a lawyer, looks after the house, and that means he looks after Srinivas and Srinivas’s wife and son. The fact that Srinivas has a family is as much a surprise as Srinivas’s age: he is thirty-seven.
    One day Srinivas is reading the
Upanishads
in his room. His elder brother comes in and says, ‘What exactly is it that you wish to do in life?’ Srinivas replies: ‘Don’t you see? There are ten principal
Upanishads
. I should like to complete the series. This is the third.’ But Srinivas takes the hint. He decides to go to the town of Malgudi and set up a weekly paper. In Malgudi he lives in a squalid rented room in a crowded lane, bathes at a communal water tap, and finds an office for his paper in a garret
    Srinivas is now in the world, with new responsibilities and new relationships – his landlord, his printer, his wife (‘he himself wondered that he had observed so little of her in their years of married life’) – but he sees more and more clearly the perfection of nondoing. ‘While he thundered against municipal or social shortcomings a voice went on asking: “Life and the world and all this is passing – why bother about anything? The perfect and the imperfect are all the same. Why really bother?’ ”
    His speculations seem idle, and are presented as half comic; but they push him deeper into quietism. From his little room one day hehears the cry of a woman selling vegetables in the lane. Wondering first about her and her customers, and then about the ‘great human forces’ that meet or clash every day, Srinivas has an intimation of the ‘multitudinousness and vastness of the whole picture of life’, and is dazzled. God, he thinks, is to be perceived in that ‘total picture’; and later, in that total picture, he also perceives a wonderful balance. ‘If only one could get a comprehensive view of all humanity, one would get a correct view of the world: things being neither particularly wrong nor right, but just balancing themselves.’ There is really no need to interfere, to do anything. And from this Srinivas moves easily, after a tiff with his wife one day, to a fuller comprehension of