R k narayan the guide 1958

R K Narayan The Guide Born Kasipuram Krishnaswami in in the Tamil-speaking city of Madras in southern India R K Narayan spent most of his life in Mysore City where Kannada is the dominant language Though uent in both languages he chose to write in English the language in which he had been educated An acknowledged master his distinguished writing career spanned seven decades of the th century from Swami and Friends to The Grandmother ? s Tale with many works translated to fourteen languages A famous writer and friend Graham Greene suggested the title of his ?rst novel and facilitated its publication in England Narayan resist being called ??modern ? His prose is simple and his storytelling direct A young man he fell in love with Rajam a young woman and had their marriage arranged An astrologer predicted doom for their match but Narayan paid another astrologer to give a favourable view Five years after Rajam died of typhoid fever and left him heartbroken His devotion to her is depicted in the partly autobiographical novel The English Teacher He is devoted to their only child and daughter Hema His essays reveal a keen interest in contemporary events Next Sunday and Reluctant Guru contains some of his best collection of essays and the best among them in A Writer ? s Nightmare Waiting for the Mahatma is about Ghandi Swami and Friends is a satire of his British ruled education at a Christian mission school where teachers can freely ridicule Hindu gods He dismissed the British from his ?ctional world as he reacted to the ? British Raj ? with comments in the New York Times article entitled ?? When India Was a Colony The India of his writings is just the India a land rich and complex worth exploring Of most Indian writers Narayan is said to be the most Indian staying close to home most of his life His ?ctions are set in the ?ctional world of Malgudi partly based in Mysore but with its own characteristics His settings has been compared to Thomas Hardy ? s Wessex or William Faulkner ? s Yoknapatawpha County but Narayan says he simply invented a town ?t for his stories The place is a typical small South Indian city big enough to have a variety of petty industries and variety of characters but small enough for people to know each other His ?rst three Malgudi novels were autobiographically based The Dark Room in which he tried to explore the plight of a woman trapped an unhappy marriage was considered a failure so he returned to portraits of women struggling for independence as in The Guide and The Painter of Signs Narayan has been criticized for relegating women to marginalized stereotyped roles Like Tagore Narayan was fascinated by women who are creative individualistic rebellious and who rejected traditional restrictions and social roles CNarayan ? s main characters are men imaginative but unsophisticated impulsive excitable easily in uenced and ultimately self-destructive Example is

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