R. K. Narayan Biography: Rasipuram Krishnaswami Iyer Narayanaswami (RK Narayan) was a well-known Indian author renowned for his fictional South Indian community of Malgudi and his body of work. Along with Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao, he was one of the most prominent and well-known authors of early Indian literature composed in English.
Their greatest accomplishment of Narayan was making India accessible to the rest of the world through his writing and eloquent literature. The primary focus of Narayan’s biography is his friendship with Graham Greene. He was Narayan’s teacher and personal friend. He was instrumental in identifying and acquiring publishers for the first four books by Narayan.
R. K. Narayan Biography
Early Years
Narayan was born in 1906 to a typical Hindu family in Madras (now renamed and known as Chennai, Tamil Nadu), British India. He was the second son of his parents’ eight children; his younger brother Ramachandran was an editor at Gemini Studios, and his youngest brother Laxman was an accomplished cartoonist.
Narayan spent his formative years in Madras under the supervision of his grandmother and a maternal uncle, joining his parents primarily only during school breaks. During that period, India, a colony held by the British since 1857, was still regarded as the most significant part of the empire.
Education
RK Narayan attended more schools than the average student in Madras while residing with his grandmother, with the Lutheran Mission School in Purasawalkam, C.R.C. High School, and Christian College High School serving as his primary schools. Narayan was an avid and enthusiastic reader who spent his childhood reading Dickens, Wodehouse, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Thomas Hardy.
After graduating from high school, Narayan failed the university entrance examination, but was able to spend a year at home reading and writing. In 1926, he passed the final examination and enrolled at Maharaja College of Mysore.
RK Narayan was always devoted to literature whenever he had the opportunity.
Career
R K Narayan was a populist author. His writing style was straightforward, easily understood by all, and infused with a natural sense of humour. His writings would centre on common individuals and their mundane existence.
The celebrated author’s writing technique was such that readers could immediately relate to his works. Critics would consider Narayan to be the Indian Chekhov due to his writings’ simplicity, delicate beauty, and humour in tragic situations.
While some would compare Narayan’s writing style to that of William Faulkner because both of their works captured the hilarity and vitality of everyday life while displaying compassionate humanism, others would not.
Most of Narayan’s stories took place in and around the fictional town of Malgudi, which was first introduced in “Swami and Friends.” His fictional town represented reality, thereby evoking the humour and vitality of everyday life.
The narratives of Narayan emphasise social context and provide a sense of his characters’ commonplace lives. “Swami and Friends”, “The Bachelor of Arts”, “The English Teacher”, “The Financial Expert”, which is considered one of the most original works, “Guide”, the Sahitya Academy winner, “The Dark Room”, his evergreen collection of short stories “Malgudi Days”, “Mr Sampath, “Waiting for the Mahatma”, “Next Sunday”, “My Dateless Diary”, “The Man-Eater of Malgudi”, “Gods, Demons
Awards and Accolades
The English Teacher (1945), Waiting for the Mahatma (1955), The Guide (1958), The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1961), The Vendor of Sweets (1967), and A Tiger for Malgudi (1983) were among the finest of RK Narayan’s 34 novels.
His 1958 novel The Guide earned him the most prestigious National Prize of the Indian Literary Academy, his nation’s highest award. In addition to the AC Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature, the Padma Vibhushan and the Padma Bhushan, India’s second and third highest civilian awards, and the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship, the highest honour of India’s national academy of letters, Narayan received numerous other awards and honours. Additionally, nominated for the Rajya Sabha, the upper chamber of the Indian parliament.
Personal Life
In 1933, Narayan fell in love with Rajam, a 15-year-old girl he encountered in Coimbatore while on vacation with his sister. Narayan began working as the first Brahmin Iyer for The Justice, a Madras-based newspaper dedicated to the rights of Non-Brahmins, which caused a sensation. The paper provided him with valuable contacts and a fresh perspective on the surrounding issues.
