Anthony Arul Valan getting RK Narayan wrong

Antony Arul Valan is a visiting assistant professor, Department of English at Ashoka University which awarded him a PhD in 2018. Sadly this does not mean he knows anything about English literature because he 'studies the representations of caste in regional and English-language writing'.

Since no English speaking country has the Indian caste system, there is no literature in English on this topic. True, there's a book called 'Untouchable' by Mulk Raj Anand. But he was a shitty writer and his book has no literary merit. 

 The current focus of Valan's work 'is on non-Brahmin characters in fiction between 1870 and 1940, situated in regions within and around modern-day Tamil Nadu.

Such characters may exist in Tamil literature. They dont exist in English literature- even books produced by Indians in English. Consider the question of decriminalization of the Thevar caste (which was opposed by the wealth Justice Party grandees as well as the Dalit community). It finds no expression in books like Venkatramani's  'Murugan the tiller' (1927) and 'Kandan the patriot' (1932). Why? Those who could read English books had no interest in the issue precisely because, unlike Gandhian or Socialist politics, it actually meant something. Indeed, even after Independence when the Thevars were decriminalized, there was the big Thevar/Dalit riot in Ramnad in1957. Indeed, this remains a live issue. Thevars are said to have been advanced by Jayalalitha. Now they are being courted by Stalin. Which political party will win over the Thevars by showing greater devotion to the shrine of Muthuramalinga Thevar- the deified Thevar leader who died in 1963. This is the stuff of real drama. Since English novels by Indians are boring, stupid and preachy, it is obvious that caste can't be properly examined in such 'literature'. 

What about Tamil novels? Do they accurately reflect things like Thevar/Dalit feuds? No. The thing is political dynamite. You are welcome to write about Brahmins being horrible and Dalits being victimized but since Brahmins don't harm Dalits or vice versa, there is little more that can be said. 

Valan says that he 'seeks to situate these texts within the anti-caste rhetoric of Iyothee Thass and Periyar E. V. Ramaswami'. 

Sadly, there are no such texts save such as were produced by the two authors mentioned. Thass had learnt a bit about Buddhism from Col. Olcott and came up with a ridiculous theory that Dalits had originally been Buddhist. It was so stupid, Dr. Ambedkar himself adopted it. Periyar was a bit of a crackpot but he had charisma. However, it was Annadurai & Kamaraj who represented the path forward. What was remarkable was the leading role taken by the film industry- in the first instance, Karunanidhit the great poet and playwright of the Dravidian movement, and then by talented actors like Sivaji Ganesan, MGR & Jayalalitha. This has been well enough reflected in film, but not in literature. 

Valan says 'The long-term agenda of this research is to contribute to a register of public language that would facilitate introspective dialogue within caste networks.' But the only way you can talk about caste in Tamil Nadu is in Tamil, not English. None Tamils simply don't know and don't care who or what a  Pallar or Maravar is. 


Valan writes in Outlook about how 'How R.K. Narayan’s Malgudi Normalises Caste Of Words' which is odd because the British rulers had normalised all sorts of words for caste long before Narayan was born. It was British policy which the Thevars were protesting.  Since RK wasn't a lawyer or a Pundit and appears to have been quite useless as a journalist, he couldn't contribute anything to the discourse on caste precisely because it was so important for administrative, judicial and political reasons. 

True, he supported the anti-Brahmin Justice party but he was aware that they had lost popularity because their Ministers, who were already rich, granted themselves a pay-rise during the Great Depression when even the King Emperor was tightening his belt. In any case, Narayan had zero clue about was the intricate hierarchies within even his own caste- forget about those at the bottom of the heap. That's why 'R.K. Narayan’s Malgudi' CAN'T 'embed caste hierarchies in everyday language rather than explicit ideology' because he simply didn't know the everyday language of the Courts and the Administration when it came to such questions. As for ideology, we can say Narayan was part and parcel of the Gandhian novel tradition and leave it at that. 

 Why? The guy really wasn't particularly smart. Unlike Venkatramani, he didn't come from a landowning family and he hadn't practiced law. All we can say about him is that he liked reading English books and then wrote some English books. They weren't very good but they were readable. Also, the were very effective in making a simple point- India is boring and shitty. Don't trouble yourself with its politics or sociology. Churchill had said, in 1931, that evil Brahmins planned to take over the country so as to oppress Muslims and Dalits. Well, that may be, but Brahmins are as stupid as shit. Take it from me- I'm one myself. Don't get your knickers in a twist about our machinations. 

Valan begins his article on a note of grandiloquent self-aggrandization- 

Every English teacher

is shit unless they are actually English or can speak and write English correctly? 

would recognise the pleasures, the guilt and the conflict that is the world of teaching literature in a university.

If you aren't fucking your students you have nothing to feel guilty about. But there is little pleasure to be got from teaching literature in a university. Why not teach farting in a public toilet instead?  

We are often carried away by the richness of poetry, be it when we are called upon to lecture about the elevated registers of Shakespeare

there are none such. 'Elevated register' means a formal, technical, or official style of language. One may say passages in Shakespeare are sublime. One can't say they read like official communiques. 

or when we nurse creative ambitions and write some of our own unreadable verses.

In which case we aren't carried away at all.  

We are shocked by our own stasis in class,

 Why not teach instead of just sitting in your chair frozen and unable to move? 

when eager ears await our interpretive moves

Will teechur say 'Hamlet is made from eggs and ham. Danish peepul is eating too much Hamlet- innit?'  

while our inner demons, nurtured by what is happening around us, are roused and raging.

The chap wants to beat up Brahmins. Sadly, some of those Haryanvi Brahmins are hefty fellows. Just close your eyes and think of Periyar. Eager ears can kindly go fuck themselves.  

We are usually remorseful as we make perfunctory remarks on grammatical infelicities

Why? Is it because what you really want to be doing is beating Brahmins the way Periyar intended?  

when we know pretty well we aren’t engaging with what the student is trying to do in that paper.

If you teach English, your job is to point out errors in grammar and spelling. However, by meditating constantly on Periyar, you can avoid doing your job. If the student has written 'Cat sat on Mat', you can engage with the student's evident zeal to exterminate Sanatan Dharma by farting loudly.  

We walk into class holding inner conflicts,

e.g. wanting to beat Brahmins but being afraid they might kick the shit out of you 

what to do when great art is created by artists who turn out to be terrible people,

Like Karunanidhi?  

or what is the purpose of all these fictional worlds we enter and leave at will when the city is suffocating on polluted air, when the country is plunging into sectarian distress and the world is headed into an algorithm that rewards solipsism and narcissism.

What is the purpose of teaching if you don't know your own subject and don't think it matters in the slightest? The point about well made 'fictional worlds' is that their authors can become very rich. That way they don't have to live in polluted cities. You can go somewhere with very few Muslims in which case there is little in the way of sectarian distress. Incidentally, the world can't head into an algorithm. It can enter a death spiral of solipsism and narcissism fuelled by incentive incompatible algorithms. It isn't difficult to write correct English. You just need to think a little before putting pen to paper. 

It is with such a contemporary and textured experience of teaching that R. K. Narayan introduces Krishna in his fourth novel The English Teacher.

Nonsense! The English Teacher compares his monotonous life to that of a cow. His job is to get his students through their exams. Nobody cares if they like or dislike the set texts.  

This is not to say that Krishna thinks about polluted Delhi in that 1945 novel, but that the world he inhabits, the world that Narayan conjures for us and we fondly co-habit with Krishna—Malgudi—does not simply remain a geographical literary canvas on which action occurs,

The setting could be anywhere. This is a story about bereavement and the comfort offered by Spiritualism.  

it is a place that impinges on its characters to such an extent that their concerns and lives are so wholly realised and contained within.

No. The location is wholly immaterial.  

Quite literally, in fact, Malgudi’s pollution infects Susila, Krishna’s wife.

We don't know that. Some people recover from typhoid. Others don't because there are complications.  

Susila uses a lavatory that hasn’t been cleaned in a while, falls sick with typhoid and passes away. Krishna then goes to Tayur, a neighbouring village, to meet with a medium who helps him communicate with his deceased wife. The novel ends with Krishna realising he can have a personal communication with Susila without the need of the medium, and within Malgudi.

or Madras or wherever he happens to be posted. Malgudi doesn't matter at all. 

This move away from and eventual return to Malgudi, a motif we see in almost all of Narayan’s works, should make us wonder what powers this imaginative edifice conceals in its construction.

None. Narayan may not have been particularly well read but he probably knew of the 'nostos' motif- i.e. the return of the protagonist- e.g. Odysseus to Ithaka.  

If Malgudi is a motif,

It is a topos. Nostos is a motif.  

rather than ask ‘what is Malgudi’, we may perhaps better understand it as a literary reality and ask ‘how is Malgudi built’.

We know Malgudi is a smallish South Indian town. That's all we need to know. As for how it is built, I suppose there are articles about its topography and how this overlaps with Mysore or some other such place.  

After all, with each Narayan novel or short story, we would see Malgudi through several iterations, repetitions, developments, changes and fractures.

No. Malgudi does change, rather slowly, over the decades but Narayan wasn't Balzac, he wasn't Proust.  He was a competent craftsman who attained some degree of psychological verisimilitude for his less sophisticated characters. 

But, if we were to ask how, we only have the language to look closely at—Malgudi remains a figment of imagination distilled in words strung together.

It is easy enough to relate it to specific parts of Mysore and its environs. But there's a scenes a faire quality to it.  

And this new idiom, a language so fluid that it opened the floodgates of literary expression away from the English metropole,

there were no floodgates. This was a bucket bath with warm water supplied by an old but fairly reliable geyser. As for floodgates, Vivekananda and Tagore had opened both. The world quickly tired of mystical India scolding the West for its crass materialism while passing around the begging bowl.  

is Narayan’s significant contribution to the world of letters.

He was and is easy to read. That means you can teach his shite to retards studying nonsense at Uni.  

But what is in that idiom that erected Malgudi into such an immediately recognisable Indian experience, a vision and way of life that related to the Indian subcontinent?

It is a South Indian experience- a boring, Brahminical, one pertaining to those whose IQ was too low to study a STEM subject.  If you don't study hard you will have to go into the Arts stream- i.e. will become stupider than a cow. Mind it!

Caste. Not caste as discrimination or hierarchy, i.e. as explicit casteist utterances, but as a willful forgetting of the everyday violence we perpetrate with language.

There is no such violence. We don't care what useless tossers say. We just hope they won't fart in our vicinity.  

Malgudi is first introduced to us in Swami and Friends, the 1935 novel

written in 1930. What gave it topicality was the passage of the Government of India Act. 

with which Narayan burst into the literary scene and generations now counting among the adults experienced as a television series.

It was shit.  

When I speak of caste and Swami and Friends I do not intend an identitarian mode of reading the novel.

You just speak of caste because you have caste on the brain.  

That is, I do not want us to narrow our focus on the protagonist as a Brahmin boy,

Brahmin-bandhu. Unless you practice priest-craft, you aren't a proper Brahmin.  

or take the discussion to how the story makes this small slice of caste society relate to all of society.

The Brits decided how different 'slices' of society would relate to each other.  RK never pretended he had any insight into the mind of the District Collector- never mind the Secretary of State for India. 

Instead, we could look at the novel and think along with it. When Swami reminds him of the atrocities of the Mughals and their destruction of Hindu temples,

Swami has a bit of get-up-and-go about him. He might do well in the Army or the police force.  

Rajam, one of Swami’s closest friends, says, ‘We Brahmins deserve that and more’.

This was the Gandhian line. Karma is a bitch. Bihar earthquake is punishment for untouchability, yadda yadda yadda.  

And follows it up stating that his father does not observe rituals.

You can always pay a big of money and do prayaschitham later on.  Religion is a service industry. 

While the publication year of the novel and Narayan’s own involvement in the non-Brahmin South India Liberal Federation’s mouthpiece The Justice sets Rajam’s rhetoric squarely within one anti-caste movement of the time,

Nope. The thing was Gandhian. The Justice party wanted more government jobs for non-Brahmins. Since they had the money, that's exactly what they got. Smart Iyers have always worked for rich Chettiars.  

we can’t help but wonder what literary yield this rare political mention has for the story.

It shows Swamy is more of a live wire than most of his peers. He is like 'Just William' in the Richmal Compton stories.  

Could it just be to add verisimilitude? A faintly registerable layer of acknowledgment over a politically sanitised novel about young boys, perhaps?

Why are they not depicted as eager for sodomy at the hands of Periyar? Was it because RK was an evil Manuvadi cunt? I suppose so.  

Let us look at another perplexing incident in the novel. Right about the middle of the novel, a seemingly unrelated episode begins the chapter titled ‘In Father’s Presence’. Swami and his two friends, Rajam and Mani, are sitting on a culvert when they see a bullock cart. They obstruct its path, and command the cart driver to stop.

Why? They are pretending to be police men- i.e. brutish thugs without any sense of decency or compassion.  

The driver is a little village boy, named Karuppan, younger than Swami. Rajam calls him a fool and screams at him. Swami threatens to arrest the boy. The young cart driver stops and asks, ‘Boys, why do you stop me?’ Mani asks him to shut up and investigates the cart. When the young boy pleads, ‘Boys, I must go,’ Rajam is infuriated. He senses condescension. In response, he says, ‘Whom do you address as “boys”? Don’t you know who we are?’

They are playing at being cops. The smaller kids should salute them as police officers and offer them a bribe.  

The trio heckle, torment and dehumanise the boy—they call the bullock he’s riding by his name. Why does this simple English word threaten these boys so much that they are not playing anymore, they’re engaging in serious violence?

Valan doesn't think Tamil kids in the 1930s spoke to each other in English. He knows that Narayan is translating what was said in Tamil into English. What he doesn't seem to understand is that Tamils, back then, considered police officers to be corrupt bullies who licked the boots of their British masters. The boys are playing at being cops and want to be addressed as 'kavalar' or some other such honorific.  

Now, this little village boy does not appear again in the story, and after recording this incident the chapter delves into a fascinating staging of Swami’s troubles with arithmetic problems in the presence of his father.

Both the father and the police officer are authority figures. Where authority is exercised in a despotic manner, the character of youth gets warped. That is why India needed to transition to democratic self-governance.  

Perhaps that incident is so forgetful

Valar means 'forgettable'.  

and that is why decades of criticism hasn’t as much as even pointed to it, and the popular TV series even excised it from the screenplay.

Because it shows that kids will imitate bad role models if Society is run in a despotic manner.  

So, what does this incident do to our experience of comprehending how Malgudi is built word by word on the page?

Nothing. Narayan shows that children need good role models. If foreigners rule over you, even if they are sweet and nice, still their minions will be callous bullies. Graham Greene understood this immediately. Even I did. It takes a PhD from Ashoka University to turn your brains to shit.  

And, what if the word that excites so much passion in kids, ‘boys’, is not English at all?

And what if Karrupan is actually a Scottish lady from Aberdeen?  

If it is rendered in Tamil, the only other Indian language referred to in the novel, could ‘boy’ stand for the singular male suffix common in Tamil ‘da’?

No. The word would be 'paiyyan' or, to older boys, 'anna' or older brother.  

A close Hindi equivalent would be ‘re’.

It would be ladka or balak. 

This suffix encompasses a range of affective registers in our everyday language and within the novel; it can be endearing (when Swami’s Tamil-speaking grandmother says ‘Come here, boy’)

Granny called me chellame or kutti paya. She would only say Vaa da or Po da if she was angry. 

or authoritative (when Swami’s father says ‘Look here, boy. I have half a mind to thrash you’)

He may have said that in English. He was a headmaster. 'Half a mind' is an English, not a Tamil, idiom.  

or carries exasperation (when Swami’s father says ‘Here boy, as you go, for goodness’ sake, remove the baby from the hall’)

Goodness sake is an English idiom.  

or marked by tenderness (when a forest officer who rescues Swami says ‘That is right, boy. Are you all right now?’)

He would use a word like magan meaning son. If Narayan sticks with the word 'boy', it is because it has a dual valency. Whites addressed even elderly Blacks as 'boy'. Narayan was writing about a boy growing up during the Indian independence struggle which had attracted world-wide attention. 

or revulsion (when Rajam he tells off Swami

that should be 'when Rajam tells off Swami. The 'he' is redundant.  

who has run away from school for a second time ‘What a boy you are!’).

i.e. 'how childish you are'. But some Britishers felt that Gandhi & Co were behaving childishly.  

Of all these affective registers, Narayan makes us see that in this instance the word ‘boys’ evokes anger because of perceived insult.

No. It goes against the protocol of the game. We are big bad police officers! Pretend to tremble like a leaf and promise to pay us a huge bribe.  

Any older boy would get angry at a younger boy who addresses him disrespectfully.

Some might. Some might not.  

But where does the audacity to stop a child doing labour (i.e. not your schoolmate) come from?

They were imitating what cops were actually doing.

Where does the absolute certainty that dehumanising someone younger/less privileged than you, by stripping them of their name, come from?

The Indian Imperial Police force.  

It is Narayan’s literary genius that enables us as readers to instantly subconsciously register this disrespect and stay within the narrative logic and not be ruffled.

Narayan shows us that the Indian police were callous bullies but he does it in a clever way so he can't be prosecuted for seditious libel. Valan has shit for brains- probably because his knowledge of English literature is derived from Ayothee Dasan & Periyar. 

This feature in Narayan’s English, an idiom that encodes time-perfected registers of respect and disrespect that precipitates violence

There is no such idiom in Narayan's English. He wrote plainly. The 'time-perfected registers of respect and disrespect in English' had to do with words like 'nigger', 'darkie', 'howling heathen', etc. One Tamil word which has entered the English language is 'pariah'. It is not a word Narayan uses.  

—and therefore is moved by a logic of caste

which only exists in the head of crazy shitheads like the author 

—that is a common feature of our Indian vernaculars, is what makes Malgudi insidiously inclusive of our uniquely casteist language.

India has plenty of languages. Sadly, none are uniquely casteist. Narayan's Malgudi isn't inclusive of any Indian language. Why? The fucker wasn't setting up to be the next Rudyard Kipling. That is why you don't have 'thanas' rhyming with zenanas or references to the thriftless gold of the babul tree. The Brits wanted shot of India. They didn't want to learn the difference between a yak shed and a dak bungalow.  

This article has not been about what to do when the art work we love turns out to conceal something terrible.

Swamy & Friends is okay- if you haven't read Richmal Compton. It is journeyman work- nothing more. I suppose one could say it conceals RK Narayan's opinion of the Imperial Police. But we don't know what that opinion actually was. My maternal great-grandfather was a Police Inspector around that time. He jailed freedom fighters but he also married off one of the 'boys' he arrested to his daughter. Why? His dad was Director of Education and owned some landed property. Having a Socialist for a son is made easier for you if your 'sambandhi' is a Police officer. My point is that Iyers were ambivalent about the police. Indeed, Tamils still are. Look at Annamalai.  

It has been an attempt to explicate what it means to succumb to its beauty,

Narayan did not aim at beauty. Psychological truth was enough for him.  

attend to its artifice

this cretin doesn't even understand that the kids were playing at being cops 

and ponder about what remains to be discovered beneath the sheets,

In English what is discovered beneath the sheets is genitalia. I suppose this dude is hoping to discover Narayan's cock. He will suck it in a manner befitting Periyar.  

about ourselves

will Varan discover he likes sucking the imaginary cocks of long dead Iyers?  

and our language.

One of these days, ghost of Periyar will tell Varan to stop sucking Iyer cock. Also, your language is Tamil, not English. Go back to Ashoka University and get a PhD in Tamil.