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 even though his English is poor and he appears to have no knowledge of  literature properly so called. 

 Valan 'studies the representations of caste in regional and English-language writing'. There may be texts in this field but they are not literary texts. People like Valan should not be awarded PhDs from English Departments nor should they be allowed to teach the subject. Valan might have some knowledge of the Political history of Tamil Nadu. But it wouldn't be enough to qualify him to teach the subject at the University level. 

Race, Gender & Class feature in English literature. Caste does not because no English speaking country has a caste system. That is why no literary text in the English language yields any information about it.  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'. This is a topic of zero interest to everybody- Tamil & non-Tamil alike. On the other hand, political analysts would want to know the story of caste rivalry in T.N because it affects electoral outcomes. Will Pallars ally with BJP as Thevars cross over to Stalin? Valan doesn't know. He is a useless tosser. That's why journalists in Delhi aren't ringing him up for his views on such matters. 

One further point, caste does find some limited expression in pre-Independence Tamil literature.  But, as far as English literature is concerned- even literature produced by Indians in English- the thing scarcely features save in a scenes a faire manner. 

Consider the question of decriminalization of the Thevar caste (which was opposed by the wealthy Justice Party grandees as well as by 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- i.e. was part of a complex reality rather than escapist fiction.  After Independence, when the Thevars were de-notified, there was a big Thevar/Dalit riot in Ramnad in1957. Indeed, this rivalry remains very much 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, Karunanidhi, 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. Non-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 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' mean s 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 bit 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 'Sahib', as opposed to '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 stupid 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 his daughter to one of the 'boys' he arrested. Why? The lad's Dad was Director of Education and owned some landed property. Having a Socialist for a son is made easier for a bureaucrat 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. He can't attend to shit.

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.  

 

Pico Iyer, Graham Greene & the Malgudi Blues

   Pico isn't from Malgudi. Nor was his dad- the late Raghavan Iyer. But, back then, Bombay, at least for  our clannish Iyerarchy, was still a small place and so my father, being a couple of years younger than Pico's dad, had to hear much kolaveri paternal palaver about  the latter's slimness, scholastic achievements and his not needing specs.

  However, it was Raghavan's self-confidence- there being no Iyer prodigy higher than himself- which set him apart. Few Indian origin Scholarship winners failed to be overawed or feel uncomfortable when translated to Oxbridge. Even Ramanujan, who was a genius, came to see the shortcomings of his method and adapted himself to Programmatic Mathematics at the urging of his Guru, Prof. Hardy. On the other hand, it was  Chandrashekar's Guru bhakti for Sir Arthur Eddington which placed a restriction on the development of his own theory. Similarly, under the blazing Eye of Tolkein, Naipaul was left blighted by the Shires' dreaming Spires, while Amartya Sen, according to Bhagwati, was intimidated away from his own, presumably Pigouvian proclivities, by Leftist harridans like, the blonde bombshell, Joan Robinson and the bald blancmange, the gorgeous, pouting, Nikki Kaldor.

  Raghavan Iyer, however, seemingly effortlessly, gathered up all the glittering prizes, save an All Souls fellowship, without compromising his own atavistic, Adyar, beliefs. Perhaps, the cult of Radhakrishnan in the 1930's, when he was the Spalding Professor at Oxford, boosted Raghavan's self confidence. Equally likely, Raghavan's faith in Theosophy- which found Universal Messiahs in the unlikely shape of Tamil Brahmin shitheads like the two Krishnamurtis- instilled in him a sense of a World Historical Mission. Annie Beasant, after all, had wanted Jeddu Krishnamurti to attend Eton & Oxford- but the boy was too dim. Raghavan, like his son Pico, had no such problem. Indeed, not Oxford, it was New Delhi which posed the difficulty. The India to which he returned had rendered marginal the verbose Theosophical/Servants of India Society Liberalism to which he had pledged an early and spontaneous allegiance.

   Later on, Raghavan's move to America might have seemed a flight from, rather than an expression of faith in, his boyhood creed. Even in Careerist terms it seemed retrograde; had he remained in India he might have become Manmohan Singh's boss or, if he'd settled in England, gained a seat in the House of Lords and become a household name as a BBC 'talking head'. But Raghavan had correctly identified California as the happening place and got there as the Sixties began to swing. It may also be that Raghavan, taking a post at Santa Barbara, wanted to be close to the Theosophists at Ojai.

 The question is whether Raghavan had escaped Malgudi or actually, and atavistically, returned to that imaginary and geometrically frustrated topos by way of having failed Bombay, at least the Bombay of the Bombay Plan, by his 'contribution to democratic planning' while Research Chief to the Planning Commission. The reason I say this is because the very year that Raghavan and Nandhini settle in California is also the year Hollywood fucks up, Malgudi's Guide, Raju's metamorphosis into a Mahatma, not to mention, the Mem Sahib, Rosie's, metamorphosis into the bayadère, Nalini-  whereas Bombay redeems both R.K Narayan's novel as well as his Swedenborgian barzakh by concretizing it as Limdi- the little town that pioneered Women's education and which set Vivekananda on the path to World fame- and where Chetan Anand had once taught English. In other words, Bombay- I will not say put Malgudi on the map, it was there already, Narayan's talent is unquestionable- Bombay connected Malgudi to everything else on every map of India- Rosie to Gulab (that was name of Waheeda Rehman's character in the immortal 'Pyaasa'), Rosie/Nalini to Rukmuni Arundale, Scripture to Forgery, India's good behavior in the British Prison to its early release from the sort of famine Pearl S Buck chronicled (well, except for that experienced by the Muslim League Government in Bengal because the League disdained both British Prisons and good behaviour), and finally early release from this Earthly Prison to the release of waters from clouds of Krishna hue which, verily to view, is the darshan of all release.

 What of the Hollywood version?
I found this on the web-  'Whereas the backdrop is authentic, the romance of a provincial Indian tourist guide with the dancing-girl-wife of an older merchant seems partly artificial and contrived, much more in the Hollywood spirit than in that of, let us say, Bombay. And the development of the narrative continuity is so erratic and frequently slurred—so clumsy and artless, to be plain-spoken—that both story and emotion are vague.'
  This is the problem with both Raghavan and Pico. When Nandhini Nanak Mehta/Iyer writes something she may get her facts wrong or her judgement may be faulty but what she says is meaningful precisely because it isn't vague, if not vacuous.
 Her husband and son, on the other hand, though not charlatans- 'the background is authentic'- yet make the romance of dialogue- and travel is a dialogue, dialogue is travel- seem 'artificial and contrived'- something much more in the Hollywood spirit than in that, certainly, of Bombay. It is the deficit in continuity, of connectivity, which mars their Art- I will not say Thought for neither has had an original thought- it is not that they do not subscribe to a Grand, or merely garrulous, Narrative, nor that their emotions remain unengaged - it is that both are nebulous and therefore without nuance.
   This is Pico writing about R.K Narayan-

Writing in English, perhaps, allowed Narayan to step just an inch outside his territory. Is this true? Surely, the opposite is the case. Writing in English allowed Narayan access to a collocational English availability cascade, which secured him an imaginary appellational terroir as a sort of after dinner Tamil Tokai, something sui generis- the highly acid and accidental product of a 'noble rot', or gangrene, disconnecting it with its natal sub-continent

 'The other thing that strikes you, within three pages of the beginning of The Man-Eater, is how you can hear the jingling ox-bells, smell the spices, see the humble scene with “appetizing eatable on a banana leaf and coffee in a little brass cup.”

It is perfectly natural to read books in line with stereotyped perceptions. Pico, like R.K. Narayan is a professional writer, who has trained himself to notice things. The jarring note enters when Pico says 'see the humble scene...'. Why humble? Does Pico really not know that Maharajas, that too from 21 gun Salute States, relished 'appetizing eatables served on a banana leaf' and drank coffee 'in little brass cups'? They may have also eaten of Sevres China when hosting the Viceroy, but that entailed ritual purification and besides, made everything taste less nice.
The odd thing here is that an English, Anglican, author, like Robert Wood, with a PhD from Oxford in Nuclear Physics, understood Narayan differently even before he first set foot in India. Why? In the English language, the very word Brahmin denotes something that is not humble for the same reason that it is the reverse of luxurious. 

'There are snake-charmers and swamis and elephant-doctors here-  but none of them are seen as more unusual than a knife-sharpener or a seller of “coloured drinks”;  everything is regarded with the unflappable good nature of a man just looking in on his neighbors. In that way, the exoticism of India is never Narayan’s selling-point or his interest; he writes of–and seemingly for–his associates as Isaac Bashevis Singer might of the Upper West Side or Alice Munro of rural Ontario.'
Pico's comparison of Narayan to Singer is interesting- psychologically, it might be illuminating, but what it highlights here is Narayan's deracination, he did not write in Tamil or Kannada, and the fact that whereas Singer's Yiddish readers- survivors like himself- demanded he continue with his writing against the judgement of his editor, Narayan might never have been published but for the accident of his catching Graham Greene's editorial eye.
Pico confuses a very English Pooterishness with Iyer authenticity.
 'Again, I can hear my South Indian uncles speakingly fondly of their wives as “The President of the Union” (or “The Speaker of the House”) - but so did suburban Solicitors in Slough back in the 70's- and catch all- all? All!-that is engaging and heartfelt in India when I read of the tough guy devouring a hundred almonds every day to train to become a taxidermist, the poet trying to write the entire life of Krishna (the completion of even a part of which causes mayhem), the forestry officer making up a collection of “Golden Thoughts,” arranged alphabetically. The textures and flavors and cadences are as Indian as palaver or hugger-mugger; the dramas and hopes and vexations belong to us all.'

Surely, all the things Pico highlights are what makes R.K a second rate writer- his Theophrastian cartoons advance no Aristotelian agenda. Kipling, the consummate journalist, had great powers of observation. He never resorted to cliches. There is always some new fact of sociology or ethology that re-reading his work yields up.  He shows more than he knows and, in consequence, everything he writes about becomes more interesting not less so.  Malgudi is almost infinitely less interesting than Mysore. It contains no intelligent or cultured people. It has no Balzacian depth. It is as fucking stupid and worthless and utterly and deracinatedly shite as Raghavan and Pico's own oeuvre. R.K was a Tamil speaker. For us, Kannada is a treasure trove. Ours is 'vanilla' Hinduism.  Kannada literature is inexpressibly rich and complex to us precisely because we are its Levinasian alterity- its material, that is Expressive, needs match exactly with our Spiritual ones. Neither R.K Narayan nor A.K Ramanujan make this explicit. Their homage, alas, is too humble, too Iyer Tamil. Kannada, like the God of the Vaishnavas, the Arhat of the Jains, is not content that merely the perfume of its incense settle on us from a distance. No. Something more is called for.

   Pico, of course, is deaf even to Iyer Tamil. He thinks the edible on the banana leaf humble. Chief Justice Anantanarayanan- Updike made a poem of his name- also has banana leaves and brass cups but the quality of his language, his poems, his scholarship is such that an enchanting image is created. Had Kipling himself gained employment in Madras, rather than Lahore, he could not have penned a more eloquent tribute to Tamil womanhood or, more to the point, avvial and applam- the both to be served upon banana leaf only, just mind it kindly I say

   In a sense- the sense in which Narayan speaks to Pico- Malgudi's idiolect is palaver- that last not being an Indian word, not even an Indglish word, though it does sound a bit Tamil, if you don't actually know Tamil- in other words, it is a sort of facetious literary pidgin from the Slave Coast- India no longer being a country of slaves though, perhaps, this Iyer at Eton didn't get the memo.
Similarly, hugger mugger is an old English word- meaning something done secretly or in a muddled manner- but the secret to this muddled thinking is that there is no secret, it's all just a facile availability cascade. Narayan believed in the silly American Spiritism dating back to the middle of the Nineteenth Century. Raghavan Iyer subscribed to Col. Olcott's generous but gullible Theosophy and speculated about whose reincarnation Eisenhower represented.

  Pico, like his Dad, is self-evidently a very bright guy- a person of good character, he attended Eton and Oxford in reverse order because of some administrative mix-up but was a good sport about it. Nor is his essay on Narayan a sloppy piece of work. Read the whole thing for yourself. Essentially an academically stupid guy with bad Tamil is being valorized by an academcally smart guy with no Tamil because that's how academic availability cascades in Literature operate. The joke here is that Narayan expresses India's disenchantment with Education. The heroes of K.S Venkatramani's novels- Murugan the tiller, Kandan the Patriot- only succeed when they turn their backs on passing exams and gaining Bureaucratic promotion. It was the pallidty of this world view- a future Chief Minister of Madras Presidency would advocate the destruction of factories, another would recommend that Schools teach lower caste students only their traditional skills- its futile gestures towards retrogression, which enabled Tamil- like that of Karunanidhi, but also the Kannada of Veerappa Moily- to rise up and displace the stupidity of English, the envenomed stasis it bequeathed Lawley extension. For Pico, Narayan is a high priest. Yes, but only because the Temple has been abandoned. India- of which Victor Hugo said 'India ended up becoming Germany'- had been downgraded by the Global Credit Rating Agencies of Credentialist Enlightenment and Education. All it was permissible to believe about India was that nothing happened there, nothing could happen, it was a Club of Rome basket case, R.K. Narayan the Virgil chronicling its transformation not from brick to marble but marble to mud.

'Reading Narayan, you soon see, is a little like sitting on a rocking-chair in a steadily churning train; the story is always pushing forwards, with not a wasted sentence or detail, and yet its theme and often its characters are all about going nowhere and getting nothing done.'
  Why is this so? Pico, son of Raghavan, though a Classical Scholar, doesn't answer quod nescis quo modo fiat, non facis- R.K's Occasionalist humility in denying any programmatic understanding of how or why he writes, extends also to his characters. Instead, Pico turns Narayan into Malgudi's malign Mayin- a feckless and effete Demiurge- orchestrating futility in a manner Bureaucratic and dilatory.

'There is a kind of ambling inevitability to the rhythm of a Narayan story, sleepy but intensifying, that at once evokes a leisurely and mischievous master-plotter and puts you inside the frenzied, but changeless, world of India right now. The fortune-tellers and astrologers who are such a staple of this world are always figures of gentle fun because no one can begin to predict what’s going to happen next. People learn to rue their acts of kindness and are constantly urged, for the good of all, to be cruel. No good deed goes uncomplicated, and no sin is ever overlooked.'

  In the light of the above, Raghavan Iyer must actually have been, to his son, a particularly cancerous hypertrophy of a R.K. Narayan character.

  He did unexpected things- he became a lion-tamer and married a tightrope walker- or, no, he became a Rhodes Scholar and married a Gujerati- same difference really- but the fact remains that his inner life retained the sort of synoecist legibility, or collocational familiarity, of a Malgudi character and, as such, ought to have interested- by being the reverse of interesting- Graham Greene in the sense of affording him a dimly nitid cameo for one of his dingily gaudy Entertainments- like the Indian 'Mass Observation' volunteer in 'the Confidential Agent'.
   Pico, of course, is the opposite of a 'Mass Observation' volunteer- having successfully fed a Mass Market taste for vicarious explorations of Observation's vacuity- and he takes Greene as a sort of literary father figure because he wishes to affirm the Theosophical, or, Obeyesekere 'Small-scale Society', truth that reincarnation means one becomes one's own Dad and so- since R.K Narayan's dad too was a Headmaster, and since all Iyers are R.K Narayan characters, and since Character and Inwardness and Thought and other such shite is merely Samskara, and since only pi jaw is eternal- it therefore follows that everybody is everybody and has a Global Soul and it turns out Greene was just the timid son of a Tamil headmaster who became a lion-tamer or trapeze artist in Lawley Extension and so, obviously, his books are all about fathers and sons and how- ever since the Brits chivied the Iyers out of their village agraharams- where, like Bihari Brahmins of the best stripe, they had previously spent their time cracking each other's skulls open with agricultural implements- it's like there's this hiatus valde deflendus between them if, but only if, both son and sire are the sort of little shits who get scholarships and publish worthless books because otherwise they could spend their time taunting each other for not getting scholarships or not securing Publishing deals for their worthless books.
  For Greene, for Waugh, Catholicism meant the World mattered because, as do families in the father, the World can find a Center, and since their travels in the wastes and the wilds had shown them that that Center was Everywhere, it therefore followed that the Father has a Son whose Passion is unspent and so writing is the ongoing project of inventing everybody's lost childhood for it is only in the concurrency of that alterity, as of Judas's lost boyhood, that Christ, that is everybody, has already been betrayed.
  For Raghavan and Pico, nothing has a Center because Eternal Recurrence makes everything the same. Pi jaw's Palingenesia ensures that samskars remain merely samskars, they never become stigmata, and are thus unconnected to Grace. At least, this is true with respect to the sort of samskar we term literary writing- which of course is only reading. Here, it makes for a facility without felicity, a yeasting without yearning, Polonius's Annunciation as opposed to Hamlet's Himmelfart.

And, no, since you ask, I haven't read Pico's book. Silly question. But I did read this-

'the father's last phone call to the son consisted of an answering-machine message racked with sobs, left in response to 'Sleeping with the Enemy'- an essay by Iyer on Greene. Greene's great gift and his fount of despair, Iyer had written in that piece, was his ability to "see the folly and frailty of everyone around him"- 

and this-

'and then his voice gave out and he began to sob. I couldn’t ever remember hearing him sob before, least of all over an answering machine. It was a shocking thing, to hear a man famous for his fluency and authority lose all words.”

Father and son had one brief subsequent meeting. “Ten days later, he was dead, at sixty-five, and the last real time I’d heard from him was the gasping call about Graham Greene.”

As he was finishing his non-memoir, Iyer found himself unable to explain to his wife, Hiroko, which man within his head he was addressing. He concludes that he knew — or knows — Greene better than his own father and that Greene knows Iyer better than Iyer knows himself.

That reads a bit too neatly.

What resonates is Iyer’s response when asked to cite a Greene passage that stays with him, emotionally.

His choice: the last line from A Quiet American: “Everything had gone right for me since he had died, but how I wished there existed someone to whom I could say that I was sorry.”

   It's an odd choice or a clever-too-clever one. For Greene, for Graves, for Le Carre's 'Naive and Sentimental Lover', the elimination of the sexual rival is the collapse of Adultery's trisexual house of cards- every arrested adolescences' last defence against prospering in Realty's Potter's field- but there's always someone you can drunk dial and say you are sorry to- well, at any rate, Raghavan managed it because by a splendidly Iyeronic atavism he had Theosophised his wife into the Goddess- Gandhism having foreclosed that possibility for his own Mum- and thus reverse Oedipalized Pico's conception.

'A couple of days before I began reading The Man Within My Head, a friend told me she had met the author’s father, Raghavan N Iyer, many years ago. At that first and only meeting, the celebrated philosopher, Oxford University professor and theosophist told my friend that he had abstained from sex until his wife was ready to conceive. He wanted to ensure that the product of their union would be exceptional, he said. The result was their only child, Pico Iyer.' In every act of abstention or indulgence, there is a man within us that is angry with us. Perhaps,  a Divine satire upon a diabolical satyriasis, Graham Greene- who feared his Anglo-Indian doppleganger, a vulgar con-man named Meredith de Varg, because to meet your double is to die- doubles for Pico as the unquiet ghost in the geometrically frustrated triangle between this chaste-all-too-chaste Iyer father and son.