Stories of talkative humanity

At its best, contemporary Indian fiction, more than any other world literature, matches the comic genius, pathos and complex humanity of the supreme Russian masters. It is no coincidence that it is R.K.Narayan (1906-2001), a Homeric figure of post-colonial Indian English letters and the first of the major Indian writers to write in English, who comes closest to Chekhov.

While the international 20th-century novel largely settled into individual odysseys featuring tormented, invariably self-tormenting, men and women in search of themselves, Indian fiction, particularly that of Narayan, has never lost sight of the community. Society and social convention consolidated the life force of the 19th-century novel and the Indians, led by Narayan (who always described himself as having been nurtured by Victorian writers), defer to that convention. His journalists, printers and teachers, his lowly office workers, drunks, dreamers, misers and bewildered husbands never lose sight of the world or, more exactly, the street they inhabit.

Above all, Narayan's characters are wonderful talkers. Dialogue is among his many strengths. "They call me Talkative Man," begins the aspiring journalist narrator of the wonderful comic novel Talkative Man (1986). "Some affectionately shorten it to TM: I have earned this title, I suppose, because I cannot contain myself. My impulse to share an experience with others is irresistible, even if they sneer at my back. I don't care. I'd choke if I didn't talk, perhaps like Sage Narada of our epics, who for all his brilliance and accomplishments carried a curse on his back that unless he spread a gossip a day, his skull would burst."

Having become involved within an intrigue featuring a mystery man who in time is exposed as a serial husband, the narrator briefly ponders the life of the local station-master. "First time I noticed what a lot of children he had produced under his little tin roof."

Narayan is at once the most, as well as the least, autobiographical of writers as he draws on the facts rather than specific emotions. Narayan is not confessional, although he always admitted that The English Teacher (1945), more than any other of his works, "is autobiographical in content, very little part of it being fiction". Narayan is disarmingly candid Narayan, a moral realist who personifies the absolute sophistication of apparent simplicity. He is as na∩ve as only the very astute can be.

Born old, though graced until the very end by a child's sense of fun, he was never to lose either his lightness of touch or his flair for all-seeing irony. He deals in realities, especially failed aspirations. His work - from Swami and Friends (1935) to The World of Nagaraj (1990) and the dazzling final fictions of The Grandmother's Tale (1993) - in common with his long life, spans the 20th century and modern India's most dramatic period of change, from the days of the Raj to the more recent political upheavals of stormy, divisive nationhood.

His literary territory is the fictional southern Indian town of Malgudi. As a place it does not seem a million miles from his native Madras, also in south India, where he was born in 1906 and raised during his early years by his maternal grandmother. While it is true that the reader can't but feel some sense of Narayan's life from his fiction, his only memoir, My Days, is vibrant, expectedly atmospheric and, word for word, among the finest examples of the genre. Although published in India and the US as long ago as 1973, this is the first British publication and appears with John Updike's review of the US edition, here billed rather disingenuously as a foreword. Narayan died in May at the age of 94.

The belated publication of his memoir in Britain of all places is odd, as he was first _published in London. Just when it seemed that his first novel, Swami and Friends, was destined never to be published, a friend of his then living in England found a powerful _champion _- none other than novelist Graham Greene, who praised Narayan's subtle comic gift. He always had a strong British readership. As for his relationship with Britain, Narayan maintained a healthy detachment, experiencing little of the angst of, say, V.S. Naipaul.

The young Narayan was drawn to British literature. It , which proved his main inspiration. Reading English poets and novelists, combined with the shock of failing his university entrance examination in his favourite subject, English, helped make him a writer. During the year he had to wait to resit the exam, he read and discovered. "I felt I was inducted into the secrets of Nature's Glory. So did much of Palgrave, Keats, Shelley, Byron and Browning. They spoke of an experience that was real and immediate in my surroundings, and stirred in me a deep response. Perhaps I was in an extremely raw state of mind. My failure at the examination, and seeing my classmates marching ahead, induced a mood of pessimism and martyrdom which, in some strange manner, seemed to have deepened my sensibilities."

Among the few advantages of having a stern headmaster father, who appears to have also been a distant parent, was easy access to the library during the summer vacation. A passage from The Bride of Lammermoor made him determined to read the novel and another six of Scott's works. Admiration for the writer set him off on a search for his portrait. From Scott to Dickens, from Pope and Marlowe to Tolstoi (sic) and Thomas Hardy, "I read everything... I and my elder brother shared a room outside the main house but in the same compound, and there we competed with each other in reading . ..For days on end we stayed at home and read, hardly aware of the seasons or the time passing . . . I loved tragic endings in novels. I looked for books that would leave me crushed at the end." He recalls being particularly keen on novels featuring doomed and/or fallen heroines succumbing to consumption or suicide.

Earlier, before he records becoming an obsessive reader moving on to a brief career as a reluctant teacher, he describes his early life with his grandmother, a daring gardener with 50 pots to water each evening. As a little boy he had a bad time with pets - they either ran away or died prematurely. One favourite was Rama, whom he felt he looked like, hoping that others would see a resemblance". His fond grandmother was not impressed. "What a fool to want to look like a monkey! You are in bad company. You must send away that creature. Wanting to look like a monkey when God has endowed you with such large eyes and all those curls falling down to your cheeks."

Narayan appears to have lived among people very like those populating his fiction. The tone of the book is light, but his perceptions are characteristically sharp. The most personal sequence concerns that of the early death of his wife from typhoid in 1939. Narayan was then 33 and they had a small daughter. He never remarried. Some critics objected to his representation of India as a backward country. When Rann arrives at the narrator's house in Talkative Man, he objects to the flush-out latrine. "In that case," says the narrator, "you have come to the wrong place. Our town has not caught up with modern sanitary arrangements, even this is considered a revolutionary concept. The 'Modern Sanitaryware' man on the Market Road is going bankrupt."

Yet the genius of Narayan rises above any criticism or notions of political correctness. Works such as those mentioned above, in addition to The Financial Expert (1952), The Printer of Malgudi (1955), The Painter of Signs (1977), A Tiger for Malgudi (1983) and the marvellous novella "Salt and Sawdust" from The Grandmother's Tale (in which a great novel is finally published as a cookbook), as well as numerous short stories such as those in Malgudi Days (1982), confirm his position as one of the literature's enduring and most endearing voices.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times