Gandhian Bearings on R.K. Narayan's Novels (Hardbound - 2011)

Gandhiji is both a man and an age. He followed Indian traditions and also strengthened them with modern spirit. R.K. Narayan, a writer of the first generation of Indian English novelists, lived in an Indian ambience which was charged invariably with Gandhian thoughts in the context of modernity. The stimulating Gandhian discourse, with its paradigms of Indian and Western cultures, becomes available to R.K. Narayan as a part of living conditions. Further, Gandhiji’s thoughts often identify themselves with the Indian traditional values to the extent that both become inseparable from each other. R.K. Narayan as an author sensitively responds to it, amalgamating and discussing it to the degree an artist can do it.

R.K. Narayan’s work is a part of Gandhian discourse, where it interacts with, or criticizes, or underlines Gandhian thoughts or the traditional cultural heritage in the Indian context. Significantly, R.K. Narayan’s fiction also accommodates the cultural debates in Gandhian context—about the medium of instruction, English versus Sanskrit and vernaculars, non-violence as a political policy, the use of khadi as an economic policy, village life versus city life and orthodox social conventions like untouchability and caste discrimination.

Gandhian Bearings on R.K. Narayan’s Novels attempts to portray extensively the basic tenets of Gandhian thought in terms of the prevailing social, political, educational, religious, cultural and economic issues and to relate them to R.K. Narayan’s fiction. The contemporary history, represented by Gandhian thought, is made to interact, coalesce or mutate into imaginative truth of Narayan’s creative genius to a degree that they both appear to form a kind of symbiosis to lend exuberance and eternity to Indian cultural matrix. The book would be fascinating to the students of Indian English literature as well as Gandhian studies.

Digambar Singh Dewari did his M.A. in English from Kumaon University, Nainital, followed by M.Phil, and Ph.D. both from Veer Narmad South Gujarat University, Surat. He cleared National Eligibility Test, conducted by the University Grants Commission, in 1998. His book entitled The Use of Myth in R.K. Narayan’s Novels was published in 2001. He has also published several poems and research papers. Besides English, Dewari also speaks French. Presently, he is working as Head, Department of English, Government Arts & Commerce College, Naswadi, District Vadodara in Gujarat.