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“The Reluctant Guru”: R. K. Narayan and The Guide

The common view of Narayan is that of a supreme ironist, who with his gentle humor exposes the absurdities of our situation. Noted critic M. K. Naik wrote an entire book celebrating Narayan's ironic vision. Indeed, most readers, especially western ones, notice and admire Narayan's inconspicuous deflation of characters and conditions. Even his language and style are a part of this subterfuge. He avoids somber eloquence or high rhetoric so common to Indian English prose. In his work we hardly find the discourse of the sublime, the serious, and the mystic. Instead, plain almost flattened English, pared down to the bare communicative essentials, is offered. As V. Y. Kantak astutely observes about the typical Narayan period, 1 "The sentence has a certain structural monotony. It is always the same subject-predicate-objectcomplement ensemble with a few subsidiary appendages of phrase or clause and the occasional inversion ... and yet this one stringed instrument suffices for Narayan's purpose" ("The Language of Indian Fiction in English" 149). In other words, this bareness, this minimalism suggests something else, something more whimsical if not witty, certainly the quality in Narayan that makes us smile or chuckle when we read him. This "something else" that makes Narayan so celebrated and admired is supposedly his comic muse, which deals with ordinary or less-than-ordinary people. With remarkably tempered understatement, Narayan draws us into the world of these timid protagonists, usually contrasted by their stronger, more assertive female counterparts. Some confusion or disturbance occurs in their settled rhythms of life; it is this turbulence or annoyance and its eventual resolution that most of his novels record. The puzzle ofNarayan's modest art is best summed up by