One of the finest novelists and a brilliant writer who we know by his pen name R K Narayan (his full name is Rasipuram Krishnaswami Iyer Narayanaswami) was born today in Madras in 1906. A name that has left an indelible mark in the history of Indian English Literature. Winner of the Sahitya Akademi and Padma Bhushan and honored by several other accolades he was a man of letters.
He took his literary work to another level where it got international acclaims and praises. This also allowed the world to peep into the Indian way of living, culture, and traditions. The content and characters he chose mainly resonated with the lives of ordinary people.
He completed his university education from Maharaja College of Mysore in 1930. He left teaching in between to fully concentrate and pursue his passion for writing. He faced several rejections by strings of publishers at the onset of his career. With the help of his friend Graham Greene, he got the publisher for his first novel Swami And Friend that came in 1935. And then there was no looking back afterward.
Swami And Friends and The English Teacher are semi-autobiographical, partly based on the author’s own life. Malgudi Days was another hit when it came to short stories. In his long career, he published fourteen novels, over two hundred short stories, a memoir, two travel books, legion essays, and two plays.
compelling and unique storyline with simplistic and lucid writing with an element of humor is what sets him apart from his contemporaries. He will be missed forever.
“The hardest of all things for a novelist to communicate is the extraordinary ordinariness of most human happiness… Jane Austen, Soseki, Chekhow: a few bring it off. Narayan is one of the”- Francis King