Bookless in Baghdad: Reflections on Writing and Writers by Shashi Tharoor Page A

brought me a rather traveled and weary typescript — a novel written by a friend of his — and I let it lie on my desk for weeks unread until one rainy day….” The English weather saved an Indian muse: Greene didn't know that the novel “had been rejected by half-a-dozen publishers and that Purna had been told by the author… to weight it with a stone and drop it into the Thames.” Greene loved the novel,
Swami and Friends,
found a publisher for it in London, and so launched a career that was to encompass twenty-seven more books, including fourteen novels.
    In giving him the Yatra Award for outstanding lifetime achievement — one of those Indian prizes that seem quite unable to sustain themselves, so that subsequent winners (if any) remain entirely unknown — the distinguished jury's citation declared Narayan “a master story-teller whose languageis simple and unpretentious, whose wit is critical yet healing, whose characters are drawn with sharp precision and subtle irony, and whose narratives have the lightness of touch which only a craftsman of the highest order can risk.” In the West, Narayan is widely considered the quintessential “Indian” writer, whose fiction evokes a sensibility and a rhythm older and less familiar to westerners than that of any other writer in the English language. My friends in India saw in Narayan our country's best hope of a Nobel Prize in Literature.
    At his best, Narayan was a consummate teller of timeless tales, a meticulous recorder of the ironies of human life, an acute observer of the possibilities of the ordinary: India's answer to Jane Austen. The gentle wit, the simple sentences, the easy assumption of the inevitabilities of the tolerant Hindu social and philosophical system, the characteristically straightforward plotting, were all hallmarks of Narayan's charm and helped make many of his novels and stories interesting and often pleasurable.
    But I felt that they also pointed to the banality of Narayan's concerns, the narrowness of his vision, the predictability of his prose, and the shallowness of the pool of experience and vocabulary from which he drew. Like that of Austen, his fiction was restricted to the concerns of a small society portrayed with precision and empathy; unlike that of Austen, his prose could not elevate those concerns beyond the ordinariness of its subjects. Narayan wrote of, and from, the mindset of the small-town South Indian Brahmin, and did not seem capable of a greater range. His metronomic style was frequently not equal to the demands of his situations. Intense and potentially charged scenes were renderedbathetic by the inadequacy of the language used to describe them. In much of his writing, stories with extraordinary possibilities unfolded in flat, monotonous sentences that frustrated rather than convinced me, and in a tone that ranged from the clichéd to the flippant. At its worst, Narayan's prose was like the bullock-cart: a vehicle that can move only in one gear, is unable to turn, accelerate, or reverse, and remains yoked to traditional creatures who have long since been overtaken but know no better.
    I was, I must admit, particularly frustrated to find that Narayan was indifferent to the wider canon of English fiction and to the use of the English language by other writers, Western or Indian. Worse, his indifference was something of which he was inordinately proud. He told interviewers that he avoided reading: “I don't admit influences.” This showed in his writing, but he was defiant: “What is style?” he asked one interviewer. “Please ask these critics to first define it…. Style is a fad.” The result was that he used words as if unconscious of their nuances: every other sentence included a word inappropriately or wrongly used; the ABC's of bad writing — archaisms, banalities, and clichés — abounded. It was as if the author had learned the words in a school textbook and imagined them hallowed by repetition rather than