Malgudi Days by R.K. Narayan

'Malgudi Days' is a fascinating town, but it exists only in R.K Narayan's work. It is a lovely place to inhabit. It is lovely because unlike the rest of India, with its big cities, its hinterlands, Malgudi is just the right size and has everything in it that a town needs. Nothing too bad or too bad happens here. Malgudi resents change and extremes of any kind. It is a cool town most of the times, and whenever something unusual happens in Malgudi, it is always contained at the end, and the peace is always restored, no matter what the problem is.

Narayan depicts the lives of people who live in Malgudi, their problems, their struggles, their happiness and so forth. So what we see in Malgudi is gripping, authentic, and one relates to it. One inhabits the world that Narayan displays, but it will be banal to say that he represents larger realities India (or even of Malgudi). His Malgudi is very selective; its landscape is endearing but it is not innocent. It excludes many. It largely deals with the lives of upper caste Brahmins, as if they are the only people who matter. While in real life, the place might be rife with lower caste men and women, those who clean and run the city, but they are nowhere to be seen in his works.

Narayan claims that he only has to look out of his window to pick up a character. Indeed, this seems true, but he never sees a low caste person – particularly an untouchable. He sees marginalized people and their problems, but he does not see 'caste.' To see it is to deal with it, to see it is to acknowledge it, and this could be too much for Narayan. It is not easy to question one's own privilege, which most of the time is attained and maintained by screwing somebody else.

So whatever happens in Malgudi is very selective. Most stories deal with Brahminical lives, and wherever non-Brahminical people surface, they are stripped off their caste identities. Narayan must have dealt with lower caste men and women on a daily basis, but in his stories, they do not emerge. The whole landscape of the town, its playground, school, bank, temple, train station, houses are spaces that are thoroughly brahminical.

So Narayan shows us a world that is real but exclusive. It is a world that is simple, middle class, and pure. Whatever threatens Malgudi's purity, is always tamed towards the end. The peace is gained, the caste-order upheld.

While Narayan picks up a character or a situation by glimpsing from a window, he never sees sex anywhere. His characters have almost zero sexuality. Only when I read too much of him, I think of his stories in this light. It is another indication how he ignores the obvious. Dealing with sexuality creates its own problems. He does not want to deal with it even in stories, something so integral to human experience and existence. Dealing with sexuality is actually dealing with caste; both are interlinked. One cannot talk about caste and remain silent about sex. So Narayan cleverly avoids both. For him, peace is very important, even if this peace demands exclusion, silence and erasure of non-brahmins.

Another deeply problematic aspect one sees in his work is that he does not want Malgudi to be improved. Slow changes are fine, but any drastic change is opposed. It might disturb the existing hierarchies of caste on which the whole society is hinged. Too much change is unwelcome in his world. It might break harmony, destroy peace, unleash chaos.

His works thoroughly support caste and in some very forceful way perpetuates it. But his manner is always simple, always benign. Brahminical ways of being in the worl