R. K. Narayan (October 10, 1906 – May 13, 2001), born Rasipuram Krishnaswami Ayyar Narayanaswami,is among the best known and most widely read Indian novelists writing in English.
Most of Narayan’s work, starting with his first novel Swami and Friends (1935), captures many Indian traits while retaining a unique identity of its own. He was sometimes compared to the American writer William Faulkner, whose novels were also grounded in a compassionate humanism and celebrated the humour and energy of ordinary life.
Narayan lived till age of ninety-four, writing for more than fifty years, and publishing until he was eighty seven. He wrote fourteen novels, five volumes of short stories, a number of travelogues and collections of non-fiction, condensed versions of Indian epics in English, and the memoir My Days.
Narayan’s novels are characterised by Chekhovian simplicity and gentle humour. He told stories of simple folks trying to live their simple lives in a changing world. The characters in his novels were very ordinary, down-to-earth Indians trying to blend tradition with modernisation, often resulting in tragi-comic situations. His writing style was simple, unpretentious and witty, with a unique flavour as if he were writing in the native tongue. Many of Narayan’s works are rooted in everyday life, though he is not shy of invoking Hindu tales or traditional Indian folklore to emphasize a point. His easy-going outlook on life has sometimes been criticized, though in general he is viewed as an accomplished, sensitive and reasonably prolific writer. His stories are incredibly easy to read because of their simplicity. He almost always writes about India in some way, and usually puts cultural influences about Indian life in his works and literature . RK Narayan was also one of the writers of the Tamil film Avvaiyar, which was directed by Kothamangalam Subbu and produced by Gemini Films.
Mr. Narayan won numerous awards and honours for his works. He won the National Prize of the Sahitya Akademi, the Indian literary academy, for The Guide in 1960. He was honoured with the Padma Bhushan, a coveted Indian award, for distinguished service to literature in 1964. In 1980, R. K. Narayan was awarded the AC Benson Medal by the Royal Society of Literature. He was an honorary member of the society. He was elected an honorary member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1982 and nominated to the Rajya Sabha — the upper house of the Parliament of India — in 1989. In addition, the University of Mysore, Delhi University and the University of Leeds conferred honorary doctorates on him. He was awarded Padma Vibhushan in 2000.
R.K. Narayan was short listed for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times but never won. Literary circles often joke that the Nobel Committee ignored his works, mistaking them instead for self-help books due to their curious titles (The English Teacher, The Painter of Signs, etc.).
His works were translated into every European language as well as Hebrew.[citation needed]
His admirers included Somerset Maugham, John Updike and Graham Greene, who called him the “novelist I admire most in the English language.”
His short story “Leela’s Friend” is studied as part of a GCSE course in the UK, under the OCR Examining Board, from 2003 – 2009.
