ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

Time for another novella for Novellas in November, hosted by Cathy of 746 Books and Rebecca of Bookish Beck.  This is Week 3 (starting Monday 13 November) and the theme is Broadening My Horizons:

• Pick your top novellas in translation and think about new genres or authors you’ve been introduced to through novellas.

Well, I have broadened my horizons, but the remarkable novella I’ve just read isn’t in translation. Swami and Friends (1935) was written in English by the great Indian author R K Narayan. There are 44 reviews of books by Indian and Anglo-Indian authors on this blog, but prior to this I had never read anything by an Indian author written before Indian independence in 1947.

On his Wikipedia page, we learn that

Rasipuram Krishnaswami Iyer Narayanaswami (1906 – 2001), better known as R. K. Narayan, was an Indian writer and novelist known for his work set in the fictional South Indian town of Malgudi. He was a leading author of early Indian literature in English along with Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao.

Narayan’s mentor and friend Graham Greene was instrumental in getting publishers for Narayan’s first four books including the semi-autobiographical trilogy of Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts and The English Teacher. The fictional town of Malgudi was first introduced in Swami and Friends.  (Narayan’s Wikipedia page, lightly edited).

Ostensibly written as a children’s novel, Swami and Friends (1935) is more than that. In 2019 the BBC listed Swami and Friends on its list of the 100 most influential novels, (and in 2015, Robert McCrum at the Guardian berated himself for overlooking the book in his list of the Best 100.)  This novella is a vivid portrait of childhood in British India but it also shows how a childhood was impacted by significant events in the pre-partition era. So though the story focusses on the universalities of childhood — school, friendships, relationships within the family and the puzzling business of growing up — it also shows this impulsive boy getting caught up in political protests even though he only dimly understands what they are about.  And while Narayan’s style is appropriately light in tone, Swami and Friends also satirises middle-class society and its complicities in the colonial administration.

Ten-year old Swami does not recognise that his parents are sometimes struggling financially.  Although his father is a lawyer and the family is middle-class, they are still not well-off.  In chapter 3, Mother asks Father for some money to pay the tailor who is pressing for payment, and Father expresses anxiety about not having enough money for the rest of the month.  This tells us two things: (unsurprisingly) that it’s a patriarchal society in which women have no economic power, and that (under the British) even a lawyer is sometimes short of money.  In the recurring theme of the relationship between father and son,  Swami doesn’t understand why he can’t have the things he wants, and he thinks his father is just being mean.

The novella also shows the stratification of society and how easily Swami has absorbed a sense of superiority over servants, and how sometimes this backfires. When Swami yearns for an unattainable hoop, he becomes easy prey for a resentful coachman who promises to get one for him for five rupees… and then reneges.

Narayan’s father was a schoolmaster, and Narayan himself briefly was too, so it is not surprising that Swami and Friends stresses the value of a good education.  Swami is an unenthusiastic student, more interested in the social side of school and often in trouble for daydreaming.  At home his strict father nags him about homework and study for the exams (with a predictable response from Swami) but Swami eventually knuckles under — because he’s afraid he’ll lose touch with his friends if he fails the exam for high school.

But when he gets there, trouble finds him.

At the All-India Congress Committee in 1920, Gandhi had united Muslims and Hindus in his policy of non-violent non-cooperation, invoking boycotts of official functions; elections; government schools and colleges, and British goods, particularly textiles.  Indians were encouraged to use home-spun, home-woven cloth. (See the Mahatma Gandhi page at Cotton Town, viewed 14/11/23) [Narayan BTW repeats the accusation that some colonial cotton manufacturers cut off the thumbs of their weavers but this is contested, not least by Gandhi who said that some weavers self-mutilated to avoid imprisonment. Which is also an indictment of colonialism, but in a different way.]

Swami’s a-political parents have sent him to the Albert Mission High School — a British Christian school, where the theme of the need for religious tolerance is exposed by a master who repeatedly mocks the Hindu religion. Swami takes any excuse to have a day off school so he goes to the protest and in the ensuing riot he enthusiastically contributes his school cap to the bonfire of Lancashire and Manchester cloth and breaks a whole lot of windows at his school.

When he gets home, with a story about how his cap was taken from him, his father is livid because he has gone out of his way to make sure that Swami’s uniform is entirely made of local cloth.  But worse is to come when his feeble excuses aren’t accepted at school, and he is expelled because of his disrespectful impudence to the headmaster.

Things are even worse at the very strict Board High School where there are school parade drills which interfere with Swami’s passion for cricket.  He and his pals dream up their own team and with a mixture of naivete and chutzpah organise an important match which necessitates Swami’s punctual attendance at practice.  Things go horribly wrong when Swami doesn’t realise that a doctor is only humouring him with a promise to get him out of school commitments, and he sees no alternative but to run away when he is found out and loses his temper.  Even then, his priority remains the cricket match and his all-important friendship with Rajam and Mani is sorely tested when once again somebody humours him and the misunderstanding causes him to miss it.

I wish I’d had a copy of this book for my school library when I was still teaching.  I think all the students — especially those from India — would have enjoyed the mischief and mayhem, and they would have been interested in the activities of children before the digital era.  At the Ohio State University blog Literary Globetrotters, they recommend it because it also shows

• the power of the mob mentality and peer pressure;
• the importance of making new friends and adjusting to changes that may occur among the friends you already have; and
• its anti-violence message to use words rather than actions.

I’ll finish with an excerpt that shows how authentically Narayan depicts the mind of a child:

He sat at his table and took out his atlas.  He opened the political map of Europe and sat gazing at it.  It puzzled him how people managed to live in such a crooked country as Europe.  He wondered what the shape of the people might be who lived places where the outline narrowed as in a cape, and how they managed to escape being strangled by the contour of their land.  And then another favourite problem began to tease him: how did those map-makers find out what the shape of a country was? How did they find out that Europe was like a camel’s head? Probably they stood on high towers and copied what they saw below. He wondered if he would be able to see India as it looked in the map, if he stood on the top of the town hall.  He had never been there nor ever did he wish to go there.  Though he was incredulous, tailor Ranga persistently informed him that there was a torture chamber in the top story of the town hall to which Pathans decoyed young people.  (pp.63-64).

Emma reviewed it at Book Around the Corner

Author: R.K. Narayan
Title: Swami and Friends
Publisher: Indian Thought Publications, 1994, 74th reprint 2015
Cover design not acknowledged.
ISBN: 9788185986005, pbk., 216 pages, large font.  (In other editions it’s <200 pages and qualifies as a novella.)
Source: personal library.

Recommended to me by Vishy, who places it as No 1 on his Vishy’s Indian Literature Rading List.  Which is why I bought it along with The English Teacher (1945);   The Painter of Signs (1976); and The Dark Room (1938).