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1 results

  • Chapter 2 - Questions for R. K. Narayan

  • Judith Brown, Indiana University
  • Book:
    Modernism and the Idea of India
    Published online:
    02 January 2025
    Print publication:
    09 January 2025, pp 47-67

  • Summary

    R.K. Narayan reaches across popular culture with his series of novels based in the fictional town of Malgudi. He has been celebrated and critiqued for his mild-mannered prose and his reticence about the catastrophes of empire. Narayan’s work has been faulted for its side-stepping of the brutal realities of colonial rule, yet he stages, in the dreaminess of his fictionalized township of Malgudi, the capacities of "unwriting," or of undermining the logic of language that subtend colonial rule. Emerging in Narayan’s comic episodes and in his baffled protagonists is a recognition of the importance of keeping things unsettled, in suspension, or visible only in their negation. Through a series of questions (themselves meant to underscore the prevalence of uncertainty in Narayan’s world), I show how Narayan imagines passivity as an interruption, suspension or cessation of the progressive, purposive, and productive time that defines modernity.