Number of words: 408

The novel, which is a form of social enquiry, and as such outside the Indian tradition, had come to India with the British. By the late 19 century, it had become established in Bengal, and then had spread. But it was only towards the end of the British period, in the 1930s, that serious novelists appeared, who wrote in English, for first publication in London.

RK Narayan’s concern has always been with the life of a small South Indian town, which he peopled book by book. His conviction in 1961, after 14 years of independence, that India would go on, whatever the political uncertainty after Mr Nehru, was like the conviction of earliest novels, written in the times of the British, that India was going on. In the early novels, the British conquest is like a fact of life. The British themselves are far away, their presence hinted at only in their institutions: the bank, the mission school. The writer contemplates the lesser life that goes on below; small man, small schemes, big talk, limited means, a life so circumscribed that it appears whole and unviolated, its smallness never a subject for wonder, though India itself is felt to be vast.

In his autobiography, My Days, published in 1974, Narayan fills in the background to his novels. This book, though more exotic in content than the novels, is of a piece with them. It is not more politically explicit or exploratory. The southern city of Madras – one of the earliest English foundations in India, the site leased by the East India company in 1640 after the last remnants of the Vijayanagar Kingdom – was where Narayan spent much of his childhood. Madras was part of a region that had long been pacified, was more Hindu than the north, less Islamicized, and had had 75 years more of peace. It had seen no wars,Narayan says, since the days of Clive. When, during the first world war, the roving German Battleship Emden appeared in the harbour one night, turned on its searchlights, and began shelling the city, people wondered at the phenomenon of thunder and lightning with a sky full of stars. Some people fled inland. This flight, Narayan says, was in keeping with an earlier move, when the sea was rough with cyclone and it was prophesied that the world would end that day.

Excerpted from Pages 18 to 20 of ‘India: A wounded civilization’ by VS Naipaul