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Acts of Ambivalence: Political Resistance/Resisting Politics in R. K. Narayan's

Swami and Friends

Article  in  South Asian review · October 2013

DOI: 10.1080/02759527.2013.11932930

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 79

Acts of Ambivalence: Political

Resistance/Resisting Politics in R. K.
Narayan’s Swami and Friends

Hager Ben Driss

University of Tunis
[Abstract: This paper addresses the Indian writer R. K Narayan’s first
novel, Swami and Friends (1930). The novel has received a rather
harsh criticism on the ground of its apolitical stance and failure to
engage in the colonial reality during which it was written and
published. Narayan’s text, however, shows particular patterns of
resistance to the colonial master narrative without adopting an explicit
militant stand. This paper proposes a threefold argument: first, it
investigates Narayan’s linguistic strategy of resistance; second, it
reveals his engagement in a counter narrative of an exoticized and
mystified India; third, it argues that his navigation between memory
and history is a tactical manoeuvre to politicize the personal.]

Critics say that I don’t talk about the aspirations of the people, of the
political agony that we have gone through, and of all those plans for
economic growth. I am not interested in that. I am interested in
human characters and their background.
—R. K. Narayan, “An Interview”
Narayan, with his glories and limitations, is the Gandhi of modern
Indian literature.
—V.S. Naipaul, “The Master of Small Things”

R . K. Narayan (1906-2001) started his literary career in a period

marked by an intense political agitation in India. The early 1930s
witnessed a rising national movement interrogating the legacy of the
South Asian Review, Vol. 34, No. 2, 2013
80 Hager Ben Driss

Raj as well as asserting an indigenous identity. His first work, Swami

and Friends, written in India in English, could see life only in England
in 1935. Refused by most Indian publishers, Narayan sent it out to an
English friend with a precise request: “Throw it into the Thames if you
fail to find a publisher”  (qtd. in Chattopadhyay, 27). By sheer luck, the
manuscript landed in Graham Greene’s hands; he loved the book and
recommended it for publication. This auspicious ending to Narayan’s
attempt to publish his first novel, however, seems to mar his
subsequent success. The imposing shadow of an English literary
authority of the caliber of Greene persistently hovered around
Narayan’s career. A writer from the periphery who needs the
benediction of an authority from the center recreates the colonial
situation. Seen from a different perspective, however, a writer from the
margin who invades the literary market of the center destabilizes the
entire colonial agenda.
Despite the fact that R. K. Narayan’s work has, ultimately,
received a wide critical interest, his first novel offers an interesting case
of ambivalent assessment. It is either celebrated, along with his other
narratives, as an essentially moral and universal narrative (Rao 29) or
harshly dismissed as apolitical, shallow, and banal (Tharoor). This
paper tries to depart from these two prevailing modes of reading Swami
and Friends. It relocates the text in its cultural matrix and seeks to view
it as a “worldly” artifact. For texts, as Edward Said maintains in The
World, the Text, and the Critic, are “events, and, even when they
happen to deny it, they are nevertheless a part of the social world,
human life, and of course the historical moments in which they are
located and interpreted” (4). Indeed, behind its deceptively simple form
and content, Swami and Friends is informed by a network of cultural
and political references that belies the text’s pretense of political
disengagement.
This essay joins in a more challenging discussion of Narayan’s
debut novel begun several years ago. In “Reading R. K. Narayan
Postcolonially,” for instance, Fakrul Alam proposes a survey of
Narayan’s critical reception informed by a postcolonial approach.
Positioned in this field of research, the essay offers a close textual
analysis of only Swami and Friends, seeking to decode messages of
political and cultural resistance carefully camouflaged in a text
seemingly disengaged from politics. While keeping aware of Narayan’s
ambivalence—his attraction to and repulsion from the colonial
project—the aim of this essay is to explore the strategies of resistance
employed in his narrative. The first part raises the ineluctable debate
over the legitimacy of using the colonizer’s language. The second part
reads the novel as a counter-narrative of exoticism and mystification.
 Acts of Ambivalence 81

And the third part reads Narayan’s navigation between memory and
history as a maneuver to politicize the self.
The debate in India over the use of the colonizer’s language may
have lost some of its urgency by now, but it still triggers cultural
apprehensions in the works of some postcolonial writers in other parts
of the world. The West Indian poet Derek Walcott, for instance, offers
a pertinent example of linguistic angst. “To change your language you
must change your life,” he writes in “Codicil” (Green Knight 7), which
displays a theme of linguistic schizophrenia that occurs in his other
poems. In “A Far Cry From Africa,” a poem about divided cultural
identities, the speaker’s anxiety bursts out as a rhetorical question:
“how choose / Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?”
(Castaway 29-30). Such a debate pursues a more rigorous argument
about utilizing the colonizer’s language in a colonial context. R. K.
Narayan’s Swami and Friends was published in 1935, some twelve
years before the independence of India. In a period characterized by
Gandhi’s Swadeshi movement, calling for an indigenous identity,
Narayan’s use of English posits him as a custodian of the colonizer’s
language. Yet his ironic declaration, “it is almost a matter of national
property and prestige now to declare one’s aversion to this language,
and to cry for its abolition” (“Fifteen Years” 14), speaks of a
challenging stance that he would develop in his maturing vision of the
English language.
Narayan, however, was not the only writer in the 1930s to adopt
English for his creative project. Swami and Friends was one of three
fictional works that marked a new phase in the development of the
Indian novel in English at that period. Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable
(1935) and Raja Rao’s Kanthapura (1938) were published around the
same time. Raja Rao was especially concerned to justify his use of the
English language. His foreword to Kanthapura, probably more famous
than the narrative itself, is considered now as a manifesto for the use of
English in Indian writing. Rao’s famous statement that “one has to
convey in a language that is not one’s own the spirit that is one’s own”
(vii), justified the special use of the colonizer’s language. His foreword
raises linguistic and stylistic anxieties as he confesses that “telling [his
story] has not been easy.” Then in three distinct and straightforward
sentences, he projects his linguistic dilemma: “[w]e cannot write like
the English. We should not. We cannot write only as Indians” (vii). Rao
expresses here a real concern about the enmeshed relationship between
the mimic act and the creative gesture in the use of the English
language.
Rao’s anxieties are not echoed in Narayan’s handling of the
foreign language, for Narayan never felt the need to apologize for his
use of English in his creative texts. It is in paratextual asides that he

 
82 Hager Ben Driss

candidly presents, rather than anxiously defends, his linguistic choice:

“I was never aware I was using a different, a foreign language when I
wrote in English, because it came to me very easily” (qtd. in Walsh 7).
Narayan, who believed that English “is an absolutely swadeshi
language,” announced unabashedly: “it is my hope that English will
soon be classified as a non-regional Indian language” (“Fifteen Years”
8). In fact, Narayan announces here a linguistic deviation taking the
form of both “abrogation,” i.e., calling for the equality of all forms of
English, and “appropriation,” i.e., articulating indigenous concerns
through the colonizer’s language and forms of writing (Ashcroft,
Griffiths, and Tiffin 3). Narayan’s textual rendering of this linguistic
divergence is clearly manifest in Swami and Friends.
The novel charts the life of a ten-year-old Indian schoolboy. It
records the happiness and disappointments of a child groping his way
towards growth. More episodic than linear, the text narrates Swami’s
negotiation of a mature identity at home with a stern father, at school
with a harsh educational system, and, in the street, with a country under
colonization. Narayan couches his seemingly simple story into a very
plain style and an almost childlike language. The opening sentences
illustrate the style employed consistently in the narrative: “It was
Monday morning. Swaminathan was reluctant to open his eyes. He
considered Monday specially unpleasant in the calendar” (Swami 1).
Shashi Tharoor offers one of the harshest examples of criticism as he
attacks “the banality of Narayan’s concerns, the narrowness of his
vision, the predictability of his prose, and shallowness of the pool of
experience and vocabulary from which he drew” (“Comedies of
Suffering”). Even though derided as shallow and trite, the simple
language Narayan uses reflects the content of the narrative, the story of
a child. This linguistic choice, however, goes beyond its effective
function as a technique of narration to embrace a mode of deviation.
Indeed, the pervasive use of a simplified language, free of
embellishment and pretense, conforms to Narayan’s call to Indianize
English. “The [English] language must be taught in a simple manner,”
he advocates in his essay “English in India,” “through a basic
vocabulary, [and] simplified spelling” (468). From this perspective,
Swami and Friends constitutes a leading literary example of
appropriating the English language in India, domesticating its structure,
and transforming the mimic act of using the colonizer’s tongue into an
act of resistance. This has paved the way to more audacious linguistic
deviations, as provided much later by Salman Rushdie’s chutnified
English. Shakespeare’s Caliban’s famous lines that announce his
subversive use of the master’s language are boldly exemplified by later
Indian writers of English: you taught me language, and my use of it is
to make it mine.¹ Narayan’s use of a personalized English is an
 Acts of Ambivalence 83

ambivalent act of mimicry and mockery that announces a “menace” to

the colonizer who is kept alert by the potential danger of dealing with
subjects who are “almost the same, but not quite” (Bhabha 86).
The fact that all languages are carriers of their own cultural,
literary, and religious heritage, does not seem to hinder Narayan’s
project of appropriating the English language. V. S. Naipaul explains
that to make English one’s own is to “cleanse” it, and enables narrating
Indian culture in “a correct English,” with “no strangeness, no false
comedy, no distance” (“The Master of Small Things”). The fact that
Narayan does not provide a glossary to explain Indian words further
emphasizes his linguistic resistance. Phrases like “Gandhi ki Jai,” for
example, refers to Indian history (Ashroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 3) and
religious allusions (4), which are inserted into the text without
italicization, translation, or explanation. These instances of “metonymic
gaps” provide “the most subtle form of abrogation” (122-23). In
representing Indian culture in a synecdochic way, these devices resist
interpretation, and, thus, create a gap, a distance between the writer’s
culture and the colonial culture. Even though written in the language of
the colonizer, Swami and Friends deploys strategies of retrieving the
Indian culture and language. The scriptural power of the English
language is undermined by traces of indigenous language not
thoroughly erased. In an attempt to acquit himself from charges of
targeting a specific audience, mainly an English one, Narayan claims:
“When I write, I write for myself. While writing, I don’t think of
readers’ reactions” (“An Interview” 234). Even though such a claim
cannot be taken at its value, Narayan matches word to act in his novel
by providing a glossary-free text. Such a gesture acquits him from the
charge of playing the local intelligentsia, translating the East to the
West.
The role of the native intercessor is assigned to Rajam, Swami’s
newly-arrived friend, who speaks “very good English, ‘exactly like a
“European”’; which meant that few in the school could make out what
he said” (Swami 12). Narayan’s ironic use of inverted commas in this
sentence is quite significant. By encapsulating the second phrase of the
sentence in single commas, and further encasing “European” in double
quotation marks, he shows the double estrangement of a newly rising
Indian elite, a hybrid caste, as Thomas Babington Macaulay would
characterize in his 1835 “Minute on Indian Education,” as “Indian in
blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals, and in
intellect” (par. 30). The sly criticism directed towards Macaulay’s
linguistic and cultural program is elicited through the unpleasant
character of Rajam. “[D]ressed like ‘a European boy’” (Swami 182),
Rajam epitomizes the cultural transvestite, estranged both from his
Indian culture and the European set. He is represented as a character

 
84 Hager Ben Driss

who is neither fully Indian nor authentically English; he haunts the text
and informs its gesture of resistance. An incarnation of a western genre,
Swami and Friends narrates a story of filiation. In a deviant maneuver
of resistance, Narayan writes an India of his own.
Swami and Friends, as well as the major bulk of Narayan’s oeuvre,
is set in a fictional town named Malgudi. While Malgudi has made the
fame of Narayan, it has often been ascribed to the universal side of his
narratives. Malgudi is not only a metaphor for colonial India, but also
of “everywhere” (Walsh 6) or of “the world” (Pousse xiii). Narayan’s
own answer to the often-asked question, “where is Malgudi?” is “it is
imaginary and not to be found on any map” (qtd. in Thieme 176).
Despite being an imaginary, a nonexistent spot on the map, Malgudi is
related to India through two symbolic spaces: the Sarayu River,
signifying an umbilical cord relating Malgudi to history; and the
railway station, standing for Malgudi’s connection to a broader space.
In Swami and Friends, Malgudi is located in time, the 1930s, as well as
in space, South India. The narrative presents characters arriving in
Malgudi from recognized places and leaving it to other mapped spaces
of India. A whole chapter, “Broken Panes,” describes a violent
demonstration in 1930 against the colonial economic policy at work in
India. Hence the conclusion that Narayan’s imaginary town constitutes
part of his strategy of resistance.
Malgudi announces a gesture of cultural and political opposition. It
is through a town of his own that Narayan can regain India. Indeed,
while narrating an imaginary space, he disrupts the colonial power of
mapping and control. In a significant episode of the narrative, the
young Swami has to grapple with the map of Europe: “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” (Swami 56).
Swami then has to copy the map of Europe to revise his geography.
What is significant here is the child’s complete alienation from a
foreign geography imposed on him at school as a major subject. While
studying the colonizer’s geography, Swami is estranged from his own
geography. Malgudi, then, can be read as a corrective move which,
while resisting the foreign, creates a space outside the cartographic
custody of the colonizer.
Narayan’s resistance to regimented space is reinforced by
countering the exotic narrative of India. Indeed, the India presented to
the reader is an India narrated from the inside. Malgudi offers a
counter-space, a dissenting geography which undermines the English
literary construction of India. The “Romantic playground of the Raj”
(Greene, “Discovering”), as offered in Kipling’s India, or the
unexplainable “muddle” (71), as presented in E. M. Forster’s A
Passage to India, are destabilized by a real India narrated by its people.
 Acts of Ambivalence 85

Malgudi in Narayan’s novel is the playground of Indian children, while

the simple story aims at demystifying India. As he empties his space of
English characters who become “peripheral” and “hopelessly
unimportant” (Greene, “Discovering”), Narayan brings to the fore
Indian characters who re-appropriate both history and geography. The
only English character in Swami and Friends is the nameless
Headmaster of Albert Mission school whose “thin long cane” (1) serves
as a reminder of violent colonial intervention.
In addition, the novel presents clear elements of the
bildungsroman, even though it covers a relatively short span of time.
The structure of the novel clearly marks a shift away from the happy
innocence of childhood to the anxious experience of growth. The
episodic first chapters, paralleling the detached life of children, turn
into a linear narrative exploring the psychological growth of the
protagonist. The story of Swami unfolds in two years during which the
young boy amasses several experiences: he protests against his
scripture teacher’s offending remarks against Hinduism; he receives his
first shock of being excluded by his friends; he participates in a violent
strike; he challenges the Headmaster, refusing to be beaten and leaves
school; he forms a cricket team; and he escapes home. All of these
episodes combine to shape Swami’s consciousness and identity. Feroza
Jussawalla argues in “Kim, Huck and Naipaul” that the growth of
Swami is metaphorically paralleled to India’s coming of age (30). It is
through the eyes of a rather rebellious child that the reader perceives a
nascent nation oscillating between tradition and modernity, colonialism
and nationalism, and mimicry and mockery.
To condemn Swami and Friends as shallow and banal betrays a
narrow reading of the text, one that concentrates on what seems to be
its center. Yet the baffling nature of a narrative that mocks
interpretation invites another strategy of decoding. The whole narrative
is anchored in an ambivalent attitude towards colonization. “Far from
being politically innocent,” John Thieme believes the novel to offer “a
subversive response to the colonial ethic and to the educational
curriculum that was one of its lynch-pins” (180). A more rewarding
reading of Swami and Friends is to be found in an ensconced layer of
the text: the simple story of Swami hides the intricate history of India.
The text navigates between the private and the public as it starts from
the personal to encompass the political.
Without being openly autobiographical, the novel weaves personal
episodes into the tapestry of the text. One recalls here that the young
Narayan was educated in a mission school. In his essay “When India
Was a Colony,” Narayan recollects an episode which he faithfully
renders in the first chapter of Swami and Friends:

 
86 Hager Ben Driss

I studied in a mission school and the daily scripture teacher class

proved a torment. Our scripture teacher master, though a native, was
so devout a convert that he would spend the first ten minutes calling
Krishna a lecher and a thief of devilry. (343)
Swami’s scripture teacher, Mr Ebenezar, is a replica of the young
Narayan’s. He, too, is a “fanatic teacher” who starts his lessons with
“O, wretched idiots! . . . why do you worship dirty, wooden idols and
stone images?” (Swami 3). He equally abuses Krishna: “Did our Jesus
go gadding about with dancing girls like your Krishna? Did our Jesus
go about stealing butter like that arch-scoundrel Krishna?” (4).
Narayan’s drawing on his childhood memories and narrating what seem
to be trifles is, truly, an act of politicizing the self. The unhindered
childhood memories function as a cultural mirror. The whole text,
therefore, comes to serve as an archive, documenting India of the
1930s.
Swami’s grandmother, a figure modeled on Narayan’s own
grandmother, illustrates the writer’s subtle strategy of creating a porous
zone between the private and the public. The grandmother, first
introduced in Chapter III, functions throughout the text as a reminder of
a dissolving tradition. Nameless and faceless, she is interpolated as a
symbol of old India squeezed between tradition and modernity. Indeed,
grandmother “live[s] with all her belongings” in “the ill-ventilated dark
passage between the front hall and the dining room” (19). Such a
symbolic space shows a nation in between, torn between Indianness
and a hybrid identity imposed by the colonizer. The grandmother’s
candid inability to understand Swami’s fascination with his friend
Rajam and her ignorance of cricket reinforce her image as an
unadulterated archive of the nation.
The grandmother’s story of Harischandra, the one that lulls Swami
to sleep, accounts for India’s oral culture superseded by European
written culture. While the grandmother’s oral narrative announces a
tranquil familiarity with one’s culture, the English written text is
always presented as a source of estrangement and puzzlement. It is not
at random that the scene following the one in which Swami falls asleep
halfway through his grandmother’s familiar story shows him “trying to
wrest the meaning out of a poem in his English Reader” (12). The
child’s wrestling with an imposed foreign culture is equally clear in his
reaction to Andersen’s Fairy Tales as he “could never get through the
book to his satisfaction. There were too many unknown,
unpronounceable English words in it” (181). The grandmother’s oral
tradition and the European scriptural authority show two competing
cultures with which the young Swami, and, by extension, a whole
nation, is grappling.
 Acts of Ambivalence 87

Children’s games and leisure activities offer another cultural

element of great significance to the text. The fact that Narayan
originally entitled his first novel “Swami the Tate,” a direct reference to
the English cricketer Maurice Tate (1895-1956), testifies to the
importance of cricket in Indian culture. Feroza Jussawalla contends that
Indian “colonials and postcolonials were steeped in cricket” (“Cricket”
117). She shares Fakrul Alam’s postcolonial reading of the novel’s
undecided attitude towards English culture in general and cricket in
particular. Alam stipulates that “Swami may be growing up in a self-
sufficient ‘Indian’ world, but he cannot escape some amount of
Anglicization in his outlook” (112). In the same vein, Jussawalla
affirms that “Swaminathan is ambivalent about things English, despite
his great admiration for them” (“Cricket” 122). Indeed, “the novel’s
attitude to cricket is complex” (176), announces Thieme in “The
Double Making of R. K. Narayan.” Such an ambivalence, however,
veers more towards repulsion than attraction.
Cricket in Swami and Friends goes beyond a mere game to
embrace a whole colonial strategy of indoctrination. This game,
deemed “a standing panegyric on the English character” (Pycroft 15),
was celebrated as a civilizing power able to elevate the barbaric
colonized into an English gentleman (Bateman 122). It is significant
that it is Rajam who introduces cricket to his group of friends. The
cricket section, which extends over almost one third of the narrative,
follows immediately the episode narrating Swami’s involvement with
political unrest. Rajam, who has ignored Swami for six weeks because
of “his political activities” (Swami 108), visits his friend, lectures him
on the necessity of keeping “clear of all […] dirty politics and strikes”
(110), forgives him his “past sins” (111), and proposes a cricket team.
Viewed from this perspective, cricket acquires a corrective antidote
used as a colonial strategy to domesticate the colonized.
Cricket, as it is clear from the text, was a cultural product that had
invaded Indian consciousness a long time before Swami was born. Like
many children of his age, Swami is quite familiar with Hobbs,
Bradman, and Duleep, and collects pictures of cricket players in an
album (111). Cricket here becomes another tool to normalize the
colonial presence. Cricket players, and such names as “Vasco da Gama,
Clive, Hastings, and others” (3) that he learns in his history class, like
the map of Europe and the school subjects he believes are “serious
things,” such as “geography, arithmetic, Bible and English” (29), all
function in a synechdochic way to show a hegemonic cultural
discourse. Differently from Rajam, however, Swami experiences the
same feelings of alienation he has already felt with other English
artifacts as he “secretly did not very much care for those [cricket]
pictures—there was something monotonous about them” (111). It is

 
88 Hager Ben Driss

through this secret voice, albeit a muted one, that Narayan registers
India’s oscillation between acquiescence and resistance.
R. K. Narayan’s Swami and Friends acquires its force through the
different strategies of dissidence it deploys. While shunning any direct
political oratory, the text is undoubtedly immersed in a rhetoric of
resistance. The narrative may have started as a naïve account of the
daily life of Swami and his friends, but it certainly culminates into an
incisive record of pre-independence India. To qualify the novel as
universal is to align it to European-accepted values and hence to divest
it of its Indian identity. Narayan exhibits, primarily, Indianness in his
debut novel, a value he would carry on in all his following works. The
private and the public, the personal and the political interconnect in a
destabilizing historiographical gesture here. Indeed, in Swami and
Friends, Narayan offers his story of India—an account from within,
that deviates from all imposed historical records.
Notes
1. One of the most oft-quoted passages in Shakespeare’s plays is spoken
by Caliban in Act I, Scene ii. Of The Tempest: “You taught me language; and
my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse.” These lines are recuperated in
postcolonial studies to describe the colonized people’s subversive use of the
colonizer’s language.

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