66697602-The-Ramayana-R-K-Narayan

of Rama and Sita that are commonly found in bourgeois
South Indian homes, and the great literary classic in the
Tamil language, Kamba Ramayana.
But it took him some decades to get around to writing his
own version of The Ramayana. Born in 1906 into a rising,
urban family of Tamil Brahmins, which sought to enter, with
one foot planted in tradition, the colonial Indian world of jobs
and careers, Narayan had, as a young man, a bolder
ambition than anyone around him could have possessed. He
wanted to be a “realistic fiction writer” at a time when
realistic fiction writers in English were almost entirely
unknown in India. It is partly why he was, as he relates in his
memoir, My Days (1974), indifferent to the classical Tamil
literature his uncle wanted him to read.
Not surprisingly, Narayan wrote his abridged version of
The Ramayana and The Mahabharata only in the
seventies, after having produced some of his finest fiction:
Swami and Friends (1935), The Financial Expert (1952),
Waiting for the Mahatma (1955), The Guide (1958), and
The Vendor of Sweets (1967). “I was impelled,” he once
said, “to retell the Ramayana and the Mahabharata
because that was the great climate in which our culture
developed. They are symbolic and philosophical. Even as
mere stories they are so good. Marvellous. I couldn’t help
writing them. It was part of the writer’s discipline.” 2
The writerly compulsion Narayan expresses through his