Grateful to Life and Death by R. K. Narayan

First published: 1945, in Great Britain as The English Teacher (U.S. edition, 1953)

Type of work: Magical realism

Time of work: The late 1930’s

Locale: Malgudi, in Southern India

Principal Characters:

• Krishna, the English teacher
• Susila, his wife
• Leela, their young daughter
• The Friend, a spiritualist who can contact the dead
• The Headmaster, an eccentric friend and teacher of Leela

The Novel

In his autobiographical memoir My Days: A Memoir (1974), R. K. Narayan declared that Grateful to Life and Death was the most autobiographical of all of his novels, very little of it, in his account, being fiction. This statement must immediately arouse doubt, if not skepticism. One can see how the start of the book, with its quasi-satirical picture of the protagonist, Krishna, teaching at Albert Mission College, could be drawn from Narayan’s memories of his own schooling at the Lutheran Mission School in Madras and the Maharaja’s Collegiate High School in Mysore. Furthermore, the pivotal event of the book, the death of Krishna’s wife, Susila, is very clearly based on the tragic death of Narayan’s own wife, Rajam, from typhoid, in June, 1939—a bereavement which left him, like his fictional hero, with a young daughter to rear on his own. What is harder to accept—though there is something close to a direct assertion by Narayan of its truth— is the last part of the book, in which the hero succeeds in establishing closer and closer contact with his dead wife, culminating in a transcendent moment of union and joy. Can this be credited? To ask a question more relevant in literary terms, does Narayan succeed in anything but an autobiographical way in unifying what appears to be a series of different threads of his hero and first-person narrator’s experience?

At first sight, one has to answer no to the last question. The mood of Grateful to Life and Death keeps changing unpredictably. The first sections are of a familiar comic type. Krishna, like many other junior teachers in novels such as Charles Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby (1838-1839) and Bernard Malamud’s A New Life (1961), finds himself in an ill-run establishment with a foolish head, and he takes revenge by not preparing for classes and complaining ineffectively to anyone who will listen. The joke is partly that his superiors are so insufferably petty (Brown, the Principal of the College, flies into a rage because one boy has spelled “honour” without a u), and partly that Krishna is so inept in his protests, his ineffective resolutions, and his general attitude. The mood changes when Susila arrives with her baby to join her husband, becoming one of tender domesticity, in which Krishna appears much more likable. The mood changes again when Susila contracts the illness which kills her, described in the novel in a long and slow section oscillating between hope and despair. Yet again, after her death, the mood shifts, though this time the effect achieved is almost surreal: Krishna not only goes through a set of psychic experiences with regard to Susila but also contracts a relationship with his daughter’s teacher, a man who is convinced that he knows the date of his own death, and who insists on being socially dead, to his wife and children, even when that date is past. In a final coda, Krishna resigns from the almost forgotten Mission College (in which Brown, the principal, has suddenly become reasonable and likable) and breaks through to full contact with his wife.

There is no argument which will make a completely integrated structure out of this novel, though there are certain thematic connections. Probably Narayan’s own statement that this is how things happened to him is the simplest explanation, in which case Grateful to Life and Death—dedicated to his dead wife— could be seen as a “therapeutic” novel. The novel is distinguished above all, however, by its overt statements about loneliness as the inescapable factor of human life, though one must note that these statements are strongly denied by almost all the novel’s events and relationships. The novel turns on a devastating sense of loss, contrasted with an even more powerful belief in the strength of love.

The Characters

Central to the novel is the relationship between Krishna and Susila, seen (in life) as total opposites. Krishna is glib, talkative, and inept. He loves to explain books to people, except in those hours when he is paid to do so, and always has an elevating sentiment to turn into poetry. Yet he has no perseverance, is bullied by everyone, and cannot so much as get his wife’s belongings off a train without feelings of inadequacy, camouflaged by authoritativeness. In contrast, his wife is quiet, a slow reader, a careful manager who runs a household on one hundred rupees a month (then about twenty dollars) and still has money, time, and energy to spare. The love between these two opposites is entirely credible and beautifully presented.

After Susila’s death, there is a danger that all other characters will become mere tools and reflections of the central figure, Krishna, who is too absorbed by his own feelings to notice others. This does seem to happen with “the friend,” an unnamed and unexplained figure who sends the hero a note one day to say that he is in touch with Krishna’s dead wife, and from then on does little but conduct experiments in automatic handwriting. Quite soon the friend has virtually disappeared as a character; one notes only the results of the handwriting. The novel is saved partly by the growing prominence of Krishna’s daughter Leela, in whom he comes to recognize something of the grace and good sense of her mother, and partly by the intriguing figure of “the headmaster,” her teacher. This latter character is indeed best explained as a double, or analogue, of Krishna himself. The headmaster shows the same practical ineptitude as Krishna, but by his idealism, he draws Krishna in to such an extent that the hero resigns his college post and goes to teach for the headmaster at a quarter of his former salary. Whereas Krishna’s marriage is ideally happy, however, the headmaster’s is a total failure; yet the headmaster escapes from it, not by his wife’s dying, but by insisting that he himself is dead, an action which in India at that time was acceptable and, even as an ascetic practice, mildly approved. His rise from misery to serenity parallels and guides Krishna’s but at the same time remains unpredictable, amusing, governed by the character’s own wayward individuality.

Grateful to Life and Death contains a large cast of subsidiary characters, most of them—like the Dr. Shankar who insists on treating Susila for malaria when she has typhoid—variants on the theme of amusing, or infuriating, impracticality. All remain firmly subordinate, however, to the narrator. Just as the headmaster shows how life can be continued, or restarted, with new vigor and meaning after symbolic death, so the others doctors, housebuilders, colleagues, and relatives play their parts by reflecting aspects of Krishna’s own character, whether negative (vagueness, indolence, indecision) or positive (humility, tolerance, warm affection).

Critical Context

Grateful to Life and Death is the fourth of Narayan’s novels, none of the preceding three having attracted much attention and all four having been printed by different publishers. After 1945, though, Narayan’s career became much better established. It may not have been Grateful to Life and Death which caused this change: The novel—suggested above to have had therapeutic properties for the author—marks the end of Narayan’s first phase of writing and the beginning of his maturity.

As a novel, Grateful to Life and Death resembles several highly conventional types, such as the “campus novel” seen from the perspective of a junior instructor, or the novel centered on a moment of incommunicable horror. Its main achievement, however, is to resist the gravitational tug of these modes and to persist in its own line of development, from youth to maturity, from love to loss and back again. The novel also combines a characteristically Indian challenge to Western views of reality with elements of humor and self-deprecation taken from the very mainstream of the English novel.

Bibliography

Naik, M. K. The Ironic Vision: A Study of the Fiction of R. K. Narayan, 1983.

Ram, Atma, ed. Perspectives on R. K. Narayan, 1981.

Sundaram, P. S. R. K. Narayan, 1973.

Walsh, William. R. K. Narayan: A Critical Appreciation, 1982.

Walsh, William , ed. Readings in Commonwealth Literature, 1973.