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Questions for R. K. Narayan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Judith Brown
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Abstract

R. K. Narayan's work has been faulted for its sidestepping of the brutal realities of colonial rule. Yet Narayan stages, in the dreaminess of his fictionalized township of Malgudi, the unwriting or undermining of the logics of language that subtend colonial rule. The author has fashioned a way to write about India that displays the vacuity of the colonial model of governance and, through his tales of failed authorship, points to something other. Emerging in his 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. Narayan, this essay argues through a series of questions that underscore the uncertainty in his world, imagines passivity as an interruption of the progressive, purposive, and productive time that defines modernity.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 131 , Issue 3 , May 2016 , pp. 622 - 635
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2016

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