The birth of the late RK Narayan, the creator of the fictional south Indian town of Malgudi, is celebrated with a Google doodle today. But the search giant has chosen to display the image of an author widely seen as India’s greatest writer in English only in India.
Narayan, who died in 2001 at the age of 84, is pictured behind a copy of perhaps his most famous collection, Malgudi Days, the writer’s head providing the “o” of the Google logo. “Who’s the man behind the book on our doodle in India? It’s Malgudi’s native son, famed Indian writer RK Narayan,” said Google. “Narayan is a well known pioneer of early Indian literature and set most of his stories in the fictional town of Malgudi. Happy 108th birthday to RK Narayan.”
Born in Madras on 10 October 1906, Narayan – his given surname Narayanaswami was shortened at the advice of his friend Graham Greene and publisher Hamish Hamilton – won India’s National Prize of the Indian Literary Academy, was awarded the AC Benson Medal by the Royal Society of Literature, and was made an honorary member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He wrote travel books, essays and memoirs, and retold legends including The Ramayana and the Mahabharata, but was best known for the novels and short stories set in Malgudi.
In the collection highlighted by Google, the author writes in his introduction that in India, “the writer has only to look out of the window to pick up a character and thereby a story”, going on to tell of everything from a seller of pies and chapattis to an astrologer and a snake charmer.
In an obituary of the author for the Guardian Susan Ram and Narasimhan Ram wrote that Malgudi was a place “where change is leisurely and incremental. It connects with a rural hinterland, and jungle and forest are never far away. It teems with life, abounds with colour. To wander any street, peer through a window or push open a door is to encounter a character: Swami, the undistinguished, cricket- loving schoolboy; Savitri, the put-upon, and briefly rebellious, housewife; Krishna, the college lecturer traumatised by the loss of his wife; Margayya, the financial expert at his questionable business beneath the banyan tree; Raju, the tourist-seeking guide.”
Greene, a lifelong friend of Narayan who helped him find a publisher, compared the “underlying sense of beauty and sadness” of his stories to Chekhov, praising his objectivity and writing that “this complete freedom from comment is the boldest gamble a novelist can take”.
Narayan joins a roll of writers celebrated by Google including Leo Tolstoy, Jorge Luis Borges and Mark Twain – three authors judged by the tech conglomerate to be of interest to a global audience.
