Volume 29, Number 5 · April 1, 1982
The Old Country
By Robert Towers
Malgudi Days
by R. K. Narayan
Viking, 244 pp., $14.95
While changes on the macrocosmic scale in India have been tumultuous since R. K. Narayan's first novel, Swami and Friends, appeared in 1935, the imaginary South Indian town of Malgudi—the microcosm of his fiction—has undergone little transformation. To be sure, it is more crowded. The population continues to increase at an alarming rate, and advocates of birth control and vasectomy have appeared on the scene, their presence an affront to the old Hindu notions of fertility, sex, and decency. The British have gone; Coronation Park (just whose coronation is no longer remembered) has become Hamara Hindustan Park and the statue of the Victorian military governor, Sir Frederick Lawley, has been pulled down from its pedestal (only to be re-erected elsewhere). Hippies sometimes join the mendicants on the temple steps. But cobblers and knife-grinders and the vendors of sweets still go about their business much as their grandfathers had. Marriages are still arranged, horoscopes consulted. Though there are more cars, the cries of the tradesmen, the dust, and the pungent smells of the place are those that struck the senses of the boy Swami fifty years ago.
Review, 2191 words
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