The Cultural Geography of Malgudi

The Cultural Geography of Malgudi John Thieme University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK Abstract A comment by Narayan on the “false geography” of his “imaginary town” provides the departure-point for a discussion of Malgudi, which argues against the frequently held view that it is a metonym for a quintessential India, or South India. Taking its cue from the cultural geographer Doreen Massey’s assertion that “The identities of places are always unfixed, contested and multiple”, the paper contends that Malgudi is a multi-faceted and transitional site, an interface between older conceptions of “authentic” Indianness and contemporary views that stress the ubiquity and inescapability of change in the face of modernity. It argues that Malgudi is far more than a physical locus, viewing it as an episteme that incorporates numerous ways of perceiving India – social, spiritual, mythological and psychological among them. Focusing on Narayan’s representation of heterotopias, it considers the demarcations between “pure” and “polluted” space in The English Teacher, the simultaneity of different layers of Indian culture in The Financial Expert and the contrast between Malgudi and a larger Indian world in The Painter of Signs. Keywords R.K. Narayan, Malgudi, cultural geography, heterotopias, The English Teacher, The Financial Expert, The Painter of Signs. In a typically whimsical “Self-Obituary”, published in The Illustrated Weekly of India in 1950, R.K. Narayan imagined himself, “On a certain day (towards the close of the twentieth century)” being interrogated and charged with various offences by “four grim men” from the “I.T.F.K.E.O.N” (“INTERNATIONAL TRIBUNAL FOR KEEPING an [sic] EYE ON NOVELISTS”). OTES R.K. Narayan, “Self-Obituary No. 5”, Illustrated Weekly of India, 23 July 1950. Copy in Special Collections, Mugar Memorial Library, Boston University, No. 737, Box 8, folder 39. These included: writing too much (exceeding his allotted weight limit of 60 pounds of books); inventing an “imaginary town”, with “false geography” that was bad for the tourist industry; and leaving his “characters in mid-air, their destinies unsolved”. Ibid. I should like to focus on the second of these charges, suggesting that, whether or not the “false geography” of Malgudi has been “bad for the tourist industry” of South India, it has been at the centre of Narayan’s appeal to armchair tourists, who reading about Malgudi have often seen it as a site that represents quintessential Indianness. Graham Greene’s oft-quoted comment, “Without him I could never have known what it like to be Indian”, Graham Greene, Introduction to R.K. Narayan, The Bachelor of Arts, 1978; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980, p. v. is the most famous of many testimonials to Narayan’s supposed capacity for conveying “authentic” Indianness, but it is only one and it is mirrored in remarks made by numerous Indian commentators, including such critics as the renowned C.D. Narasimhaiah, who says of him, “Few writers have been more truly Indian”. C.D. Narasimhaiah, The Swan and the Eagle: Essays on Indian English Literature, Simla: Indian Institute, 1968, p. 136. These critics have, often nostalgically, invoked Narayan’s fictional town as a microcosm of the nation, sometimes tempering this by an acknowledgement of the extent to which it is representative of a particular region of India and a particular segment of Indian society. Thus a commentator such as D.A. Shankar, talking about the caste implications of Narayan’s fiction, emphasizes the South Indian specificity of Narayan’s world, but has little difficulty in reconciling this with the nation as a whole in his appeal to Indian “authenticity”: Of all the Indian writers in English, R.K. Narayan is surely the finest and most authentic in his representation of the national ethos, the scenery, the sights and sounds, the ambience of the nation – or at least of South India, which he has made his special domain under the name of Malgudi. There is hardly ever anything that is unreal in his picture of peoples and places alike; we are constantly aware that what he depicts is what we are accustomed to, what we know from experience or report. D.A. Shankar, “Caste in the Fiction of R.K. Narayan”, in R.K. Narayan: Critical Perspectives, ed. A.L. McLeod, New Delhi: Sterling, 1994, p. 37. Shankar does, however, demur from the assessment of Narayan quoted here in one crucial respect. He argues that Narayan’s broad-brush approach to caste means that he is “forced to leave out all the little local details that go with an individual’s actual living that is co-extensive with his sub-caste and class status” and sees this as characteristic of “Indian fictionists writing in English”, who lack the “density of meaning” to be found in Indian regional writing, which displays “direct, living touch with the sub-castes” (p. 144). This is not, however, always the case in Narayan. In The Bachelor of Arts, e.g., Chandran’s marriage prospects are specifically associated with the Iyer sub-caste to which, like Narayan, he belongs, The Bachelor of Arts, 1978; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980, pp. 114 and 253. Similarly, in a passage which uses a Gandhian analogy to suggest the extent to which Narayan’s language functions as a means for articulating a local subjectivity through an imported medium, K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar, says: He is of India, even of South India: he uses the English language much as we used to wear dhoties [sic] manufactured in Lancashire – but the thoughts and feelings, the stirrings of the mind, the wayward movements of the consciousness, are all of the soil of India, recognizably autochthonous. K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar, Indian Writing in English, Bombay: Asia Publishing House, revised 2nd.? edn., 1973, p. 359. The passage appears to echo Raja Rao’s oft-quoted comments on the use of English as a medium for Indian literature in his Foreword to Kanthapura (1938). In such readings Malgudi becomes a metonym for a traditional India, a locus that exists outside time and apart from the forces of modernity, a site which, it seems, the complicitous “we” used in both passages will immediately recognize as “authentic”. However, for contemporary readers the claim that Narayan captures “the ambience of the nation” often rings hollow, an expression of a dated upper-caste Hindu-centred version of Indianness, which is no longer acceptable as a national metanarrative, because it fails to address the multiplicity of discourses that have constituted India as it exists both today and yesterday. A consequence of such readings has been that Narayan’s “false geography” has begun to seem quaint, a mythologized version of the national imaginary which runs the risk of being dismissed by those alert to the multitude of Indias in existence both then and now. Conversely, the second of the charges that Narayan levels against himself in his mock-obituary, that he leaves his characters in mid-air, is a pointer towards a more general indeterminacy in his mode of writing, an elusiveness which is the antithesis of fundamentalist thinking; and his habitual use of irony also frustrates unitary interpretations. Furthermore the actual, as opposed to the perceived, Malgudi of his fiction is always a multi-faceted and transitional site, an interface between older conceptions of “authentic” Indianness and contemporary views that stress the ubiquity and inescapability of change in the face of modernity. Additionally, Malgudi is seen from varying angles and with shifting emphases at different points in Narayan’s career. In his early novels his perennial fascination with place and space is less concerned with the public countenance of the small town than with interiors, domestic and otherwise, while in the middle-period and later novels characters frequently go beyond the boundaries of Malgudi and, as they do so, find that there are more things in heaven and earth than they have dreamt of in their geography. In early novels such as The Dark Room (1938) and The English Teacher (1945), the room is a central trope and more generally the novels of this period engage with buildings, notably schools, colleges and temples. Although there are exploratory investigations of external spaces in the early novels, it is when Narayan moves into his middle period, with novels such as Mr Sampath (1949) and The Financial Expert (1952), that he seriously embarks, albeit in a meandering way, on the project of mapping Malgudi at large, creating the vivid “false geography”, which to his amusement enabled the University of Chicago to place it on the map of India and an academic to produce a plan of the town. See Narayan’s Introduction to his short story collection, Malgudi Days, 1982; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984, p. 8. Subsequently the geographical field of reference expands further in more picaresque works, such as Waiting for the Mahatma (1955), The Guide (1958) and The Painter of Signs (1976), in which the protagonists’ travels outside Malgudi open up perspectives on village India, which belie the notion that the “imaginary town” represents the nation or South India as a whole. Malgudi is, of course, far more than a physical locus. It is an episteme that incorporates numerous ways of perceiving India – social, spiritual, mythological and psychological among them – and in the vast majority of Narayan’s novels these come together in the protagonist’s consciousness, as he (in just one novel, The Dark Room, this should be “she”) struggles to find an appropriate dharma for his situation in life. These various aspects constitute the cultural geography of Malgudi. The “imaginary town” is a site that represents a set of beliefs rather more than an attempted transcription of a physically observed space. In Narayan’s fiction places invariably have tropological associations and the range of conceptual territory covered is extensive and varied, even if his writing seems to offer a narrowly bounded view of location. In the words of the cultural geographer Doreen Massey, “The identities of places are always unfixed, contested and multiple”. Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994, p. 5. This has obvious relevance to contemporary Indian writing, for example the poetry and prose of Mumbai, but perhaps it needs foregrounding in relation to Narayan, since Malgudi has often, mistakenly, been seen as a metonym for a stable, older conception of either India or more specifically South India. As a way of trying to identify what is most distinctive about the cultural geography of Malgudi, I should like to focus on Narayan’s representation of other spaces, what Michel Foucault calls heterotopias. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Places”, trans. Jay Miskowiec Diacritics, 16, 1 (1986), 22-7. We define ourselves through contradistinction from alterity, by saying what we are not, and Narayan frequently constructs oppositions between the supposedly familiar and safe Malgudi space – the part of the town centred around its business hub, Market Road, and its most established and conservative street, Kabir Street, and newer parts of the town, such as Lawley Extension and the sweepers’ colony on the other side of the Sarayu river. The familiar “world” of Malgudi, as seen by, say, the eponymous protagonist of The World of Nagaraj (1990), is a very narrowly demarcated space and several of Narayan’s heroes, including Krishna in The English Teacher, Sriram in Waiting for the Mahatma and Jagan in The Vendor of Sweets (1967), are similarly unaware of what lies beyond the immediate parameters of this inner Malgudi environment. Jagan, for example, thinks at one point of his “whole existence” as having been lived “between the Lawley Statue and the frying shop”. The Vendor of Sweets, 1967; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983, p. 106. When they venture even a little way outside this circumscribed territory, they find themselves in locations that challenge their cognitive mapping not just of physical space, but of what constitutes cultural norms. One very obvious instance of this is Sriram’s initiation into village India, when he is recruited into the Gandhian project in Waiting for the Mahatma; and Raman in The Painter of Signs undergoes a similar broadening of his epistemological horizons when, like Sriram, his attraction to a socially committed woman leads to his enlistment in her cause, in this case the attempt to make villagers aware of the need for birth control. To exemplify how place is constituted and challenged in Narayan, I should like to focus very briefly on two particular locations that are crucial to the cultural geography of the Narayan novels in which they occur, The English Teacher and The Financial Expert, and follow this with a short analysis of The Painter of Signs, a novel that particularly challenges positivist notions of the mapping of space. The first of the two particular locations is central in the episode that leads to the death of Susila in The English Teacher, arguably the most traumatic event in all Narayan’s fiction, based as it was on the tragic death of his beloved wife Rajam. Krishna and his young wife Susila explore the possibility of buying a house in Lawley Extension, a site which represents the changing face of Malgudi. The impulse to “extend” is itself a challenge to the world-view embodied by the centre of the old town, which in Narayan’s cosmos is closely, though not exclusively associated with orthodox brahminical Hinduism. The “moving spirit” behind the extension is Krishna’s colleague, Sastri, a logician whom he describes as “a most energetic ‘extender’”. In Krishna’s view Sastri is “a marvellous man – a strange combination of things, at one end ‘undistributed middle’ [sic], ‘definition of knowledge’, ‘syllogisms’, and at the other he had the spirit of a pioneer. His was the first building in the New Extension […]”. The English Teacher, 1945; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980, p. 56. Subsequent references cite ET and are included in the text. And, as Krishna and Susila venture into this new section of the town, they do so optimistic that a similar “strange combination” will provide them with a home of their own and the sense of existential autonomy that comes with it. The tragic sequel frustrates this. They eventually arrive at a house, which Krishna sees as both attractive and propitious, because of the perfume thrown off by its jasmine creepers. For a discussion of the importance of jasmine in the novel, see Gideon Nteere M’ Marete, “Krishnan’s Jasmine-Scented Quest”, in R.K. Narayan: Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. Geoffrey Kain, East Lansing, MI: Michigan State UP, 1993, pp. 37-47. He is impressed by its pleasant garden and its view of Mempi Hills, another site that will come to assume a central role in Narayan’s mapping of Malgudi and its environs. Suddenly he notices that Susila, who has gone to look at the backyard, has been absent for rather too long and the mood begins to darken. She has locked herself in an unclean outside lavatory, which she has entered barefoot in the expectation that its interior will be as clean as its brightly coloured door. Krishna initially views this as no more than “a sad anti-climax to a very pleasing morning” (ET, p. 62), but far more is involved here. Susila is thoroughly traumatized by her experience. She emerges from the lavatory filled with disgust and, although Krishna is slow to realize it, the auspicious promise of the house has been completely negated. It is a space that now has completely different connotations. Susila is taken ill and her subsequent decline and death from typhoid appears to stem from this moment, though with characteristic ambivalence Narayan stops short of categorically identifying the experience as responsible for her death. However, reading beyond the naturalistic surface of the novel and irrespective of whether the New Extension lavatory has been the cause of Susila’s illness, this experience with a heterotopian space is represented as deeply traumatic. A brahmin-based fear of pollution seems to underpin it and, read as an allegory about spatial economies, both physical and mental, the novel suggests that it is the development of Lawley Extension that is responsible. While Susila has been undergoing her ordeal, Krishna has been busy debating the sanitation of the house’s surroundings and the clear inference is that its “strange combination”– the challenge represented by the coming of modernity to Malgudi – is the cause of the tragedy. Narayan’s technique leaves all this implicit, but later references to the psychic and spiritual properties of place establish a pattern which makes it hard to resist the conclusion that it is the transgression of codes of cleanliness that causes Susila’s death. Read like this, The English Teacher is, then, a far cry from the “domestic” novel of manners that it may initially appear to be. Krishna teaches his students Pride and Prejudice (ET, p. 45), but the novel’s account of married life is a world away from Jane Austen’s comforting conclusion which reaffirms the conventions of her middle-class social world. The second particular location I should like to focus on is Vinayak Mudali Street, where Margayya, the protagonist of The Financial Expert, lives. Margayya comes from a less respectable Malgudi background than most of Narayan’s protagonists: there is “a family secret about his caste”; The Financial Expert, London: Methuen, 1952, p. 183. Subsequent references cite FE and are included in the text. and he also lives in a more liminal situation: Vinayak Mudali Street, close to the centre of Malgudi, but a far less prestigious address than Kabir Street, the bastion of conservative Malgudi values. The choice of name represents a probable allusion to the fifteenth-century mystic and philosopher, Kabir, a bhakti saint, who is revered as one of medieval India’s most important poets. Nilufer E. Bharucha, “Colonial Enclosures and Autonomous Spaces: R.K. Narayan’s Malgudi”, South Asian Review, 23, 1 (2002), 133, notes that Kabir “was a symbol of Hindu-Muslim unity”. Situated on “the very edge of the town” (FE, p. 34), the street is clearly a borderline environment, but although it is a world away from the Kabir Street aristocracy, it has a complex past of its own. Margayya’s own house, No. 14 D, has already attained the status of “a famous local land-mark, for it was the earliest house to be built in that area” (FE, p. 9) and his father has been seen as heroic for deciding to settle in what would then have been heterotopian space. This claim to fame is, however, mitigated by the insalubrious aspects of the street: it is close to a cremation ground and a wide, unsanitary gutter runs in front of its houses. Anything that falls into this gutter sinks “deeper and deeper into a black mass” (FE, p. 40) until it is irrevocably lost. Once again such physical geography seems to be associated with waste and pollution, suggesting that the street may be a similar site to the unsanitary Lawley Extension house, where Susila appears to contract her fatal illness. Vinayak Mudali Street is, however, more complex than this suggests. At one end of the street there is a small temple with a shrine to Hanuman, supposedly built on a spot that the monkey god’s foot touched during his journey south to Lanka with Rama. So, seen from another angle, the street is on the edge of hallowed ground. One way of reading this might be in terms of a Foucault-like view of the past as archaeologically layered rather than a product of linear historiographical discourse. In The Guide a submerged ancient temple reappears during a drought, to suggest that another level of experience has always lain beneath the surface of contemporary life, and in The Financial Expert, Vinayak Mudali Street, past and present, also seem very different places. Narayan is clearly suggesting that the same physical space can be seen in very different, even opposed, ways. This said, the archaeological model of place as a set of palimpsests imposed one on top of another is inadequate to account for the ambivalence of the street in the present, where it is on the edge of town, situated between New Extension and the old centre around Kabir Street and Market Road. Compared with Lawley Extension, which again figures prominently in the novel, it seems to be in Malgudi and it has been built on ground which can be claimed as sanctified, but viewed from another perspective it is a location that is close to being beyond the pale. It only receives any attention from the Municipal authorities when elections are looming and the gutter is the main metonym for its unsanitary, disease-ridden condition (FE, p. 41). Although it is mistaken to identify Malgudi with Mysore, Narayan’s comments on sanitation and slum clearance in the city of Mysore in his officially commissioned 1939 travel book on the state provide interesting background to this. After several pages lauding Mysore as “India’s most beautiful city” and detailing the civic improvements undertaken by the Municipality that have contributed to its high standards of cleanliness, he finally comes to speak of “its dark spots, of the congested and slummy quarters that still disfigure its loveliness like so many ugly blotches, of the unsewered drains that run like tears down its beautiful face”, Mysore, Mysore: Government Branch Press, 1939, p. 113. Narayan also talks of the continuing prevalence of malaria and the need for “a great and wholehearted drive against the mosquito […]” (ibid., p. 114). So the street resists unitary construction, offering different hermeneutic possibilities depending on the viewpoint from which it is seen. Most importantly, it is simultaneously both hallowed and polluted ground in the present. These two versions of its identity are coterminous and so the archaeological model which suggests that one layer has been superimposed on another simplifies the text’s complex representation of space. No 14 D is equally ambivalent, since it has been partitioned down the middle during a dispute between Margayya and his brother after their father’s death, Cf. The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1961), where the protagonist Nataraj experiences a similar form of family partition, The Man-Eater of Malgudi, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983, pp. 10-12. Inevitably the signifier “partition” used in novels published in the 1950s and 1960s invites interpretation as some form of national allegory, but Narayan makes no reference to the national Partition. Such a reading is arguably more sustainable for The Man-Eater, which is set in the post-Independence era than for The Financial Expert, which is set in the early 1940s (“it was the third year of the war […]”, FE, p. 118). an episode which has also contributed to Margayya’s low self-esteem, as it has left him feeling socially inferior to his brother. Now they inhabit separate halves of the house, which are self-contained apart from their having to share a well, while their wives continue to feud. So the house is both a haven for Margayya and an uncomfortable kind of “home”, since it is a split, contested site, in which the traditional values of the joint family have been negated. And, as in earlier Narayan novels, rooms also take on particular identities and are subject to transformations. Thus, when in the first part of the novel Margayya decides to devote himself to Lakshmi, in the hope that she will favour his business enterprises, he converts a small room in the house into a shrine where he can undertake a forty-day penance to enlist the goddess’s help. Later, when he becomes very prosperous financially, this room is assigned another identity: along with other parts of the house it becomes a storing-place for the vast deposits of cash Margayya has accumulated. These spatial dynamics underpin the central conflicts of the novel, which centre on an evaluation of the relative merits of Margayya’s financial entrepreneurialism and the more conservative aspects of brahmin culture. Again, Margayya’s physical situation mirrors his position in the society. He is an interstitial figure, whose business ethics distance him from the older scribal culture, personified in other novels of Narayan’s middle period by protagonists such as Srinivas (Mr Sampath), Sriram (Waiting for the Mahatma) and Nataraj (The Man-Eater of Malgudi [1961]). In short, The Financial Expert’s representations of place frustrate the binary opposition that it is possible to see in The English Teacher. These are just two instances of ways in which Narayan loads places with cultural baggage, but they are typical of two major patterns in his fiction: his early drawing of a sharp distinction between safe and polluted space and his later movement towards the view that “The identities of places are always unfixed, contested and multiple”. The latter pattern, which dominates the fiction from Mr Sampath onwards, provides particularly strong evidence for the case against seeing Narayan as an “authentic” chronicler of a settled world, but the dividing-lines drawn in the early fiction also construct Malgudi as a split site. Narayan’s fiction may derive from very particular South Indian specifics, but it demonstrates how fluid, fractured and fleeting these specifics can be. Far from achieving its effects through offering its readers a transcribed version of a monolithically conceived “real” social world, it ministers to their nostalgic fantasies of what such a world might be like and what kinds of struggles it would need to engage in to defend its older, more orthodox side from the encroachments of omnipresent heterogeneity. Narayan’s success emerges from the skill with which he persuades us to enjoy his “false geography”. For his readers, from Graham Greene onwards, Malgudi itself has been a heterotopia that has allowed them free rein to unleash their imaginative fantasies. Another recurrent pattern in Narayan’s cultural geography revolves around a contrast between Malgudi and a larger Indian world, into which the protagonist ventures. As mentioned above, this pattern is central in Waiting for the Mahatma, The Guide and The Painter of Signs, the novel on which I should like to concentrate in the remainder of this paper. Once again the subject is the impact of outside forces on Malgudi, but the text travels beyond the narrowly circumscribed world inhabited by most of Narayan’s Tamil brahmin protagonists, implicating the hero in a starker encounter with modernity. In this case modernity takes the form of the zealous young family planner, Daisy, whom the protagonist Raman follows into village India, in much the same way as Sriram follows Bharati into mountain villages in Waiting for the Mahatma and, as in the earlier novel, national policies find their way into remote regions. Again, though, the main focus of the novel is on the challenge that social change offers to the protagonist’s mental equanimity and Raman’s movement outside his cloistered world puts him in a liminal position, since he is more an observer of social change than a proactive agent in its service. He is also a liminal protagonist in another sense: although the opening of the novel finds him totally absorbed in his work as a sign-painter, he is ambivalent about the extent to which meaning can be fixed through scribal media and he alternates between seeing himself as an arch-rationalist and impetuous flights of fancy which suggest a very different temperament. His name Raman, echoing that of the legendary epic hero, serves to point up ambiguities in both his character and the novel’s tone, which moves between high comedy and more reflective passages, flirting with mock heroic, but never fully committing itself to such a mode. Raman’s home is interestingly situated within the changing cultural geography of Malgudi. He lives in Ellaman Street, close to Market Road and Kabir Street, which he feels is “choking”. The Painter of Signs, 1976; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977, p. 13. Subsequent references cite PS and are included in the text. He finds the location of his own house equally uncongenial, viewing Ellaman Street as situated in “a wretched part of the town” (PS, p. 115) and his house, where he lives with his elderly aunt, an “awful lonely home” (PS, p. 26). The pace of change within Malgudi seems to have accelerated and Raman, though no more than a thirty-something, seems happiest away from the bustle of contemporary life, now represented by the centre of Malgudi. He is most content when working in an untroubled way on his sign-boards in his backyard, where the seemingly unchanging constant of “the river flow[s] softly” (PS, p. 26). Again, then, location provides an index of a Narayan protagonist’s state of mind. Within the semi-deserted ancestral house and looking towards the street, Raman is ill at ease; in his backyard, close to the tranquillity of the river, he has a different perspective on his world, though urban sprawl and technological advances seem to have shrunk the space in which the protagonist can maintain a sense of mental equanimity. When, in the opening chapter, a traffic policeman blows his whistle to make him move on, he reflects: They won’t leave one in peace. This is a jungle where other beasts are constantly on the prowl to attack and bite off a mouthful, if one is not careful. As if this were New York and I blocked the traffic on Broadway. He would not recognize it, but Malgudi was changing in 1972. […] (PS, p. 13) He is, however, attracted to modernity as personified by Daisy and when he embarks on an affair with her he contemplates escaping from the prying eyes of Ellaman Street by going to live in “a more civilized locality like the New Extension” (PS, p. 115) or leaving Malgudi altogether. These, however, are no more than temporary ideas and they are quickly supplanted by a reaffirmation of his sense of belonging in the locality where he has lived all his life: “The more he thought of his home, the more he began to love it – there was no other spot in the whole town – such a coveted spot by the river with the breeze blowing” (PS, p. 115). Earlier Narayan heroes such as Sriram have found themselves equally torn between a rooted past and a changing present, but in this instance the protagonist’s interstitial predicament is exacerbated by a present which throws up ever more challenges to the “conservative” Malgudi past. Raman’s work as a sign-painter foregrounds this tension. On an obvious level the satisfaction and peace of mind that it affords him as he works on his boards in his backyard beside the river offer a degree of insulation from the intrusions of modernity. At the same time sign-painting represents something more to Raman: he sees it as a means of fixing identities through clearly designated labelling. In one of his many reveries in the novel, he muses about the possibility of designing a board for an arcade of new shops selling illicit goods that has sprung up in an alley off Market Road, but he quickly realizes the impossibility of assigning a clear identity to such a transitory site. In this instance, then, his quest for fixed signification suggests a conservative desire for stability, which is thwarted by the fugitive nature of the alley’s newly arrived traders, who with their smuggled “imported goods” (PS, p. 35) represent alterity in the form of a very different kind of occupation to his own. But it remains mistaken simply to identify Raman with the orthodox older faction in Malgudi. This is personified by his aunt and in significant respects his behaviour is at odds with traditional norms. The novel functions as a psychodrama, in which the protagonist is pulled in different direction by conflicting forces. Despite his desire for the kind of permanency and fixed signification represented by sign-boards, Raman’s favourite leisure haunt is an establishment on Ellaman Street known as The Boardless Hotel, because of its proprietor’s refusal to put up a sign. He is well aware that he would lose his livelihood “if everybody adopted the boardless notion” (PS, p. 36) and jokes about this with the proprietor, but he continues to enjoy the freedom that the hostelry offers him from his aunt’s company; and later, when he is with Daisy in a remote village, he thinks longingly of The Boardless’s afternoon coffee and the male camaraderie he enjoys there. The Boardless is a location outside the traditional signifying systems of Malgudi, systems founded on fixity of meaning; it functions as a trope for resistance to labelling and this resistance is associated with Raman’s bachelor state, which has enabled him to elude the domestic cares of the second asrama. Seen in this way, then, the Boardless is an undefined physical space that parallels a similarly uncommitted mental state and this appeals to an aspect of Raman’s psychology which is the antithesis of his desire for fixity. Raman’s relationship with Daisy dramatizes this mental split from another angle. His work for her takes him into a world where the scribal has little currency: she argues that they need “‘a pictorial medium rather than just words’” (PS, p. 57) and the remote village terrain in which they are operating means that he has to inscribe her messages on walls, a departure from his habitual use of boards. So he comes to feel that she is luring him away from “his legitimate normal activity” (PS, p. 60) into a situation where his independence and self-respect are being compromised. In short, Daisy’s project disturbs his customary mode of working and his attraction to her leaves him torn between what he considers “legitimate” and “normal” and the enticements of modernity. Although The Boardless is the most obvious trope for the impossibility of assigning fixed signification, Daisy also frustrates encapsulation within the brahmin signifying codes that have shaped Raman’s consciousness. As with Rosie in The Guide and Grace in The Vendor of Sweets, her Western name is an index of the challenge she offers to orthodox Tamil brahmin expectations concerning women’s roles. Raman’s aunt, the repository of older values, assumes she must be a Christian, but Daisy’s choice of the name is a more radical departure from Hindu naming practices: she has chosen it for its “non-denominational” (PS, p. 121) quality. Raman’s very first response to her focuses on her name and is perhaps the clearest indicator of the semantic disturbance it causes in his mind, since he instinctively realizes that it locates her outside the conventions in which names are indicators of caste, family and regional origins: She called herself just Daisy. She was a slender girl in a sari. No one could say who was her husband or father or brother, or where she came from – a sudden descent on Malgudi. Daisy! What a name for someone who looked so very Indian, traditional, and gentle! (PS, p. 28) So Daisy not only frustrates the fixity of identity conferred by traditional onomastics, she also resists being located in a specific place (“No one could say […] where she came from”) and it is no coincidence that her work leads her into a nomadic existence. She is, then, a very different modern woman from, say, Savitri, the brahmin protagonist of Narayan’s early “feminist” novel The Dark Room, who fails in her attempt to achieve a degree of independence, although she is sympathetically drawn from the inside. In The Painter of Signs, the angle of focalization remains with the male hero, but the novel maintains a greater degree of distance from him than is the case in Narayan’s earlier variations on the figure of the Tamil brahmin in a changing world. The above-quoted sentence, “He would not recognize it, but Malgudi was changing in 1972” (PS, p. 13), suggests a degree of distance between Raman’s character and the implied author who assesses him and this encourages a more interrogative reading of the protagonist’s affinity with, and situatedness within, his world than is the case with earlier Narayan heroes. When Raman’s relationship with Daisy collapses and she leaves him at the end of the novel, she tells him, “‘[…] You have your world, in which you have always existed happily, even before you knew me. It is always there, isn’t it?’” (PS, p. 138). However, for Raman there can be no uncomplicated return to the “old equilibrium” V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization, London: André Deutsch, 1977, pp. 13-36. of a “world” that is “always there”. Such a world has been personified by the aunt with whom he lives, a devotee of the temple at the end of Ellaman Street and a symbol of the supposedly unquestioning domestic role of the traditional South Indian woman. Prior to meeting Daisy, Raman’s putative rationalism is a product of his desire to distance himself from his aunt’s receding world; after he meets Daisy, the gap widens, but he is still attracted to the permanence that his aunt embodies: “Raman wished he had her stability of mind. She lived like clock-work, performing her duties at home without a question or doubt of any sort” (PS, p. 86). Her religious and domestic devotion make her the complete antithesis of Daisy, but the novel is less concerned with illustrating this opposition than with dramatizing the conflict it engenders in Raman’s mind. For all his desired rationalism, he occupies a midway position between the modernity represented by Daisy and the older Tamil codes of his aunt. Consequently when his aunt decides, like Sriram’s grandmother in Waiting for the Mahatma, to renounce worldly concerns and go to Benaras, the liminal Raman experiences a double sense of loss: dispossessed of his older culture, he is equally unable to find a place in the modern world of work personified by Daisy. Malgudi in 1972 is changing and it seems a bleaker place for the brahmin protagonist. The only place he can now turn to is a space outside older notions of community and clear markers of identity, The Boardless – referred to in the final words of the novel as “that solid, real world of sublime souls who minded their own business” (PS, p. 143). PAGE 146