Rasipuram Krishnaswami Narayan, India's much-loved storyteller whose spare, wry English-language novels and short stories gave the world insight into the richness and depth of life and literature in India, died Sunday in his native Madras. He was 94.
Narayan, whose 34 books of elegantly subtle, simple and universal fiction made him India's most notable writer in English, died in his sleep of heart failure. He had been hospitalized last month with internal bleeding prompted by a duodenal ulcer.
"In Narayan's passing away, India has lost one of its finest authors, and one whose books I have enjoyed reading for many years," India's Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee said Sunday.
The author's prolific works were translated into all European languages, Hebrew, and India's own Hindi and other tongues. Narayan also expanded the English lexicon with such India-based words as "swat," meaning ridding oneself of flies.
Narayan, who shortened his pen name to R.K. Narayan after British novelist Graham Greene, who became his mentor and friend for more than 50 years, advised him in 1935: "In this country, a name which is difficult for the old ladies in libraries to remember materially affects sales."
Absent the encouragement of Greene, who died in 1991 at age 86, Narayan might never have achieved worldwide notice. Greene once referred to Narayan as "the novelist I most admire in the English language." He wrote in a forward to Narayan's 1990 book, "The World of Nagaraj": "Narayan wakes in me a spring of gratitude, for . . . without him I could never have known what it is like to be Indian."
Narayan's writing, set in India but universal in theme, came to be compared to that of Greene. Scholars later saw in a collection of letters between the two men (they met only once, in London in 1964)--auctioned in 1996--that Narayan influenced Greene's work as well.
A schoolmaster's son, Narayan grew up in Madras and Mysore in southern India, earned a degree at what is now the University of Mysore and taught--but fervently longed to write. He took a job as a journalist covering the Mysore police beat while penning copious fictional stories about everyday life.
Discouraged when his first manuscript failed to sell, he shipped it to a friend studying at Oxford with the rueful advice to "weight it with a stone and drown it in the Thames." Instead, the friend put it before Greene, who pronounced it "excellent," gently offered to correct lapses in Narayan's English and got the book published.
