I’m too small a person to comment on R K Narayan’s writing but I can safely claim that he has an inimitable style which makes you appreciate the nuances of day-to-day life and transports you into the setting of his semi-fictional world. Set in the background of Malgudi, The Bachelor of Arts is part two of the trilogy starting with Swami and Friends and traces the life of Chandran, and his experiences in colonial era India as a college student, who later falls in love and gets heartbroken, leading to a stint as a Sanyasi in Madras before returning to Malgudi, after realizing the sacrifices his family has made for him and how their love needs to be reciprocated.

If one were familiar with how “Tambrahm” uncles speak, one would notice that R K Narayan’s sentence construction is largely an English version of the same. Personally, that is what made it more enjoyable to me. There’s ample doses of the dry and sarcastic humor, and the usual fretting over the “orthodox and right way” of doing things. Chandran might seem a spoilt kid in some ways, but the decency of his approach and his thought process, his internalizations and deductions on the nature of life and his personal opinions on people and places around him are so relatable a century later, especially for someone who has been through a similar orthodox upbringing.

It is interesting to visualize the mindset of people who lived in the latter part of the British empire, how status was a deeply personal matter among the upper-class society, how marrying a girl above 15 years of age was seen as something negative, and how job referrals were not so different from how they are today. It was also funny to see how Madras was seen as far more cosmopolitan back in the day, and people “rude” to not even look the eye.

It would be silly to judge the actions of the characters in the book by today’s standards, something which we have been accustomed to of late. It is best enjoyed by allowing yourself to be transported to a bygone era, and let the author spin his charm.

Originally published here.