The English Teacher
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The English Teacher
The English Teacher is the third of the trilogy that began with Swami and Friends, and The Bachelor of Arts. This novel dedicated to Narayans wife Rajam is not only autobiographical but also poignant in its intensity of feeling. The story is a series of experiences in Krishnas life – some joyful, some sorrowful; and his journey towards achieving inner peace and self-development, in the traditional Indian sense.
About the Author
Rasipuram, Krishnaswami Narayanaswami, or R K Narayan as he is widely known was born during the British colonial rule in India. In his obituary Barbara Crosette writes about Narayan and Malgudi thus: In the 1930s, he (RK Narayan) created a town in South India that he called Malgudi and populated it with characters who could be fussy, tricky, harmlessly rebellious or philosophical – but who were always believable. Mr. Narayan would return again and again to Malgudi in many of his 34 novels and hundreds of short stories. His books accurately portray an India that hovers between the unchangingly rural and the newly industrial and that is still filled with individualistic, often eccentric personalities that recall his imagined universe.
This novel is however more autobiographical than others. It recounts Narayans own happy days with his wife Rajam, who died after contracting typhoid. They had only 5 short years before she passed away. He sincerely and truly loved her, and after her demise Narayan plunged into a period of darkness and was obsessed by the thought of communicating with her. One of the glaring facts that meets the readers eye is the restrain with which the married couple express their love so unlike the demonstrative love that is seen today both in real life and the media.
Dialogues
Krishna the central character of the novel is an English teacher at the same college he attended as an under graduate student. Krishnas wife Susila is with her parents, some miles away as she had recently given birth to their daughter Leela. (It is an Indian custom that a pregnant mother should stay with her own mother, and the midwife still takes precedence over a hospital, a doctor or nurse). When the story opens we see a very nervous and anxious Krishna expecting the arrival of his wife and daughter to Malgudi where he is an English Teacher in the Albert Mission College. His visions of the misfortunes that would befall on mother and child on their train journey are almost comical to the point of being preposterous.
However, as the days go by Krishna learns that his love for his wife and child surpasses everything he imagined previously. The early years of marital bliss and the deep bond that develops between the husband and wife becomes the center of Krishnas life. He feels Leela, his daughter completes his perfect world. But as all good things must come to an end, so does his, with the mysterious ailment that comes over Susila. In the days before antibiotics were discovered, it was not until late that a proper diagnosis was made as to the exact nature of the ailment, which they later learned was typhoid. After a long period of illness she finally dies bringing nothing but sorrow and misery to Krishna. His grief was boundless and infinite; Krishna almost sank to the depths of melancholy and desolation. He then decided to put all his love and zest for life to bringing up his daughter who in her innocence did not know or question about her mother. He became both mother and father to the child and did not wish his parents to bring her up. Although eventually after a period of time relents and decides that the best course of action is for his parents to bring up Leela.
Events take an unexpected turn when he is able to communicate with his dead wife through a medium. This brings him solace and he lives to communicate with her during the weekly sittings as he calls them. It is unknown why Narayan included an episode such as this, full of the fantastic, to an otherwise believable story. However it is a known fact that he was obsessed by the thought of communicating with his own wife, in his misery. This puzzles the reader, especially the Western reader, who is brought up with a solid disbelief of anything from the nether world. Though to the Indian reader, and most importantly to Narayan, who actually experienced this tragedy and wrote after it, the communication between his dead wife and himself was nothing out of the ordinary, but a means of achieving solace and reconciling life and death as we see at the end of the novel.
From a man dependent on his wife and daughter for happiness, and later the medium he becomes self-reliant and realizes that happiness- or in his case peace of mind and equanimity comes from within. He strives to achieve this sense of peace, very unlike the effervescent one he experienced with his wife and daughter, through meditation and withdrawing from adult world and adult work into the world of children. But this serenity, the inner peace that so eludes him at first comes to him when he least expects it, in the middle of the night when he has given up everything – cleansed himself of all worldly possessions, his wife, his daughter, a good income in the form of a respected job and salary. He truly transcends life and death when he is finally able to communicate with Susila his wife, and now his mentor. Narayan explains it thus: “The boundaries of our personalities suddenly dissolved. It was a moment of rare, immutable joy – a moment for which one feels grateful for Life and Death.
While literary critics argue about the exact nature of this meeting stating