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Short Summary of "Painter of
Signs" by R. K. Narayan
Article shared by Pragati Ghosh

Bewilderment and retreat to a simpler life:

modernity produces the sanme reactions in The
Painter of Signs (1977), where Daisy, a young
woman,comes to Malgudithe time is Mrs. Gandhi's
Emergency with a fanatical mission to control
India's population. Raman, another of Narayan's
post-independence young drifters, is both attracted
and perplexed by her sense of individuality and high
responsibility, and attaches himself to her as she
travels around the countryside, Impatiently trying to
root out what she sees as superstitious prejudices
against contraception among illiterate villagers.
Raman keeps anxiously hoping to win her over even
as he is alienated by her coldness, her all-excluding
focus on family planning, the governnment-enforced
program whose slogans (Hum Do, Hamare Do,
"Two of us, two we have") he paints all over the
countryside with as little effect as Sriram had once
painted "Quit India"
But Daisy has grown up in the progress-minded
authoritarian India of Five-Year Plans and Twenty
Point Programs an India trying hard to be as strong
and rational and efficient as the Western countries
whose models of development it has adopted and
Narayan withholds from her the sensitivity and
patience he confers upon Bharati in Waiting for the
Mahatma. She claims to have little time for love,
even though she seems toneed it as much as
Raman does,and she eventually drops Raman after
agreeing to marry him.
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The novel ends with Raman trying to feel relieved,

trying to recover his old life of idleness in Malgudi. It
is the point the unfulfilled dream of freedom, the
dream of Narayan's own enchanted childhood at
which many of Narayan's novels end: the point at
which you see his characters finally turning away
from the challenges of self-creation and
individuality which every developing nation imposes
on itspeople and seeking re-absorption into the
passivity and sterility of old India. Such non
resolutions expose Narayan tothe charge of
escapism, especially in India, where seriousartists
are often expected, when not to create suitable role
models for youngpeople, to add at any rate to the
narrative of nation- building and Indian self
assertion.

Yet the limitations we might see in Narayan's

characters are the limitations of the still-raw and
shapeless society in which they have their being:
limitations that are not overcome, but merely
avoided, by leaps into fantasy and myth that such
ready-made forms as magic realism facilitate.
Narayan, as the first writer of his kind, was always
far from attaining an intellectual overview of his
circumstances. Early realist writers like him usually
stay within,and share the prejudices of, the
particular historical moment they finds themselves
in;sometimes offering, as Narayan does in his later
novels, quasi-religious explanations for the chaotic
nature of their world.
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This is why Narayan's political ideas, when spelled

out in his nonfiction, seem only marginally more
sophisticated than those offered by his characters.
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 4G
2:17 AM |0.3KB/s(G l 34
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This is why Narayan's political ideas, when spelled

out in his nonfiction,seem only marginally more
sophisticated than those offered by his characters.
In his book about his American travels, My Dateless
Diary (1988), Narayan rejects, like Jagan in The
Vendor of Sweets or Srinivas in Mr. Sampath, any
real engagement with the modern world; fear and
insecurity seem to lie concealed underneath his
Complacent humor.
The fiction and essays he wrote after his first and
for the colonial writer, crucial encounter with the
West in the 1950s hint at a kind of intellectualself
narrowing that is often the result of the colonial's
bewilderment and resentful pride before the
metropolitan culture that has partly formed him.
Narayan, however, by writing from deep within his
small shrinking world, came to acquire an
instinctive understanding of it. He developed with it
the special intimacy which is sometimes capable of
taking the novelist to truths deeper and subtler than
those yielded by a more analytical intelligence.
It is the unmediated fidelity his novels have to his
constricted experience which makes them seem so
organic in both their conception and execution, and
which also makes him now, remarkably, a more
accurate guide to modern India than the
intellectually more ambitious writers of recent
years.
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The early novels with their energetic youngmen

(Swami, Chandran, and Krishna), the middle novels,
with the restless drifters (Srinivas, Sriram), and in
the later novels, the men wounded and exiled by the
darn a r l A / l a n Damnn
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 4G+
2:18 AM |9.5KB/s G
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The early novels with their energetic young men

(Swami, Chandran, and Krishna), the middle novels,
withthe restless drifters (Srinivas, Sriram),and in
the later novels, the men wounded and exiled by the
modern world (Jagan, Raman) map out an
emotional and intellectual journey that many
middle-class people in formerly colonial societies
have made: the faint consciousness of individuality
and nationality through colonial education;
confused anticolonial assertion, postcolonial sense
of inadeguacy and failure; unfulfilled private lives;
distrust of modernity and individual assertion; and,
finally, in middle or old age, the search for cultural
authenticity and renewal in the neglected, once
great past.
"The silent spirit of collective masses is the source
of allgreat things, Renan wrote at Turgenev's
death. That silent spirit is what Narayan, writing
about men andworlds condemned to ambivalence,
renders eloquent in his best novels. His characters
don't leave the pages of his books without having
achieveda kind of nobility, as part of an all
encompassing vision in which everything is
accepted and forgiven.
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The characters,for instance, in The Financial Expert

(1952) small-time con men,greedy landlords,
ingrate children, embittered parents, unhappy wives,
exploited villagers are like people locked in a trance,
in what the Hindus call maya: the immense illusion
nf aintan Thahaik dnni anh nthar and
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 4G-1
2:18 AM|0.3KB/s G e l 34

The characters, for instance, in The Financial Expert

(1952) small-time con men, greedy landlords,
ingrate children, embittered parents, unhappy wives,
exploited villagers are like people locked in a trance,
in what the Hindus call maya: the immense illusion
of existence. They busily deceive each other and
themselves; and everyone seems lost in the end. No
liberation of the spirit,you feel, is likely to happen to
these characters. Yet Narayan considers them with
sympathy, even affection.
We see them as the creator of maya himself, that
great ironic illusionist, would see us. It is this
religious- seeming acceptingness that gives
Narayan's novels their peculiar irony an ironyrooted
in skepticism about human motives and actions
but in a strongand consistent faith: an irony that
belongs less to the European tradition of the novel
than to a Hinduview of the world, in which the
conflicts and contradictions of individuals and
societies, however acute and compelling, are in the
end no more than minor events in the life of an old
and serene cosmic order.
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