R. K. Narayan’s “The Painter of Signs”

Among contemporary Indian English Writers, perhaps the two most outstanding novelists who, having mastered the language and the technique of the craft, have deployed their particular genius are Raja Rao and R. K. Narayan. Raja Rao obviously writing in the symbolist tradition of Joseph Conrad, James Joyce and E. M. Forster, uses the large and overflowing symbols in his works. Narayan, on the other hand, is generally recognized as the master of comic, portraying life and characters of Malgudi with subtle humour and delightful chuckle. By the time Narayan’s The Painter of Signs appeared in 1976, he had already published more than ten novels and seven volumes of short stories in none of which the author displayed any pretension that they were written with symbolic or metaphysical idea in mind.

Narayan’s The Painter of Signs, written after something like ten years silence, is both “slim and packed. It is not much longer than a novelette and yet by the end of it a character has been evolved, a predicament analysed, a world constructed, a point of view defined”. Walsh William. 1983 R. K. Narayan A Critical Appreciation.p. 153 Hernemann.

            The Painter of Signs is a novel about Raman, a young bachelor, an inhabitant of Narayan’s fictional city Malgudi. He has always regarded his trade, the painting of signboards, as an art worthy of the highest attention, and thought of himself as an intellectual carrying the “Age of Reason” to his ward compatriots. In fact he has lived a gay carefree life surrounded by traditional comforts provided by his aunt. Commissioned to paint a sign for a clinic, he falls in love with a young woman called Daisy who is obsessed by population control. Her modern rationality and commitment to her cause leave no room for his softer comforts. Caught up in his illusions, he first imagines she is trying to seduce him and then blindly follows her. At last taking her to bed, he thinks it is just a question of time before she will marry and settle down to the traditional role of an Indian housewife, confined at home, preparing meals all day, rearing and nursing her many children. She will have none of this and agrees to marry him only if they have separate lives and no children, and if he does all the household chores. Fascinated by her strong will, he concedes comfort after comfort until on the day she is to move into his house, symbolically consummating a common – law marriage, she decides marriage is impossible for her and leaves to propagandize population control in remote villages. Raman’s aunt, who devoted her entire life to gossip and pre­paring food, has been shocked by his projected marriage outside traditional custom; her Hinduism awakened, she leaves for the Ganges where she will spend the remainder of her life in religious observances. If Raman has been defeated by the age of reason, he has given his aunt’s life a purpose which he had not foreseen.

Narayan’s The Painter of Signs should be enjoyed for its sheer comedy and irony. While it is possible to discuss the novel in terms of the cultural confusion of modern India and the failures of the Indian character, such analysis would lose sight of the experience of the book. Narayan conveys a community’s attitudes and assumptions through a few deft strokes. He is a master of benign amusement toward the self-deceptions of his characters. We feel the interplay of personalities as they ricochet off each other, defining themselves through posturing or disdain. Despite a degree of exaggeration, the world of The Painter of Signs is instantly recognizable. Life has always been like this, in villages, small towns, and even cities, for those who work, marry, plot, and plan, acting upon each other without intellectualizing their motives or goals. Daisy, the advocate of population control, does not explain herself except by recourse to a few absurd statistics. She is an “unexpected experience” to which Raman is attracted and because of which he destroys his settled routine. Caricature gives her and Raman a deserved importance and grandeur that they might not otherwise be seen to possess. The fanatical popu­lation controller Daisy is quite an attractive. Indian girl, who reminds the sign painter of a previous autocrat:

“Daisy sat on a boulder as if it were a throne. Her imperious manner both charmed and frightened Raman. In her previous incarnation, she must have been Queen Victoria”.

Both Raman and Daisy are the particular persons who symbolize the general without loss of individuality. Raman cares for his craft and his independence, and is quite happy to leave social causes to others. He has his books which include Plato, Dickens and Gibbon, his view of the river Sarayu, his friends at the cafe. Raman agrees to travel with Daisy round the neigh­bouring villages, painting signs to advocate birth control, not because he is converted to the cause, but because he finds her irresistible. Love, he decides, “deadens the wits and makes one dumb”. He daydreams briefly of fouling up her campaign by copulating with women in all the villages and thus ensuring that Daisy’s targets of a five per cent reduction in the birthrate is not achieved. Raman and Daisy are the typical Narayan characters, who can tolerate one another for a short time only. Daisy leaves to campaign in another district:

“I have told you, five thousand men and women have to be taken care of immediately. After that they may move me elsewhere – even to Africa. I cannot afford to have a personal life”.

Daisy is like the 19th century English missionaries. Raman settles into his Malgudi niche, a niche in which people mind their own business.

            The Painter of Signs is a book in which people act within the roles they have been allotted, leaving little room for ambiguity, but Narayan never reduces them to mere pawns. Narayan is a profound lover of humanity; he portrays with sympathy life in Malgudi in all its flaws and frivolities from a comic point of view, laughs and makes his readers laugh at the silly human follies and foibles, for indeed man is a toy in the hands of fate. Narayan’s view of life is one of practical wisdom; and he treats human sentimentalism, selfishness, manners and meanness, with sympathy and compassion. Narayan’s The Painter of Signs evokes the atmosphere of orthodox middle-class life and society.

In The Painter of Signs, Narayan achieves much of his art through economy, which he has in masterly measure. His is a prose tailored exactly to the task at hand, a prose without ego. One still discerns that Narayan has a true subject in The Painter of Signs: the incursion of the modern on the traditional, the primitive Indian subject. His is the comedy that cuts deep, yet does not bruise. One of the nice things about having settled morals, Virginia Wolfe once remarked, is that at least one knows what to laugh at. Also she might have added, what to cry about. Narayan knows both things. He is a novelist with a point of view, a moral centre, which is firmly anchored. Of his principle character he notes:

“He had a general philosophy of books – all the classifications that mattered was good books and bad books”.

One lays down Narayan’s The Painter of Signs with no hesitation about in which class it goes. Undoubtedly it belongs to a category of “good books”.