Madras miscellany

R. K. Narayan's Madras years

IN ALMOST all the tributes paid to R. K. Narayan, that pioneer of the Indian Novel in English, the focus has been on the Malgudi he created and the Mysore he lived and worked in. Little attention has been paid to his 15 formative years in Madras, 1906-1921, and to the last 15 that were spent here, still writing and still developing storylines for the future. If we lived in a more heritage-conscious State or country, we'd find a plaque going up on a wall at No. 1 Vellala Street, Purasawalkam, proclaiming that Rasipuram (a village near Salem) Krishnaswami Narayan(aswami) had been born and brought up at the address.

Instead, not only has the home that was his till he was 15, been pulled down and a new building taken its place in the late 1980s, but everyone in the neighbourhood seems to have a better idea of the basement Saravana Bhavan and the Sakthi Priya Lodge that stand there than the significance of the address.

A little to the east of his maternal grandfather's home and across the road is the E.L.M. Fabricius School, now proclaiming secondary school status rather than Lutheran beginnings. Today, the main building of a school founded in 1849, lies in ruins, a victim of the wreckers' hammers and, no doubt, awaiting new highrise. It was in this once and former building that Narayan imbibed the three R-s, made his first friends, learnt what teachers are made of and discovered a world outside a traditional upbringing.

On a visit to the school nearly 75 years after he had first entered its portals, he noted with amusement the name 'Vedanayagam' above the headmaster's door just where it had been in his day. "I hope it's not the same man," he had chuckled, recalling pedagogues who were not exactly his favourites.

But they, like his friends Kapali, the class monitor and Samuel, the 'Pattani', were to figure in his first novel, Swami and Friends, his autobiography, My Days and in several other Malgudi episodes.

No. 1, Vellala Street was the home of his maternal grandfather 'Tindivanam' R. Narayanaswami Iyer and it was here that Narayan was brought up by his 'Ammani' Parvathi on a diet of tuition, slokas, ragas and storytelling.

A favourite grandmother she might have been, but Narayan also felt she would have made an excellent school inspectress. As for Grandfather Narayanaswami, who died shortly before Narayan was born, he was a successful tahsildar who "derived considerable funds from his postings in various districts". His "loot", as Narayan described it, went into several houses in Vellala Street (are a couple of them the old homes next to No. 1?), a number of bungalows rented out to Europeans, agricultural lands and 'Walker Thottam' that supplied vegetables to Madras markets.

All the prosperity vanished with the Arbuthnot crash days before Narayan's birth in 1906, but the whole family and the friends who kept flocking to the 'open house' Ammani kept were to prove inspirational once Narayan became a writer.

It was of the tahsildar that Narayan was thinking in his last days. When close friends met him shortly before he went into Intensive Care, he spent half an hour narrating to them the plot of what would have been his 16th novel - a 35,000-word narration that was to be part-biography and part-fiction about a tahsildar who had kept people talking.

Truly, Narayan was indefatigable, forever telling stories to himself or to the world.

Roots in journals and journalism

PLAYING SIGNIFICANT influences in real life as well as roles in some of R. K. Narayan's stories were maternal uncles, Seshachalam and Venkataraman. The former was to open the door to serious literature and good writing for his nephew, the latter to open a window on a happy-go-lucky worldly-wise life that he himself had embraced but which would only provide literary inspiration for the Narayan he encouraged to become a writer.

Some years after Narayan left Madras, Seshachalam founded a Tamil literary weekly, Kala Nilayam. It may not have countered the populism of Ananda Vikatan, but it did have a good run for seven years, catering for "the intellectual needs of the elite among the Tamil readers".

Kala Nilayam and the pages of writing his uncle did for it, as much as anything, inspired Narayan to consider a literary career some years before he graduated from Maharaja's College, Mysore, in 1930. In July that year, he saw himself in print for the first time, a piece of his starting "What is wrong with Indian cinema? Everything" appearing in the Madras Mail and earning him Rs. 12. Two years later he did a book review for the Indian Review and had a short story published in that esteemed magazine edited by G. A. Natesan.

But after that he saw more rejection slips than any of his material in print. Which is when he felt it necessary - and marriage must have been another compulsion - to have a more regular income, and sought it in journalism, becoming in 1934 the Mysore Correspondent of the Madras-based The Justice. It didn't seem to worry either that the voice of the anti-Brahmin South Indian Liberal Federation, better known as the Justice Party, was happy to employ a Brahmin reporter.

The parting of the ways came about a year later, not because of any philosophical differences but because Narayan felt he was not earning an income commensurate with his work. A conscientious reporter, he filed a story every day and almost all of them appeared in print.

But as was the wont in those days, mofussil correspondents were paid by the line published and, as was also the wont in those days, subeditors at headquarters were ruthless in their editing, so what should have been earning Narayan about Rs. 75 a month seldom brought him more than a long-delayed Rs. 30 a month.

By then, however, he had in that watershed period (1934-35) won a short story first prize in a competition run by that delightful Madras journal of the time, 'Gemini' Vasan's The Merry Magazine, and was welcomed as a regular contributor thereafter.

A short story, 'Cacklebury Vs. Editor', that appeared in the magazine section of The Hindu on July 7, 1935, began another long association. And when a month later, he received from a friend in Oxford a cable stating, "Novel taken, Graham Greene responsible," he was, as Susan and N. Ram wrote, "freed from hack work".

The Rams were Narayan's biographers in 1996. But their story was only of his early years, 1906-1945. I wonder when the second half of a story that needs to be told will be narrated? R. K. Narayan's contribution to the Indian English Novel certainly warrants that telling.

Taking heartcare to the people

T T. KRISHNAMACHARI, a great believer in 'let's do it ourselves in India', would have smiled with pleasure recently if he'd been alive to see a businesshouse sporting his initials, receiving the National award for "the successful commercialisation of indigenous technology".

What TTK Healthcare had done was to begin producing India's first locally-developed heart valve, the Chitra, helping bring down costs to a more comfortable Rs. 15,000 or so from a figure well in excess of three times that for the imported valve. The tilting disc TTK-Chitra heart valve, now meeting about a quarter of India's present annual demand for 12,000 valves, is the culmination of a 25-year old story.

It is a story that began in the Shri Chitra Thirunal Institute for Medical Science and Technology, Thiruvananthapuram, when a team led by Dr. M. S. Valianathan was provided support by the National Research Development Corporation to develop an indigenous heart valve. With no help from any of the five heart valve manufacturers in the world, the team struggled in the initial stages to develop this biomedical engineering device.

Even finding the animal with the right size and weight to test the first devices was a problem, recall members of the team. But slowly, the Valianathan team overcame every obstacle, step by step finding the right materials, evolving the correct testing procedures and identifying fabrication techniques.

Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, Bangalore, provided the answers that made bulk manufacture possible. Eventually, after successful tests on sheep, the Ethics Committee cleared the valve in October, 1990, for clinical tests and evaluation.

The first human implant was done in December that year. And the funding agency, NRDC, the development agency, the Shri Chitra Thirunal Institute, and the manufacturing agency, TTK Pharma (as the company was then known) signed a manufacturing and sales agreement.

The Chitra heart valve was commercially launched in 1995 by TTK Pharma, but it was 1999 before TTK Healthcare established its heart valve manufacturing facility in Tiruneermalai, in suburban Madras, and launched production.

It now hopes to increase production from 3000 valves a year to 10,000 in a couple of years, when it will meet more than half the country's requirements.

Seen as a major breakthrough in indigenous heartcare, many a cardiac patient in years to come will owe a lot to Dr. Valianathan, biomedical engineer G. S. Bhubaneshwar, veterinary surgeon Dr. G. A. V. Lal and HAL's K. G. Krishnadas Nair and other doctors, engineers and scientists, who combined inputs from medicare, biomedical technology, material science, toxicology and animal surgery to develop what is now called the TTK-Chitra heart valve.

Reporting on an international cardiologists' meet in Madras in 1997, Hiramalini Seshadri, physician and writer, mentioned the note taken of the Chitra heart valve at the conference and stated, "A country that could develop INSAT-II should surely be able to develop balloons and stents and make quality heartcare accessible to a greater number in this country".

While the use of the TTK-Chitra heart valve grows in popularity, I've heard of no progress on these other needs.

S. MUTHIAH

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