Potrayol of Gandhi in Waiting for Mahatma

Waiting for the Mahatma (1955) is perhaps the most controversial novel of R. K. Narayan. Apart from its artistic merits and demerits (which are considerable), many Indian readers of the novel have felt dissatisfied with it and found it difficult to warm up to it particularly because of the way the Mahatma is portrayed in it. Non-Indian readers however have more or less favourably reacted to it, while being alive to its artistic lapses. An extreme instance is H. M. Williams who regards it as one of the two “most mature novels” of Narayan (Studies in Modern Indian Fiction in English. Vol. I, Writers Workshop, Calcutta. p. 86). On page 123 of his My Dateless Diary Narayan has recorded that a young American novelist, to whom he had given this novel to read, remarked that “we don’t learn anything about Mahatma Gandhi from it,” a view many Indian readers would perhaps readily endorse. For us Indians the mere mention of Gandhi’s name conjures up the vision of a “man of God” who “trod on earth”, as Nehru described him in one of his speeches after Gandhi’s death. He was acclaimed a Mahatma and worshipped as an Avatar. Exasperated by Narayan’s handling of Gandhi in WFM my teacher Prof. C. D. Narasimhaiah had even suggested that Narayan would have done well to withdraw it from circulation (The Swan and the Eagle. Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Simla. 1969. p. 155). There is no gainsaying at all that WFM, for all its readability, is indeed unsatisfactory and disappointing as a novel. But if we could see it for what it really is in itself, we would be able to arrive at a fair assessment of it as well as Narayan’s handling of the Gandhian motif in it. The first thing to note about WFM is that it is not a “Gandhi-Novel” as one is very likely to assume it to be. Uma Parameswaran, for instance, has asserted: “It is aGandhian novel...and the theme is Gandhism.” (A Study of Representative Indo-English Novelists. Vikas Publishing House, New Delhi. 1976. p. 65) But Narayan