Swami and others
Any collection of first editions of successful Indian writers would be incomplete without RK Narayan and Mulk Raj Anand
All collecting is sort of madness – a pleasurable madness, but madness nevertheless. One
such madness is collecting modern first editions of books one loves or authors one holds in
esteem. A first edition I have long sought and
searched for but never come across in all these
years of book collecting is that of RK Narayan’s
Swami and Friends, published by Hamish Hamilton,
London, in 1935. This was an Indian writer’s first
successful work of fiction in modern times and was
the first volume of Narayan’s great Malgudi trilogy
that eventually made its author famous.
The year 1935 saw the publication of yet another
much discussed work – Mulk Raj Anand’s
Untouchable, which tells the story of an eventful
day in the life of a sweeper boy, Bakha. Swami
attracted notice because it had been recommended
for publication by the English novelist Graham
Greene, while the Untouchable drew critics’ attention especially because of EM Forster’s laudatory
preface. Both these works were their authors’ first
full length novels and marked the beginning of
their successful literary careers. Anand had published a collection of short stories under the title
the Lost Child and Other Stories in London in 1934,
that is, a year before the publication of the
Untouchable, but Swami was Narayan’s real first.
Then, in 1938 came Raja Rao’s Kanthapura, a story
woven around the Gandhian non-cooperation
movement. Ten years later in 1948 came out GV Desani’s All About Mr. Hatterr, an amazingly refreshing work of fantasy.
Although these four novels are little read or
remembered now except at academic seminars or
in courses on Indian fiction in the American universities, they will always remain the four pioneering
works of modern Indian fiction in English language. They were followed by other novels like
Khushwant Singh’s 1956 gory Partition story titled
Train to Pakistan in Britain, where it was published
by Chatto & Windus, and Mano Majra, published by
the Grove Press in the US but none attracted the
attention that was destined for Salman Rushdie’s
allegorical Midnight’s Children, published in the US
in 1980, a year before its first publication in the
UK. Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children owes much to
Desani’s Hatterr which he himself has acknowledged. Rushdie took Indian fiction in English to the
centre stage. It is he and, particularly, this work of
his that created an entirely new audience and readership for Indian novels. Until he came on the
scene, even the best of Indian writing in English
was at best treated as fringe contribution and never
as great literature despite the accolades offered to
such works as Nehru and Nirad C Chaudhuri’s autobiographies.
I am not addicted to collecting modern firsts, as
they are called, and have never made much effort
to acquire these, but I have at the same time never
let a good copy of a first edition slip out of my
hands whenever one has come my way. I love to
feel the physicality of the book as a product, though
there is nothing by way of beauty or charm in the
dust jackets or bindings of the books I have mentioned above to recommend them. I still find the
looks and feel of these firsts enchanting. Most of
these firsts I came across at bookshops and pavement stalls while roaming the streets in Calcutta,
Bombay and Delhi. Of course, there are a few like
Kanthapura and different revised editions of Desani
that I have made a special effort to acquire from
booksellers as far away from each other as Norway
and California.
The only first I have searched for a long time but
never ever seen is Narayan’s Swami because of all
the books I have listed, this one held me in a thrall
when I first read it many, many years ago. I think
everyone who has read this book in their young
years must feel the same way about it. In those
years Enid Blyton’s Fours, Fives and Sevens felt
extremely exciting, as today’s young must feel
about Harry Potter, but it was Narayan’s
Swaminathan with whom we really identified with,
as a pal and a buddy. I have grown much in years
by now but the fascination for Swaminathan is still
strong in me.
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