Waiting for the Mahatma is a novel by R. K. Narayan

Waiting for the Mahatma is a 1955 novel by R. K. Narayan.

Plot introduction

Sriram is a high school graduate who lives with his grandmother in Malgudi, the fictional Southern Indian town in which much of Narayan's fiction takes place. Sriram is attracted to Bharati, a girl his age who is active in Mahatma Gandhi's Quit India movement, and he becomes an activist himself. He then gets involved with anti-British extremists, causing much grief to his grandmother. Sriram's underground activity takes place in the countryside, an area alien to him, and the misunderstandings with the locals provide the book's best comic moments. After spending some time in jail, Sriram is reunited with Bharati, and the story ends with their engagement amidst the tragedy of India's partition in 1947.

Waiting for the Mahatma is written in Narayan's gentle comic style. An unusual feature of this novel is the participation of Gandhi as a character. His revolutionary ideas and practices are contrasted with the views of traditionalists such as the town's notables and Sriram's grandmother. The political struggle serves as a background to Sriram and Bharati's unconventional romance which is concluded outside either's family circle. This is one of Narayan's most successful novels, where much happens behind the façade of the low key storytelling.

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Waiting for the Mahatma...( A commentary)

Beautiful in its simplicity and gentle narration, a slow meandering of events, true to form, this is a novel by R.K.Narayan. He writes in his usual rambling style, but very contrarily sets his novel in the political background of the Indian Freedom struggle. Many might say that this is the personal story of a lazy and complacent young man, who meets and falls in love with a young woman, a disciple of Mahatma Gandhi and involved in the freedom struggle - his travails, reluctant transformation and ultimate union with the girl, where the political events unfold in the peripheral vision.

Yes, it is Sriram, the young man's personal story. But there is also another story woven along with this. The title is completely revealing of the essence of this latter story. The unusual component is the fictional appearance of Mahatma Gandhi, which the author has handled brilliantly. The conversations and episodes with Gandhiji reflect a keen and minute understanding of not only the man and his actions, but also his impact on the thousands of people that he met and how the freedom struggles were conducted at individual levels. There is a deeper understanding of the principles and foundation of the Mahatma which alone would enable one to extrapolate his words and actions to hypothetical / fictional situations in such a manner that a reader, be her casually acquainted with Gandhiji's messages or one who has studied him intensely, cannot quarrel with the author's portrayal of the Mahatma.

This same quality I found in the movie Lage Raho Munna Bhai, the instinctive recognition of the truth and rightness of the answers of the on-screen Gandhi - that "this is what Mahatma Gandhi would have said or done, given this situation" feeling.

Whether he wanted to or not, the author also draws for his readers a clear picture of how the freedom struggle reached so many villages, how millions joined the congress after Gandhiji entered the scene. R.K. Narayan does this by writing instances and episodes of Gandhi's visits to the villages, how people wait for a glimpse of the Mahatma everywhere that he goes, the moral charisma and authority that he exudes, how people are won over by his compassion and charm and how youth across the country join the national movement by doing something in their own neighbourhood. He also writes of episodes where many such youth follow Gandhiji's squad from one village to another and are chided by others for not being responsible to their own role of spreading the freedom struggle in their own place.

We know all this to be true from writings of other people of that time. The difference for me has been that, while earlier I knew these as events that happened at a particular time period, "Waiting for the Mahatma" brought to me in a personal and individual sense the inspiration and motivation that the man gave to each of his countrymen who encountered him in any way.

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Colonial Ambivalence in R. K. Narayan's Waiting for the Mahatma

Satish C. Aikant

H.N.B. Garhwal University, Pauri, Uttarakhand, India

The Gandhian phase of the anti-colonial movement for India's freedom finds frequent expression in literary representationsof the period. There was large-scale support among Indians for Gandhi's intervention in the civil disobedience and Quit Indiamovements. However, R. K. Narayan's novel Waiting for the Mahatma (1955) reflects a certain ambivalence towards the freedom movement. There were many who were impressed by the more benign aspects of the British presence in India and Narayan's own writing came to depend heavily on patronage by British publishers and readers. He was ostensibly writing for an English audience and could not upset the colonial English system which supported him. This article examines the issues of colonial ambivalence in Narayan's fiction, comparing Waiting for the Mahatma with Raja Rao's Kanthapura (1938), in which the author's commitment to Gandhian ideology is firm and unambiguous.