The Financial Expert by R. K. Narayan

First published: 1952

Type of work: Regional comedy

Time of work: The late 1940’s

Locale: Malgudi (based on Mysore), in southern India

Principal Characters:

• Margayya, the protagonist, a manipulator of loans to needy, bad-risk villagers and peasants
• Dr. Pal, self-described as an academician, sociologist, journalist, and author
• Madan Lal, the principal printer in Malgudi
• Balu, Margayya’s son, an academic failure and runaway
• Arul Doss, an old Christian, the head servant of the Cooperative Bank

The Novel

Margayya who adopted his name, which means “one who shows the way”), a financial expert, is one of the minor businessmen who are to be found in most Indian towns and cities. Neither a moneylender nor really a banker, he is a manipulator of others’ affairs who accumulates a modest income by giving financial advice, selling forms, and showing illiterate farmers and peasants how to obtain loans from the Central Co-operative Land Mortgage Bank in Malgudi. His role as middleman is lucrative, for he has almost no overhead: His pen, ink, blotter, and account book are contained in an old, gray tin box that he carries with him and that constitutes his office when he sits under a banyan tree across the lawn from the bank. When he is rebuked by Arul Doss, the chief peon of the bank, for being a nuisance on the premises (normally trying to obtain loan application forms or even new clients), Margayya decides that large sums of money—necessary for the type of life and position in society of which he judges himself deserving—are not to be made from villagers’ small transactions; rather, they are to be made by devotions to Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth, whose favors to the elect are almost boundless.

A priest from a run-down local temple prescribes special rituals for obtaining the favor of Lakshmi: mixing the ashes of a red lotus with the milk of a smoke-colored cow, exorcising rodents and cockroaches from his house, decorating the doorways with mango-leaf garlands, and repeating a special mantra a thousand times daily for forty days. The result is that Margayya becomes a devotee not of Lakshmi but of money itself.

During his search for the red lotus, Margayya meets Dr. Pal, author of a 150-page manuscript, “Bed-Life, or the Science of Marital Happiness,” and he decides to become the publisher of his manuscript rather than a seller of snuff or tooth powder—two possibilities that attract him now that he is almost penniless after his forty-day absence from his banyan-tree “office,” during which his son, Balu, has thrown his account book into a sewer canal.

Madan Lal, the proprietor of the Gordon Printery on Market Road, reads Pal’s manuscript and offers to publish it in partnership with Margayya under the title Domestic Harmony—though it is really an amalgam of the Kama Sutra and the writings of Havelock Ellis. Sold at one rupee a copy, Domestic Harmony (promoted as sociology but in reality a work of prurience) becomes Margayya’s means to unexpected riches and position (as secretary of the town elementary school—through a manipulated election).

Yet in spite of his newfound social status resulting from his increased wealth, Margayya is distressed by the lack of academic progress by his son Balu. Even after teachers are pressured, Balu fails to gain admission to a university and so runs away to Madras, confessing that he hates studies and examinations.

Word is received that Balu has died—but the cause is unknown. Margayya (to economize) takes a third-class train to Madras, where, with the help of an inspector of police, he learns that Balu is alive and that the postcard announcing his death was written by a madman, who is a cinema owner; Balu is the supervisor of street urchins who wear sandwich-board advertisements for films. After reconciliation, Margayya and Balu return to Malgudi.

After preliminary inquiries about a bride for Balu, Margayya is aided by Dr. Pal, who persuades an astrologer to manipulate horoscopes. Balu and his bride, Brinda, move into a fashionable new house, and Dr. Pal becomes a tout for Margayya, who decides to become a deposit-taker rather than a lender. He quickly achieves celebrity status, and he is virtually a currency-hoarder.

Balu has fallen under the influence of Dr. Pal, however, who is part owner of a “house of debauchery,” and Margayya assaults Dr. Pal, who then spreads rumors about Margayya’s bank being insolvent. There is a ruinous run on the bank, and even Balu’s house and property are attached. In about four months, Margayya, crushed, suggests that Balu take up the old, gray tin box and set up office under the banyan tree while he plays at home with his grandson.

The Characters

If, as has been suggested by some distinguished critics, The Financial Expert is the quintessential Narayan novel, then its characters are fully representative of the entire range of the writer’s invention and thus of India itself, for Malgudi is as representative of urban life on the subcontinent as is any other town or city in modern literature, and it is drawn in greater detail and with greater fidelity and sympathy. That is to say, the characters are both individuals and representatives of the types to be found in their multifarious modifications throughout South India.

Margayya, aware that his grandfather and his grand-uncles were corpse-bearers (and hence of one of the lowest castes), has nevertheless managed to rise above his origins through providing a service of sorts to illiterate and intimidated villagers; he is hardworking, frugal to the point of penuriousness, and—aware that knowledge is power—ever careful to become acquainted with others’ finances while remaining secretive about his own. His relationships reveal his character in all of its complexity. First, in typical fashion, he treats his wife, Meenakshi, as unworthy of being apprised of his business dealings and unworthy of love, or even of respect. (There is no word for love, as it is defined in English, in Indian languages.) Second, he regards Balu as a projection of himself and tries to force him into a mold quite unsuited to him; he shows him neither paternal affection nor true understanding but wants him to achieve academic success so that he might become a government official or a business success. By indulging him after his return from Madras, he merely ensures Balu’s future failure though his last act is to recommend that Balu follow in his father’s footsteps. It seems certain that the son, like the father, will never “pass on to the grade of people who [are] wealthy and not merely rich.”

It is Margayya’s consuming desire for wealth and position that blinds him to the machinations of Dr. Pal and Mr. Lal, author and publisher, respectively, of Domestic Harmony. All three men illustrate one side of Indian society: the puritanical public attitude toward sex (and even to normal heterosexual behavior) that coexists with the erotic, in the form of temple statuary and the Kama Sutra, which are almost compulsively exhibited to Western visitors. Dr. Pal, in particular, represents the seamy side of Indian academic life: He is, by his own account, a sociologist, psychologist, journalist, author, and tourist director, but in fact, he ekes out a living through illicit enterprises and by performing lowly tasks. He is, in essence, a social parasite. Mr. Lal, on the other hand, is merely a furtive businessman: He loves to read a titillating manuscript and sees in it ready profit from surreptitious sales.

Arul Doss, however, although he plays a seemingly minor role as chief servant of the Co-operative Land Mortgage Bank, is an important foil to Margayya, whose cupidity and self-interest (if not also his deviousness) are contrasted to the values that have been represented for years by the Bank: cooperation, frugality, regularity, punctuality, moderation, and caution. That is, the Bank represents the Puritan ethic of Western culture. Doss is ready to address Margayya on terms of equality and with politeness, but it is not a reciprocal attitude. Doss has an inherent dignity as a functionary that suggests a basis in Christian theology and in a philosophy of service and equality—service to employer and customers alike.

Even the minor characters—such as Balu’s wife, Brinda; the inspector of police; and the mystic owner of the Madras theater— add materially to R. K. Narayan’s panorama of Indian characters. Brinda is the arranged bride, sought out by negotiation and consultation with astrologers yet dutiful, retiring, complaisant, and devoted to her domestic duties; the inspector is diligent, resourceful, modest, and professional in the execution of his work; the theater owner is one of those mystics who pervade the Indian scene—partly religious, partly profane, they seem to belong to neither world entirely, yet they influence both. When impoverished villagers, prostitutes, film-makers, and small-time vendors are included, one has a picture of Indian urban life of remarkable detail and comprehensiveness.

Critical Context

Narayan was first championed by Graham Greene, who saw in the Indian writer’s work the continuation of the best elements of comedy, which had (he thought) been superseded in European writing by farce and satire. In large measure, Narayan’s work depends for its comic tone upon his basic identification with the society in which he places his characters and yet upon his ability to perceive its inconsequentialities, its irrelevancies, and its irreverences as much as its departure from the ideal. He is never the satirist intent upon demolition or poking fun at the foibles of men, nor is irony his pervading mode, for he does not dwell upon the dissonance between proclaimed principle and performance. He smiles rather than laughs at his neighbors’ idiosyncrasies and shortcomings, remembering that even the observer has his faults. It is this gentleness that pervades his writing and makes his novels so appealing to sensitive readers; it is the gentleness one finds also in the works of Anton Chekhov.

The comic in Narayan is balanced by the genuinely pathetic, which indicates the point of view of the philosopher-novelist. Yet there is never any truly tragic circumstance any more than there is a melodramatic one: The Hindu philosophy almost excludes the possibility of tragedy, and there is never a clear good/bad dichotomy that would produce melodrama. It is this deft and rare handling of character and circumstance that gives Narayan’s work such an inimitable quality, whether his protagonist is a vendor of sweets, a schoolteacher, a film-maker, a painter of signs, a guide, or a financial expert.

Bibliography

Garabian, Keith. “Narayan’s Compromise in Comedy,” in The Literary Half-Yearly. XVII, no. 1(1976), pp. 77-92.

Gowda, H. H. A. “R. K. Narayan: The Early Stories,” in The Literary Half-Yearly. VI, no. 2 (1965), pp. 25-39.

Iyengar, K. R. Srinivasa. Indian Writing in English, 1962.

Naik, M. K. The Ironic Vision: A Study of the Fiction of R. K. Narayan, 1984.

Walsh, William. R. K. Narayan, 1971.

Walsh, William. R. K. Narayan: A Critical Appreciation, 1982.