A Tiger for Malgudi

A Tiger for Malgudi: Allotropy and Congruity Joseph A. Dupras (bio) Animals must be made to say that they are not animals, that bestiality, savagery—with what these terms imply of unintelligibility, radical strangeness to reason—do not exist, but on the contrary the most bestial behaviors, the most singular, the most abnormal are resolved in science, in physiological mechanisms, in cerebral connections, etc. Bestiality, and its principle of uncertainty, must be killed in animals. Jean Baudrillard, “The Animals: Territory and Metamorphoses,” Simulacra and Simulation Arjuna, when you have realized this, you will not descend into delusion again; knowledge will let you see creatures within yourself and so in me. Bhagavad-Gita (4.35) The genre of R. K. Narayan’s A Tiger for Malgudi—apparently a rather unremarkable beast fable—may account for the scant interpretive attention that the novel has received since its publication in 1983. A personable tiger, Raja, chronicles his life as it nears an end in a zoo where he has been sent by Master, whom Raja and several human characters regard as a sadhu. After being in the jungle, in a circus, on a movie set, and asleep in the office of a school’s headmaster, the impressionable Raja comes under [End Page 186] Master’s spell and is tagged “only a tiger in appearance . . . a sensitive soul who understands life and its problems exactly as [humans] do . . . a gift from God” (151). In captivity, God’s gift can begin to connect his discipleship to his former sovereignty in the wild, to confusing circus antics and movie rehearsals influenced by Captain’s chair handling, and to threats from a cameraman-poacher to “shoot” him. Conditioned as much by Master’s self-seeking, disingenuous “philosophy” as by Captain’s “wrong philosophy” (84), the tiger’s zoological—and supposedly dharma-like—role is to make people, “particularly children, . . . happy” (152). Shallow entertainment will suffice for Malgudi: its residents prefer light fare and know nothing of Raja’s strength gained from untold lives and years that bring the philosophic mind.1 A Tiger for Malgudi, a mock bildungsroman, carries Narayan’s characteristic stripe—gaiety and gravity—characteristic of the literary phylum l’entretien infini. He coddles immature readers who think they have only a flimsy text on their hands. But he also sets before discriminating readers a transubstantial story; with each new, yet familiar, course they undergo a quasi reincarnation that reforms their experiences and opinions. With practice they perhaps learn to read Raja’s mind in a livelier way, and with introspection they recognize (but do not always avoid) the mistakes made by the novel’s influential, yet inept, species and altera; two of them—a goat and a human—he decapitates, a narrative coup whereby Narayan lightly makes fun of all dumb creatures great and small. The common soul of the diverse personae wants to remake a wild animal whose romantic reflections concur with encyclopedic samsara. When readers try to review and reclassify Narayan’s paper tiger, they take their lives in their hands. If A Tiger for Malgudi were ever to get their full attention, not merely their tongues, otherworldly genius and the genus of metamorphic narrative would be the prizes. Like other Narayan stories, Raja’s adventures and fate can be understood in light of allegorized Hindu philosophy. Yet more is at stake for readers than figuring out Hindu arcana, or authenticating Master as a sannyasi,2 or even testing the genuineness of Raja’s docility and pacifism. By attending to Raja’s recollected “lives” and some previous ones, readers become his proxies.3 Like Captain’s regimen for Raja, the novel’s transmutations put readers through intellectual paces that may lead eventually to valid inferences about Narayan’s purposes. Raja learns that “ignorance and self-assurance” (23), like that of humans, can deny self-conscious [End Page 187] creatures their freedom. Raja has sharp eyes, ears, and a nose for textuality, yet proud readers assume their education is better than his. This headless (i.e., chapter-less) novel, which obviously features “heads” (e.g., “Raja,” “Captain,” “headmaster,” “Master”), has plenty to chew on: mind-(mis)reading, timing, semiotics, textuality, narrative, scripture, religion

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• Simulacra and Simulation

  Jean Baudrillard, Sheila Glaser•Simulacra and Simulation•1995

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• Hindu Mythology in R.K. Narayan's The Guide

  Open Access•Patrick Swinden•The Journal of Commonwealth…•1999

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