Author Comparison Essay, Research Paper

The authors, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and R. K. Narayan have very different styles and themes. One was born in Germany and one was born in India, yet they born wrote Indian stories. Jhabvala based most of her characters as people deciding between western life styles and traditional Indian family lifestyles. While Narayan based most of his stories in a fictitious town, called Malgudi and his experience in life. Jhabvala wrote the story, The Interview , which was about a man deciding whether he really wants a job that pays well but is very boring and strict. And Narayan wrote the story, A Horse and Two Goats , which is a story about a man from the village Malgudi who is poor, and while sitting on the pedestal of a statue of a horse and a man, meets a tourist who wants to buy the statue because he that the man was selling it. But due to miscommunication the man thought that the man wanted to buy his two goats.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, born in 1927, was a German-born novelist, short-story writer, and scriptwriter, who first gained recognition for her humorous, transcultural novels of manners, which show an acute awareness of the residual effects of colonialism on contemporary Indian society. She was born Ruth Prawer in Cologne, Germany, to Polish parents who went as refugees to England in 1939, Jhabvala was educated at Queen Mary College in London, from which she graduated in 1951. In 1951 she also married Indian architect Cyrus S.H. Jhabvala and moved to India, where they raised three daughters. She lived in India until 1975, when she settled in New York City. She spent some time as a screen writer and did motion pictures like, A Room With A View , based on the 1908 novel by British author E. M. Forster, which she won an Academy Award for best screenplay in 1987. She is currently at work on a screen adaptation of The Golden Bowl.

R K Narayan, born in 1906, He was the first modern Indian writer to make literature a fulltime career. Between 1930 and his death, he wrote 15 novels and scores of short stories; nearly all his fiction was located in Malgudi. Rasipuram Krishnaswami Narayanaswami was born in Madras. The third of eight children, he was raised by his maternal grandmother as a middle-class Tamil Brahmin in an ancient quarter of the city, which retained links with its rural past, while the rest of the family lived in Mysore. From his grandmother he absorbed folk-tales, a fluent narrative tradition and an appreciation of south Indian classical music. An impecunious uncle, idealistic and committed to classical Tamil literature, and Shakespeare instilled in him enduring values. Narayan was educated at a Lutheran mission and two other Madras schools before his father summoned him to Mysore in 1922. He was, he recalled, a reluctant pupil, prone to daydreaming in class and at sea with subjects like arithmetic. But he was captivated by the green spaces and eloquent landscape of Mysore, dominated by the rise of Chamundi Hill, and became part of a large, lively family. His parents believed in education and the value of learning, and shared a liberal perspective on life that worked against orthodoxy, both religious and social. This was a bilingual household where Tamil, rather than Kannada, was spoken, but correct English usage was required. Narayan twice failed his university entrance examination, the first time, ironically, in English. The two-year respite from formal education left him time to read, muse, and savor nature. When he gained admission to Maharaja’s College, in Mysore, he found little interest in the curriculum. But college life proved absorbing, he wrote his first short stories, and many friends he made there would later enter his fiction. Graduating in 1930, Narayan tried teaching, but gave it up after four days. In September 1930, on a day selected by his grandmother, he opened an exercise book and waited for inspiration. After writing his first line, “It was Monday morning,” he saw, in his mind’s eye, a railway station; its name “seemed to hurl into view”, and Malgudi was born. Narayan saw this as the pivotal moment in his writing life.

One author, Jhabvala wrote most of her stories with a character torn between western life and traditional Indian life. I think she based stories on this idea because she is feeling the same way. She was a European living in India with an Indian family. She writes her characters with the characters debating on whether or not to do something like in the story The Interview . Not all her stories are like that but most are. I think she depicts westerners as a virus to Indian culture.

And the other author, Narayan had an ability to make the rhythms and intricacies of Indian life accessible to people of other cultures. Central to this was Malgudi, his fictional south Indian town, which he peopled with ordinary men and women, made memorable by his art. He wrote his stories with a wry sense of comedy to the daily Indian life. Although Malgudi is a fictitious town, Nanyan described it as though it were a real town through out his novels and short stories. Whatever happens in India also happens in Malgudi. While reading his novels and short stories, you would think Malgudi is a real town. I think he used his grandmothers story telling and his experience in life to write his stories. Most of his characters that he used were based on his friends, family, and himself. R. K. Narayan died on May 13, 2001. He was 94 years old.