Small men and their big talk

Shardul Bhardwaj

Doordarshan, our national public service broadcaster, enters its 60th year in 2018. It is 59 years old, by old one means outdated here. While public service broadcasters all over the world set new standards in both fiction and non-fiction formats, ours teaches what not to do on television. But there was a brief moment between mid-1980s and 1990s in Doordarshan’s long history that there was a huge surge in the quality of fictional content. One of the gems from this era is the televised 39 episodes of Malgudi Days (first telecasted in 1987) directed by Shankar Nag.

The simple yet complex writing of RK Narayan was translated in a prepossessing manner. At most points in its adaptation for the screen, there has been an effect of forced comedy or pushing for effect which is in accordance with RK Narayan’s writing. It is often said the most simple stories can also be the most complex, and at the same time be tricky to translate on to the screen. When the visual medium tries to become the written word, it begins to become didactic and loses its beauty.

Malgudi Days and Narayan’s comic art dwells in the belief that ordinary people are not capable of extraordinary qualities. Each character in the text is ordinary and extraordinary at the same time. Perhaps, it has appealed to generations of young and old viewers because they can identify with this duality.

In one of the episodes, we see the Swami and Mani talk about taxes they will have to pay for the cricket club they are forming in Malgudi, which is akin to a colony cricket team. These are kids, not more than 10 or 12 years of age with no money, talking about taxes for an informal local boyish cricket club. Both in book and televised version, the moment is not underlined, the audience breaks into a smile looking at these little boys with most ordinary lives talk and dream of most extraordinary things.

There is a timelessness found in these stories. Malgudi is a town fixated in the 1930s. Even with the many references of that time like the Quit India Movement, Malgudi Days manages to take us into a pre-liberalisation South Indian small town, which could be placed in any year between the 1930s and 1970s. The bullock cart and the motor car seem to coexist in one space. The television adaptation of Malgudi Days has been able to maintain and accentuate this sense of timelessness by the careful choice of shooting locations like Agumbe village in Karnataka which at the time held the curious mix of the new and the old.

This simplicity and timelessness is what lends itself to the most recognisable form of storytelling for Indians, which is the folktale. Or what has been called magical realism by westerners, who seem to find anything beyond their own idea of rationalism — magical.

Although the writing of dialogues seems old fashioned and everybody speaks in a kind of non-conversational Hindi, which seem like lines being spoken than people talking, Malgudi Days will occupy a seat with the great Doordarshan serials of its early colour days like Buniyaad, Nukkad, Hum Log and Wagle Ki Duniya. In V.S. Naipaul’s words Malgudi, RK Narayan and Shankar Nag gave us “the lesser life that goes on below: small men, small schemes, big talk, limited means: a life so circumscribed that it appears whole and unviolated, its smallness never a subject for wonder, though India itself is felt to be vast.”