Feroza Jussawalla

University of Texas, El Paso

One of my favorite books to teach is R. K. Narayan's Swami and Friends. Often it is
hard for me to believe that the "crusty," cynical, silent, and shy Narayan wrote a light-
hearted and airy novel about a young boy's escapades, which so many students enjoy and
benefit from at so many different levels. Narayan himself tells us in his autobiography, My
Days, that some of the experiences--learning English ("A is for apple, B bit it, C cut it"),
playing cricket, and experiencing the independence movement first hand--are his own.
Swami and Friends is technically not a postcolonial novel ¹ because it was written while the
independence movement was still in progress, and Swami often describes history in the
making--India's independence movement, an important historical moment that set in
motion the breakup of the British Empire by shaking loose the most precious jewel in the
crown. At the same time, Swami expresses awe and admiration for the British as well as an
intense desire to be British in his cricket-playing and Western in his tastes--such as Shirley
Temple movies. The intermingling of cultures created immense confusion in the minds of
that generation concerning their identity and belonging and their choice of language for
day-to-day communication and creative expression. As Narayan switches back and forth
between the standard English of his narrative and the Indian English of his characters, the
reader witnesses the creation of Indian English, a variety of English that grew out of
Britain's contact with India and is still the preferred medium of communication. It took on
the tint and lilt of Indian languages and became an Indian language itself.

This short novel thus provides the opportunity to teach it at three different levels:
the historical, the personal (dealing with questions of the evolution of the "self" and of the
individual's identity resulting from the cross-cultural encounter of India and Britain), and
the linguistic. The same three levels allow for comparisons with other third world or
minority American texts. As I will show in the following discussion, the historical pro-
cesses of colonialization, acculturation, and decolonization in Swami and Friends can be
illuminated by comparisons with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's Weep not, Child, a novel about

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