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Charting the Anger of Indian Women Through Narayan's Savitri

A first read through R.K. Narayan's The Dark Room is apt to produce a response halfway between shock and chagrin. Since it is hardly the Narayan novel that people usually choose as an introduction to his workÂ—the others are so much more popular and therefore availableÂ—we come to it expecting the same kind of lighthearted and gentle sketch of Malgudi that we find in his fiction generally. We expect a tone of amused tolerance. We expect what is fundamentally a conservative approach to the world of south India, an approach that views change as, to use Meenakshi Mukherjee's words, "a play of shadows, an illusion, an unreality like a bubble, which will burst sooner or later, and the normal order of the cosmos will prevail again" (155). But The Dark Room does not give us this security. Instead, it offers its readers a mixture of anger, despair, confusion, and belligerence. William Walsh is clearly disappointed with the novel when he writes,