194. Lawley Road. R K Narayan Story Reintroduced By P S Remesh Chandran

194

Lawley Road. R K Narayan Story Reintroduced

P. S. Remesh Chandran
 
Editor, Sahyadri Books & Bloom Books, Trivandrum

Article Title Image 01 By Siberian Beard. Graphics: Adobe SP.

The Chairman of the Malgudi Municipal Council, a Journalist, and the Statue of Sir. Lawley are the only characters in the story, but what characters! Lawley Road is a humorous story by R. K. Narayan. Malgudi is an imaginary district situated on the banks of the imaginary Sarayu River in South India where most of R. K. Narayan’s stories and novels are based. There is no such district in India. Through his stories and novels he actually immortalized this district which most people think actually exists somewhere in the vast stretches of India. 

The people of the world got only confused with long-accepted names and famous geographical indicators.

There is a world-wide craze to change the names of cities, towns, villages, roads, streets, buildings, places, and even statues when a country gains independence from a hostile and foreign power or even the administration of the country changes. If we did not build them, renaming them is a pleasure which would satisfy our ego. Wherever we look in the world, we can see so many instances. Many countries we know today by name were not them a few years before. Burma became Myanmar, Ceylon became Sri Lanka, Siam became Thailand and so on and on. Who gained what with these name changes? The famous Russian city St. Petersburg became Leningrad when the communist revolution came and reverted back when communism collapsed. In India Madras became Chennai, Calcutta Kolkotha, Bombay Mumbai, Calicut Kozhikodu and Trivandrum Thiruvananthapuram, which satisfied a few. It satisfied the vanity of a few snobs here and there who live in the vain glory of regionalism, language and false patriotism. It lined the pockets of politicians with money. It also gave opportunities to pocket millions in association with the expenses of a name change. But the people of the world got only confused with long-accepted names and famous geographical indicators. Perhaps of the thousands of writers in the world, R. K. Narayan was the only writer who came up with an immortal story ridiculing this craze among rulers and administrators of countries and institutions. And Lawley Road is that story. 

Malgudi district celebrates the Independence Day of India.

With the birth of the Independence of India, Malgudi Municipal Council decided to rename all roads and public places. The Coronation Park was renamed Hamara Hindustan Park. (Coronation Park undoubtedly was named in honour of the coronation of Queen Victoria in England. Hamara Hindustan Park means Our Hindu Land Park). Several roads were renamed Mahatma Gandhi Road. There now were several Nehru Roads and Netaji Roads in Malgudi Town. This confused the postal department. Letters reached the wrong persons or no persons at all. But people suffered all these difficulties in the name of narrow nationalism. 

How the statue defies the efforts to pull it down and remove.

The chairman of the Malgudi Municipal Council decided to dismantle the statue of the Britisher, Sir. Frederick Lawley, and rename the place Gandhi Nagar. (Nagar means Place, Square). People, who hated all British who had been ruling their contry for many decades and suppressing them, regarded the statue to be that of a very cruel British administrator. The chairman asked his friend, the journalist, to take up the work of pulling the statue down and removing it to some place of his choice, in fact to anywhere where it won’t be seen again. The journalist agreed, hoping to make some money out of it. He spent a lot of money on the project, engaging fifty workers for ten days. The statue defied the best of their efforts. It was twenty feet high and made of lead. And it was well built by the British too. Pulling it down proved to be futile. They could not break the pedestal. So they dynamited the statue and it fell down to the ground. Now was there the task of removing it. Engaging enormous labour, they finally succeeded in dragging it to the journalist’s house. There the head and shoulders filled the house. The rest of it won’t go inside for there was no further space inside. So the bulk of the stature remained outside the house, with only the head and the shoulders inside. 

In their narrow-mindedness they pulled down the statue of a good man.

Which journalist in this world can remain without writing about his adventures, especially when it is one no one has even heard about earlier? So our journalist wrote an article about this adventure and it changed the course of events dramatically. There was uproar. Things changed by overnight and information began to come out. Historians protested the dismantling and removal of the statue and pointed out that there were two Lawleys in British India. This particular Lawley had been a very good administrator and it was he who had built the town of Malgudi! It was he who had established the first cooperative society in India!! And he had sympathy towards India’s Independence Movement too!!! Those who pulled down his statue and dragged it through the mud became the laughing stock of the town. 

A new park comes into being with the journalist’s house and the statue in it.

In no time the situation caused by the Lawley statue became serious. The journalist suggested a strange solution which the chairman was only glad to accept. The house and compound of the journalist along with the statue parked there half in and half out of the house was to be purchased by the chairman of the Malgudi Municipal Council who caused all this scuffle out of his own money and turned into a public park. Then, the park was to be presented by him to the nation as his humble gift. What else could that ignorant fool of a chairman do except acquiescing to this proposal? So he personally purchased the house, built the park, and presented those as his personal gift to the nation. Thus the problem of the Lawley Road Statue was finally solved. Sure, the journalist must have got handsome money for his old house!

Article Title Image 02 By Andrew Martin. Graphics: Adobe SP.

Written in: August 1990
First published on: 27 March 2020  

Tags:

Changing Place Names, Free Student Notes, Indian Writers, Lawley Road, Post Independent India, Malgudi Statue Story, R K Narayan, Short Stories Reintroduced, Surprise End Stories,

About the Author P. S. Remesh Chandran:

03. Author Profile Of P S Remesh Chandran By Sahyadri Archives.

Editor of Sahyadri Books & Bloom Books, Trivandrum. Author of several books in English and in Malayalam. And also author of Swan: The Intelligent Picture Book. Born and brought up in the beautiful village of Nanniyode in the Sahya Mountain Valley in Trivandrum, in Kerala. Father British Council trained English teacher and Mother University educated. Matriculation with distinction and Pre Degree Studies in Science with National Merit Scholarship. Discontinued Diploma studies in Electronics and entered politics. Unmarried and single.

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E-Mail: bloombookstvm@gmail.com

Post: P. S. Remesh Chandran, Editor, Sahyadri Books, Trivandrum, Padmalayam, Nanniyode, Pacha Post, Trivandrum- 695562, Kerala State, South India.