The Financial Expert Margayya's Strive to New Identity: An Echo of His Own World

Abstract

Reading R. K. Narayan certainly leads the South-Asian readers to the home and bosom of his own country people. It sparks a sense of Indianness provided with his own taste, flavour and recognition of a rich cultural inheritance. Narayan’s presentation of Indian ways of life gets a meticulous and painstaking regard for verisimilitude. His wonderful creation, The Financial Expert, is not an exception being a veritable goldmine for anyone interested in India and its culture. At the heart of the novel is the landscape of India, the customs, conventions and lores that are the quintessence of Indianness. Building up a new nation parallels with searching and adjusting a new identity of an Indian. Narayan's protagonist, in the book, is forced to transcend the age-old customs and traditions of the society and embrace his new identity which he cannot do without echoing his own world. Finally he discovers himself and comes back to his root. This paper attempts at examining Narayan's creation of a soul which strives for adaptability only to restart a new stride.

Keywords: Strive, Identity, Own World, Karma, Indianness, Tradition.