Vernacular Modernism and the Colonial Tongue: Narrative Strategies, Language, and Decoloniality in O.V. Vijayan and R.K. Narayan

Abstract

This article does a comparative study of the narrative strategies of O.V.Vijayan (1930-2005) and R.K.Narayan (1906-2001), two towering figures in Indian Literature who worked in fundamentally different linguistic registers and with divergent aesthetic and political commitments. Vijayan, writing primarily in Malayalam, is positioned here as a practitioner of vernacular modernism whose linguistic experimentation with dialect, myth, and indigenous oral forms constitutes a form of decolonial praxis. His self-translations into English, rather than smoothing the rough edges of the vernacular, are read as acts of rewriting that negotiate the politics of translation and postcolonial representation. R.K. Narayan, by contrast, operated exclusively within the English literary tradition, adopting what might be termed a domesticated realism shaped in part by his relationship with Western publishing and mentorship. This paper argues that while Narayan’s Malgudi fiction performs a subtle resistance to colonial epistemologies through irony and humor, his narrative form remains embedded in Eurocentric realist convention that limits the scope of his decolonial critique. The paper subjects that claim to rigorous factchecking, nuancing the comparison where necessary, and situates both writers within the broader frameworks of postcolonial theory, Global South literary studies, and the politics of literary language.