Swami and Friends Important Long Questions Answers

1. What were the circumstances that led Swami to board the High School?

Swami and Friends is an Indian book written in English published in 1935. The work was the first novel ever published by the famous Indian author R. K. Narayan. The novel is the first of a trilogy of novels. The second is entitled The Bachelor of Arts and the third The English Teacher. The trilogy, which counts among his earlier fiction, focuses largely on problematic social practices, such as the institution of schooling and culture of punishment. The novel Swami and Friends is an episodic narrative that follows the daily life of Swaminathan, a charismatic and lazy schoolboy, in the fictional South Indian town of Malgudi with his father, mother, and granny. He attends the Albert Mission School and has an established cadre of friends, including Samuel “the Pea,” Sankar, Somu, and Mani, but the arrival of a new boy in school, Rajam, son of the police superintendent who speaks English like a European, threatens Swami’s popular status. They become rivals, enemies even, but swiftly reconcile and become fast friends…………

2. Analyse the character of Rajam.

R.K Narayan started his prolific writing career with this novel Swami and Friends written in 1935. It is full of humor and irony. Narayan started writing this novel with the words “It was Monday morning…” to the auspicious time his grandmother chose for him. Like many of his fictional grandmothers, he was close to his grandmother who was well versed with astrology. Despite this it took time for the budding writer to be acknowledged as an author. Fortunately for him, he had helped from many quarters, such as the well-established author British author Graham Green. He called Swami and Friends a work of “remarkable maturity, and of the finest promise….and is the boldest gamble a novelist can take. If he allows himself to take sides, moralise, propaganda, he can easily achieve an extra-literary interest, but if he follows Mr. Narayan’s method, he stakes all on his creative power.”………

3. What were the reasons behind Swami’s argument with Mr. Ebenezer?

Swami wakes up on a Monday morning dreading the day of school ahead, which means more work and discipline. He mentally catalogues all of his homework for the day and completes it in the two hours before school. At school, he is taught arithmetic, history, and scripture at the end of the day, a class taught by Ebenezer, a Christian “fanatic” who expresses disdain of the Hindu gods as dirty, lifeless, wooden idols that pale in comparison to the Christian Jesus. Swami’s blood boils, and he gets into a fight with his teacher; when his father gets wind of the fight, he sends Swami back to school with an angry letter penned wherein he strongly objects to the “assault” and rough treatment that he suffered under Ebenezer. His father accuses the school of not wanting non-Christian boys to attend the missionary school and threatens to remove his son from the school…………

4. How Rajam and Mani influenced Swami’s early life?

Malgudi Days is best among Indian English Children’s Literature, writings designed to appeal to children-either to be read to them or by them-including fun, adventure, knowledge, and fantasy. Like the riddles, precepts, fables, legends, myths, and folk poems and folktales based on spoken tradition, Malgudi Days works and often adapts simple narrative forms. The delicate skill and graceful simplicity of R. K. Narayan delighted children and impressed thinkers. The book is commercially successful children’s books comparable to May Day, Little Ann, and Mother Goose. Here is one of the rarest of rare scenes of the yesteryear of Swami, one can just reminisce the past, walk the memory lane……….

5. Analyse the character of Sankar.

R.K Narayan started his prolific writing career with this novel Swami and Friends written in 1935. It is full of humor and irony. Narayan started writing this novel with the words “It was Monday morning…” to the auspicious time his grandmother chose for him. Like many of his fictional grandmothers, he was close to his grandmother who was well versed with astrology. Despite this it took time for the budding writer to be acknowledged as an author. Fortunately for him, he had helped from many quarters, such as the well-established author British author Graham Green. He called Swami and Friends a work of “remarkable maturity, and of the finest promise…and is the boldest gamble a novelist can take. If he allows himself to take sides, moralise, propaganda, he can easily achieve an extra-literary interest, but if he follows Mr. Narayan’s method, he stakes all on his creative power.”………..

6. Discuss the Irony of the Novel Swami and Friends.

Humour of Narayan is the direct course of his intellectual analysis of the contradictions in human experience tragically or comically. But this view of irony raises some issues which require explanation. The basic feature of every irony is a contrast between a reality and its appearance. But the matter is not so simple: the ironist is not sure which is reality and which merely seems. …

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