Magayya Character Analysis

“Margayya is one of the most touching and loveable of all Narayan’s frustrated and baffled characters, human to a fault in his combination of religious devotion, with hard-headed financial skill, and with hopeless love, for his prodigal son Balu.” (H.M. Williams)

Graham Greene commented that

“Margayya, the sad ambitious absurd financial expert, is perhaps the most engaging of all Narayan’s characters. In his ambitions for his boy, his huge dreams, his unintended villainies and his small vanities, his domestic tenderness, he has the hidden poetry and the unrecognized pathos we so often fined in Chekhov’s character”. (Graham Greene)

Margayya tries his best to educate Balu, his affectionate son. When Balu is admitted to the Town Elementary

She is a domesticated Indian wife. She loves her son Balu more than her husband. When Balu disappears from home she sheds tears constantly and asks her husband to go out in search of Balu. To some extent, it is her excessive love of Balu that has spoiled the boy. But she alone is not responsible for this. Both Margayya and his wife are responsible for spoiling Balu, but Meenakshi like most of the Indian women blames her husband for having spoiled. In the very beginning of the novel, when she has gone to a neighbouring shop, Balu burns his finger by his own mischief by touching a burning lamp. He lets out a shriek, she hears it and comes rushing into the house. When she sees the burnt finger of the child, she blames Margayya for the calamity. She says that it was his duty to look after the child in her absence. But he did not do so. This reveals her love for Balu and as pointed out earlier, an Indian mother loves her son more than she loves her husband. She is a simple woman. She has no lust for money. Meenakshi does not think money to be the most important thing in this world as Margayya thought. She is not an educated woman like any Indian woman of early days of Indian independence but even then she is wiser than Margayya in many ways. Many times she gives good advice to her husband. Margayya speaks rudely to Arul Doss, the peon but when he tells this episode to Meenakshi, she says: “you should not have been so rude

“His immediate concern was to attain material benefits, such as unlimited affluence foreign studies for Balu, his only son, his possible marriage with a Judge’s daughter and the realization of the next generation of aristocrats” (p.29) in his family, filled his mind night and day. His only salvation lay in acquiring the riches he coveted. The best way to fulfill his desire, he presumed, would be to consult the temple priest. The atmosphere in the temple on that late evening swayed his mind towards the mysterious and awesome superiority of the Gods and Goddesses of his culture. Millign aptly points out that “People thoroughly influenced by the society in which they have grown up. The complicated network made out of the consequences of individual decisions becomes a map of the moral attitudes of a