Ecological Commodification and Capital Accumulation in R. K. Narayan’s The Financial Expert

Abstract

This study explores how land, agrarian labour and social relations are transformed into abstraction of financial value within the fictional world of Malgudi in R. K. Narayan’s The Financial Expert (1952), focusing especially on the relationship between the ecological resources and the new formations of capital accumulation. The study aims to examine the ideological and material processes that transform communal and ecological forms of value into exchange, credit and collateral and to expand the novel’s interpretive scope beyond its traditional reading as social comedy or character study. The research is based on a close reading of the text, using a qualitative, theory-based approach that draws on Marx’s (1990) theories of capital accumulation and primitive accumulation and Huggan and Tiffin’s (2010) postcolonial ecocriticism, with an emphasis on the banyan tree, the Co-operative Land Mortgage Bank, the moneylending economy, and Margayya’s domestic sphere as interdependent spaces that redefine relationships between nature, labour, and economic value. The analysis shows that financial accumulation in the novel depends upon the abstraction of value from the ecological and social conditions that sustain material life. The novel’s comic and cyclical structure, moreover, reveals the recurrent tensions produced by this process. The study therefore argues that The Financial Expert (1952) offers an important framework for understanding the intersections of ecology, finance, and capital accumulation in postcolonial fiction.