A Multidisciplinary Research Journal - Devanga Arts College

A novel deals with the physical features, people, life, customs, habits, manners,
traditions, language, etc., of a particular locality. The novelist emphasizes the unique features of
a particular locality, its uniqueness, the various ways in which it differs from other localities, the
differences are used as a means of revealing similarities; form the particular and the local, the
artist rises to the general and the universal. The selected region becomes a symbol of the world
at large, a microcosm which reflects the great world beyond.
R.K. Narayan is regarded as one of the greatest of Indians Writing in English. His sole
aim is to give aesthetic satisfaction and not to use his art as a medium of propaganda or to serve
some social purpose as in the case with his contemporary Mulk Raj Anand. Indian English
must be used to express Indian sensibility, to convey the feeling of the culture and emotional life
of the people to the readers. There are a number of eminent writers who have overcome the
difficulties caused by the medium of expression and achieved international fame and recognition.
Only in India with a native population whose indigenous religions and cultures were
never crushed by a colonial church militant and whose millennia old literary tradition far pre-
dated the advent of the first European, has a foreign language achieved such a profound and
positive cultural symbiosis. It is probably the greatest linguistic feat.
The Malgudi forms the setting to all the works of Narayan. It is a symbol for India. It is
a typical South Indian town and it has been presented in his works vividly and realistically.
Every reader sees it changing growing and becoming different. All the ten novels and most of
the short stories are set in Malgudi. Various critics have attempted to identify the origin of this
mythical town.
As a creator of Malgudi, Narayan has put his particular region of South India on the
world map. His treatment of it is realistic and vivid so much so that many have taken the
fictitious to be the real and have tried to identify the various geographical features under the
landmarks that constantly recur in his novels. Thus some have thought that Narayan’s Malgudi
is Lalgudi while others identified it with Coimbatore. But like Hardy’s Wessex, it is a pure
country of the mind, a dream country in which the physical feature of various places are
intimately known to the novelist.
Malgudi is Narayan’s greatest invention wherein he could put in real people, real places
in one harmony of day-to-day existence and eccentricity. Every minor and major character of
Narayan’s stories fascinates, even the only villain to figure in all his writings, Vasu, the Man-