A Multidisciplinary Research Journal - Devanga Arts College

Eater of Malgudi. Narayan is that supreme alchemist who discovered that the ordinary is the
most extra-ordinary aspect of civilized living.
The Nava Rasa of human life is not to be seen in cinematic exaggerations or in the blood
and core of modern novels, but in good, clean portrayal of life around.
Hari Prasanna’s The World of Malgudi says:
‘The recurrence of the same landmarks serves to put together the various novels
into an organic whole. They may be rightly called Malgudi novels, just as,
Hardy’s novels are called Wessex novel.’(n.p.)
Narayan creates his fictional world of Malgudi as an essentially Indian society or town.
The Indianness and Indian sensibility pervaded the whole place. Narayan’s Malgudi is also a
microcosm of India. It grows and develops and expands and changes and it is full of humanity,
drawing its substance from the human drama that it enacted in it.
Like Hardy, Arnold Bennett too writes about five towns, also famous as fictional places.
For Bennett the five towns were provincial. His attitude towards them is always expository in
the sense that he explains and exhibits them to outside body, but for Narayan Malgudi is
anything but provincial.
K.R. Srinivas Iyengar an eminent scholar expresses about the universal element in the
novels of Narayan:
‘Like Hardy’s Wessex, Malgudi is the chosen region which forms the background
to the works of Narayan. Malgudi is Narayan’s Caster Bridge, but the inhabitants
of Malgudi, though they may have the recognizable local trappings, are
essentially human and hence have their kinship with all humanity. In this sense
Malgudi is everywhere.’(361)
In Swami and Friends, Malgudi is neither village nor city, but a town of modest size,
with each new novel. We advance in time and Malgudi grows in importance and gain in
definition.
Uma Parameswaran very rightly says:
‘Indeed Malgudi is the only character that grows, changes, reacts to time and
circumstance, has spirit, a soul, other Narayan characters do not grow. They are
essentially what E.M. Forster would call ‘flat characters’.’(50)