Post for Debjit Banerjee ICSE Class IX Literature Project Work

Summary
R.K. Narayan’s Malgudi is a fictitious town of India which forms the setting of most of his novels and short stories. The simple and ordinary characters of his fiction live and enact their roles in life here. The versatile author has very aptly portrayed this imaginary town in South India as a microcosm of India. The city is as synonymous with Wessex created by Thomas Hardy as it is for Narayan. He populates an imaginary landscape with the unique characters of his narratives.

In Narayan’s own words, ‘Malgudi was an earth-shaking discovery for me, because I had no mind for facts and things like that, which would be necessary in writing about Lalgudi or any real place. I first pictured not my town but just the railway station, which was a small platform with a banyan tree, a station master, and two trains a day, one coming and one going. On Vijayadasami I sat down and wrote the first sentence about my town: The train had just arrived at Malgudi Station.'' The same landmarks used in his novels and short stories have somehow lent an organic wholeness to his literary creations.
Critical Appreciation
The fictional world of Malgudi strongly smacks of Indianness brimming over with basically Indian sensibilities. The human drama growing and developing in ‘Malgudi Days’ is not only dynamic like real life is but the characters themselves also appear to be drawing sustenance from the drama itself.
Narayan chose to treat Malgudi exclusively as provincial because he thought –
``I must be absolutely certain about the psychology of the character I am writing about, and I must be equally sure of the background. I know the Tamil and Kannada speaking people most. I know their background. I know how their minds work and almost as if it is happening to me, I know exactly what will happen to them in certain circumstances. And I know how they will react.''
Even a writer of Graham Greene's stature has expressed his love for the symbolic town saying that Malgudi is a place ‘where you could go.’ According to him - ``into those loved and shabby streets and see with excitement and a certainty of pleasure a stranger approaching past the bank, the cinema, the haircutting saloon, a stranger who will greet us, we know, with some unexpected and revealing phrase that will open the door to yet another human existence.''

``into those loved and shabby streets and see with excitement and a certainty of pleasure a stranger approaching past the bank, the cinema, the haircutting saloon, a stranger who will greet us, we know, with some unexpected and revealing phrase that will open the door to yet another human existence.''
There is no doubt that the popularity of Narayan’s literary work among the general reading public and literary critics evidence the versatile depth and expanse of his story-telling canvas.