Malgudi

Malgudi is the fictitious town created by R.K. Narayan in his novel Swami and Friends. It forms the setting for most of Narayan's works.

Related Topics:
R.K. Narayan - Swami and Friends

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Narayan portrays Malgudi as a microcosm of India. While describing how he

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conceptualised Malgudi he says

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"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 in Malgudi Station."

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Various critics compare Narayan's Malgudi with Thomas Hardy's Wessex or William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha. Unlike Hardy and Faulkner, Narayan has drawn out no map for Malgudi and has kept it purely a "country of the mind".

Related Topics:
Thomas Hardy - Wessex - William Faulkner - Yoknapatawpha

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Some believe that the name 'Malgudi' is derived from the names of the two old suburbs of Bangalore - Malleswaram and Basavangudi.

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Link: Malgudi explainedhttp://www.iit.edu/~jainank/reading/db/narayan/malgudi.html

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