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.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

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

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

conceptualised Malgudi he says

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

"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."

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

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".

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

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

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

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

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

R.K. Narayan: Rasipuram Krishnaswamy Narayan (October 10, 1906 - May 13, 2001) was an Indian novelist writing in English, whose sensitive, well-drawn portrayals of twentieth-century Indian life were set mostly in the fictional South Indian town of Malgudi....

Swami and Friends: Swami and Friends is the first of a trilogy of novels written by R.K. Narayan, a celebrated English novelist from India. The novel, which is also Narayan's first, is set in pre-independence days in India, in a fictional town - Malgudi, which has almost become a real place in India today, due to the ...

Thomas Hardy: Thomas Hardy, OM (2 June, 1840 – 11 January, 1928) was a novelist and poet, generally regarded as among the greatest poets and novelists in English literature. The bulk of his work, set mainly in the semi-imaginary county of Wessex, is marked by imaginative poetic descriptions, and a forebodi...