Word: malgudi
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...Master of Malgudi Thank you for "the fountainhead" [Aug. 15-22], about novelist R.K. Narayan, who vividly brought to life the make-believe South Indian town of Malgudi through detailed descriptions of every street, alley, shop and office. [The fictional town is the setting for almost all of Narayan's stories.] One of India's most subtly humorous writers, Narayan delighted in exploring the lives of ordinary Indians of all ages. A literary great, he is still alive in the hearts of many people around the world! Suresh Kumar Parappurath Bangalore, India...
...common ground holding most of these tales together is the Malgudi district, a fictional area of southern India that Narayan has been tilling for the past 50 years. Not much changes in Malgudi. The British, who are rarely mentioned in this book, have come and gone. World War II is recalled for its temporary effects on the price of rice. The riots that break out between Hindus and Muslims when India achieves independence are seen through the eyes of a neutral, nondescript hero: "It was on the whole a peaceful, happy life--till the October of 1947, when he found...
...politics; all governments were wicked. The story is in Narayan's autobiography, My Days. And, while the British ruled, Narayan never wrote about the independence movement. Waiting for the Mahatma appeared only in 1955. I do not hold this against him. He might have been looking for peace, but Malgudi was also a delicate literary creation. Much depended on the notion of the timelessness of the petty life there, the true India just going on. The high feelings of the independence movement would have been too radical...
...Malgudi wasn't able to hold the independence movement, it wasn't able later to hold the great social changes, the general opening up, that began to come to India with independence. When Narayan tries to deal with that opening up, his fine humor can turn to a gross kind of satire. In one late novel, for instance, a Malgudi man returns from the United States with a Korean wife and a story-writing machine...
...antihistorical. But without that idea, and its associated religious sentiments, he would not have arrived at his remarkable way of looking and his peerless humor. A more clear-sighted man would not have been able to filter out or make harmless the distress of India, as Narayan does in Malgudi. But then we wouldn't have had the great early books...