R.K. Narayan’s Malgudi Milieu: A Sensitive World of Grotesque Realism

This book projects R.K. Narayan as a writer who, unlike many of his contemporaries was able to address his times and country of birth without giving in to the ruling influences of certain ideologies which made the works of many of his peers monologic, and even pedagogic. It underscores the influence of colonial capitalism in India and the advent of a new and strange class of people who responded to the market economy with gusto. The book also shows how Narayan’s approach is ethical in nature without being harsh on the people he critiques. Through the application of Bakhtin’s theories, Narayan is here positioned as a writer who was deceptively simple, but who can be considered as one of the foremost post-modern writers of India. He wrote at a time when the Gandhian influence had motivated writers so much that they could not envision the other side of the coin, the constant subversion of this ruling influence. Narayan depicted that reality effectively in a grotesque form.