In a writing career spanning over half a century, R.K. Narayan created the imagined landscape of a town called Malgudi, located somewhere in South India. Malgudi is a town just like any other, its inhabitants like old familiars one might meet round the corner of any ordinary street. With deft strokes of his pen, Narayan is able to flesh out characters and situations that entertain us on the first reading and linger in our memory for years afterwards. The World of Malgudi brings together four of Narayan’s most memorable novels set in Malgudi. In Mr. Sampath, we are told of the collaborative efforts of Srinivas, the editor, and Mr. Sampath, the printer, who work together on a local weekly. We next meet Margayya, in The Financial Expert, who sits under a banyan tree and gives advice on methods of extracting loans from the local cooperative bank. In The Painter of Signs, we encounter the unlikely love story of Raman, the local signboard painter, and Daisy, a birth-control propagandist who is on a visit to Malgudi. Finally, in A Tiger for Malgudi, a venerable tiger looks back over his life, from his early days roaming wild in the jungle to his unhappy years in captivity. Avaliable for the first time in a collectors’ edition, with an illuminating introduction by S. Krishnan, the novels in this volume will be a delight for Narayan’s fans as well as for first-time readers.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR R.K. Narayan
R. K. Narayan was born in Madras in south India and educated in Mysore which had also been his home for over half-a-century now. Narayan was one of India’s most distinguished writers at work today. Through his several novels and short stories, he had created the enchanting fictional world of Malgudi which has captivated his readers throughout the world and, more recently, millions of Indian television viewers who saw TV adaptations of several of his Malgudi stories. Narayan’s books are regularly published in USA, UK and India and have also been widely translated into several European and Indian languages. His novel The Guide (1958) won the Sahitya Akademi Award, India’s highest literary honour. In 1980, Narayan was awarded the A.C. Benson Medal by the Royal Society of Literature and in 1982 he was made an Honorary Member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1986, he was nominated for a 6-year term to Rajya Sabha, the Upper House of Indian Parliament in recognition of his outstanding literary stature. Apart from The Mahabharata, Narayan had also retold the other great Indian epic The Ramayana, as well as a selection of Indian legends in Gods, Demons and Others.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR S. Krishnan
S. Krishnan taught English literature at Madras Christian College and at Annamalai University. He spent many years with the United States Information Agency in their educational and cultural programmes. He is now a weekly columnist for the Hindu, consulting editor with the Indian Review of Books and senior editor of Shruti, a music and dance magazine. Krishnan has edited several volumes of R.K. Narayan’s writings for Penguin Books. He lives in Chennai.
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