MALGUDI LANDSCAPES

The locale of all these novels and most of Narayan's short stores is Malgudi, a mythical town with which his name is inextricably associated .... The other statement usually made about Narayan is to compare him with William Falkner. The link is very tenuous and is sustained by no more than the circumstance that both writers created their own worlds and moved suely in them. ... As John Updike has pointed out, both Narayan and Falkner are 'writers immersed in their materials', though widely differing in their use of them. For Naraya aficionado, Malgudi is a real place with which, as Graham Green says, 'we have been as familiar with our own birth place. We know, like the street of childhood, Market Road, the snuff stalls, the vendors of toothpaste, the Regal Haircutting Saloon, the river, the railways'. The name Malgudi, Narayan has said, made its appearance in a sentence that suddenly flashed in his mind when he was working on 'Swami and Friends'. ~ xii Editors Introduction

'The train stopped at Malgudi.' As happened the train did not stop at Malgudi in 'Swami,' except at the end though it does o in several later stories, notably in 'The Guide' and 'The English Teacher'. Narayan's own somewhat tongue-in-cheek answer to the question, Where is Malgudi? Appears elsewhere in this volume. A particularly rewarding aspect of the Malgudi saga is the way characters keep reappearing in the various stories, sometimes in life-size roles. Swami was in a short story before he had a book to himself, and we had known Jagan long before his total apotheosis as the vendor of sweets. Xiii - Editors Introduction

'The Guide' won the Sahitya Akademi award, the Government of India decorated him with a Padma Bhushan, and nominated him a member of Rajya Sabha for a term. Elsewhere, in Britain the Royal Society of Literature gave him the A.C Benson medal, while the United States he received the English Speaking Union's award, and was made a Fellow by the prestigious American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, only one of the two Indians to be so honoured. His papers have been acquired by the Department of Special Collections of Boston University which will make them available to researchers. Graham Green, his staunch supporter and friend of more than fifty years once comparing Narayan to Turgenev and Chekhov, said: "Narayan (whom I don't hesitate to name in such context) more than any of them wakes in e a spring of gratitude, for he has offered me a second home. Without him I could never have known what it is like to be an India.' To which it can be added that even to Indians born and bred, he performs a similar service by revealing truths about ourselves we have not been aware of. Xiv - Editor's Introduction