Narayan's Treatment of the Generation Gap in 'Nitya' Megha Ghosh College

R.K. Narayan is one of the very few Indo-Anglian writers who has been placed in America among the country's distinguished realists and modernists, as is recorded in ‘My Dateless Diary’ by Narayan himself. He writes about issues in day to day life in the middle class Indian household, but his intention is not didactic like his contemporaries Mulk Raj Anand or Raja Rao. Narayan's stories, deal with themes of common life and simple people. They are not of newsworthy interest and rarely does Narayan deal with the world-shaking events of the 1930s and 1940s or the political and social upheavals in India during and since independence. Narayan excels in selecting incidents and people that reveal the human comedy. In his novels Narayan shows himself a clever manipulator of plot and character. He is an artist whose main interest lies in presenting, through the fluent flow of his narrative and an attitude towards life which is amused but, non-condescending.

One of the issues that recur in Narayan’s short stories is the issue of generation gap. Narayan writes during a period of various social reforms. The writer himself is ahead of age old Hindu customs and married a woman despite several obstacles. However, the said issue crops us very...