One of the things most commonly associated with R.K. Narayan is Malgudi, the Indian town where he set many of his novels and short stories. Malgudi is not a real place, but has attained fame and nostalgic approbation over the decades; in fact, as the New Yorker claims, it “put modern Indian fiction on the map.” We will look at Narayan’s creation to better understand The Guide.
Malgudi is bustling but not overly crowded; it is full of scooter-riding boys and rickshaws, hotels with European food, and small and large shops selling all manner of wares. Scholar M. Parvathi writes, “With each of the works of R.K. Narayan, Malgudi unfolds new vistas of life. A simple, innocent and conservative society undergoes fast changes because of the incursions of the modem civilization. From a sleepy, silent and small town atmosphere on the bank of river Sarayu to a fast developing metropolitan ethos with modem streets, banking corporations, talkies and smuggler's den, and even a circus, Malgudi marks a movement in time. The movement not only affects the geography of the place, but also the social and cultural milieu.” It is, Charles Nicholl writes, “trapped in a dusty miasma of daily preoccupations in which pre- and post-independence are only hazily distinguishable. Narayan is sometimes called the Indian Chekhov: a master of the inconsequential and its hidden depths.” Fellow Indian novelist V.S. Naipaul sees Narayan’s work as full of “stasis” and as more “fable” than realistic, but admires how Narayan was interested in "the lesser life that goes on below: small men, small schemes, big talk, limited means.”
Narayan’s friend and novelist Graham Greene loved Malgudi, and once wrote, “Whom next shall I meet in Malgudi? That is the thought that comes to me when I close a novel of Mr. Narayan’s. I do not wait for another novel. I wait to go out of my door into those loved and shabby streets and see with excitement and a certainty of pleasure a stranger approaching, past the bank, the cinema, the haircutting saloon, a stranger who will greet me I know with some unexpected and revealing phrase that will open a door on to yet another human existence.”
Many journalists and scholars have endeavored to find the “real” Malgudi—i.e., the place that so inspired Narayan. For a National Geographic article, writer Zac O’Yeah visited and ruminated on places like Bengaluru, Agumbe, and Mysore, but ultimately concluded, “I realise that perhaps in the end, Malgudi is both a geographical space and a state of mind, a place where we can all go to if we find the right door to step through.” Narayan himself said something similar in his introduction to Malgudi Days: “I am often asked, ‘Where is Malgudi?’ All I can say is that it is imaginary and not to be found on any map (although the University of Chicago Press has published a literary atlas with a map of India indicating the location of Malgudi). If I explain that Malgudi is a small town in South India, I shall only be expressing a half-truth, for the characteristics of Malgudi seem to me universal.”
