Malgudi

Malgudi () is a fictional town located in Agumbe situated in the Shivamogga district of the Indian state of Karnataka in the novels and short stories of R. K. Narayan. It forms the setting for most of Narayan's works. Starting with his first novel, Swami and Friends, all but one of his fifteen novels and most of his short stories take place here. Malgudi was a portmanteau of two Bengaluru localities - Malleshwara and Basavana Gudi.

Narayan has successfully portrayed Malgudi as a microcosm of India. Malgudi was created, as mentioned in Malgudi Days, by Sir Fredrick Lawley, a fictional British officer in the 19th century by combining and developing a few villages. The character of Sir Fredrick Lawley may have been based on Arthur Lawley, the Governor of Madras in 1905. Swami and Friends also seems to have taken place during the Swadeshi and boycott movement against the British. While some commentators have seen Malgudi as representing an unchanging, quintessential India, John Thieme (2007) takes the view that "far from serving as a metonym for a settled, secure India, the town is the product of a particular coming together of social, religious and above all psychic forces, which undergo transformations as they interact with one another". He argues that Malgudi is "[b]uilt on the fault-lines where classical Hindu discourse and the more 'realistic', supposedly Western form of the novel collide" and as such "it ushers new forms of fiction into being".