Paper Details

Name: Malakar Shephali
Country: India

Year: 2024
Volume: Volume-11, Issue-1 (January-June)
Page Number: 22-26

ABSTRACT
This study examines how R. K. Narayan and Amit Chaudhuri transform local spaces into
complete literary universes. Narayan’s Malgudi and Chaudhuri’s Calcutta are not merely
geographical settings; they are narrative worlds where memory, everyday life, social rhythm, class relations, family structures, and cultural consciousness acquire literary form. While Narayan constructs the small South Indian town as a semi-mythic yet ordinary space, Chaudhuri presents Calcutta through fragments of domestic interiors, streets, music, afternoon stillness, middle-class habit, and inherited cultural memory. The study argues that both writers resist spectacular narratives of nation, crisis, and heroic transformation. Instead, they locate meaning in the small, the habitual, and the locally remembered. Their fiction demonstrates that the local can function as a complete literary cosmos, capable of representing modern Indian life with subtlety and depth.

Keywords: R. K. Narayan, Amit Chaudhuri, Malgudi, Calcutta, locality, memory, everyday
life, Indian English fiction, space, social life