'It's the original violence which has started a cycle—violence which goes on in undying waves once started, either in retaliation or as an original starting-ground—the despair of Gandhi—.' These reflections which arise in the course of a small difference between husband and wife in one of R. K. Narayan's novels seem to belong to the world of the Marabar Caves rather than to the placid world of Malgudi. But then this South Indian novelist has been too easily stereotyped by many readers. It has been his misfortune that while his reputation has grown with healthy slowness over his long career as a novelist, his cult has more recently sprung up in an ivy-like fashion beside that reputation and now threatens to smother it in a luxuriant growth.
Several features of his work combine to make him a typical cult novelist. Like Jane Austen, who is similarly dogged by the Janeites, he offers his devotees a topographical security that grows from book to book. We know it all like the backs of our hands: the animated torpor of human and animal life around the fountain in Malgudi's Market Road, the well laid out respectability of the British and post-British 'Extensions', the maze of narrow streets humming with the activity of innumerable printing presses—from one of which, surely, must issue the small drab paperbacks that give us the freedom of this South Indian town. His books afford us too in lavish measure the delight offered by all cult novelists (Dickens being the most prolific example) of encounters with characters whose extraordinariness is, in the inescapable cliché, unforgettable…. (p. 92)
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