The Construction of Indian Middle-Class Life in R. K. Narayan’s Fiction
Keywords:
R. K. Narayan, Malgudi, Indian middle class, postcolonial fiction, Indian English literature, domesticity, modernity, class identity, colonial legacy.Abstract
R. K. Narayan (1906–2001) is among the most enduring voices in Indian English fiction. His imaginary town of Malgudi serves as a sustained fictional laboratory for examining the values, anxieties, contradictions, and aspirations of the Indian middle class across the twentieth century. This paper analyses the construction of middle-class life in Narayan's major novels — including The Bachelor of Arts (1937), The English Teacher (1945), The Financial Expert (1952), The Guide (1958), The Vendor of Sweets (1967), and Talkative Man (1986) — by interrogating the socio-cultural, economic, ideological, and gendered coordinates through which Malgudi is constituted as a middle-class space. Drawing on contemporary postcolonial and sociological scholarship, the paper argues that Narayan's fictional world is neither politically innocent nor simply nostalgic, but constitutes a nuanced and critically ironic portraiture of a class defined by its colonial formation, its nationalist aspiration, and its uneasy negotiation between modernity and tradition. The study situates Narayan's work within broader debates on postcolonial identity, Indian modernity, and the gendered dimensions of bourgeois domesticity
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