Cooperation of Opposites: The Home and the Foreign in R. K. Narayan’s Novels

International audienceThe fiction of R. K. Narayan, one of the so-called Founding Fathers of Indian writing in English, is best known for the imaginary town called Malgudi, read by Mukherjee as a metonymy of India. Narayan starts writing in 1930s and Malgudi in his novels and its inhabitants are, for several decades, facing the impact of colonization. The foreign forces subvert the established order, and the integrity of the place and of its characters is challenged. The 'home' is conceived rather as a quest for identity, for a sense of belonging in terms of community, culture and a common mindset, and belonging in the geographical sense is used as a convenient tool. While dealing with a couple of Narayan's novels the paper will look at how this quest is represented by the interaction of opposing phenomena, and especially at the ways in which this apparent conflict is resolved in the end: the Indian character of the place and of the individuals being transformed, but not compromised