Vol. 2, Issue 5, Part D (2016)

Abstract
R.K. Narayan's novels are not different from other novels, at least those that constitute the main body of English fiction, and he is being no more than ordinarily faithful to the original bourgeois inspiration and the subsequent history of the English novel. For novels since Fielding's time have traditionally concerned themselves with the middle-class hero, often becoming in the process what may be called epics of the commonplace. So, if Narayan is unique, or at least different, the difference does not lie in his concern with the middle-class but rather in the unique cultural character of that class the Indian middle-class of the last century or so, which would certainly not have come to possess its peculiar identity without the influence of British.