e of the group of people with whose psychology and background he’s most familiar”. The evident example of the same being writers like Mulk Raj Anand who painted the picture of India and presented it as if first hand. But in the same time, R.K. Narayan emerged as a writer who used the novel as medium of reflection of India but Narayan’s picture is overtly the Utopian picture of India. “He is neither an intolerant critic of Indian ways and modes nor their fanatic defender”. Narayan in his novels attempts to “explore the wayward movements of the consciousness and the thoughts and stirrings of the soul, which are recognizably autochthonous”(Iyengar). And it is thus that even after Swami undergoes the “biggest shock of his life” his childish brain gets carried away towards a tin can floating in the gutter. This way Narayan is able to maintain a sufficient distance from the “political” and “nationalist” using his “Touchstone method” and yet cater to the paradox that permeated in the lives of the Common Indian of the time. 
Narayan’s Malgudi is neither a village nor a typical city but a town of modest size. It is a place that “embraces all change” and yet remains the same in its core. The Sarayu river which is lavishly described as if it bears the fervour of the Ganges and the Memphis Forest on the other side of Malgudi spread as Amazon are hints that point to the fact that Malgudi is a small representation of Narayan’s India (Naipaul), which is steadily intermixing with the world. And to quote Walsh: “What happens in India happens in Malgudi and what happens in Malgudi happens everywhere”. In the early twentieth century when the common Indian struggled to find an identity amongst the tussle between the humbled traditional and the invasive modern norms of the society, it becomes imperative that “Malgudi” would encounter the same with a certain seriousness and comic element. As Ron Shepherd observes there is “an architectural duality (in the structure of Malgudi) in which modernity superimposes on tradition”. Hence in a remote town like Malgudi, which stands at a large distance from Madras, one can find the Ellaman street and Grove Street and the Abu Lane and Vinayaka Mudali Street existing simultaneously.

Such blending becomes explicitly evident in the household of Swami, where three generations of Srinivasan Family emulate the three stages of transition from the traditional to the apparently modern society. Swami’s Grandmother epitomises the life of the traditional with her “faint atmosphere of cardamom and cloves”. She sleeps on a bed made of “fine carpets, bed sheets and five pillows” and narrates the stories of Harichandra to the much ignorant Swami. It is this ‘aura’ of the Grandmother that makes Swami refuse for Rajam to meet her with “brutal candour”. While Swami’s father expresses the stage of partial acceptance as he dresses for the court in a black silk coat and “turban”. As K. Chellapan opines, the socio-ethical life portrayed in Narayan’s novels are “rooted in the ageless past, of which myths are objective correlative”. Thus, while Swami and his friends look with much fascination at the toy gun in Rajam’s possession, one and all of their tussles are sorted out through simple hand to hand duels. On the other hand, while the children read about the Bible, Rajam attempts at quoting from the Vedas and Swami troubled by the supposed death of an ant “took a pinch of earth and uttered a prayer for its soul”. And to extend this understanding of the middleclass household from Swami’s House to all the houses in Malgudi won’t prove futile. 
But while these manifestations of modernity “overlay the earliest formation of tradition and customary life they do not necessarily replace them”.  Malgudi is a town which has a railway station which stands as a direct symbol of the industrialization brought with Colonial rule but yet the 12:30 mail “glided over the embankment, booming and rattling while passing over Sarayu Bridge”. On one side of the town lie the fields and to the other the Colonial structures like Court, where Swami’s father works and the Police Station. Malgudi thus, becomes a town which is as wild as the Memphis Forest at its core- a town of peasants and herds- but equally modernised and raised to the stature of a ”near presidency”. And to personify the town Malgudi, one can imagine it to appear like the “Common Man” of R.K. Laxman (Narayan’s cartoonist brother) “who is clad in dhoti and a plaid jacket”. So while the mixed attire of the Common Man may mislead and/or misdirect to present him as a modernised figure, but it is impossible to notice the covert traditionalism he follows.
Therefore, while mapping the layouts of Malgudi, it is understandable that the town dwells on a structure where “life” happens in a natural environment such that modernity seems to become more of a psychological phenomenon than physically transformational. So much so, that “citizens” seem to personify the same spirit of the town amidst these two notions of Living