Landscapes Real and Imaginary: A Comparative Study of the Short Fiction of R K Narayan and Ruskin Bond

Abstract

India is a country with geographical diversity and as such the geographical setting of the fictional narratives penned by Indian writers are diverse as well. R.K.Narayan’s India as represented through Malgudi is quite different from the India represented in the fiction of Ruskin Bond. Like Narayan, Ruskin Bond is another author whose stories are set in and around a particular region and the sincere depiction of landscape, characters and situations make these stories undeniably Indian. This paper attempts to compare Narayan’s and Bond’s oeuvre as manifested in their short stories and to observe whether the various narrative strategies by which their imaginative rendition  of a particular place and its people create an authentic sense of ‘Indian ness’ ,faithful to the context in which they are writing.