The Financial Expert

The Financial Expert  – R.K. Narayan, along with Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao, is a pioneer in Indian fiction in English. While Anand and Rao busied themselves, respectively, with social and philosophical issues, Narayan focussed on his “two square inches of ivory” – the fictitious small town of Malgudi, somewhere in South India. Gradually, Malgudi became “a metaphor” for India and life’s ironies for the middle classes. Narayan’s fifth novel, The Financial Expert is also set in Malgudi. It brings out the protagonist’s obsession with money, his meteoric rise and eclipse. Margayya’s rise and fall as the Napoleon of Finance in Malgudi reads as a modern day parable. The present critical study examines and analyses the narrative from the point of view of university examinations.