Swami and Friends

Swami and Friends – Narayan’s first novel, Swami and Friends describes he growing up of an adolescent Swami in the little town of Malgudi, somewhere in South India. With that gentle humour which is perhaps the author’s greatest gift, Narayan evokes for us the universal experiences of childhood while capturing the flavour of what that experience was like in 1930 amidst the first stirrings of India’s independence struggle. “A book in ten thousand” is how Graham Greene hailed it. Swami and Friends is remarkable for the author’s understanding of child psychology and for his depiction of the carefree, buoyant world of school boys in a realistic and convincing manner. The present critical study examines and analyses the narrative from the point of view of university examinations. It provides a comprehensive summary of the novel; its background and the critical problems associated with it. Shakti Batra, Formerly Vice-Principal of Dyal Singh College (University of Delhi), has also taught at the Kabul University and the University of Kyrgyzstan, Bishkek.