Abstract
Delivered as an opening address at the International Seminar on R.K. Narayan, held in Mysore to mark the centenary of Narayan's birth, this is an attempt to see what his writing meant to me as a reader at a time when, for an Indian writer, fiction in English meant British fiction and when Indian writing in English was a rarity. The address also considers how my view of Narayan altered, when I began writing in English myself. And finally, as one who lives in the same region as Narayan did and who writes, as he did, surrounded by the same milieu of Kannada literature, I examine the curious fact of Narayan's total disjunction from that entire literary world that he lived and worked in, and the way in which he completely disregarded this literary tradition, which was, at the time, very vibrant.