R. K. Narayan was born on 10 October 1906 and passed away in 2001. In his long career he published fourteen novels, over two hundred short stories, a memoir, two travel books, innumerable essays, and two plays. His first novel was Swami and Friends (1935). His last published work was Grandmother's Tale (1992), which in many ways reinforced the concerns and motifs of his writing in his long career—themes like exile and return, education (in the widest sense of the term), woman and her status in the society, myths and the ancient Indian past, tradition and modernity, Malgudi and its culture, appearance and reality, the family and so on. These have been Narayan's consistent concerns in a career spanning over nearly seventy years. In this deep ploughing of a small plot of literary land, Narayan almost resembles Jane Austen who too, in a somewhat shorter career, painted in varying colours a small canvas of quintessential English life and manners. While the range of Austen or Narayan may be small, their depth places them in the ranks of the truly great novelists of their times. Perhaps no special case needs to be made for Austen because of the enormous scholarship on her. One might however need to highlight Narayan's excellences. In our postmodernist times a writer like him, who is not obscure, difficult or dense in his writings, is likely to be less in favour, though recent scholarship has begun to evaluate him in post-colonial-post-modern [‘pocomo’] terms.