Malgudi (/mɑːlɡʊdɪ/) is a fictional town located in Agumbe situated in the Shivamogga district of the Indian state of Karnataka in the novels and short stories of R. K. Narayan.
[2][3] Narayan's assertion that Malgudi is work of fiction has not deterred readers from speculating about its actual location being Mysore[citation needed], with a river on one side and a forest on the other, and buildings and lanes similar to those of Malgudi, such as Lawley road, Variety Hall, and Bombay Anand Bhavan.
He created the town in September 1930, on Vijayadashami, an auspicious day to start new efforts and thus chosen for him by his grandmother.
[4] As he mentioned in a later interview to his biographers Susan and N. Ram, in his mind, he first saw a railway station, and slowly the name Malgudi came to him.
Kabir Street is the residence of the elite of Malgudi, while Lawley Extension is a new upcoming lane housing the rich and the influential.
Various critics compare Narayan's Malgudi with Thomas Hardy's Wessex or William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha.
A place, where, in the words of Graham Greene (from the introduction to The Financial Expert), you could go "into those loved and shabby streets and see with excitement and a certainty of pleasure a stranger approaching past the bank, the cinema, the hair cutting saloon, a stranger who will greet us, we know, with some unexpected and revealing phrase that will open the door to yet another human existence."
Malgudi Days a 1986 Indian television series directed by Kannada actor and director Shankar Nag, based on the eponymous works of R.K. Narayan was mostly shot near Agumbe in Shimoga District, Karnataka.
The concept of Malgudi as an "idyllic spot located in South India" seems to have taken root in popular imagination.