Timeless and (Un)original : the Role of Gossip in R.K. Narayan's The Man-Eater of Malgudi and The Painter of Signs

Abstract

Tropes of gossip underline much of R.K. Narayan's work and they assume particular significance, I shall argue, in The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1961) and The Painter of Signs (1977), in which they interleave with, and describe an oppositional paradigm to, the processes of printing and sign writing.