Name: Malakar Shephali
Country: India

Year: 2024
Volume: Volume-15, Issue-2 (July-December)
Page Number: 11-15

This paper examines the literary aesthetics of ordinary life in R. K. Narayan and Amit
Chaudhuri, with special attention to domestic interiors, neighbourhood streets, family
routines, local speech, and the slow rhythms of small-town and urban India. Narayan’s
Malgudi and Chaudhuri’s Calcutta are not merely settings; they are lived spaces where social relations, memory, class, habit, and cultural identity take narrative form. The study argues that both writers resist spectacle and large historical drama by turning everyday experience into a refined literary method. Narayan’s ordinary world is organized through irony, moral comedy, and a compact narrative structure, while Chaudhuri’s ordinary world is shaped through sensory attention, musical pacing, domestic observation, and fragmentary urban memory. The paper shows that the ordinary, in both writers, becomes a serious aesthetic category through which Indian English fiction represents social change without abandoning intimacy, loc