RK Narayan and more: The flavour of small towns in our novels

Amitava Kumar on the appeal of the novels that best capture the flavour of small-town India.

Politicians offer propaganda in a loud voice. Ditto for pundits. I love the small voice of literature. As Joan Didion said, we tell ourselves stories in order to live.

The frontrunners : Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August challenged the staidness of colonial English; a few years later, Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy spoke in a voice that had all the transparency of a Hindustani novel.

The small town in 2015: In The Patna Manual of Style, Siddharth Chowdhury has woven wonderful fiction around Patna; In Ishq Mein Shahar Hona, Ravish Kumar explains that Delhi entered his consciousness through an image: women in nighties on balconies; And most recently, Ratika Kapur’s The Private Life of Mrs Sharma presents the voice of the small town and also the tumult of the big city.