Present research work is a comparative study of the short fiction of the two giants of the canon in IndianWriting in English (IWE): Rasipuram Krishnaswami Iyer Narayanaswami and Khushwant Singh.Although both writers are contemporaries around the upheaval in the 20th century, the Partition trauma,the post-colonial nation-state complications, the literary reaction to the Indian experience is radicallydifferent in both style of narrative and social outlook. By taking a close look at primary collections—specifically Narayan’s Malgudi Days, Under the Banyan Tree, and An Astrologer’s Day, contrasted withSingh’s The Mark of Vishnu, Paradise, and The Portrait of a Lady— this paper maintains that Narayan andSingh create rival microcosms of India. Narayan, Malgudi, is a kind of a metaphysical microcosm a semimythicalspace of a soft irony and cyclical vision of time in which human folly is tolerated as the onlyconstant. Khushwant Singh, on the contrary, creates a sociological wasteland, but based upon the harsh,material facts of Northern India, which is operated by a scalpel realism and a linear, reformist outlookthat insists violently on hypocrisy, superstition, and social decline. The research paper breaks down themechanics of the narration of both authors: the impersonal or invisible narration of Narayan that acts as ahistorian of the banal, and the activist, even invasive narration of Singh that wields such a weapon assatire as a tool of social analysis. Moreover, the paper discusses their unique social visions with respect tothree thematic pillars which are critical namely the clash between tradition and modernity, representationof women and gender order and role of faith versus superstition. Finally, the paper assumes that the twodifferent literary modes are not only stylistic decisions on their part, but must reflect the dual awarenessof contemporary India; to hold on to a mythic past and urgency, even violence, of a secular future.
Sharma et al. (2025) studied this question.