THE MASTER OF MALGUDI.

When R. K. Narayan died, in the spring of 2001 at the age of ninety-four, his legacy seemed assured. Over seven decades of literary activity, he had produced fourteen novels, countless essays, and dozens of stories, the majority of his fiction set in a South Indian town that he called Malgudi. No more a feature of atlases than Trollope's Barchester, Narayan's Malgudi put modern Indian writing on the map. For although a handful of Indian novels had been written in English during the nineteenth century, and both Raja Rao and Mulk Raj Anand had found readers for their novels in English by the nineteen-thirties, it was Narayan--two generations before Salman Rushdie--who began to produce the first world-renowned body of work not rendered in any of India's many vernacular languages. As such, there seemed little risk of hyperbole when Narayan's obituary in the Guardian said that he was held to be "India's greatest writer in English of the twentieth century."

And yet if Narayan's standing was consistently described in the most vigorous terms, assessments of his writing were less robust. His work was called "charming," "simple," "gentle," "harmless," "lightly funny," and "benign"--applause so placid that it was unlikely to wake anyone dozing in the audience. V. S. Naipaul, in a tribute to Narayan in Time, recalled having been "immediately enchanted" by Narayan's early work, but he seemed perplexed that Narayan, a writer of realist fiction, "was not interested in Indian politics or Indian problems"--that he did not see the India that Naipaul had dubbed "a wounded civilization." Though Naipaul claimed, charitably, "I do not hold this against him," there was a lingering suggestion that it could be held against Narayan's art. "A more clear-sighted man would not have been able to filter out or make harmless the distress of India, as Narayan does in Malgudi." He went on:

I have grown to feel that he is in some ways like Gandhi. Gandhi's first book . . . is full of religious idiocies. No one would have prophesied a future for him. But he had in a heightened way Narayan's mystical idea of an eternal India; and look what happened to him. Narayan, with his glories and limitations, is the Gandhi of modern Indian literature.

Sainthood is a kind of legacy, but fiction writers tend to prefer devoted readers to ardent worshippers. To mark the occasion of Narayan's centenary year, a range of reissues has recently appeared, introduced by a new generation of authors who see him not as a dated writer of historical consequence but as a timeless writer of aesthetic excellence. They focus less on his uncontested greatness than on his disputed goodness. Monica Ali, introducing Narayan's late novel "The Painter of Signs" (Penguin; $13), warns us not to mistake a smaller world--Narayan's novels rarely run to more than two hundred pages--for a lesser one. Pankaj Mishra prefaces "The Ramayana" (Penguin; $13), a prose retelling of the epic poem, with the observation that Narayan, far from lacking political clear-sightedness, responded with a "pragmatic realism, a gentle refusal to regard good and evil as unmixed." Jhumpa Lahiri, in her foreword to "Malgudi Days" (Penguin; $14), a selection of short stories, is anxious for us not to overlook, in Narayan's unself-regarding and economical style, its fineness: "While other writers rely on paragraphs and pages to get their points across, Narayan extracts the full capacity of each sentence, so much so that his stories seem bound by an invisible yet essential mechanism, similar to the metrical and quantitative constraints of poetry."

Nonetheless, it should be conceded that a modern reader may initially find barriers to a thorough appreciation of Narayan's work. Consider a few lines from his first novel, "Swami and Friends" (1935), where a fight has erupted in a classroom full of young children: "The teacher came in and stood aghast. He could do little more than look on and ejaculate." A few pages later, one boy begins to lecture a group of quarrelling playmates: "He said impressive things about friendship, quoting from his book the story of the dying old man and the faggots, which proved that union was strength." Though we're unlikely to mistake a bundle of sticks or a headmaster's shouts for anything coarser, such old-fashioned formulations can be distracting. But this apparent quaintness is instructive, given that Narayan wrote not ...