Cartographies of Erasure: Spatial Segregation and Ambient Dalits in Narayan’s Malgudi

Abstract

R. K. Narayan’s Malgudi—often romanticized as a placid South Indian town immune to the violent churn of national politics—conceals beneath its fictional gentility a textured cartography of spatial marginalization. This paper interrogates how Narayan’s literary topography tacitly enforces erasures through ambient invisibilisation of Dalit presence. While overt brutality is absent, spatial cues like the alleyways, outskirts, temples, wells etc. carry a silent semiotics of caste-based exclusion. By reading Malgudi not merely as backdrop but as a living structure of social code, this essay explores how caste operates ambiently, through architecture, silence, and routine gesture. Fundamentally, the absence of Dalits is not a void but a strategically ambient construct—where the social body reaffirms itself through who is not seen, not heard, not located at the center. This study conducts close readings of The Dark Room, The Guide, and a few selected short stories, resisting the temptation to retroactively “spot” Dalits and instead focusing on spatial strategies of occlusion and the material politics of literary geography. Drawing on theorists such as Gopal Guru, Doreen Massey, Michel de Certeau, and Sunil Khilnani, the analysis situates Malgudi within broader discourses of caste and space, attending to the ambient violences that enable its quiet realism. It argues that Narayan’s ostensibly apolitical realism in fact relies on spatial segregation to maintain a normative Brahmanical order—rendering Malgudi complicit in a project of caste erasure by design. Such a reading reframes the town as a cartography of caste-coded absence not as a benign cultural artefact. Rather than dismiss Narayan, however, the paper invites a more ethically alert reading—one that asks not only what is narrated but also where and who is excluded in the process.