The Karnataka government will be converting the Mysore house where the writer RK Narayan lived into a memorial. Several Kannada writers, among them DA Shankar, G Venkatasubbaiah, M Chidanandamurthy, GS Shivarudrappa, Sumatheendra Nadig and L S Sheshagiri Rao, have objected to this on the basis that Narayan was not a Kannadiga, he did not write in Kannada or translate Kannada writing and lastly, that the government has only created memorials to four Kannada writers so far.

RK Narayan, wrote his first novel in 1930, in English. It was rejected by many publishers. A friend of Narayan’s at Oxford University showed it to writer Graham Greene and that is how Swami and Friends was published. So it continued for a few years until Narayan became justly famous and by the 1950s his books were available in fairly cheap Indian paperback form.