Swami and Friends Study Guide

Swami and Friends is an Indian book written in English published in 1935. The work was the first novel ever published by the famous Indian author R. K. Narayan. Narayan's friend, Graham Greene, recommended his manuscript to a publisher, and it was finally published by Hamish Hamilton in 1935. The original title of Swami and Friends was Swami the Tate, but it was changed during the publishing process to Swami and Friends likely so that it could have more literary identification with Rudyard Kipling's Stalky & Co (1899) and thus appear more marketable as part of a sub-genre of English schoolboy fiction. The novel is the first of a trilogy of novels. The second is entitled The Bachelor of Arts and the third The English Teacher. The trilogy, which counts among his earlier fiction, focuses largely on problematic social practices, such as the institution of schooling and culture of punishment.