Malgudi is the fictitious town created by R.K. Narayan in his novel Swami and Friends. It forms the setting for most of Narayan's works. Narayan portrays Malgudi as a microcosm of India. While describing how he conceptualised Malgudi he says

"Malgudi was an earth-shaking discovery for me, because I had no mind for facts and things like that, which would be necessary in writing about Lalgudi or any real place. I first pictured not my town but just the railway station, which was a small platform with a banyan tree, a station master, and two trains a day, one coming and one going. On Vijayadasami I sat down and wrote the first sentence about my town: The train had just arrived in Malgudi Station."

Various critics compare Narayan's Malgudi with Thomas Hardy's Wessex or William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha. Unlike Hardy and Faulkner, Narayan has drawn out no map for Malgudi and has kept it purely a "country of the mind".