 Having published many novels , essays and short stories , Narayan is credited with bringing Indian writing to the rest of the world . While he has been regarded as one of India 's greatest writers of the twentieth century , critics have also described his writings with adjectives such as charming , harmless and benign . Narayan has also come in for criticism from later writers , particularly of Indian origin , who have classed his writings as having a pedestrian style with a shallow vocabulary and a narrow vision . According to Shashi Tharoor , Narayan 's subjects are similar to those of Jane Austen as they both deal with a very small section of society . However , he adds that while Austen 's prose was able to take those subjects beyond ordinariness , Narayan 's was not . A similar opinion is held by Shashi Deshpande who characterizes Narayan 's writings as pedestrian and naive because of the simplicity of his language and diction , combined with the lack of any complexity in the emotions and behaviours of his characters . 
