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.