A Tiger for Malgudi is a 1983

1983 in literature

The year 1983 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*Ironweed by William Kennedy is published.*Salvage for the Saint by Peter Bloxsom and John Kruse is published. This is the final book in a series of novels, novellas and short stories featuring the Leslie Charteris...

 novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 by R. K. Narayan

R. K. Narayan

R. K. Narayan , shortened from Rasipuram Krishnaswami Iyer Narayanaswami Tamil: ) , Madras Presidency, British India. His father was a school headmaster, and Narayan did some of his studies at his father's school...

 told by a tiger

Tiger

The tiger is the largest cat species, reaching a total body length of up to and weighing up to . Their most recognizable feature is a pattern of dark vertical stripes on reddish-orange fur with lighter underparts...

 in the first person

First-person narrative

First-person point of view is a narrative mode where a story is narrated by one character at a time, speaking for and about themselves. First-person narrative may be singular, plural or multiple as well as being an authoritative, reliable or deceptive "voice" and represents point of view in the...

. Deeply moving is the attachment of the tiger to the monk and the monk's care for the tiger.
The tiger recounts his story of capture by a [circus] owner, and his eventual escape. He lived freely in the wild jungles of India in his youth. He mates and has a litter with a tigress, and raises a litter until one day he finds that hunters have captured and killed his entire family.