(i) Chandu Menon portrayed Indulekha, as a woman of breathtaking beauty, high intellectual abilities and artistic talent with an education in English and Sanskrit. (ii) Madhavan, the hero of the novel, was also presented in ideal colours. He was a member of the newly English-educated class of Nayars from the University of Madras, presently known as Chennai. (iii) The hero was also a ‘first-rate Sanskrit scholar’. He was dressed in Western clothes. But, at the same time, he kept a long tuft of hair, according to the Nayar customs. (iv) The heroes and heroines in most of the novels were people who lived in the modern world. Thus, they were different from the ideal or mythological characters of the earlier poetic literature of India. (v) Characters like Indulekha arid Madhavan showed readers how Indian and foreign lifestyles could be brought together in an ideal combination.