The Guide

by R. K. Narayan

  Instead he offers an image, an illusion, of permanence. Amit Chaudhuri has written that the “subject of Narayan’s fiction is . . . the fictionality of ‘timeless India,’ ” a place that, like Malgudi itself, “exists nowhere.” That fiction, however, is one that Narayan both acknowledges and insists upon, invoking Nehru and shrugging him off at once. On the riverbank Raju at first keeps “a rough count of the time,” marking not the years so much as their “seasons of sun, rain, and mist.” Then he loses track. One cycle falls into another, and history seems suspended. Or is it? For change does come, has already come, to disturb this world; change that takes the provocative form of the dancer, Rosie. Her Anglo name is the least of it, though it does serve as a warning, with Raju’s mother looking “anguished for a moment, wondering how she was going to accommodate a ‘Rosie’ in her home.”

  Narayan uses Raju’s affair with Rosie to suggest the disruptive power of all change, including the very ones that have made her career possible. The move from the shrine to the secular stage is characteristic of classical Indian dance in the middle of the twentieth century, and yet it is difficult, at first, to see Rosie as typical or representative of her age. Narayan doesn’t depict her performances as something new, but presents them instead as a revival, a way of restoring the past. It seems an unlikely career for a “Rosie,” and in fact Raju soon gives her a “sober and sensible” new name; the world knows her as “Nalini.” Yet that insistence on—that fashion for—revival stands in itself as typical of the novel’s moment, with the dance as a kinetic version of the homespun, or khadi, that Gandhi made popular and which Raju begins, with prosperity, to wear. Indeed the past in Narayan’s work is endlessly reviving, though Raju himself has little interest in history as such. Statues, shrines, temples—as a guide he does know the dates, but “the age I ascribed to any particular place depended upon my mood at that hour.” When the “ruin-collecting activities” of Rosie’s cast-off husband, Marco, lead to an “epoch-making” book, Raju pushes it aside as “beyond me.” For like many of Narayan’s characters, Raju sees the past as immemorial to the exact degree that he does not in fact remember it.

  If he did, he might listen more to the mixture of admiration and ambivalence with which his mother speaks to Rosie: “Girls today! How courageous you are! In our day we wouldn’t go the street corner without an escort.” Raju even disregards Rosie’s own attempts to warn him off, and in many ways she herself disapproves of the besotted man she has created. Or perhaps unleashed. “I was puffed up with the thought of how I had made her,” he says. “There was no limit to my self-congratulation.” And no limit to his spending, either, until one day he forges Rosie’s signature on a form “for the release of a box of jewelry,” and goes to jail because of it. Yet all the enormous upheaval of Rosie’s career—that experience of modernity itself—is precisely what brings Raju to the pastoral world of the riverbank, and allows him to insert himself into the endless round of its seasons. Change alone is what enables him to assume his place in the India that, in Desai’s words, “is capable of absorbing change and of transforming it into the perpetual.” It is not, she adds, “the whole story.” But that paradox remains one of India’s stories, and so let me add one final quotation from Naipaul: “For all their delight in human oddity, Narayan’s novels are less the purely social comedies I had once taken them to be than religious books, at times religious fables, and intensely Hindu.”

  Most criticism deals with Narayan’s Hinduism thematically, showing how this or that character embodies this or that principle. So the belief of the moneylender Margayya, in The Financial Expert (1952), that he can “make his own present and future” leads him into a form of spiritual corruption; while the outsized impositions of the taxidermist Vasu in The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1961) reveal him to be a kind of rakshasa or demon. Raju himself can be seen, as Chitra Sankaran has written, as an example of the “trickster-sage” characteristic of some Hindu myths, while his refuge on the riverbank stands as an ironic version of a holy man’s ashrama. But all this is rather like looking for the Christ imagery in Russian fiction. Narayan’s work offers more interesting problems, and in particular raises questions of form that criticism has yet fully to address.

  What, for example, happens to literary realism when it must confront the concept of maya, when the social world itself becomes a form of illusion? This may at first simply seem like the novel’s stock-in-trade. In reading Jane Austen, for example, we note the difference between Emma Woodhouse’s perceptions of the people around her, and the way those people really are. Emma’s misreading of the book’s other characters is, however, a far simpler thing than the sense of spiritual delusion that maya entails. Her ego may need to find its proper scale, and she may need to learn the truth of her heart, but that isn’t at all the same as learning to live, in the words of the Bhagavad-Gita, as though “Weapons do not cut [and] fire does not burn.” How might the novel adapt itself to a realm in which Narayan’s illusion of permanence, of a perpetual riverbank world, may not be illusory at all?

  Or take the question of dharma, that untranslatable concept that includes both social duty and a sense of vocation, an idea so all-embracing that it appears to subsume the very idea of a self. Narayan’s titles suggest its centrality in his work: The Vendor of Sweets (1967), The Painter of Signs, and yes, The Guide. In what way does dharma affect the novelist’s sense of the relation between plot and character? Is the discovery of one’s dharma the same thing as the process of maturation we recognize in a Bildungsroman? Does a sense of novelistic characterization as governed by dharma allow its people to grow and change? Near the end of the novel a journalist asks Raju if he has always been a yogi. “Yes,” he replies, “more or less.” One laughs—Raju the dishonest tour guide has seemed so very un-yogi like. But let us take his words seriously. Before he was less of a yogi; now he is more. Always he has been a guide of one kind or another, someone showing people how to get what they want, whether as a tour guide, as an impresario of traditional culture, or now as a spiritual guide, a swami. The whole action of the novel, in fact, concerns Raju’s discovery of just what kind of guide he is, of becoming more the yogi that he has always in some sense been.

  Character in Narayan remains fixed in a way that in Western literature seems more common on the stage than in a novel, and dharma in his work functions as something like an equivalent of the caractères of seventeenth-century French comedy, or the comedy of humors that we associate with Ben Jonson. As Molière has his embodiments of vices, his miser and his misanthrope, so Narayan has his financial expert and his talkative man; figures who can no more escape their dharma than Tartuffe can escape the consequences of his own hypocrisy. Molière never thinks to explain the origin of his characters’ vices. Narayan’s characters find, in contrast, that their natures have been determined by the force of external events, over which they have at best the illusion of control. “It is written on the brow of some,” Raju tells Velan, “that they shall not be left alone. I am one such, I think.”

  That statement suggests the way in which dharma may be determined by one’s circumstances, socially given—people won’t leave him alone—and yet also innate; it is written on his brow. Raju takes no active role in shaping his own career. He becomes a tour guide by accident, because other people expect it of him; so too he becomes a swami. His only actions are negative ones, and grow from his dual lusts for Rosie and for money. Then he finds himself seized by an egotism that makes it feel as though “some devil was wagging his tongue within my skull,” transforming him into the kind of man described in the Gita as “self-aggrandizing, stubborn, drunk with wealth and pride.” But on the riverbank all that self-interest falls away, and in the end The Guide shows how Raju comes to fulfill his given role. He may enter upon his fast unwillingly, his life as a swami may have started as a kind of imposture, and yet the mask does begin to fit him, or he to fit the mask. His character grows into the plot that’s been written for it, performing the dharma from
which the maya of his affair with Rosie, his attachment to the things of this world, had distracted him. We can read it on his brow, and when he tells Velan his story, he discovers that it makes no difference to the esteem in which the villager holds him.

  By the twelfth day of his fast, Raju himself has become a tourist attraction. Before an enormous crowd and an American television crew, the starving man is helped down to the drought-stricken river to pray:

  Narayan here recalls those moments in the work of his friend Graham Greene in which a character appeals to a God in whom he doesn’t quite believe, and perhaps one’s view of the novel’s conclusion will indeed depend on where one personally stands in terms of swamis and miracles and prayer. He is, however, a more delicate writer than Greene. Narayan may well have found a structural model for The Guide in the looping chronology of The End of the Affair (1951), and yet he does not insist upon belief in the way that the English writer so often does. The Western novelist he most resembles is instead Muriel Spark. Narayan lacks her savagery, but like Spark he is easy to read, and hard to understand. Both see their characters sub specie aeternitatis, finally concerned only with their souls and not their bodies. That might even suggest why Narayan’s books have no kitchens—under the aspect of eternity, they are simply not worth worrying about. “India will go on,” he once told Naipaul; endures now as it was and will be. At the height of his career that affirmation made his work seem a reassuring point of stability in a rapidly changing country. And perhaps a bit unsettling as well.

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  Volumes 28 and 47 of the Gale series Contemporary Literary Criticism present a miniature version of Narayan’s critical heritage, including the reviews by Anita Desai and William Walsh from which I have quoted; volume 121 includes a selection of scholarly work. V. S. Naipaul has come back to Narayan throughout his career. See his comments in An Area of Darkness (London: Andre Deutsch, 1965), India: A Wounded Civilization (New York: Knopf, 1977), and Reading and Writing: A Personal Account (New York: New York Review of Books, 2000). Those interested in classical Indian dance, or Bharat natyam, will benefit from Frédérique Apffel Marglin, Wives of the God-King: The Rituals of the Devadasis of Puri (New Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). Other works of interest are as follows:

  Cronin, Richard. “The Politics of R. K. Narayan,” in Imagining India, pp. 59-74. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989.

  Jussawalla, Feroza. Family Quarrels: Toward a Criticism of Indian Writing in English. New York: Peter Lang, 1985.

  Khair, Tabish. “R. K. Narayan: The View from the Window,” in Babu Fictions: Alienation in Contemporary Indian English Novels, pp. 226-242. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001.

  Mehrotra, Arvind Krishna, ed. A History of Indian Literature in English. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. The most comprehensive account of its subject available. The chapter on Narayan, by Pankaj Mishra, is exceptionally fine; it also appears as “The Great Narayan” in the New York Review of Books for 21 February 2001.

  Mukherjee, Meenakshi. The Twice-Born Fiction: Themes and Techniques of the Indian Novel in English. London and New Delhi: Heinemann, 1971.

  Ram, Susan and N. Ram. R. K. Narayan: The Early Years, 1906-1945. Penguin Books India, 1996. The only biography available.

  Sankaran, Chitra. “Patterns of Story-telling in R. K. Narayan’s The Guide.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Vol. 26 (1991), pp. 127-150.

  Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “How to Read a ‘Culturally Different’ Book.” In Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory, eds. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iverson, pp. 126-50. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994. Provocative and with special attention to the cultural role of Bharat natyam in the newly independent nation.

  Swinden, Patrick. “Hindu Mythology in R. K. Narayan’s The Guide.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Vol. 34 (1999), pp. 65-83.

  Walsh, William. R. K. Narayan: A Critical Appreciation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982.

  My thanks to Sumit Ganguly and the Indian Studies Seminar of Indiana University for serving as this introduction’s first audience; and to Pankaj Mishra, Andrew Rotman, and especially Margery Sabin for their comments on the manuscript.

  Books by R. K. Narayan

  NOVELS

  Swami and Friends (1935)

  The Bachelor of Arts (1937)

  The Dark Room (1938)

  The English Teacher (1945)

  Mr. Sampath—The Printer of Malgudi (1949)

  The Financial Expert (1952)

  Waiting for the Mahatma (1955)

  The Guide (1958)

  The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1961)

  The Vendor of Sweets (1967)

  The Painter of Signs (1976)

  A Tiger for Malgudi (1983)

  Talkative Man (1986)

  The World of Nagaraj (1990)

  *Dodu and Other Stories (1943)

  *Cyclone and Other Stories (1945)

  An Astrologer’s Day and Other Stories (1947)

  *Lawley Road and Other Stories (1956)

  A Horse and Two Goats (1970)

  Malgudi Days (1982)

  Under the Banyan Tree and Other Stories (1985)

  The Grandmother’s Tale and Selected Stories (1993)

  RETOLD LEGENDS

  Gods, Demons, and Others (1964)

  The Ramayana (1972)

  The Mahabharata (1978)

  My Days: A Memoir (1974)

  *Mysore (1939)

  *Next Sunday: Sketches and Essays (1960)

  *My Dateless Diary: An American Journey (1964)

  *Reluctant Guru (1974)

  *The Emerald Route (1977)

  *A Writer’s Nightmare: Selected Essays 1958-1988 (1988)

  *A Story-Teller’s World (1989)

  *Indian Thought: A Miscellany (1997)

  *The Writerly Life: Selected Non-fiction (2001)

  CHAPTER ONE

  Raju welcomed the intrusion—something to relieve the loneliness of the place. The man stood gazing reverentially on his face. Raju felt amused and embarrassed. “Sit down if you like,” Raju said, to break the spell. The other accepted the suggestion with a grateful nod and went down the river steps to wash his feet and face, came up wiping himself dry with the end of a checkered yellow towel on his shoulder, and took his seat two steps below the granite slab on which Raju was sitting cross-legged as if it were a throne, beside an ancient shrine. The branches of the trees canopying the river course rustled and trembled with the agitation of birds and monkeys settling down for the night. Upstream beyond the hills the sun was setting. Raju waited for the other to say something. But he was too polite to open a conversation.

  Raju asked, “Where are you from?” dreading lest the other should turn around and ask the same question.

  The man replied, “I’m from Mangal—”

  “Where is Mangal?”

  The other waved his arm, indicating a direction across the river, beyond the high steep bank. “Not far from here,” he added. The man volunteered further information about himself. “My daughter lives nearby. I had gone to visit her; I am now on my way home. I left her after food. She insisted that I should stay on to dinner, but I refused. It’d have meant walking home at nearly midnight. I’m not afraid of anything, but why should we walk when we ought to be sleeping in bed?”

  “You are very sensible,” Raju said.

  They listened for a while to the chatter of monkeys, and the man added as an afterthought, “My daughter is married to my own sister’s son, and so there is no problem. I often visit my sister and also my daughter; and so no one minds it.”

  “Why should anyone mind in any case if you visit a daughter?”

  “It’s not considered proper form to pay too many visits to a son-in-law,” explained the villager.

  Raju liked this rambling talk. He had been all alone in this place for over a day. It was good to hear the human voice again. After this the villager resumed the
study of his face with intense respect. And Raju stroked his chin thoughtfully to make sure that an apostolic beard had not suddenly grown there. It was still smooth. He had had his last shave only two days before and paid for it with the hard-earned coins of his jail life.

  Raju felt it would be no use being angry with such a man. Here he was in the presence of experience. He asked, “How do you know?”

  “I have spent twenty years shaving people here. Didn’t you observe that this was the first shop as you left the jail gate? Half the trick is to have your business in the right place. But that raises other people’s jealousies!” he said, waving off an army of jealous barbers.