AcknowledgmentI would like to thank almighty in blessing me with strength and good health to carryout this research work. I express my heartfelt thanks to my supervisor Md. Musfiqur Rahman Lecturer of English department, Dhaka International University (DIU) for giving me the opportunity to work on this subject and giving his valuable instructions and advice. I am also very thankful to Professor Dr. Sazzad Hossain whose brilliant lecture on R.K. Narayan inspired me to work on R.K. Narayan.

Sincerely

…………………………

Ferduchi Akter

Batch no: 30.A

Roll no: 42

Statement of the problem

From my reading of several articles, it is found that the transformation of Raju’s character in the plot of The Guide is greatly undiscovered for this reason. I have decided to work on this topic. I have investigated deeply and read several articles which allowed me to work on the area. Moreover I found this topic very interesting to work on The Guide. My research is based on keen observation and analysis of the topic and I have tried to substantiate it by providing sufficient logic and reference from the text. The problems are the justification and glorification of Raju’s character in The Guide. The vice of evil to good in The Guide by R.K Narayan and the rule of Rosie in The Guide.

Table of Contents

Chapter No Title of the point Page NoChapter-I Abstract

IntroductionBackground of the TopicObjectivesJustification of the Research

1233

Chapter-II Background of R.K Narayan Life and career of R.K Narayan

List of Literary works

44-15

15-16

Chapter-III Character Analysis 17-18Chapter-IV Themes of The Guide 19-20

Synopsis of The Guide  21Chapter-V The Guide 22-23Chapter-VI Plot Review of The Guide

The Guide: Summary

Symbolism in The Guide, by R. K. Narayan

Violence against women in R.K. Narayan’s ‘The Guide’

The Conflict between Tradition and Modernity in “The Guide”

Hindu Mythology in R.K. Narayan’s The Guide.

Critical appreciation of The Guide

Transformation of Raju’s Character in “The Guide”

24 24-25

25-26

26-29

29-38

38-51

51-56

56-57

Chapter-VII Findings 58-59Chaptwer-VIII Conclusion 60

Chapter-I

Abstract

The Guide reveals the Indian way of life and also the culture and tradition of India. R.K.

Narayan has used typical Indian characters and Indian atmosphere to portray Indian culture.

The main characters of this novel are Raju, Rosie and Marco. R.K. Narayan has given a true

social picture of India through ‘The Guide’. The traits of Indian manners and customs are

also reflected in this novel. Hospitality of Indians is a well known trait all over the world.

Narayan has given a clear picture of India at the time of narration without idealizing the

country and he has not also condemned it. The poverty of India has been reflected with a

personal touch of the author. The villagers are shown as suffering from poverty and

ignorance and their illiteracy has been reflected as the root cause for all their sufferings.

There are as gullible and kind hearted as any Indian village habitats. 'The Guide' paints a

picture of the daily life of the Indians, the ethnicity of the land and indeed the superstitions

and values of India gains a contour in the remarkable novel 'The Guide'. It is the story of a

tourist guide Raju, who happens to be the central character of the novel. The development of

the character of Raju, as a travel guide justifies the title. Although started in a rather loose

way the story carries a deep significance of sheer realisms. R.K. Narayan, quite consciously,

in his novel The Guide echoes the mores and tradition of the Indian society amidst his literal

symbolisms.  This novel is based in the fictional town known as 'Malgudi', as has been the

scenario in a majority of novels composed by the author. Readers will be introduced to a

tourist guide in the form of Raju who undergoes a metamorphosis into a spiritual guide and

eventually one of the legendary holy men of the country. The Guide has won immense

recognition and enabled R.K. Narayan to receive the Sahitya Akademi Award in the year

1960, for English. 

Introduction:

R. K Narayan, one of the greatest novelists of India. This is one of the most popular novels of R.K Narayan, The Guide narrated about a tourist guide known as ‘Railway Raju’. It is based on the Indian concept of tourist who every time guided the different people. Raju’s rule may take six forms as a young son, as a shopkeeper, as a tourist, as Rosie’s lover, as Rosie’s stage manager and finally as a Swami. All these rules in one way or another alter Raju’s characters and attitudes himself and people around him. He adjusts himself positively in this play. One first place it gives illegal relation and uncontrollable life. On second place, it turns out the character, Raju who is now very kind hearted to people which will be described throughout our research paper that how a person translates his life from a greedy person to kindness. Actually this novel shows how a man it turned personalities to kind hearted. Here Raju proved that one can be kind in spite of having dishonesty. Raju’s transition reminded the chief theme of the novel. It’s point of the beginning i.e. climax to its ending point in the conclusion. The Guide is the most popular novel of R.K. Narayan. It was published in 1958, and won the Sahitya Akademy Award for 1960. It has also been filmed and the film has always drawn packed-houses. It recounts the adventures of a railway guide, popularly known as ‘Railway Raju’. As a tourist guide he is widely popular. It is this profession which brings him in contact with Marco and his beautiful wife, Rosie. While the husband is busy with his archaeological studies, Raju seduces his wife and has a good time with her. Ultimately Marco comes to know of her affair with Raju and goes away to Madras leaving Rosie behind. Rosie comes and stays with Raju in his one-room house. His mother tolerates her for some time, but when things become unbearable, she calls her brother and goes away with him, leaving Raju to look after Rosie and the house. Rosie is a born dancer, she practices regularly and soon Raju finds an opening for her. In her very first appearance, she is a grand success. Soon she is very much in demand and their earnings increase enormously. Raju lives lavishly, entertains a large number of friends with whom he drinks and gambles. All goes well till Raju forges Rosie’s signatures to obtain valuable jewellery lying with her husband. The act lands him in

jail. Rosie leaves Malgudi and goes away to Madras, her hometown. She goes on with her dancing and does well without the help and management of Raju, of which he was so proud.

Background of the Topic

Published in 1958, The Guide is a novel by Indian author R.K. Narayan set in the fictional South Indian town of Malgudi. It follows the life of an Indian man, , as he evolves throughout his life to become one of the most prominent holy men in India. The protagonist of The Guide is, a tour guide living in Malgudi known for his corrupt tendencies. He falls in love with a mistreated married woman named Rosie, and the two begin having an affair together. However, as time goes on and Rosie becomes more and more successful as a dancer, becomes excessively controlling and soon ends up in jail because of his overbearing and greedy actions. After he is released, in a turn of events, he is mistaken as a holy man in a town he happens to be passing through. Because he decides to keep the act up, he eventually gets himself in a situation where he must fast for the length of several days, heavily publicized and lauded for his actions. The Guide has won R.K. Narayan several awards, including but not limited to the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1960. As well, the book has been adapted into both a movie and a play of the same name.

Objectives

Every work is done for some objectives. The topic of my research is the transformation of Raju’s character in the novel The Guide by the following sentences-

i. To learn about the concept of Indian tourist.ii. To know about the society of India.iii. Throughout the novel I have seen that how a man transforms his life evil to good.iv. To know newness in the novel.v. The eyes of the Indian writers this novel is completely about a tourist guide as a

lover, as a saint.vi. To learn a man’s goal or aim.vii. To know that how a man can change his life and its possibility in the Indian .

Justification of the Research

The justification and glorification of transform character in The Guide. In a sense it seems as if R.K Narayan is glorifying a tourist guide in The Guide by focusing so much on it and by elevating certain guides as a tourist lover and saint while minimizing loses and faith. The Guide is a story of a true guide. Whatever the situation, location or time. Raju is a protagonist would play the role of guide. The

suggestive and apt tittle of the novel implies what the novel is about and thus what our curiosity to know more about the novel. Raju is not only a tourist guide but also a symbol of wisdom, guidance and common sense. Here we can see that Raju changed his character. Narayan shown that everybody can transform his intension if he wants. In many ways man can help others. Accoeding to the justification of the research, it takes relation to convince. The example of the guide- coming model and Rosie’s experimental work indicate that relation required for other people to recognize the

significance of seems to depend on the creation of the enabling techniques. So justification of the research shown the Raju’s transform by R. K Narayan.

Chapter-II

Background of R.K Narayan

R. K. Narayan (10 October 1906 – 13 May 2001), full name Rasipuram Krishnaswami Iyer Narayanaswami, was an Indian writer known for his works set in the fictional South Indian town of Malgudi. He was a leading author of early Indian literature in English along with Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao.

Narayan's mentor and friend Graham Greene was instrumental in getting publishers for Narayan’s first four books including the semi-autobiographical trilogy of Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts and The English Teacher. The fictional town of Malgudi was first introduced in Swami and Friends. Narayan’s The Financial Expert was hailed as one of the most original works of 1951 and Sahitya Akademi Award winner The Guide was adapted for film and for Broadway.

Narayan highlights the social context and everyday life of his characters. He has been compared to William Faulkner who also created a similar fictional town and likewise explored with humour and compassion the energy of ordinary life. Narayan's short stories have been compared with those of Guy de Maupassant because of his ability to compress a narrative. However he has also been criticised for the simplicity of his prose.

In a career that spanned over sixty years Narayan received many awards and honours including the AC Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature, the Padma Bhushan and the Padma Vibhushan, India's third and second highest civilian awards.[1] He was also nominated to the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of India's parliament.

Life and career of R.K Narayan

Early life

R. K. Narayan was born in Madras (now Chennai), British India. He was one of eight children; six sons and two daughters. Narayan was the oldest of the sons; his younger brother

Ramachandran later became an editor at Gemini Studios, and the youngest brother Laxman became a cartoonist His father was a school headmaster, and Narayan did some of his studies at his father's school. As his father's job entailed frequent transfers, Narayan spent a part of his childhood under the care of his maternal grandmother, Parvati. During this time his best friends and playmates were a peacock and a mischievous monkey.

His grandmother gave him the nickname of Kunjappa, A name that stuck to him in family circles. She taught him arithmetic, mythology, classical Indian music and Sanskrit. According to Laxman, the family mostly conversed in English, and grammatical errors on the part of Narayan and his siblings were frowned upon. While living with his grandmother, Narayan studied at a succession of schools in Madras, including the Lutheran Mission School in Purasawalkam, C.R.C. High School, and the Christian College High School. Narayan was an avid reader, and his early literary diet included Dickens, Wodehouse, Arthur Conan Doyle and Thomas Hardy. When he was twelve years old, Narayan participated in a pro-independence march, for which he was reprimanded by his uncle; the family was apolitical and considered all governments wicked.

Narayan moved to Mysore to live with his family when his father was transferred to the Maharajah's College High School. The well-stocked library at the school, as well as his father's own, fed his reading habit, and he started writing as well. After completing high school, Narayan failed the university entrance examination and spent a year at home reading and writing; he subsequently passed the examination in 1926 and joined Maharaja College of Mysore. It took Narayan four years to obtain his bachelor's degree, a year longer than usual. After being persuaded by a friend that taking a master's degree (M.A.) would kill his interest in literature, he briefly held a job as a school teacher; however, he quit in protest when the headmaster of the school asked him to substitute for the physical training master. The experience made Narayan realise that the only career for him was in writing, and he decided to stay at home and write novels. His first published work was a book review of Development of Maritime Laws of 17th-Century England. Subsequently, he started writing the occasional local interest story for English newspapers and magazines. Although the writing did not pay much he had a regular life and few needs, and his family and friends respected and supported his unorthodox choice of career. In 1930, Narayan wrote his first novel, Swami and Friends, an effort ridiculed by his uncle and rejected by a string of publishers. With this book, Narayan created Malgudi, a town that creatively reproduced the social sphere of the country; while it ignored the limits imposed by colonial rule, it also grew with the various socio-political changes of British and post-independence India

Turning point

While vacationing at his sister's house in Coimbatore, in 1933, Narayan met and fell in love with Rajam, a 15-year-old girl who lived nearby. Despite many astrological and financial obstacles, Narayan managed to gain permission from the girl's father and married her. Following his marriage, Narayan became a reporter for a Madras-based paper called The Justice, dedicated to the rights of non-Brahmins. The publishers were thrilled to have a Brahmin Iyer in Narayan espousing their cause. The job brought him in contact with a wide variety of people and issues. Earlier, Narayan had sent the manuscript of Swami and Friends to a friend at Oxford, and about this time, the friend showed the manuscript to Graham Greene. Greene recommended the book to his publisher, and it was finally published in 1935. Greene also counseled Narayan on shortening his name to become more familiar to the English-speaking audience. The book was semi-autobiographical and built upon many

incidents from his own childhood. Reviews were favourable but sales were few. Narayan's next novel The Bachelor of Arts (1937), was inspired in part by his experiences at college, and dealt with the theme of a rebellious adolescent transitioning to a rather well-adjusted adult; it was published by a different publisher, again at the recommendation of Greene. His third novel, The Dark Room (1938) was about domestic disharmony, showcasing the man as the oppressor and the woman as the victim within a marriage, and was published by yet another publisher; this book also received good reviews. In 1937, Narayan's father died, and Narayan was forced to accept a commission from the government of Mysore as he was not making any money.

In his first three books, Narayan highlights the problems with certain socially accepted practices. The first book has Narayan focusing on the plight of students, punishments of caning in the classroom, and the associated shame. The concept of horoscope-matching in Hindu marriages and the emotional toll it levies on the bride and groom is covered in the second book. In the third book, Narayan addresses the concept of a wife putting up with her husband's antics and attitudes.

Rajam died of typhoid in 1939. Her death affected Narayan deeply and he remained depressed for a long time; he was also concerned for their daughter Hema, who was only three years old. The bereavement brought about a significant change in his life and was the inspiration behind his next novel, The English Teacher. This book, like his first two books, is autobiographical, but more so, and completes an unintentional thematic trilogy following Swami and Friends and The Bachelor of Arts. In subsequent interviews, Narayan acknowledges that The English Teacher was almost entirely an autobiography, albeit with different names for the characters and the change of setting in Malgudi; he also explains that the emotions detailed in the book reflected his own at the time of Rajam's death.

Bolstered by some of his successes, in 1940 Narayan tried his hand at a journal, Indian Thought. With the help of his uncle, a car salesman, Narayan managed to get more than a thousand subscribers in Madras city alone. However, the venture did not last long due to Narayan's inability to manage it, and it ceased publication within a year. His first collection of short stories, Malgudi Days, was published in November 1942, followed by The English Teacher in 1945. In between, being cut off from England due to the war, Narayan started his own publishing company, naming it (again) Indian Thought Publications; the publishing company was a success and is still active, now managed by his granddaughter. Soon, with a devoted readership stretching from New York to Moscow, Narayan's books started selling well and in 1948 he started building his own house on the outskirts of Mysore; the house was completed in 1953. Around this period, Narayan wrote the screenplay for the Gemini Studios film Miss Malini (1947), which remained the only screenplay by him that was successfully adapted into a feature film.

The busy years

After The English Teacher, Narayan's writings took a more imaginative and creative external style compared to the semi-autobiographical tone of the earlier novels. His next effort, Mr. Sampath, was the first book exhibiting this modified approach. However, it still draws from some of his own experiences, particularly the aspect of starting his own journal; he also makes a marked movement away from his earlier novels by intermixing biographical events. Soon after, he published The Financial Expert, considered to be his masterpiece and hailed as one of the most original works of fiction in 1951. The inspiration for the novel was a true

story about a financial genius, Margayya, related to him by his brother. The next novel, Waiting for the Mahatma, loosely based on a fictional visit to Malgudi by Mahatma Gandhi, deals with the protagonist's romantic feelings for a woman, when he attends the discourses of the visiting Mahatma. The woman, named Bharti, is a loose parody of Bharati, the personification of India and the focus of Gandhi's discourses. While the novel includes significant references to the Indian independence movement, the focus is on the life of the ordinary individual, narrated with Narayan's usual dose of irony.

In 1953, his works were published in the United States for the first time, by Michigan State University Press, who later (in 1958), relinquished the rights to Viking Press. While Narayan's writings often bring out the anomalies in social structures and views, he was himself a traditionalist; in February 1956, Narayan arranged his daughter's wedding following all orthodox Hindu rituals. After the wedding, Narayan began travelling occasionally, continuing to write at least 1500 words a day even while on the road. The Guide was written while he was visiting the United States in 1956 on the Rockefeller Fellowship. While in the U.S., Narayan maintained a daily journal that was to later serve as the foundation for his book My Dateless Diary. Around this time, on a visit to England, Narayan met his friend and mentor Graham Greene for the first time. On his return to India, The Guide was published; the book is the most representative of Narayan's writing skills and elements, ambivalent in expression, coupled with a riddle-like conclusion. The book won him the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1958.

Occasionally, Narayan was known to give form to his thoughts by way of essays, some published in newspapers and journals, others not. Next Sunday (1960), was a collection of such conversational essays, and his first work to be published as a book. Soon after that, My Dateless Diary, describing experiences from his 1956 visit to the United States, was published. Also included in this collection was an essay about the writing of The Guide.

Narayan's next novel, The Man-Eater of Malgudi, was published in 1961. The book was reviewed as having a narrative that is a classical art form of comedy, with delicate control. After the launch of this book, the restless Narayan once again took to travelling, and visited the U.S. and Australia. He spent three weeks in Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne giving lectures on Indian literature. The trip was funded by a fellowship from the Australian Writers' Group. By this time Narayan had also achieved significant success, both literary and financial. He had a large house in Mysore, and wrote in a study with no fewer than eight windows; he drove a new Mercedes-Benz, a luxury in India at that time, to visit his daughter who had moved to Coimbatore after her marriage. With his success, both within India and abroad, Narayan started writing columns for magazines and newspapers including The Hindu and The Atlantic.

In 1964, Narayan published his first mythological work, Gods, Demons and Others, a collection of rewritten and translated short stories from Hindu epics. Like many of his other works, this book was illustrated by his younger brother R. K. Laxman. The stories included were a selective list, chosen on the basis of powerful protagonists, so that the impact would be lasting, irrespective of the reader's contextual knowledge. Once again, after the book launch, Narayan took to travelling abroad. In an earlier essay, he had written about the Americans wanting to understand spirituality from him, and during this visit, Swedish-American actress Greta Garbo accosted him on the topic, despite his denial of any knowledge.

Narayan's next published work was the 1967 novel, The Vendor of Sweets. It was inspired in part by his American visits and consists of extreme characterizations of both the Indian and American stereotypes, drawing on the many cultural differences. However, while it displays his characteristic comedy and narrative, the book was reviewed as lacking in depth. This year, Narayan travelled to England, where he received the first of his honorary doctorates from the University of Leeds. The next few years were a quiet period for him. He published his next book, a collection of short stories, A Horse and Two Goats, in 1970. Meanwhile, Narayan remembered a promise made to his dying uncle in 1938, and started translating the Kamba Ramayanam to English. The Ramayana was published in 1973, after five years of work. Almost immediately after publishing The Ramayana, Narayan started working on a condensed translation of the Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata. While he was researching and writing the epic, he also published another book, The Painter of Signs (1977). The Painter of Signs is a bit longer than a novella and makes a marked change from Narayan's other works, as he deals with hitherto unaddressed subjects such as sex, although the development of the protagonist's character is very similar to his earlier creations. The Mahabharata was published in 1978.

The later years

Narayan was commissioned by the government of Karnataka to write a book to promote tourism in the state. The work was published as part of a larger government publication in the late 1970s. He thought it deserved better, and republished it as The Emerald Route (Indian Thought Publications, 1980). The book contains his personal perspective on the local history and heritage, but being bereft of his characters and creations, it misses his enjoyable narrative. The same year, he was elected as an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and won the AC Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature. Around the same time, Narayan's works were translated to Chinese for the first time.

In 1983, Narayan published his next novel, A Tiger for Malgudi, about a tiger and its relationship with humans. His next novel, Talkative Man, published in 1986, was the tale of an aspiring journalist from Malgudi. During this time, he also published two collections of short stories: Malgudi Days (1982), a revised edition including the original book and some other stories, and Under the Banyan Tree and Other Stories, a new collection. In 1987, he completed A Writer's Nightmare, another collection of essays about topics as diverse as the caste system, Nobel prize winners, love, and monkeys. The collection included essays he had written for newspapers and magazines since 1958.

Living alone in Mysore, Narayan developed an interest in agriculture. He bought an acre of agricultural land and tried his hand at farming. He was also prone to walking to the market every afternoon, not so much for buying things, but to interact with the people. In a typical afternoon stroll, he would stop every few steps to greet and converse with shopkeepers and others, most likely gathering material for his next book.

In 1980, Narayan was nominated to the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian Parliament, for his contributions to literature. During his entire six-year term, he was focused on one issue—the plight of school children, especially the heavy load of school books and the negative effect of the system on a child's creativity, which was something that he first highlighted in his debut novel, Swami and Friends. His inaugural speech was focused on this particular problem, and resulted in the formation of a committee chaired by Prof. Yash Pal, to recommend changes to the school educational system.

In 1990, he published his next novel, The World of Nagaraj, also set in Malgudi. Narayan's age shows in this work as he appears to skip narrative details that he would have included if this were written earlier in his career. Soon after he finished the novel, Narayan fell ill and moved to Madras to be close to his daughter's family. A few years after his move, in 1994, his daughter died of cancer and his granddaughter Bhuvanes wari (Minnie) started taking care of him in addition to managing Indian Thought Publications. Narayan then published his final book, Grandmother's Tale. The book is an autobiographical novella, about his great-grandmother who travelled far and wide to find her husband, who ran away shortly after their marriage. The story was narrated to him by his grandmother, when he was a child.

During his final years, Narayan, ever fond of conversation, would spend almost every evening with N. Ram, the publisher of The Hindu, drinking coffee and talking about various topics until well past midnight. Despite his fondness of meeting and talking to people, he stopped giving interviews. The apathy towards interviews was the result of an interview with Time, after which Narayan had to spend a few days in the hospital, as he was dragged around the city to take photographs that were never used in the article.

In May 2001, Narayan was hospitalized. A few hours before he was to be put on a ventilator, he was planning on writing his next novel, a story about a grandfather. As he was always very selective about his choice of notebooks, he asked N. Ram to get him one. However, Narayan did not get better and never started the novel. He died on 13 May 2001, in Chennai at the age of 94.

Writing style

Narayan's writing technique was unpretentious with a natural element of humour about it. It focused on ordinary people, reminding the reader of next-door neighbours, cousins and the like, thereby providing a greater ability to relate to the topic. Unlike his national contemporaries, he was able to write about the intricacies of Indian society without having to modify his characteristic simplicity to conform to trends and fashions in fiction writing. He also employed the use of nuanced dialogic prose with gentle Tamil overtones based on the nature of his characters. Critics have considered Narayan to be the Indian Chekhov, due to the similarities in their writings, the simplicity and the gentle beauty and humour in tragic situations. Greene considered Narayan to be more similar to Chekhov than any Indian writer. Anthony West of The New Yorker considered Narayan's writings to be of the realism variety of Nikolai Gogol.

According to Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri, Narayan's short stories have the same captivating feeling as his novels, with most of them less than ten pages long, and taking about as many minutes to read. She adds that between the title sentence and the end, Narayan provides the reader something novelists struggle to achieve in hundreds more pages: a complete insight to the lives of his characters. These characteristics and abilities led Lahiri to classify him as belonging to the pantheon of short-story geniuses that include O. Henry, Frank O'Connor and Flannery O'Connor. Lahiri also compares him to Guy de Maupassant for their ability to compress the narrative without losing the story, and the common themes of middle-class life written with an unyielding and unpitying vision.

Critics have noted that Narayan's writings tend to be more descriptive and less analytical; the objective style, rooted in a detached spirit, providing for a more authentic and realistic narration. His attitude, coupled with his perception of life, provided a unique ability to fuse

characters and actions, and an ability to use ordinary events to create a connection in the mind of the reader. A significant contributor to his writing style was his creation of Malgudi, a stereotypical small town, where the standard norms of superstition and tradition apply.

Narayan's writing style was often compared to that of William Faulkner since both their works brought out the humour and energy of ordinary life while displaying compassionate humanism. The similarities also extended to their juxtaposing of the demands of society against the confusions of individuality. Although their approach to subjects was similar, their methods were different; Faulkner was rhetorical and illustrated his points with immense prose while Narayan was very simple and realistic, capturing the elements all the same.

Malgudi

Malgudi is a fictional, semi-urban town in southern India, conjured by Narayan. He created the town in September 1930, on Vijayadashami, an auspicious day to start new efforts and thus chosen for him by his grandmother. As he mentioned in a later interview to his biographers Susan and N. Ram, in his mind, he first saw a railway station, and slowly the name Malgudi came to him. The town was created with an impeccable historical record, dating to the Ramayana days when it was noted that Lord Rama passed through; it was also said that the Buddha visited the town during his travels. While Narayan never provided strict physical constraints for the town, he allowed it to form shape with events in the various stories, becoming a reference point for the future. Dr James M. Fennelly, a scholar of Narayan's works, created a map of Malgudi based on the fictional descriptors of the town from the many books and stories.

Malgudi evolved with the changing political landscape of India. In the 1980s, when the nationalistic fervor in India dictated the changing of British names of towns and localities and removal of British landmarks, Malgudi's mayor and city council removed the long-standing statue of Frederick Lawley, one of Malgudi's early residents. However, when the Historical Societies showed proof that Lawley was strong in his support of the Indian independence movement, the council was forced to undo all their earlier actions. A good comparison to Malgudi, a place that Greene characterised as "more familiar than Battersea or Euston Road", is Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. Also, like Faulkner's, when one looks at Narayan's works, the town gets a better definition through the many different novels and stories.

Critical reception

Narayan first broke through with the help of Graham Greene who, upon reading Swaminathan and Tate, took it upon himself to work as Narayan's agent for the book. He was also instrumental in changing the title to the more appropriate Swami and Friends, and in finding publishers for Narayan's next few books. While Narayan's early works were not commercial successes, other authors of the time began to notice him. Somerset Maugham, on a trip to Mysore in 1938, had asked to meet Narayan, but not enough people had heard of him to actually effect the meeting. Maugham subsequently read Narayan's The Dark Room, and wrote to him expressing his admiration. Another contemporary writer who took a liking to Narayan's early works was E. M. Forster, an author who shared his dry and humorous narrative, so much so that Narayan was labeled the "South Indian E. M. Forster" by critics.

Despite his popularity with the reading public and fellow writers, Narayan's work has not received the same amount of critical exploration accorded to other writers of his stature.

Narayan's success in the United States came a little later, when Michigan State University Press started publishing his books. His first visit to the country was on a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, and he lectured at various universities including Michigan State University and the University of California, Berkeley. Around this time, John Updike noticed his work and compared Narayan to Charles Dickens. In a review of Narayan's works published in The New Yorker, Updike called him a writer of a vanishing breed—the writer as a citizen; one who identifies completely with his subjects and with a belief in the significance of humanity.

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.

A general perception on Narayan was that he did not involve himself or his writings with the politics or problems of India, as mentioned by V. S. Naipaul in one of his columns. However, according to Wyatt Mason of The New Yorker, although Narayan's writings seem simple and display a lack of interest in politics, he delivers his narrative with an artful and deceptive technique when dealing with such subjects and does not entirely avoid them, rather letting the words play in the reader's mind. Srinivasa Iyengar, former vice-chancellor of Andhra University, says that Narayan wrote about political topics only in the context of his subjects, quite unlike his compatriot Mulk Raj Anand who dealt with the political structures and problems of the time. Paul Brians, in his book Modern South Asian Literature in English, says that the fact that Narayan completely ignored British rule and focused on the private lives of his characters is a political statement on its own, declaring his independence from the influence of colonialism.

In the west, Narayan's simplicity of writing was well received. One of his biographers, William Walsh, wrote of his narrative as a comedic art with an inclusive vision informed by the transience and illusion of human action. Multiple Booker nominees Anita Desai classes his writings as "compassionate realism" where the cardinal sins are unkindness and immodesty. According to Wyatt Mason, in Narayan's works, the individual is not a private entity, but rather a public one and this concept is an innovation that can be called his own. In addition to his early works being among the most important English-language fiction from India, with this innovation, he provided his western readers the first works in English to be infused with an eastern and Hindu existential perspective. Mason also holds the view that Edmund Wilson's assessment of Walt Whitman, "He does not write editorials on events but describes his actual feelings", applies equally to Narayan.

Awards and honors

Narayan won numerous awards during the course of his literary career. His first major award was in 1958, the Sahitya Akademi Award for The Guide. When the book was made into a film, he received the Film fare Award for the best story. In 1964, he received the Padma Bhushan during the Republic Day honors. In 1980, he was awarded the AC Benson Medal by the (British) Royal Society of Literature, of which he was an honorary member. In 1982 he was elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature multiple times, but never won the honor.

Recognition also came in the form of honorary doctorates by the University of Leeds (1967), the University of Mysore (1976) and Delhi University (1973). Towards the end of his career, Narayan was nominated to the upper house of the Indian Parliament for a six-year term starting in 1989, for his contributions to Indian literature. A year before his death, in 2001, he was awarded India's second-highest civilian honor, the Padma Vibhushan.

Swami and FriendsThe first of a trilogy of novels, Swami and Friends is set against the backdrop of pre independence India. The story is about an adolescent boy growing up at that time. It is thestory of Swami, a small boy who is a student at Albert Mission School. It not only tells the story of Swami but others like, Shankar whose specialty is to top every exam; „Pea‟ and Somu, who occupy the middle positions and Mani, who is Swami’s best friend and who always sits on the last bench and takes more than one year to pass some classes. Together Swami and Mani rule over the class and barely manage to scrape past the exams. These boys live for summer vacations when they can play all the time in the street with friends. This peaceful setting is disturbed occasionally by the stern headmaster of the school and sometimes by the religious study teacher, Ebenezer and also by a stern father. The 10 year old boy grows up when Raju joins the school. The monotonous school life of Swami then gains excitement when together with Rajam, he dreams of forming a cricket team. Young Swami gets caught up in the anti-British movement and manages to get thrown out of school. When he runs away from school for the second time, he feels that there is nothing left and so he also runs away from home. Eventually Swami returns home to the relief of his parents. The story attains its climax when Rajam moves out of the town without even uttering a word to Swami.All the children in this novel have unique personalities. Mai is the daredevil, Rajam, though naughty, usually acts as a voice of caution, Swami is shy, but impish and impulsive. Through all this character Narayan takes us to the world of children.

School LifeIn this novel Narayan has drawn upon his own childhood experience to recreate a child‟s perception of the world. The protagonist of Swami and Friends is Swaminathan, a school boy, whose attitude towards school is just like Narayan himself. The opening lines of the novel clearly sketch the moods, behavior and psychology of a young boy. Swaminathan…. considered Monday especially unpleasant in the calendar It was difficult to get into the Monday mood of work and discipline. He shuddered at the very thought of school: that dismal yellow building; ….the Head Master with his thin long cane. In My Days, his biography, Nayaran expresses the same attitude towards school. In his progress through school, Narayan acquired a lifelong dislike for traditional formal education which is reflected in the novel. In the opening pages of Swami and Friends, Narayan convey the silent, jail-like atmosphere of the classroom. Narayan’s kindergarten experience

resurfaces in the scene where Swami wanders into the infant sections of his school and watches the toddler’s effort to shape models from wet clay. Like Narayan he is also baffled by this pointless effort. It seems to Swami a meaningless activity which they can do in their own home instant of coming „to school to do this sort of things‟. For him school was meant for learning serious subjects like geography, arithmetic, Bible and English. In his infant class Narayan was suppose to “sit on the floor and knead small lumps of wet clay and shape them”. Later, he wondered how making shapes with wet clay helped him became educated. Another incident from his life which resurfaces in this novel is Narayan’s attitude towards drill class and the punishment he suffered for skipping them. Narayan used to regularly skip Friday afternoon drill class and consequently get „six whacks‟ in his upturned palm from the headmasters cane first thing on Monday morning. In Swami and Friends when Swami skips a few drill classes due to cricket practice he has to endure punishment from his headmaster. Swami had to attain drill class every day after school while his friends played cricket. So he pretended to be sick to skip the drill classes and requested the doctor to talk to his headmaster. As the doctor did not make excuses on Swami’s behalf, he got punished by the headmaster, „six on each hand for each day of absence, and the next lesson on the bench‟. In Swami and Friends the boys formed a cricket team called „M.C.C‟. Instead of „Jumping Star‟, suggested by Swami the name-M.C.C. short for “Malgudi Cricket Club” suggested by Rajam was decided for the team. “Jumping Star” is the name of Narayan’s own football team. His “Jumping Star” experiences of the dust, sweat and excitement of practice sessions is reflected in Swami and Friends. You covered the distance half running, half walking, moved by the vision of a dun field sparsely covered with scorched grass…. rays of the evening sun, enveloped in a flimsy cloud of dust, alive with the player stamping about. (Narayan, Swami‟s evening journey to the cricket field, beset by delays and school imposed obstacles, seems to carry the same urgency of the writer’s own efforts to reach the lake everyday to practice football. The leadership qualities of Jambu can also be seen in Rajam, the Captain of M.C.C.s. Jambu was the captain of Narayan’s football team, who materialized every evening to conduct his team to the practice ground. Like Jambu, Rajam contributes hugely to the teams provisioning by taking money from his family to provide the team with necessary equipments like bats, balls and stumps.

FriendshipIn childhood friendship are quickly forged and as easily forgotten, a reality which Narayan shows through Rajam’s departure without saying farewell to Swami. Rajam is the son of the police superintendent and assume the leadership of Swami’s group of friends. Rajam feels that they loss the cricket match due to Swami’s absences and so he breaks his friendship with Swami. Narayan provided insights into the varied manifestations and quirks of childhood friendship from his Madras childhood.

Examination & VacationAnother feature of school life which according to Narayan is considered torture by students is examination. In Swami and Friends, the tension associated with the approach of exam is explored with sensitivity. The anxiety and sleeplessness of the night before examination is shown as Swami tries to deflect his rising trepidation by making a list of his exam stationery requirements. The atmosphere of examination hall is grim and tension filled. After the examination the students speculate about the answers. On leaving the examination hall Swami begins to have doubts after hearing other’s responses. The reader begins to share his sense of error and mild panic. Though there are trepidations about the result, the joy of having finished the exam is great. Swami and his classmates welcome the summer holidays with a glorious, ink soaked celebration of freedom. As a middling student, the writer finds the

examinations a particular ordeal. Narayan expresses his dislike of exams in many essays. Through Swami, Narayan expresses the desperate nervousness and mental anguish one suffers at exam time.

ReligionIn E.L.M. school Narayan suffered because of religious intolerance for non-Christian students. Staffed by Christian coverts the school appears to have taken a somewhat proselytizing attitude towards its non Christian students. As Narayan was the only Brahmin boy in his class he suffered much unpleasantness from a teacher called Ebenezar. Swami too faces a fanatical scripture master called Ebenezar at the Albert Mission School in Malgudi, who regularly denigrated Hindu religion. When Swami tries to defend his faith he got his ears twisted for his effort. Swami‟s father writes an angry letter to the headmaster, which express the writer‟s own sentiments about fanaticism and which affects the value of religious tolerance. The letter from the father belongs to the realm of fiction.

Childhood FearIn childhood, fears, secrecies and furtive acts are necessary to survive in an adult dominated world. In his autobiography My Days Narayan recounts his fear of a fuel merchant who was famous for his belligerent traits and prowess in local forms of martial arts. One day young Narayan saw that merchant in his grandmother’s garden and hid behind a pile of clothes in his uncle’s study. As the evening develops, so does the child’s fear and resolution not to reveal himself to his supposed assailant. At last the fear of the dark obscures his other fears and he emerged before his distraught family. In Swami and Friends a similar figure emerges to terrorize a substantially older child. The son of the coachman cheated Swami of some money. His pugnacious appearance and possession of a penknife create cold fear in Swami. Like young Narayan, Swami also spent a tension ridden, terror- filled evening and finds it impossible to articulate his fears.

Pre-Independence EraNarayan’s observation and brief enlistment in the anti-imperial cause emerge as a theme in Swami and Friends as Swami participates in the freedom movement. Soon after the out break of the First World War in 1914, Madras experienced an early taste of hostilities. The advent of war brought about a quickening of the freedom movement. Student participation in the freedom movement emerged in Swami and Friends as Swami got caught in the political movement. Along with his friend Mani, Swami attends a public meeting in protest against the arrest of a prominent Bombay political leader. Swayed by the speaker’s powerful oratory, Swami flings his cap into a Swadeshi bonfire of foreign goods. In My Days Narayan tells about his own brief enlistment in the anti-imperialist cause through his participation in a procession „with patriotic songs and slogan shouting. Narayan’s uncle, an anti-politician, took strong exception in his nephew‟s political excursion and forbade his further involvement. Swami’s father similarly urges the schoolboy not to get involved.

GrandmotherRam & Ram point out that Swami‟s granny is the replica of the grandmother whom Narayan remembers from his childhood and who like Narayan‟s grandmother Ammani is shown to share her kindness and passion for storytelling. Raised by his grandmother, he formed a special bond with her. In his biography Narayan has repeatedly underscored his debt to his grandmother, describing her as „the most abiding influence‟ in his childhood. From Narayan‟s description in My Days, Ammani, appears like a traditional South Indian

grandmother while manifesting certain special qualities all her own. Narayan recreated Ammani in his Swami and Friends from his childhood memory. Swami‟s grandmother, notably more aged and frail then the Ammani of Narayan’s childhood, also share her kindness and her passion for story telling. This shows that grandmothers are the sanctuary or refuge, in times of upheaval, crisis or excitement. Swami, while impatient at his grandmother’s moods and limitations, nevertheless find solace in her physical closeness and stories.

FatherSwami‟s father, a lawyer, shares many traits of Krishna swami Iyer, Narayan’s own father. The fictional father‟s character shows a passion for education, strict paternal authority and some other interests like involvement in club activity; these are similar to Narayan’s own father. Through Swami and his father Narayan illustrate the distance that used to exist in father-son relationship at that time. In his father’s presence Swami displays wariness and apprehension. Swami greets his father’s departure from home with hope and his presence at home with trepidation. Narayan also had a similar attitude towards his father in his childhood. Later in the novel, Swami’s action of running away from home enables Narayan to explore deeper regions of father-son relationship. The caring and love a father feels for his son but is unable to openly express is shown in this novel. In this novel the attitude and expressions of adult characters like Swami’s father, his Granny, the Headmaster of the school and teachers are viewed through the eyes of a child.

MalgudiNarayan is the creator of the fictional town „Malgudi‟, which is the setting of all his novels. Malgudi is supposedly a small town in South India, which is situated on the bank of a river. Khatri says that Narayan‟s Malgudi represents South Indian semi-urban life, people and culture. In opinion Narayan has deliberately created a town for his novels, a semi-urban locale that has both the qualities of urban and rural India because Narayan is familiar with this location. He notes that Narayan drew a vivid picture of Malgudi with its past, present and a growing Malgudi which became a part of living tradition, a representation of the whole of India. Narayan says about Malgudi:

“I wanted to be able to put in whatever I liked, and wherever I liked – a little streetor school or a temple or a bungalow or even a slum, a railway line, at any spot, aminor despot in a little world.”

List of Literary works

Novels

o Swami and Friends (1935, Hamish Hamilton) o The Bachelor of Arts (1937, Thomas Nelson) o The Dark Room (1938, Eyre)

o The English Teacher (1945, Eyre)

o Mr. Sam path (1948, Eyre)o The Financial Expert (1952, Methuen) o Waiting for the Mahatma (1955, Methuen) o The Guide (1958, Methuen) o The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1961, Viking)

o The Vendor of Sweets (1967, The Boldly Head)o Swami and Friends (1935, Hamish Hamilton)o The Bachelor of Arts (1937, Thomas Nelson)o The Dark Room (1938, Eyre)o The English Teacher (1945, Eyre)o The Financial Expert (1952, Methuen)o Waiting for the Mahatma (1955, Methuen)o The Guide (1958, Methuen)o The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1961, Viking)o The Vendor of Sweets (1967, The Bodley Head)o The Painter of Signs (1977, Heinemann)o A Tiger for Malgudi (1983, Heinemann)o Talkative Man (1986, Heinemann)o The World of Nagaraj (1990, Heinemann)o Grandmother's Tale (1992, Indian Thought Publications)

Non-fiction

o Next Sunday (1960, Indian Thought Publications) o My Dateless Diary (1960, Indian Thought Publications)

o My Days (1974, Viking)o Reluctant Guru (1974, Orient Paperbacks) o The Emerald Route (1980, Indian Thought Publications)

o A Writer's Nightmare (1988, Penguin Books)o A Story-Teller's World (1989, Penguin Books) o The Writerly Life (2002, Penguin Books India)

o Mysore (1944, second edition, Indian Thought Publications)

Mythology

o Gods, Demons and Others (1964, Viking)o The Ramayana (1973, Chatto & Windus)o The Mahabharata (1978, Heinemann)

Short story collections

o Malgudi Days (1942, Indian Thought Publications)

o An Astrologer's Day and Other Stories (1947, Indian Thought Publications)o Lawley Road and Other Stories (1956, Indian Thought Publications)

o A Horse and Two Goats (1970)o Under the Banyan Tree and Other Stories (1985)

o The Grandmother's Tale and Selected Stories (1994, Viking)

Chapter- III

Character Analysis

Raju

Raju is the protagonist of the story. He was born in a fictional town named Malgudi, he belongs to a middle class family, He lives with his mother as his father died when Raju was very young and he became the only bread earner in his family. But Raju was very smart, he grows his father's shop and side by side he was performing his role as a guide because Railways always fascinates him. Later he became popular among tourists with the name "Railway Raju".

Raju was surprised when he met Marco and Rosie and came to know that Marco was interested in caves and acrobatics and not in Rosie. Then, he became sympathetic to Rosie. But later Raju's interest in Rosie was reduced to material comforts. He becomes greedy because of the money he was earning through Rosie's dance and after that, he got arrested on the charge of forgery.

Raju is a materialist and a man of surface emotions. He does not believe in old cultures. Social responsibility is none of his concern. But on the other hand, he was a kind-hearted man. It is his kindness for Rosie that he accepts her, and for villagers for whom he fasted for twelve days, for Marco that even after his release from jail he did not try to take revenge from Marco.

From the beginning of the story, he always making fool of people but when he saw people were fighting and killing others, just for food and water. He got attached to their emotions and he feels their pain. It leads to his enlightenment and he becomes a real holy man.

Raju’s Mother

Raju’s mother is a traditional Indian woman. She was the only one who took care of Raju when his husband left. She is a positive woman who loves everyone. She permits Rosie to live with them even after she knew that Rosie belongs to a low-class dancer family. But she is a woman who gives society a certain importance and she was bounded by the societal rules. That is why she forces Rosie to leave her house but when Raju did not let it happen, then she leaves and lives with his brother. It shows that she was devoted to society,

Rosie

Rosie is the daughter of a dancer and therefore belongs to a lower caste. She did not marriage Marco out of love but because of his social status. She was fond of dancing. Later on, she attains popularity as a dancer by performing on the stage. Due to her devotion and hard work she attains a greater recognition as a dancer than her husband gets as a scholar. She is a woman of independent mind and thinking. She is ambitious. At times she appears to be a mature woman but at other, she behaves like a child. She is more of a dreamer than real. Materialism is not of her concern. She is an agitated soul and suffers from an inferiority complex because of her low birth. At last, she decides to live alone, abandoning Raju also.

Marco

Marco is Rosie's husband. He expected from his wife understanding, mature behavior and capacity to live independently. She wants love from Marco but he had no time even for looking to the needs of his wife. He never respects her desires as she always wanted to be a dancer. Marco hates dancing and he always insults her by calling her daughter of a dancer and she felt inferior to him despite her education. However, he is very honest and sincere scholar. His sincerity towards his work leads him to get his book published. He left jewelry for Rosie even when he knows that she already left him and not going to live with him. Marco is an unsuccessful husband but a successful scholar.

Velan

Velan is a superstitious man who believes in saints and miracles because during 60s of 20th century India, most of the villagers believe in these things, they think only God or their disciple can save them from their poverty, and other calamities. Velan was expecting the same from Raju. He is a good friend of Raju, but he got blind by the edification and preaches of Raju, he still believed in Raju when he told the truth of his past life, and he said It does not matter what a man was instead what matters the most is what a man is. It shows his immense faith in Raju.

Velan’s sister

Velan's Sister is the third woman character in the novel. She is a minor character but she played a major role in Raju's life of a saint. It was she who makes Raju popular in the village

by accepting the proposal of the groom that his brother chooses for her. This transformation surprised Velan and confirms him that Raju is a holy man.

Gaffur

Chauffeur and a good friend of Raju.

Chapter- IV

Themes of The Guide

The Guide by R. K. Narayan is a multi-themed book. I have read this book twice and wrote reviews of it on several books review on websites. Well, many critics say that it is all about conflict of nature/interests which is only one theme of the book. The most important themes of this novel of this novel are given below-

Generation Gap:

Raju was the protagonist of the book who loved to wander here and there. On the contrary, his father had a small shop. His father was a small-minded but a hardworking man. When Raju deferred in studies, he placed Raju on the shop. Later when the railway lines were constructed near the shop area, the shop got shifted onto the platform. After the death of his father, he sat there reluctantly and soon took tour guide as his profession. And he became famous by the name: The Railway Raju.

Raju always considered his parents unambitious and short sighted. Thus, when he fell in love with a married lady Rosie, he kept it hidden from his mother. And when Rosie came to his home for help and started living, his mother raised eyebrows and became susceptible and soon called his brother from the native place. Overall, there was no trust in the family. Probably, parents knew that their only son was turning bluff master.

Tourist Psychology:

Raju has been showed shrewd since the start of the novel. He would never let go any opportunity of making money from the tourists. Over the time, he developed a sense of smelling the financial status of the visiting tourists, this he did by asking a few questions about staying or visiting Malgudi, noticing the type of compartment the tourist had travelled in, the type of suitcase they carried and of course the dressing of tourists and their family members. He paid attention to rich ones and prompted them to stay longer so that he could make good money from them. And to small or stingy travelers, he never cared to lose them or misguide them.

Status of Women in the Society:

Rosie was an excellent dancer and she always craved for it even after her marriage to Marco, a very studious man who had come to Malgudi to study the caves. He remained so lost in his work that the beauty of Rosie was a thing of ordinary interest to him. But why and how did he marry Rosie or vice versa. Rosie came from a dancing family background: she used to be a temple dancer girl and when she saw the marriage advertising in a newspaper her family found that the groom was simple and of course rich. So they all forced her to go into the marriage with him. And after marriage Marco insisted her not to take up dancing in any ways as a term to the marriage life. Marco, more than a wife, needed someone to have had company and sex with a beautiful woman, it was subtle but evident.

When Raju saw the gaps in their marriage life, he entered and made Rosie his lover and took her into the field of dancing and also made her a dancing superstar. Through her, he made himself rich and led a comfortable life.

Literature Review of “The Guide”

Perhaps the most remarkable example of the difficult genre the serious comedy to which R.K Narayan’s novels belongs to The Guide 1958..it seems to me not only his best but shows the qualityies of characters clearly The Guide of the novel is the very human Raju ,ex shopkeeper, ex lover of Rosie, ex tourist guide or is the tourned by the people desperate for rain in the midst of a drought into a Messiah. Not of course that Narayan’s attitude simply one of completive gentleness. It includes too, considerable daftness in moral analysis, considerable and confused territories of sincerity. One can not attempt without damage to both idea from the detail and yet one’s awareness at any place in the novel is intimately effected by the presence, sometimes insistence, sometimes fainter, of this controlling conception.

_______William Walsh

From the start of the novel we feel the presence, the tactful effective presence of the idea shaping the density of the detail. We feel the detail, solid, convincing and natural conception.

“The man stood gazing reverentially on his face Raju felt amused and embarrassed. It is Raju’s Faith to be the product of other people’s conviction. In his nature there is developed to the point of extremity what exists in all of us to some degree- the quality of suggestibility desires of others. Yielding responsive part in most of us is limited by an unyielding core of self, it operates only so far as the bias of a nature allows but in Raju it is the centre of nature as an influence at his face of his odd carer”.

_______William Walsh

Narayan returns to a non political story in “The Guide” (19958) which has been acclaimed by many of his finest novel. Here his comedy is at its serious and irony in effectively used. Though it stands apart in start relief from his other novel. Narayan makes it clear that Rosie is utterly self-centered and that Marco is a dangerous man to cross. But raju blind by his infatuation with Rosie, ruins his life and through Marco’s vindictiveness, lands up in prison. When he becomes a holy man indeed. Raju seeing the logic as well as the irony of his gesture and dies just as the rain begin. The Guide is a tragic treatment of the theme of innocence betrayed leading to corruption and redemption. But in this novel Raju can never return to his old life, to his job as “Railway Raju” The guide. Instead he becomes a ‘spiritual guide’ and ambiguously, a fraud turned honest whose impersonation turns into a genuine act of self sacrificial virtue.

_____H.M William.

Synopsis of The Guide 

Published in 1958, The Guide begins as a comic look at the life of a rogue, but develops into something different in its progression. In a fairly compact and concise manner the book conveys the numerous aspects of the day-to-day lives of India people. The different culture systems, the superstitions and values of the people of a small town named Malgudi serve as a reflection on Indian society altogether. 

The Guide is set at the background of Malgudi, R. K. Narayan's make-believe place in southern India. The novel is told through a series of flashbacks. Raju is the hero of the story who grows up near a railway station and eventually becomes a shopkeeper. Later he becomes a resourceful tourist guide. He meets Rosie and her husband. Rosie is a beautiful dancer. Her husband Marco is a scholar and anthropologist and is more interested in his research than in his young wife Rosie. As the story progresses the guide falls in love with Rosie and starts to live with her. He loses all his money and inspires Rosie to start dancing and he becomes his manager. But he cannot forget his habit and is one day caught red handed while forging Rosie's signature to sell one of her necklace. He stays in jail for two years. After returning from imprisonment he decides not to go to Malgudi. He arrives at a village wherein a local villager, Velan notices his simply draped garments and immediately creates an impression that Raju is a saint. Raju, however, decides to continue residing in the village as going back to his native village would shower him with renewed disgrace. Therefore he accepts the food offered affectionately by the villagers and enjoys the whole process. The irony of the story is a drought that occurs in the village. Raju takes a 12-day fast on people request. After many days of his fasting in one fine morning when he goes to the riverside for his daily rituals his

legs sag down and he feels it is raining in the hillside. The ending of the novel is a bit confusing as it leaves an unfinished end of Raju's death or end of drought. 

Chapter-V

The Guide

The Guide is the most popular novel of R.K. Narayan. It was published in 1958, and won the Sahitya Academy Award for 1960. It has also been filmed and the film has always drawn packed-houses.

It recounts the adventures of a railway guide, popularly known as ‘Railway Raju’. As a tourist guide he is widely popular. It is this profession which brings him in contact with Marco and his beautiful wife, Rosie. While the husband is busy with his archaeological studies, Raju seduces his wife and has a good time with her. Ultimately Marco comes to know of her affair with Raju and goes away to Madras leaving Rosie behind. Rosie comes and stays with Raju in his one-room house. His mother tolerates her for some time, but when things become unbearable, she calls her brother and goes away with him, leaving Raju to look after Rosie and the house.

Rosie is a born dancer, she practices regularly and soon Raju finds an opening for her. In her very first appearance, she is a grand success. Soon she is very much in demand and their earnings increase enormously. Raju lives lavishly, entertains a large number of friends with whom he drinks and gambles. All goes well till Raju forges Rosie’s signatures to obtain valuable jewellery lying with her husband. The act lands him in jail. Rosie leaves Malgudi and goes away to Madras, her hometown. She goes on with her dancing and does well without the help and management of Raju, of which he was so proud.

On release from jail, Raju takes shelter in a deserted temple on the banks of the river Sarayu, a few miles away from Malgudi, and close to the village called Mangla. The simple villagers take him to be a Mahatma, begin to worship him, and bring him a lot of eatables as presents. Raju is quite comfortable and performs the role of a saint to perfection.

However, soon there is a severe famine drought, and the villagers expect Raju to perform some miracle to bring them rain. So he has to undertake a fast. The fast attracts much attention and people come to have darshan of the Mahatma from far and wide. On the twelfth day of the fast, Raju falls down exhausted just as there are signs of rain on the distant horizon. It is not certain if he is actually dead or merely fainted. Thus the novel comers to an 1

abrupt close on a note of ambiguity.

The last pages of Narayan’s best novel, The Guide, find Raju, the chief protagonist, at the end of a lifetime of insincerity and pain. As a professional guide to Malgudi’s environs, he invented whole new historical pasts for bored tourists; he seduced a married woman, drifted away from his old mother and friends, became a flashy cultural promoter, and then tried, absentmindedly, to steal and was caught and spent years in jail, abandoned by everyone.

His last few months have been spent in relative comfort as a holy man on the banks of a river: a role imposed on him by reverential village folk. But the river dries up after a drought and

his devotees start looking to him to intercede with the gods. Raju resentfully starts a fast, but furtively eats whatever little food he has saved. Then abruptly, out of a moment of self disgust, comes his resolution: for the first time in his life, he will do something with complete sincerity, and he will do it for others: if fasting can bring rain, he’ll fast.

He stops eating, and quickly diminishes. News of his efforts goes around; devotees and sightseers, gathering at the riverside, create a religious occasion out of the fast. On the early morning of the eleventh day of fasting, a small crowd watches him quietly as he attempts to pray standing on the river bed and then staggers and dies, mumbling the enigmatic last words of the novel, “It’s raining in the hills. I can feel it coming up under my feet, up my legs….”

Characteristically, Narayan doesn’t make it clear whether Raju’s penance does actually lead to rain. He also doesn’t make much of Raju’s decision, the moment of his redemption, which a lesser writer would have attempted to turn into a resonant ending, but which is quickly passed over here in a few lines. What we know, in a moment of great disturbing beauty, is something larger and more affecting than the working-out of an individual destiny in an inhospitable world.

It is and the words are of the forgotten English writer William Gerhardie, on Chekhov, but so appropriate for Narayan that sense of the temporary nature of our existence on this earth at all events…through which human beings, scenery, and even the very shallowness of things, are transfigured with a sense of disquieting importance.

It is a sense of temporary possession in a temporary existence that, in the face of the unknown, we dare not overvalue. It is as if his people hastened to express their worthless individualities, since that is all they have, and were aghast that they should have so little in them to express: since the expression of it is all there. Raju was the protagonist of the book who loved to wander here and there. On the contrary, his father had a small shop. His father was a small-minded but a hardworking man. When Raju deferred in studies, he placed Raju on the shop. Later when the railway lines were constructed near the shop area, the shop got shifted onto the platform. After the death of his father, he sat there reluctantly and soon took tour guide as his profession. And he became famous by the name: The Railway Raju.

Raju always considered his parents unambitious and short sighted. Thus, when he fell in love with a married lady Rosie, he kept it hidden from his mother. And when Rosie came to his home for help and started living, his mother raised eyebrows and became susceptible and soon called his brother from the native place. Overall, there was no trust in the family. Probably, parents knew that their only son was turning bluff master.

Chapter- VI

Plot Review of The Guide

Railway Raju (nicknamed) is a disarmingly corrupt tour guide who is famous among tourists. He falls in love with a beautiful dancer, Rosie, the neglected wife of archaeologist Marco. Marco doesn't approve of Rosie's passion for dancing. Rosie, encouraged by Raju, decides to follow her dreams and start a dancing career. They start living together, but Raju's mother doesn't approve their relationship, and leaves them. Raju becomes Rosie's stage manager and soon, with the help of Raju's marketing tactics, Rosie becomes a successful dancer. Raju, however, develops an inflated sense of self-importance and tries to control her life. He wants to build as much wealth as possible. Raju gets involved in a case of forgery and gets a two-year sentence. After completing the sentence, Raju passes through a village where he is mistaken for a sadhu (a spiritual guide). Since he doesn't want to return in disgrace to Malgudi, he decides to stay in an abandoned temple, close to the village. There is a famine in the village and Raju is expected to keep a fast in order to make it rain. Raju confesses the entire truth about his past to Velan, who had developed a complete faith in Raju like the rest of the villagers. With media publicizing his fast, a huge crowd gathers (much to Raju's resentment) to watch him fast. After fasting for several days, he goes to the riverside one morning as part of his daily ritual, where his legs sag down as he feels that the rain is falling in the hills. The ending of the novel leaves unanswered the question of whether he died, and whether the drought ended.

The Guide: SummaryThe novel focuses on the life and growth of Raju. Born in Malgudi, Raju was the son of a sweet-shop owner. Raju learns how to run his father’s shop and continues their family business after his father passes away. Raju is a very adaptable person and becomes whatever people and life want him to become.

With little to no professional training, but owing to his knowledge of local landmarks and buildings, he soon becomes a tour guide at the railway station in Malgudi. Raju’s pleasing personality and his interpersonal skills allow him to win the trust and admiration of those who meet him at the station, hence earning the nickname “Railway Raju’’

Tempted by the material pleasures like money and comfort, Raju soon finds himself drawn to another source of pleasure – Rosie. Rosie is the wife of Marco, an archaeologist obsessed with ancient art forms. Marco and Rosie visit Malgudi and meet Raju as a guide.

Rosie’s and Marco’s marriage is an unhappy marriage. Marco seems to be unfriendly towards Rosie and dismisses her passion for dance, calling it a shallow profession for harlots. Raju realizes that Rosie must’ve married Marco only for his money. Taking advantage of this weak marriage, Raju uses his tempting words on Rosie and starts a love affair with her.

He appreciates her dance. Rosie becomes a famous dancer in cosmopolitan circles because of her talent and Raju’s impressive marketing skills as her manager. They both start living together. Raju’s mother does not approve of this and she ultimately leaves the house to go live with her brother. However, greed takes over Raju, which leads to his fall. Marco sends jewelry for Rosie, tempted, by which Raju forges her signature – thinking that no one would be able to catch him. But Marco recognizes this forgery and Raju is jailed for 2 years.

After he’s freed from prison, Raju is reluctant to go back to Malgudi because he’ll be disgraced there as a former prisoner. He spends his time, confused where to go, in a village called Mangal, where a simpleton named Velan mistakes him as a spiritual guru. Velan is fully convinced of Raju being a guru, even when Raju reveals his entire life story Velan’s sister, who has refused to marry as per the family’s wishes, is brought to Raju. Raju successfully convinces her to marry as per the elders’ wishes and hence furthers the idea of him being an enlightened personality.

Mangal villagers soon ask Raju to perform a fast to end the famine that has been severely affecting their village. Since they believe he is a guru, the villagers think that if Raju fasts as a ritual to appease the rain gods, it will surely rain and hence the famine will be over.

Accepting this responsibility, Raju begins the ritual. Each day, although he remains hungry, he finds within himself a new sense of fulfillment. His body grows weaker day by day, to the point where he can’t even walk without the villagers’ support, but this bodily impoverishment is accompanied by an emotional delight. Raju’s death is bittersweet and the ending of the novel is not a definitive one but is rather open to interpretation. Raju asks the villagers to take him to the river, where he used to visit daily as a part of his ritual, and there he utters his final words,

“Velan, it’s raining in the hills. I can feel it coming up under my feet, up my legs.”

Symbolism in The Guide, by R. K. Narayan

R. K. Narayan’s The Guide is often considered to be a realistic depiction of the Indian society at the time of her independence. The novel nevertheless incorporates symbolism as one of its major stylistic features: Raju, Rosie, Marco and various other characters are symbolically presented to enrich Narayan’s descriptions of the Indian society and characterizations of its people. Raju is defined by the symbolic function of the guide, from tourist guide to Rosie’s career guide to a spiritual guide. Raju functions well as a guide, for integrating sociability with affability; he manifests the essential qualities of an effective guide in all his transitions, articulate and intelligent. As a character of marked quality, Raju has the ability to adapt in his new situation, for he has “a kind of water-diviner’s instinct” about the right word or action in any situation. Nevertheless, the symbol of the guide is parodied and applied to an ironic effect here this guide misguides others, and is later misguided himself. It must not be forgotten that despite his articulation, Raju fails to carry out his moral obligations as a guide: he behaves irresponsibly to the tourists, whom he misguides and lies to Marco, whom he deceives, and Rosie, whom he also misleads “I never said, ‘I don’t know’ instead, I said, ‘Oh, yes, a fascinating place’…I am sorry I said it, an utter piece of falsehood. It was not because I wanted to utter a falsehood, but only because I wanted to be pleasant”. Furthermore, he almost betrays the villagers’ faith before finally being misguided into a thicket from which he cannot extricate himself: “he realized that he had no alternative: he must play the role Velan had given him.” This guide no longer performs the role of affording guidance for others, for he himself is forced to seek guidance he is forced to perform a role chosen and dictated by the villagers. Indeed, the symbolic function of the guide at the end is heightened by the irony Raju himself is misguided into undertaking the ritual fast that costs his life.

In the same way as the symbolism of Raju as the guide, the snake and the metaphor of dance are equally symbolic of Rosie’s character. In the novel, Rosie’s symbolic association with

snake is vividly manifested in Raju’s descriptions. Violence against women in R.K. Narayan’s ‘The Guide’

The United Nation Commission on the status of women defines Violence against women as any act of gender-based violence that results in physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts as Coercion or arbitrary deprivations of liberty, whether occurring in private or public life. Indian society is a male dominated society and the idea of women’s subservience prevails. Interestingly, male supremacy is widely accepted by female themselves. For an average Indian woman Manu’s law still defines her position and role. It says: “As daughters women should obey their fathers, as wives obey their husbands, and as widows obey their sons.” Before making analysis of the treatment of violence against women in the present novel, it will not he out of place to consider, in brief, what violence is. According to concise Oxford Dictionary, the word “Violence” is derived from two roots in Latin: (i) Violent us and (ii) Violates. Violent us is an adjectival term meaning ‘forcible’ vehement or impetuous, and concerns itself with the state of the agent who is acting rather than the consequence of the action. In this sense ‘Violence’ is primarily a descriptive term. Violare is used as a verb, and means ‘to injure’, ‘to dishonor’, ‘to outrage’ or ‘to violate’. It takes into account the consequence or the effect of the concerned action. On the basis of this etymology the same dictionary defines the term ‘Violence’ to have following meanings: 1. the exercise of the physical force so as to inflict injury or cause damage to person or property; 2. to inflict harm or injury upon a person; 3. An act of infringement in the form of distortion, repudiation or irreverence to a person or a thing; 4. Undue constraint applied to some natural process so as to prevent its free development or exercise. Violence may as well be psychological or emotional, and this kind of violence consists in injury or trauma caused to someone’s thinking, emotions or person.

Great thinkers and philosophers have, after deep study of the mind of man, come to the conclusion that violence is thoroughly innate and natural to man. Indeed, man is a child of conflict, being torn all through his life between opposite sentiments and passions within him, and batting against a hostile world, in order to preserve his identity and economic stability. Violence is pervasive in the social psychology of human beings, not only because, in them, the tendency to it is stronger than to harmony, but because it has a stronger demonstrative effect than peace and co-existence. Violence, both physical and psychological, has therefore come to be a permanent condition of mankind. Violence as we all know is the extreme form of aggressive behavior. We must, therefore, find out the sources of aggression in order to understand violence Lorenz explains aggression in terms of a “fighting instinct” in man. Storrs is rather emphatic in saying that “aggression is a drive as innate, as natural and as powerful as sex-in-man, as in other animals. The aggressive drive is an inherited constant of which we cannot rid ourselves, and which is absolutely necessary for survival” But all aggressive behavior can not be termed as violent. It depends on whether the aggressive act violates commonly accepted social norms or supports them. Any act which violates

commonly accepted social norms will be called violent. Violence occurs when some potentiality for good receives injury or when some-one suffers an indignity as a free being. Narayan in The Guide grapples with a woman who is surer of herself, more sure of her desires and the way of fulfilling them, of completing herself. She ceases to be quivering jelly of emotions that society had got accustomed to. When she introduces an element of volition, of choice, of thought, sex and imagination, she has to confront the male dominated cultural milieu which looks askance at the woman’s independence. Marco, a scholar with a consuming passion for deciphering old historical frescoes, is married to Rosie who is an educated curvaceous cute with a modem look on the world. She has broken off from a long line of Devdasis. Her mother, grandmother and her great grandmother have been temple dancers. In spite of her formal change from Devdasi to the modern Rosie, her essence does not change. She is still unconsciously bound to her heritage. The static and dry life of a scholar repels her. Movement in nature fascinates her. Her rapture knows no bounds at the sight of a playful Cobra. Its movement awakens her suppressed life. She wants to be out in the world to absorb herself in its color, variety and movement. Marco is content to see beneath the rocks and cold frescoes on the walls. He always remained too busy in his art to spare time in sharing little pleasures of life with her. He has neither respect for her desires, not for her instincts. He treated her coldly and sometimes cruelly. Dancing is in Rosie’s blood, but Marco does not allow her to develop her art of dancing. The word dance always stung him. Rosie is obsessed with her ambition to be a dancer and the more she showed it, the more he hated her for it. Feeling frustrated, she snatches off her relation with Marco and. tries to establish relation with Raju who pays a lot of attention to her beauty and her art of dancing. “Movement of the blocked desire starts between the peak house and room no 28 in a hotel at Malgudi. The peak house provokes their desire and room No. 28 consummates it. Later she repents on her deed and asks Marco to forgive, her. She confesses to him, I have come to apologies sincerely. I want to say I will do whatever you ask me to do. I committed a blunder....But Marco treats her most cruelly. He completely ignores her presence. Narrating the incident to Raju, Rosie tells, “He returned and went about his business without worrying about me. But I followed him, day after day, like a dog waiting on his grace. He ignored me totally. I could never imagine that one human being could ignore the presence of another human being so completely.” Marco accepts no explanation, not even penitence and leaves Rosie determinedly. The derelict Rosie has no choice but to stick on to make her fortune with Raju. Here again she is exploited by Raju to the utmost possibility. He first gratifies his sexual lust, and when he catches the slightest doubt that Rosie may not be interested in him anymore, he again comes back to appreciate her dancing, an appreciation that she sorely needs as an ego boost, says he: I found out the clue to her affection and utilized it to the utmost. Her art and her husband could not find a place in her thoughts at the same time, one drove the other out. On Raju’s suggestion Rosie becomes Nalini. i.e. commerce is given priority over sex. The lover turns into a man who looks upon her as a gold mine, a valuable possession. She is sought to be transformed into a tool of commercial success. She is a commodity to Raju rather than a person with her own aspirations. He himself confesses, “But I took care to see that no one saw her. I had a monopoly on her and nobody had anything to do with her.” The greater the Rosie’s success, “The greater the Rosie’s success, the more aggressive Raju’s conceit becomes. As his greed for wealth and status grows, he becomes

increasingly selfish and possessive in his attitude to Rosie. He commits the ‘Cardinal Hindu mistake of falling in to the trap of Maya.” He wants Rosie to be happy but only in his company. He does not tolerate Rosie laughing in the company of other. He takes maximum care to prevent Rosie’s interaction with other people. During one of her performances when they are guests in a home and Rosie is happy in chatting with women-folk of the house. Raju does not allow her to do this even. Rosie is hurt and irritated at this interference: Why should you come and pull me out of company? Am I a baby? Raju has deprived her of liberty, both in private and public life. He likes to keep her in citadel. His mercenaries led him to keep Rosie engaged. He accepts engagements without her permission. He never asks Rosie whether to accept an engagement or not. She goes through a set of mechanical actions. She fell sick of all this. She longs for the common pleasures of life. She wants to go into a crowd, walk about and wants to stay out for an evening without having makeup or dress for the stage. She is fed up with the monotony of her shows. She says: I feel like one of those parrots in a cage taken around village fairs, or a performing monkey. She resents being treated as a commodity. Commercialization of her art has degenerated her life into a circus life. She has visualized it as something different. She is forced to go through such busy hectic schedule that she compares herself to the bulls yoked to an oil crusher going round and round, in circle. She has to keep dancing without a beginning or an end. Raju’s manipulation reaches its highest point when he forges Rosie’s signature in order to obtain a box of her jewellery from the Bank. Raju is arrested for this crime. Rosie arranges for his bail. Despite Rosie’s machine like routine as a dancer, there is not enough money in her account to arrange for the bail money. Raju has lived as a parasite on her. He wasted all her money in luxurious living. Despite her unwillingness, Rosie has to go for the performances for which Raju has taken advance. She feels much hurt and shattered. In this shattered state Rosie reveals suicidal tendency: I think the best solution for all concerned would be to be done with the business of living. I mean both of us. A dozen sleeping pills in a glass of milk, or two glasses of milk. Another female character in the novel. Raju’s mother is also in no better position. She is also hurt emotionally by her own son. Raju plays with his mother’s sentiments. Despite her warning he goes on with his relations with Rosie. The presence of an ill reputed woman appears to the traditional mother a taint on the ancestral home. The tradition of the primitive home clashes violently with the modernity of the westernized India. The ancestral home is surrendered to Raju and Rosie, and mother lives with her brother. When mother comes into know about the fact that Raju and Rosie are shifting to another house, she expresses her desire to come back to her husband’s house. But Raju does not care a bit for her wish. He himself is now living a luxurious life but he is not ready to pay rent for her. He has enough time for Rosie but he does not have time for his mother. No doubt, he sometimes sends her money, hut does not arrange for her stay in the house: “To have mother live in the house, I should have to pay rent to the sait. Who would look after her I was so busy.” The intensity of his involvement with Rosie is such that he keeps his mother away from the house which is a very shocking experience for her. She is emotionally attached with the house because her husband has made it with his own hands. Not just this, with his act of forgery’, he hurts his mothers sentiments to such an extent that of sheer desperation she says to him in the court: “I used to think that the worst that could happen to you might be death, as when you had that phneurnonia for weeks; but I now wish that rather than survive and go through this...” She

was so extremely hurt, she could not complete the sentence, she broke down and went along the corridor. From the above analysis, it becomes clear that though there is no physical violence against women in the present novel but there is violence on emotional and psychological level. They are hurt emotionally and psychologically

The Conflict between Tradition and Modernity in “The Guide”

East-West conflict is a major theme in R. K. Narayan’s novels. This paper is an attempt to delineate the conflict between tradition and modernity–one of the aspects of East-West conflict–in Narayan’s magnum opus The Guide.

The Guide was written between 1956 and 1958 when he was in the United States. It was first published in Great Britain in 1958 by Methuen & Co. Ltd. and in the U. S. by Viking. Its 61st

reprint appeared in 2006. That reveals the popularity and greatness of the book.

The Guide is the autobiography of Raju, who is in turn a rail road station food vendor, a tourist guide, a sentimental adulterer, a dancing girl’s manager, a swindler, a jail-bird and a martyred mystic. It follows Raju along a curiously braided time sequence. After describing the early life and education of Raju, the author shows how Malgudi became a railway station and how Raju became the owner of a railway stall and came to be tourist guide. Trying to help a rich visitor, Marco, the archeologist, in his researches, Raju is involved in a tangle of new relationships. Rosie, Marco’s wife, becomes Raju’s lover. Abandoned by Marco, Rosie realized, with Raju’s help, her ambition of becoming a dancer. But Raju’s possessive instinct finally betrays him into a criminal action, and he is charged and convicted for forgery. Coming out of the jail, he cuts off all connection with the past and sets up as a sort of ascetic. Once again he is caught in the coils of his own self-deception, and he is obliged to undertake a twelve-day fast to end a drought that threatens the district with a famine. In vain he tells his chief ‘disciple’ Velan the whole truth about himself and Rosie, and about the crash and incarceration. But nobody believes that he is anyone other than a saint. He has made his bed, and he must perforce lie on it. The reader is free to infer that, on the last day of the fast, he dies opportunely, a martyr. Does it really rain, or is it only Raju’s optical delusion? Does he really die, or merely sinks down in exhaustion? Has the lie really become the truth, or has it been merely exposed? The reader is free to conclude as he likes.

The story of The Guide develops along a bewildering succession of time shifts. Since Narayan was in touch with South Indian film industry he applied cinematic techniques of jump out, flash back, flash forward and montage in his plot construction. Thus the novel has an episodic structure rather than the linear plot of the more usual kind of novel, where the story moves in a singly cohesive curve from the beginning through the middle to the end. The unconventional plot of The Guide circles freely in time and space, both within and between chapters, moving from the past to the present and back again, and from Malgudi to the Mempi Hills to Mangal in a seemingly random way. Modern European and American novels influenced the novelists of Indian Writing in English and Narayan was no exception. Thus the Western fictional paradigms of bildungsroman and picaresque narrative are evident in The Guide. In fact The Guide is a bildungsroman of a rogue.

In his essay “The Reluctant Guru” Narayan recounts his constant resistance to the role that seemed to be foisted on him—the role of an authentic exponent of the mystic East, a guru or a sage, a role that he was most uncomfortable with, but which he could not entirely shake off.

Going by the flimsy evidence of texts like The English Teacher and The Guide, his audience often demanded doses of Indian spirituality and mysticism from him. Narayan confesses “I felt myself in the same situation as Raju, the hero of my Guide who was mistaken for a saint and began to wonder at some point himself if sudden effulgence has begun to show on his face.” Narayan is even telephoned by enthusiasts in the wee hours of the morning because it is assumed that he would be up and meditating at 4: 00 a. m.; he is asked if he can communicate with spirits; he is asked to predict the future; he is even importuned to help an earnest diasporic devotee attain a vision of the Goddess Kali!. In response to such mistaken adulation, this is what Narayan had to say to his class: “Your search is for a Foundation Grant. The young person in my country would sooner learn now to organize a business or manufacture an atom bomb or an automobile than how to stand on one’s head.” We cannot be in any doubt as to what Narayan meant: the “realities” of India were quite different from the images that the Americans had of them. Narayan himself was also quite different from what Velan and others projected on him.

The title “Reluctant Guru” is also well-suited to Raju, the protagonist. Raju, like Narayan, is a most reluctant Guru. Raju has been called a guide, not a guru, because Narayan wishes to underscore, even problematize, the very difficulties of such a traditional appellation and function. “Indeed it would almost seem that Narayan wishes to tone down “guru,” which etymologically conveys the idea of heavy, to something lighter, or Laghu in calling Raju a guide. But the crucial question is whether the slighter, lighter, or more ironic title of guide makes a real difference in the end”.

Rosie, Velan, Raju’s mother and uncle, Gaffur, the driver, Joseph, the steward of the bungalow where Marco stayed are all characters exhibiting the traditional Indian culture and ethos. Raju and Marco, on the contrary, bear features of Western or Modern culture and manners. Thus the conflict between tradition and modernity or influence of one over the other is evident in the behaviour and conversation of these characters throughout the novel. Some such situations where traditional or modern elements are visible in the characters are portrayed below:

“It was customary or traditional among the Hindus to bow low and touch the feet of elders and venerable persons. But Raju, after his release from the prison, and sitting lonely on the river steps, did not allow the villager, Velan to do so. To quote from the text: “Velan rose, bowed low, and tried to touch Raju’s feet. Raju recoiled at the attempt. ‘I’ll not permit anyone to do this. God alone is entitled to such a prostration. He will destroy us if we attempt to usurp His rights”

Rosie though a post-graduate is never a modern woman. She is not corrupted with modern and materialistic values. She is a traditional Indian wife, longs for affection and care from her husband. She cannot cope up with the archeological interests of her husband, Marco. Marco dislikes being disturbed by anyone, even his wife in his studies and professional activities. Rather he longs for appreciation from his wife. This difference in wave-length is the cause of quarrel between Rosie and Marco. Joseph, the steward of the bungalow where Marco stays for his professional work, reads Marco well and has all praise for him. He tells Raju when Raju asked him if Marco bothers him in any way, “Oh, no, he is a gem. A good man; would be even better if his wife left him alone. He was no happy without her. Why did you bring her back? She seems to be a horrible nagger”

When Marco deserted Rosie and took train to Madras, she came to Raju’s house for shelter. Seeing her coming to the house alone in the evening Raju’s mother was wonderstruck. To quote from the text:

The very first question she asked was, ‘Who has come with you, Rosie?’ Rosie blushed, hesitated and looked at me. I moved a couple of steps backward in order that she might see me only dimly and not in all raggedness. I replied, ‘I think she has come alone, mother.’

My mother was amazed. ‘Girls today! How courageous you are! In our day we wouldn’t go to the street corner without an escort. And I have been to the market only once in my life, when Raju’s father was alive.’

The difference in attitude, as well as the temperament is seen here. Raju’s mother is a traditional Hindu woman who is denied public exposure. She was prohibited and hence afraid to go out alone, whereas Rosie is a modern woman. The western influence is evident in her attitude, behavior and temperament. She is not all afraid to go out alone.

Is Raju a real saint or is he a fake? This question has exercised most readers of the novel ever since its publication. Sally Appleton in the review titled “The Ambiguous Man,” which appeared in Commonweal Magazine, a few weeks after the novel’s publication observes: “The author must decide whether or not holiness will work. . . . The author abandons the reader to choose arbitrarily whether or not, as Raju sinks into the muddy river bed, he is dying, whether or not, as the water rises to Raju’s knees, it rises because “it’s raining in the hills” or because Raju himself is sagging into it. It is not surprising that critics are divided on this question. C. D. Narasimhaiah considers Raju a transformed man in the end, a saint, whereas G. S. Balarama Gupta believes that Raju is a selfish swindler, an adroit actor, and a perfidious megalomaniac. To quote Para jape again.

The question is not so much whether Raju is a willing saint or not because, like all of us, every one within the novel notices Raju’s reluctance, even his unfitness for gurudom. But does that really change who or what he ends up becoming? So what we have here is a real problem, one that leads us to the crux of Narayan’s artistry and to his relationship to Indian modernity. Because if Raju is a fake, Narayan is putting into doubt not just an individual but the institution of guru itself.”

It is the belief of village people of Mangal that it will rain and thus put an end to the drought if a true sanyasi does genuine fasting for twelve days. It is a belief prevalent among the Hindus as such in India. Whether that people have direct experience of this miracle or not, does not lessen their faith in it. It might be only hearsay, something popularized by the Brahmin priests for their exploitation of the people. Narayan only wants to portray such beliefs and rites prevailing among his people. He does not want to glorify or condemn such beliefs. There is no clear hint at the end of the novel whether it rained. Rather one has to doubt it based on the description of the topography. The narration of the last paragraph of novel is as follows:

“He got up feet. He had to be held by Velan and another on each side. In the profoundest silence the crowd followed at a solemn, silent pace. The eastern sky was red. Many in the camp were still sleeping. Raju could not walk, but, he insisted upon pulling himself along the same. He panted with the effort. He went down the steps of the river, halting for breath on each step, and finally reached the

basin of water. He stepped into it, shut his eyes, and turned towards the mountain, his lips muttering the prayer. Valan and another held him each by an arm”.

The morning Sun was out now; a great shaft of light illuminated the surroundings. It was difficult to hold Raju on his feet, as he had a tendency to flop down. They held him as if he were a baby. Raju opened his eyes, looked about, and said, ‘Velan, it’s raining in the hills. I can feel it coming up under my feet, up my legs.’ He sagged down. The description of the eastern sky as red and the apparition of the morning Sun and the great shaft of light which illuminated the surroundings does not match with raining in the hills. To quote Paranjape:

“Again, we are invited into what seems to be a terrain of endless indeterminacy: does it really rain? Does Raju survive to see the miracle? Or does he die with the delusion that his sacrifice has paid off? Again, while the novel offers us no conclusive evidence to answer these questions satisfactorily, it definitely compels us to examine our own wishes and hopes for Raju and the villagers. Are we people of faith, those who believe that the sacrifice of a well-intentioned individual can solve social problems, even change the course of natural events? Or are we modern, “scientific” people who refuse to yield to such superstitions? To frame the choices offered by the novel in an even more complex manner, do we want to believe even though we might be unable to?”

Though Raju was a fake guru, on whom gurudom has been thrust, he does seem to grow in stature to fit its mantle. He was willing to sacrifice his life. Since the villagers believed that his fasting would bring rain he had no other alternative than continuing the fast to the twelfth day. Raju understood that he could not correct the villagers’ misconception about him. They considered him as a true sanyasi and hence his genuine fast would bring rain. Thus Raju was trapped. He has no existence other than a sanyasi’s. He could have saved himself as the doctors and Velan requested him to stop fasting. But once he stopped fasting what would the hundreds of people assembled there think about him? Wouldn’t it be a betrayal of faith laid on him by the people? So he might have thought that it was better and nobler to die a martyr than live an ignoble life, despised by others. Narayan wants to tell the readers that there are many Rajus or fake sanyasis in our society. Despite being so aware of the dangers of shamming such a serious thing as being a guru, Narayan actually comes out in favor of the institution in the end. He is unable to show the villagers rejecting Raju, or Velan abusing and unmasking him. He does not want the novel to be a propaganda tract against superstitious villagers and unscrupulous charlatans. “The Guide is far from being an expose of phony god men exploiting the gullible masses. Narayan cannot make a pitch in favor of mechanization or development as the cure of all its, including drought”.

Narayan does not endorse tradition in a loud or sententious manner. He does not reject or condemn it but rather creates a space for it. He points out that in the struggle between tradition and modernity, tradition wins though in a reluctant manner. Raju’s penance and his ultimate sacrifice are real no matter how painfully flawed his motives may have been earlier or how ineffectual their outcome. There is ample textual evidence to suggest that a gradual but sure alteration in Raju’s inner being does take place. “In other words, the irony strengthens the “Hindu” world view, not weakens it, though at first it appears as if the opposite is the case”.

R. K. Narayan portrays a South-Indian conservative society in the village, Mangal. Though the contact of Western culture brought many changes in the village, castes and traditional occupations continue to exist. Marriages are still arranged. Astrology is accepted there. Washing the feet before visiting a temple or a saint as a ritual of purification, pulling the temple chariot along the streets on festive days, smearing holy ash on the forehead, reciting

all kinds of sacred verse, consulting an astrologer for auspicious or sacred time, lighting the lamp in the god’s niche, reading the Bhagavad-Gita are some of the minor rituals appearing in The Guide. Touching the feet of the saint, making offerings in kind or prostrating before god, are other ritualistic forms. Raju’s fasting to appease the rain gods and bring rain to save the people is the most significant ritual in the novel. The people of the village had a clear idea of the fasting ritual and it is reflected through Velan’s words. “Velan gave a very clear account of what the savior was expected to do stand in knee-deep water, look to the skies, and utter the prayer line for two weeks completely fasting during the period and lo, the rains would come down, provided the man who performed it was a pure soul, was a great soul”. Referring to the fasting ritual by Raju to appease rain-god Narayan writes: “He felt suddenly so enthusiastic that it gave him a new strength to go through with the ordeal.” Ritual is depicted as an ordeal because this is forced on the reluctant Raju who has no faith in it. However, the drought and the plight of the villagers have a persuasive effect on him and so he prays to heaven to send down rain to save the villagers”. Narayan does not glorify the superstitious rituals. Similarly he does not deny the existence of a strong strain of faith among the villagers in the native rituals.

Malgudi is a microcosm of India. Just as British India sought the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi, the post-Gandhian Malgudi looks up to Raju as a savior. As Gandhi fasted in matters of public interest or concern, Raju also fasted for the redemption of Malgudi from drought. The Guide is a brilliant illustration of Narayan’s artistic talent in creating inner and outer landscapes balanced by a set of traditional values. There are four major symbols that constitute the basic structure of the novel. They are: the temple, the village, the town of Malgudi and the river Sarayu. To quote A. V. Krishna Rao:

“The temple’s influence on the democratic consciousness is so profound and efficacious that it results in the ultimate transformation of Raju. It enables the establishment of the identity of the mask and the man. The second symbol of the village, Mangal as well as Malgudi, signifies native strength, continuity of tradition, the ecology of a whole race with its inescapable influence on the individual consciousness and elemental determinism of individual destiny. Thirdly Malgudi is the symbol of modern India caught in the throes of change under the impact of western civilization. Its faith and resilience are effectively affirmative of the root of a changing tradition. Lastly Narayan’s invention of Mempi Hills is paralleled in his creation of Sarayu River, thereby completing the image of a whole country as a structural symbol for the Universe itself”.

The coming of the Railway to Malgudi is symbolically the impact of an industrial and urban society on a predominantly simple, agricultural community. The cherished values of life give way to the modern ways and their attendant evils. Raju who grew up in a decent home has now picked up terms of abuse from the Railway men and his father’s words ‘Just my misfortune!’ sound ominous in the light of the impending disaster. “The Railway meant the undoing of Raju and his old mother—a small shop keeper’s son becomes a Railway guide who starts living by his wits and runs into Rosie and Marco, two tourists, gets emotionally entangled, neglects his old, honest means of making a living, and brings ruin upon himself as well as a married woman”

In The Guide one finds a clash between castes, classes and their old values on the one hand and the weakening modern social and moral structure on the other. Marco only paid lip-service to a casteless, convention less society that was slowly taking shape before him by advertising for a good-looking educated young lady regardless of caste. Old prejudices die hard and Marco for all his erudition looked upon dancing as just street acrobatics and he killed Rosie’s instinct for life and love of art by denying her both of them.

Narayan’s treatment of the English language in the novel is Indian in its restraint, particularly where sex is concerned. Sex though pervasive in the novel is implicit always. Even when Raju decides to enter Rosie’s room and stay alone with her for the night how characteristically Indian and different he is from his western counterpart! He ‘stepped in and locked the door on the world.’ “The only time it is explicit, the utmost he has permitted himself on such an occasion is: Marco, the kill-joy is walking towards the cave swinging his cane and hugging his portfolio and Raju snaps: “If he could show half the warmth of that hug elsewhere!”.

Narayan’s novels are written in a bi-cultural perspective. The clash between the ancient Indian traditions and values on the one side and modern western values on the other side is visible in many novels. The three major characters in The Guide are concerned with the revival of indigenous Indian art forms. In the words of John Oliver Perry:

“Marco, Rosie’s soon deceived husband, obsessively studies ancient cave art and thus loses his wife, but ultimately his work illuminates older culture for present audiences; Rosie betrays her husband in order to foster what she vaguely calls “cultural traditions” through her inbred, caste-decreed dancing profession, and she is quite successful aesthetically, personally and socially. Raju’s more irregular successes as a guide to local cultural sights and to Rosie-Nalini’s traditional dancing lead directly to his virtual apotheosis as god-man fasting to death to bring villagers’ desperately needed rains”.

Raju seems to be the psychological projection of the typical individual in Indian social set up. In the social behavioral pattern, Raju is critical of the age-old institutional values, albeit he himself is deeply rooted in the family tradition. Rosie’s caste affiliation is attacked by the general people as ‘public woman’ but Raju negates the prevalent mode of thinking and asserts that Rosie’s caste is ‘the noblest caste on earth.’ To quote Gajendra Kumar from his essay “R. K. Narayan’s ‘The Guide’: The Vision of Indian Values,” “Time is changed and continuously changing. Now, there exists no caste, class or creed. Marco too demonstrates his modesty and embraces Rosie as his wife”.

In the novel The Guide, Narayan seems to be particularly fascinated by the ubiquitous presence of swamis and saints, gurus and guides, charlatans and philistines, cobras and concubines in India’s colorful society. With his characteristic humor he is able to capture the spectrum of Indian life, with its superstitions and hypocrisies, its beliefs and follies, its intricacies and vitalities, its rigidities and flexibilities. The action of the novel proceeds in two distinct streams, presenting two different aspects of Indian culture. Malgudi, a miniature of India, presents the rich traditions of classical dances by Rosie-Nalini and the breath-taking paintings that embellish Marco’s The Cultural History of South India. Mangal, the neighbor town village presents the spiritual dimension of Indian culture presented through Raju’s growth into a celebrated Swami. “Thus Raju, Rosie and Marco become temporal symbols of India’s cultural ethos”. While Marco’s aspiration seek their fulfillment in unearthing the buried treasures of India’s rich cultural past, Rosie’s longing seeks satisfaction in the creative channels of classical dancing in the midst of an ever-present, live audience. Raju is all the time dreaming of an elusive future till a time comes when he is irrevocably committed to a definite future by undertaking a fast in the hope of appeasing the rain-god. “While Marco is cultural historian of the past, Rosie is a cultural ambassador of the present, and Raju is a cultural prophet of the future”

The Guide displays many of the structural devices and thematic concerns of the Hindu epics and puranas. In having a rogue as the hero, there is an element of the folk tale also. Krishna Sen is opinion that

we have the idyllic opening scene, the dramatic dialogue format, the layered narrative, the multilateral structure compressing time shifts and interwoven digressions, and the final penance for a divine boon to save humanity. Some elements have been parodied or ironically subverted by bringing them from the mythic past to the imperfect present, elements such as the guru being superior to the shishya, or the dialogue leading spiritual illumination.

Another indigenous pattern working through the novel is the linear progression or varnasrama, or the Hindu belief in the four stages of the ideal life student, house holder, recluse and ascetic. This pattern, too, is parodied. Raju is successively a ‘student’ preparing for life in the platform vendor and Railway Raju phases, a ‘house holder’ and man of affairs in his illegal union with Rosie and as her corrupt business manager, a ‘recluse’ during his days in prison, and an ‘ascetic’ in his role as the fake guru. Raju’s fasting for the rain, the denouement in the novel, is a travesty, reminiscent of the story of the sage-king Bhagirathi who conducted severe penance to bring down the goddess Ganga. This story is found in both the Ramayana and the Mahapurana. The entire ritual by Raju may or may not have brought rain, but it did help bring peace to the strife-torn Mangal and turn the community back to religion. Thus The Guide can be triumphantly called a Hindu novel. “The denouement is neither a rejection nor a defense of the Hindu faith it gestures towards the complexity of life, in which there are no simple solutions. It is this ambiguous and open-ended denouement that raises the novel far above the level of a mere moral fable, or a story with a simplistic happy ending”.

The only minor character in the novel that may be said to exist solely for the plot is Mani, who was Raju’s secretary during his day’s glory. He is like a prop used by Narayan to move the plot forward and communicate necessary information. He is neither characterized in any distinctive manner, nor is he representative of any familiar social type. He remains a somewhat indistinct figure, a name without a face. All the other minor characters, with the exception of Velan who has an important part of play, fall into clearly defined slots, and their typical traits are sketched with Narayan’s characteristic sureness. “Socially the novel charts the transition in India from an old-fashioned way of life to a modern and urbanized one, and the character groupings roughly correspond to these two spheres”. Raju’s parents and uncle, and the old pyol school master represent tradition, orthodoxy, hierarchy and conservative values. The peripheral character who is crucial to the progress of the plot is Velan. His personality is not drawn in detail, nor is it required. Velan would not be a credible character in a western setting. Velan was the sole person responsible for the final plight of Raju. But Velan’s contribution is not merely to oppress Raju. It is he who builds Raju up into a ‘saint,’ and it is Velan’s unshakable faith that finally enables Raju to rise above himself. “Velan is a catalyst for Raju’s apotheosis”

Narayan is acclaimed as a Regional or Social novelist. The locale of  The Guide is the small town of Malgudi where Raju has his home, the village Mangal from where Velan hails, and Madras and other big cities where Rosie is invited to dance. This semi-urban and largely rural setting is typical of the places in which most Indians live. Thus the locale is almost the microcosm of India. Through the social portrait of a single region, Narayan succeeds in presenting the larger picture of Indian society, both in its general features as well as in its specifically post-independence lineaments. The world in The Guide is “structured along

simple binaries Malgudi and Mangal, the town and the village, urban sophistication versus rural simplicity, modernity versus tradition, cynicism versus faith”.

Raju’s father does not follow the traditional Brahmin calling of priesthood. Thus it becomes ironic that Raju comes back full circle to his caste occupation as a performer of sacred rites in a most ambiguous way. His father is a worldly man who takes the full advantage of the colonial world trade and commerce. Perhaps his father’s worldliness may be the source of Raju’s worldliness. It is the railway which brings the outside world, with its modernity and hybridity to Malgudi. It bifurcates the world of Malgudi both literally and metaphorically. Western notions of individual choice and self-expression are thoroughly out of place among the people of Malgudi. The locale that oppose tradition are the the westernized parts of the town where Raju and Rosie carry on their assignations the cinema hall, the Taj restaurant, and the hotel. “This fast moving, individualistic, opportunistic world is as familiar to post-colonial India as the centuries-old traditions”. Paradoxically, it is this newly urbanized rich world of Malgudi, and not the traditional world that Raju’s mother and uncle inhabit, that fosters the renaissance of art by encouraging Rosie to express herself as an artist and classical dancer. The same Rosie who was shunned as a devadasi by those who swore by their traditional norms is reborn Nalini, the respected classical dancer, because of the emergence of and affluent and cosmopolitan class of people in Malgudi. Yet it is the villagers of Mangal who show the quintessentially Indian emotional response the spontaneous, implicit, unquestioning faith in a person perceived to be a holy man. The holy man or ascetic is an integral part of traditional Indian society. He is respected for representing the heritage of Indian values and wisdom, and it is not customary to question his authority. “Orthodox Hindus believe that there is no spiritual salvation without a guru, and the guru-shishya relationship is considered to be one of the closest and most sacred ties in Indian society”.

The Guide can be called a postcolonial novel. Looking at India from the Indian perspective is felt to be a postcolonial deconstruction of colonialism. Ellek Boehmer is of opinion that

the comic pastorals of R. K. Narayan emphasizes the continuity and harmony of small-town India, are actually an instance of the Empire writing back. Referring to the fact that there are hardly any British characters in Narayan’s early pre-independence novels, she observes that ‘through the simple device of ignoring the British presence,’ these novels effectively dramatis a world ‘that existed quite independently of the colonial power’

Narayan’s post-colonialism in The Guide is revealed neither through rejection of Westernization nor through celebration of tradition. In the politics of representation, his position is that of the critical insider who is alive to the need to negotiate the contradictions of the post-colonial predicament. Narayan is not only aware of the inevitability of change, but also of the problems that attend the processes of change in a traditional society. “The interface between traditions and modernity is mediated with characteristic irony. Narayan is interested in looking at the extent to which the cultural life of the past can be viably integrated with the post-independence reality of India”.

When Raju dissociates himself from society and pursues Rosie he has moral degradation and he faces unpleasant repercussions. When he returns to society as a swami he achieves redemption. In the words of Arun Soule:

“Thus, it is seen that in the Western context, the individual can grow and develop, if he dissociates himself from society and becomes individualistic: whereas in the Indian context if an individual

dissociates himself from society, he comes to grief, but if he takes society along with him, then he will be at peace with himself and his surroundings, and will be able to grow and develop”.

The Guide can be read as a “complex allegory satirizing the process by which gods and demi-gods came to be established within the religion, wherein through the centuries’ myths and stories came to be built around a man until he gradually attained the stature of a god and joined the ranks of celestial beings as a divine incarnation. In this view The Guide would be a satire, albeit a gentle one, about the system of worship within Hinduism. Raju is in a sense, the distillation of a type of character that has existed in Hindu mythology for nearly five centuries ‘the trickster sage.’ In Hindu mythology the sages and even the gods are shown to be fallible, and no one is considered perfect or lying so low as to be incapable of reaching great spiritual heights. Similarly in Hindu mythology transformation can occur to a person due to an outside agency without the volition of the person. “Raju would, in this light, be eminent ‘sage’ material”.

The characters in The Guide can be reducible to symbolic meanings. Velan is a valid positive Indian average representing in particular the psychological reality of the rural ethos. Velan is the spiritual guide of Raju, the professional guide. Raju remains professional even in his mask. Raju, Velan and Rosie are the central characters in the novel. In the words of U. P. Sinha from his essay, “Patterns of Myth and Reality in “The Guide”: Complex Craft of Fiction”:

Their implicative or metaphoric roles in the novel make a mythic triangle which is a triangle with three points, one indicating the height of spiritual-cum-moral triumph. The point indicating the low, the deep is represented by Rosie, and the vertical one is represented by Velan. The third point at the level, which seems to be vertical but is not obviously so, represents Raju. The first two points act upon this one so that the whole triangle becomes mythical—man facing two opposite-worlds; facing always with very little chance of a smooth and painless arrival here or there.

The character portrayal in The Guide can be interpreted in terms of gunas. In the words of Rama Nair, “Gunas can presuppose the question of basic predisposition called Samskaras and fate. In Hindu thought, a mental or physical act is called Karma. Karma is the sum-total of a man’s past actions, in the present and the previous lives, which determines his life now. One can achieve liberation only through spiritual self-realization”. In Hindu philosophy names of individuals do not matter. Actions determine one’s individuality and character. The names of central characters in The Guide are not individualistic. They are vague, impersonal. The reader is never told either Raju’s or Marco’s real name. Raju’s spiritual triumph at the end of the novel is a reaffirmation of the satwic potential that is innate in every individual. The same critical frame work can be applied to Rosie’s character also.

The ending of the novel is very Indian. The main character narrates his own story to an acquaintance overnight and by the time he concludes, the cock crows. In this traditional way of story-telling, the story-teller, Raju, holds the listener, Velan, in his grip as the ancient mariner had held the wedding guest. Thus Narayan achieved a supreme triumph through this narration. To quote C.D. Narasimhaiah from his essay, “R. K. Narayan’s ‘The Guide,” “It is not surprising when we know that at all times Narayan writes not merely with an intense social awareness of his own age but with the past of India in his bones. Thanks to him our social sympathies are broadened and our moral being considerably heightened”.

From the social point of view The Guide not only depicts Indian society, its customs, traditions, culture, ostentations, superstitions, religious faith but also presents a conflict between the traditional and modern values which are symbolized by Raju’s mother and his maternal uncle on the one hand and by Raju and Rosie on the other. In such conflict, old values have to give place to new values and thus Raju’s mother leaves her home for Raju and Rosie. “The novel also presents a conflict between the Eastern and Western culture and synthesizes the two through their assimilation which has been symbolised by Rosie’s transformation in to Nalini. Like Anand, Narayan points out that one has to go to the West in order to come back to the East”.

Hindu Mythology in R.K. Narayan’s The Guide.

Writing in My Days about his early short stories, R.K. Narayan explained that he wished to attack the tyranny of Love and see if life could offer other values than the inevitable Man-Woman relationship to a writer. In order to do this he found. Themes centering around a moment or a mood with a crisis. Really there isn’t anything very remarkable about a short-story writer claiming either of these things as an ambition. The fact that Narayan claims them might go some way towards explaining why his stories have so frequently, and inexactly, been compared with Chekhov’s. Contrary to the received wisdom, however, not much of Narayan’s best writing is in the short-story form, and in his novels and novellas the Man. Woman relationship. Remains a significant presence. Nor do the themes of his longer fictions usually centre around a moment or a mood with a crisis. Instead, there are many moments which appear to be crucial, but which soon transpire to be something both more and less than that. It might be truer to say that in Narayan’s longer fiction a whole life tends to be characterized as being prone to crisis, but the dramatic incidents that might have been expected to constitute the crisis at any particular moment in that life confirms a predisposition rather than present a challenge to it. Of course, the character concerned might not have realized what it was to which he was predisposed, and therefore recognition might in itself constitute a psychological or moral crisis. Also, the plots of the novels often look as if they are leading from and towards crises that take a dramatic form. But one senses that there is a mismatch, a slither, between the apparent and the real value attaching to many of the incidents described. At the time, it seems to the reader and the character as if something important, even crucial, is happening. Then, with hindsight, they both realize it was nothing of the sort, nothing that changes things in any significant or fundamental way.Yet things do change - both in the character’s fortunes and in his life. It’s just that the crucial incidents aren’t what make them change. In any case change, in these circumstances, often takes the form of recognition of what doesn’t change. The only change is in the recognition of the unchanging. In this essay I want to argue that this combination of apparent change and real continuity is unintelligible outside the parameters of Hindu thought that plays such an important role in Narayan’s fiction; and that the play of that thought over the changes and continuities of his characters’ behavior influences the manner in which their behavior is represented more strongly than exclusively Eurocentric interpretations of his practice as a novelist might have led Western commentators to believe. Thoughts such as these arise from a comparison between similar events occurring in Narayan’s short stories and his novels. Like his admirer, V S. Naipaul,3 Narayan isn’t a generously inventive writer at the level of

plot and incident. He tends to use the same material over and over again in slightly different contexts and in relation to lightly differentiated characters. A feature of this tendency to repetition is his use of the sealed letter motif, where suspense arises out of the reader’s and the character’s unawareness of what lies concealed in a receptacle of some kind: a bag, or a box, or an envelope. One good example of the motif, where uncertainty about the receptacle’s contents is relatively quickly dispelled, is the Market Place Professor’s brown paper envelopes in The Painter of Signs inside each of which is written in four different languages the caption. Not much of a crisis here. Instead, the message might have the effect of warning against too easy an identification of the passing occurrences of life with a crisis of one sort or another. In a different category is the envelope that Govind Singh, the gatemen of the short story Gateman’s Gift, spends the better part of the story and many days of his life being afraid to open. Singh has been employed for twenty-five years by the Engladia Insurance Company. Now that he has been pensioned off he spends most of his time making clay models of buildings and animals, some of which he hands over to the company when he goes to collect his pension each month. This is the Gateman’s Gift of the title. A week after one of his visits to the company office, he receives a registered letter. It is the first time he has received a letter in the whole of his life, and he daren’t open it. He is afraid he has given offence by presenting the models. Perhaps his pension will be stopped. After several days of anxiety, even madness, he meets an employee of the Engladia who tells him what is in the envelope. It is a letter of thanks from the General Manager, with a cheque for one hundred rupees as a token of his appreciation. After this Singh continues to make his monthly calls at the office to collect his pension, but he makes no more models. On the face of it what we have here is one of those and dquo;themes centering around a moment or a mood with a crisis. Narayan drew attention to in his autobiography. The moment is the receipt of the envelope. The crisis is Singh’s inability to open it. The mood is one of frenzied anxiety followed by morose self-withdrawal. So what is the theme? To fit Narayan’s description, it would have to be something like the bitter irony of life. or, more specifically things aren’t what they seem; but by the time you’ve discovered they’re not, it’s too late to undo the damage;. Expressed in this way, however, the tale sounds too much like a Maupassant short story. It even sounds like one particular story of his, and quo; La Parure and dquo; But no sooner does the comparison present itself (which it usually does during discussions of and dquo; Gateman’s Gift and dquo than its fundamental inappropriateness becomes obvious. The two stories do have several points in common. Singh’s mistake over what’s inside the envelope is rather like the Loisels’ mistake about the necklace, and in each case the mistake quite unnecessarily ruins the lives of the characters. But the longer and shorter time-scales of the stories aren’t the only or the most important differences between them. Maupassant’s story is a bitter twist-in-the-tail expose of the characters’ misfortunes which is all the more an exposg because those misfortunes arise out of a simple combination of the characters’ temperaments and a stroke of fate (or accident). By contrast, Narayan’s story isn’t really an expos at all, because what Singh’s mistake about the letter and dquo;exposes and dquo;, both to him and to us, is the mistake he has made about the whole course and direction of his life - which would have been no less of a mistake if he had never received the letter. The Loisels’ lives may well be spiritually impoverished. But impoverish- ment suits them. It is in their character to be impoverished, and the mistake about the diamonds simply brings their

material impoverishment into line with their spiritual one. Singh, though, discovers hidden depths of creative imagination in his play with his and quo;toys and dquo;. His tragedy isn’t that he suddenly discovers he needn’t have allowed one foolish mistake to ruin his life, but that the whole of his life was already a ruin long before it was exposed as such by the mistake about the letter. Unlike the Loisels’, Singh’s inner life wasn’t what his outer life proclaimed it to be. That is why the mistake over the letter isn’t as much of a and dquo;crisis and dquo; for him as the Loisels’ mistake over the necklace was for them; and why a mistake that lasts only a few days provokes a much greater spiritual re-assessment (which is and dquo; understood and dquo; in the story: we don’t hear about it in so many words) than a mistake (in the Maupassant story) that lasted for many years, and had much more damaging material consequences. For Singh, the accident over the letter tells him the truth about his whole life, and there is nothing now that he can do about it. That is why the dramatic crisis of the story doesn’t reflect accurately the crisis in Singh’s life. Nothing could. All that can happen is the triggering of a (silent) recognition. Now let us turn to an apparently similar event in one of the novels - similar because it also makes use of the device of the unopened envelope. Since The Guide is a 220-page-long novel, we would expect Railway Raju’s adventures to be more extensively and minutely described, over a longer period of time, than Govind Singh’s are in and dquo; Gateman’s Gift and dquo;. So it is unlikely we shall find a single event that crucially effects Raju’s fortunes in the way Singh’s reception of the envelope effects his. But if we persist in the error of looking for one, the arrival of Marco’s letter to Rosie might be as good a place as any. The letter arrives during an uneventful period in Raju’s management of Nalini’s dancing career. Addressed to and dquo;Rosie, alias Nalini&dquo;, and bearing the address of a law firm in Madras, it must have been sent by Marco. But what is in it? Raju, like Govind Singh, and dquo;felt nervous about opening the letter...&dquo. But he is made of sterner stuff than the retired gateman. In any case, unlike the gateman, Raju can read. So three or four sentences later he opens the letter: &dquo;I looked at it with misgiving for a while, told myself that I was not to be frightened by a seal, and just cut it open and nd dquo; But therein lay Raju’s doom. For Marco’s lawyer has enclosed an application for Rosie’s signature, to authorize a bank to release a box of jewellery; and this presents an irresistible temptation for Raju to forge Nalini’s signature in order to secure the jewellery for himself. All Raju’s and Rosie’s later misfortunes spring from his failure to resist this temptation. In conventional critical terms, it might be argued, this is a major crisis in their relationship. Therefore it is the crisis of the novel’s plot, in so far as the plot is concerned with the and dquo;Man-Woman relationship&dquo; - which, we need to remember, Narayan said ought not to be the central theme and value of the novel. This raises two questions. First, is the Man-Woman relationship the central theme and value of The Guide? And second, whether it is or it isn’t, is the plot of this novel, which has more to do with Raju’s relationship with Rosie than with anything else (to put it least contentiously), really the most important thing about it? I shall try to answer the second question first, since the answer I shall provide will, I think, make it unnecessary for me to spend much more time answering the first. In Aspects of the Novel, written less than two years after he completed his own Indian novel, A Passage to India, E.M. Forster tended to depress the importance of plot in prose fiction. Something about his experiences in Dewas native state seems to have disillusioned him with what he came to see as the modem preoccupation with the psychology of cause and effect, which achieved its

most satisfactory literary expression in the plots of the great European realist novels of the nineteenth and early twentieth cen- turies. &dquo;The plot&dquo;, he says, &dquo;is the novel in its intellectual aspect&dquo;, but we must ask ourselves &dquo;whether the framework thus produced is the best possible for a novel&dquo;. After all, why has a novel to be planned? Cannot it grow? Why need it close, as a play closes? Cannot it open out? Instead of standing above his work and controlling it, cannot the novelist throw himself into it and be carried along to some goal which he does not foresee? The plot is exciting and may be beautiful, yet it is not a fetich, borrowed from the drama, from the spatial limitations of the stage? Cannot fiction devise a framework that is not so logical yet more suitable to its genius? This reminds me of nothing so much as Narayan’s comments on traditional Indian storytelling in his account of origins of the Ramayana in his story &dquo;Valmiki&dquo; Valmiki, author of the Ramayana, first appears as a highway robber who has stolen a pair of sandals from a Brahmin scholar called Sankha. The Brahmin discovers a vestige of compassion in the robber’s behaviour, and attributes this to his previous incarnation as a man of learning. He tells the robber about his karma, and how in the future he will assume the form of the poet Valmiki. Narayan shows how the robber is transformed into the poet (by covering himself in an ant-hill for thousands of years and chanting an apparently meaningless sequence of words that eventually developed into the Ramayana). Then he shows how Valmiki taught the poem to the two sons of the hero (Rama) whose activities it celebrates, and how they returned to their father at his court and sang the Ramayana to him. Narayan confesses: The time scheme of the epic is somewhat puzzling to us who are habituated to a more horizontal sequence of events. Valmiki composed as if he had a past tale to tell, and yet it was broadcast to the world by Kusa and Lava, the sons of Rama, who heard it directly from the author. One has to set aside all one’s habitual notions of going forwards and backwards and sideways. When we take into consideration the fact that a king ruled for sixty thousand or more years, enjoying an appropriate longevity, it seems quite feasible that a character whose past or middle period is being written about continues to live and turns up to have a word with the historian.... What one had all along thought of as retrospective on the part of the poet seems actually to have been a prophecy as well as a piece of contemporary chronicling. However, an average story-listener accepts these situations without a second thought, never questioning &dquo;When&dquo; or &dquo;How?&dquo; &dquo;Before or after?&dquo; To an ordinary Indian story-listener it seems perfectly natural that events could spread over before, after, and just now.) The opening remarks here recall Conrad’s and Ford’s discussions about the time-shift as Ford recorded them in his account of their collaboration.9 But the emphasis on telling rather than writing suggests a different origin, and one entirely appropriate to an author who learned the art of storytelling at his grandmother’s knee and who is now employing it to create a version of his country’s myths and legends. The mingling of the poet’s activities with his character’s also points to native influences, especially where Narayan elaborates on the effect of this simultaneous living and writing of the legend as follows: The author, Valmiki, watched rather helplessly the conclusions that the characters of his epic were working out for themselves. He had a hope that he might be able to bring his hero and heroine together, help the family to reunite, and thus round off his tale. But the characters managed their affairs in their own way. At the moment when Rama was eager to take Sita back, Sita decided differently. Rama himself decided on a great

renunciation. The characters, as they would in any perfect work of art, got out of control. Valmiki let them act in their own way, and returned to his life of contemplation. Narayan combines here two commonplaces of twentieth-century thinking about the novel. First, the movement away from a linear, chronological representation of the passage of time, as demonstrated, for example, in the work of Conrad, Ford and Faulkner. Raju’s description of Rosie’s narrative technique sounds for all the world like Dowell’s in The Good Soldier: &dquo;I wanted a chronological narration, but she seemed unable to provide it. Second, the freedom of fictional characters from the dominant intentions of their author, as described by too many critics to reward the trouble of naming. But the effect of the theory on the practice is not at all like that of Narayan’s contemporaries in the West, and the difference doesn’t lie only in the closeness of his text to oral narration. After all, most of the relevant European and American novels that spring to mind - from Nostromo, through The Fall, to Last Orders - also offer themselves as single or collective oral narratives. Narayan’s distinction lies more in the way the &dquo;story and dquo; that lies beyond the re-assembled time scheme, and that expresses the &dquo;free&dquo; personality of the novels’ dominant characters, fails to create a plot on the lines of the expected Western model. Character and event don’t seem to relate to each other, to explain each other, in the causal and consequential terms appropriate to the novel as we have grown to understand it. There has always been a pronounced air of storytelling in Narayan’s fiction. In the early novels, though, this was easily accommodated within the conventions of a relaxed third-person narrative. Then, in The English Teacher, Narayan chose to speak in the first-person - taking upon himself the personality of his protagonist, Krishna, whose misfortunes, he tells us , closely followed his own. But there was nothing surprising in the way he did this. The movement of the prose seemed to have much in common with what the Western reader expects from first-person narrative - as he has encountered it in the classical novels of his own civilization. It is important that this familiarity persists into the second half of the novel, when Krishna has lost his wife and then finds her again in circumstances that would be unthinkable in a contemporary European novel. Narayan himself discloses (again in My Days) that &dquo;Many readers have gone through the first half with interest and the second half with bewilderment and even resentment, perhaps feeling that they have been baited with the domestic picture into tragedy, death, and nebulous speculations.&dquo; But he doesn’t say that this change of attitude on the part of his readers has anything to do with an accompanying change in his use of the narrative voice. It may be more helpful instead to describe the change as one from relatively conventional plotting (on the picaresque lines of an earlier novel like The Bachelor of Arts) to a relatively plotless series of developments accompanying the &dquo;nebulous speculations&dquo; mentioned in the autobiography. After The English Teacher, Narayan’s novels sometimes employ thirdperson and sometimes first-person narration. His most recent novella, The Grandmother’s Tale, is written in the form of a retelling of his actual grandmother (Ammani)’s story of her own mother (Bala)’s life. He includes himself in the story when he mentions how he has already described his grandmother’s house in the autobiography. But none of this produces a striking change in the reader’s response to an oral narrative, except where the change can be easily accounted for by the author’s maturing command of technique and idiom. The success of the piece owes more to Narayan’s loosening of the hinges and joints of the plot than to dramatic adjustments of the tone of the

oral narrative - for instance in letting the principal character suddenly die about three-quarters of the way through the story; and &dquo;failing&dquo; to explain her change of character after she has secured a child-husband as a grown-up husband before she returns to her village. It might be significant that the tale the grandmother tells closely follows the story of Shakuntala in the Hindu legend Narayan repeats in Section Four of Gods, Demons and Others. To account for the distinctiveness of Narayan’s handling of the timescheme and his approach to character, with its attendant depression of the importance of plot, we have to look beyond what he might have learned from novelists in the West, and also beyond the varieties of oral narrative he has used from time to time in both his short stories and his more extended fiction. Even so, his comment on storytelling and story-listening at the beginning of &dquo;Valmiki&dquo; remains a good place to start. Really, the point about &dquo;getting used to a narrative going backwards and forwards and sideways&dquo; (which is what puts the reader in mind of European comparisons) is less important than the assumptions Narayan makes about an &dquo;average&dquo; or &dquo;ordinary&dquo; &dquo;Indian story-listener&dquo;. To him, it will be remembered, it is &dquo;perfectly natural that events could spread over before, after, and just now&dquo;. Notice that it is not representations of events, but events themselves, that Narayan says behave this way. So it’s not so much the way he tells it, as what it is he tells, that creates the problem, or opportunity, for the uninitiated Western reader. The reason the narrative keeps changing direction is that events keep changing direction. A European writer - Conrad, in Nostromo for instance - changes narrators and alters time sequences either because he wants to draw the reader’s attention to similarities and differences between the events that are being recorded, or because he wants to reproduce mental operations that are so extreme or so defective as to issue in a fragmented perception of their objects. The events are stable. It is the author’s use of them, or the character’s perception of them, that makes them seem disordered. But this isn’t what Narayan is saying about Valmiki’s handling of the Rama story. That story, Narayan explains, is happening around Valmiki in the process of composition. The time-sequences in it are so fluid, so deliquescent, because the events to which they relate are at the same time both complete and incomplete, finished and unfinished. With the help of Sugriva, Hanuman and others, Rama has defeated Ravana and his rakshasas, and succeeded to the throne of his kingdom. But then the varied stories of his treatment of his faithful wife Sita have to be incorporated into the story. And that involves the birth and upbringing of his two sons - in the ashram of the scholar-poet Valmiki, who teaches them the song of their father’s exploits. After he has taught them the song, they travel to the court and sing the Ramayana to him - and he makes an effective response to their performance of his story (within the story). (This is to say nothing of the story of Valmiki himself, both enclosing the story he tells and a part of that story as it is told by succeeding storytellers. One of these happened to be Narayan’s grandmother, who told him the story of Rama’s struggle against Ravana long before he read about it in the epic poem, with the result that in order to tell it in his turn he has to blend the processes of memorizing her oral narrative and reading the written text [which is itself the incomplete expression of multiple and diverse oral narratives].) Something similar to this, I shall argue, happens in Narayan’s original fiction as well as in his &dquo;translations&dquo; of the Tamil versions of the Rama and other legends. He is acquainted with the experimental writing of modem European fiction in the same way as he is acquainted with the various

redactions of the Ramayana story. But also he is able to dissolve the often already hazy and soft-edged time sequences of the epic through his memory of repeated oral versions of its episodes - frequently related to one another in varied, unstable and contradictory ways. For the Western reader (or &dquo;us&dquo;, as Narayan himself admits), this creates peculiarities which reference back to merely &dquo;novel&dquo; practice fails to resolve. Narayan has learned lessons from European fiction, but he has complemented them with knowledge of his own native Indian narrative tradition. And this knowledge is of both the actual legends and of the characteristic ways of &dquo;organising&dquo; them that 73 appears in both the written and the oral versions with which he is familiar. In The Guide, he doesn’t make much use of legendary analogues and parallels. (There is some play made with the story of Devaka, but even that is more important for the way it is told, or rather fails to be told, than for its subject-matter; and there is something is made of Rosie’s devotion to a little bronze figure of Nataraj, the god of dance.) But he does depend a great deal on the way not just the telling of the legends, but their narrative substance, adapted to a modem subject, can illuminate aspects of that subject which an exclusively Western approach would almost certainly keep in the dark. This is more like The English Teacher than some of the later novels like Mr Sampath. The Man-Eater of Malgudi, or The Vendor of Sweets - novels that do make elaborate use of mythical motifs. But while the relatively early English Teacher falls into two halves - the half that everyone can understand and the half that everyone is puzzled by (on Narayan’ own admission) - The Guide is a complete and perfectly shaped work of art in which it is impossible to clearly differentiate the European modernist and Hindu traditional contributions to its theme. The story of Devaka, or rather the telling of the story of Devaka, is a hinge on which the telling of the story of Raju, the railway guide, turns. It occurs very early in the novel, towards the end of the first chapter, where the reader flounders in a temporal confusion almost as great as at the opening of Nostromo. In fact the composition of this chapter owes a lot to the modernist art of the time-shift, which means that although events keep moving backwards and forwards in time, and this creates the difficulties to which I have already referred, the &dquo;European&dquo; reader doesn’t feel that he has entirely lost his bearings. We are used to these kinds of difficulties by now. They belong to our reading culture and this makes us feel secure even in our (temporary) bafflement. Raju’s attempt to recall and re-tell his mother’s story of Devaka simultaneously draws the reader’s attention to the present situation (Raju in the deserted temple ministering to the peasant Velan’s spiritual requirements), and opens a window to his earlier history. It is a good example of Narayan’s use of the time-shift for a purpose I referred to earlier: placing side by side two temporally divergent but thematically convergent concatenatons of events. In this instance the events (key incidents in Raju’s earlier life, and his encounter with Velan in the temple) converge on Raju’s behaviour as a guide: previously as a tourist guide, now as a sort of guru in the eyes of the peasant farmer. From this point on the story of Raju’s rise from store assistant to impresario develops smoothly in tandem with the story of the impression he makes on the community near the temple. Indeed the transitions from one time-scale to the other are so smooth that we probably don’t notice the skill with which Narayan moves from third- to first-person narration in the description he provides of Raju’s rise to fame and fortune. But he does move in this direction, and all of Chapters Seven (by far the longest) to Ten, occupying the centre of the novel, take the form of first-person confessional narrative. They are so

absorbing that it comes as something of a shock to be returned to the situation at the end of the opening chapter: &dquo;Raju’s narration concluded with the crowing of the cock. Velan had listened without moving a muscle... Raju had mentioned without a single omission every detail from his birth to his emergence from the gates of the prison.&dquo; This means we have become as absorbed as Velan in Raju’s narrative, forgetting for the time being the farmer’s presence in the foreground of the picture. Raju’s powers of persuasion are rendered entirely credible, through the reader’s retrospective acknowledgement that he has shared Velan’s rapt attention to what the guide has been telling him. That is an index of Narayan’s skill in what might be described as modernist narrative art. It incorporates a more traditional art of storytelling, but that is an art that in the present instance has been subordinated to more sophisticated narrative requirements. That is a great deal. But is it everything? Does it account for everything that creates the impact on the reader that this novel undoubtedly makes? I don’t think it does, because it leaves out of account certain aspects of the earlier descriptions of Raju’s behaviour towards Velan in the chapters devoted to whatever is happening in the temple; and, more significantly, it ignores what happens as a result of Raju’s having made his confession - as this is recorded in the last chapter of the book. In other words, it accounts for Raju’s success as a tourist guide and as a false prophet. But it doesn’t account for his success as a saint. Immediately one searches for quotation marks to surround that last word. But then one chooses not to place them there. For there is a sense in which Raju has become a saint, a holy man, a spiritual guide. There is even an implication at the end that we don’t have to rely on ambivalent descriptions of Raju’s or Velan’s state of mind to come to this conclusion. We might be able to find objective support for it in the coming of the rains, which was what Raju’s strange behaviour in his last days was intended to provoke. How, then, does a novelist represent this most obscure and incredible spiritual condition, which no-one - including Cervantes, Dostoevsky and Iris Murdoch - has found it easy, or unambiguously convincing, to describe in fiction? It can’t be done by time-shifts, because time-shifts relate to experiences that are grounded in time - time as it is experienced and organized by humankind that is held in its toils. Sainthood is a condition that exists out of time. For the saint, the incongruities of living in time collapse under the pressure of duties and obligations that belong to another world, yet whose manifestations are (barely) perceptible in this one. This other world has to find a way of getting into Narayan’s fiction, because he genuinely, and radically, can’t make sense of this world without recourse to it. That is why there are so many saints and brahmins and sanyasis in Narayan’s novels. They often make a poor and questionable show. Think of the priest whose temple Savitri sweeps in The Dark Room, or the dubious pedagogue priests of The Financial Dealer or The World of Nagaraj. Or see how suspect and self-regarding Chandran is, in The Bachelor of Arts, when he presciently emulates Raju’s confidence-trick as he settles down as a sanyasi in the village at Koopal.Nevertheless, they might be true saints, or have the potentiality for true sainthood, lurking somewhere in the nooks and crannies of their egoism. Narayan is writing of his bereavement, and of how he tried to see beyond it in the picture he produced of Krishna’s suffering in The English Teacher, when he insists: Our normal view is limited to a physical perception in a condition restricted in time, like the flashing of a torchlight on a spot, the rest of the area being in darkness. If one could have a total view of oneself and others, one would see all in their full stature, through all the stages of evolution and growth, ranging from

childhood to old age, in this life, the next one, and the previous ones. Fascinating how Narayan uses the same image as Naipaul, in An Area of Darkness, but with entirely contrary meanings and associations. For Narayan it is possible to imagine the beam of the torchlight expanded and the surrounding darkness dispersed, because he sees the restriction of time as fundamentally an illusion, a consequence of our dependence on &dquo;physical perception&dquo;. But we exist both in and out of time, as Krishi’s spirit guide proves to him - and as Narayan tells us he also had proved to him after his wife’s death in similar circumstances to Susila’s. The crucial statement in this passage from My Days is the one about &dquo;this life, the next one, and the previous ones&dquo;, because it clarifies Narayan’s belief in the Hindu notion of karma, the rebirth of the individual in different forms but with persisting capacities for good and ill. It is difficult to understand why belief in karma should provide the sort of comfort Krishi derives from his experiments in automatic writing, or Narayan himself derived from a similar experience. The aim of the vanapastra, or sanyasi, is to escape from the machinery of karma and the process of rebirths called samsara through moksha (liberation). I think one is expected to imagine an intermediate state in which the person who is mourned prepares for re-entry into the world in a different form, or is freed from attachment to the material world through the exercise of moksha. Be that as it may, Raju’s aim, if it can be dignified by such an intentionally active word, is to escape from his karma altogether, and that is what he must be presumed to be doing in the River Sarayu at the close of The Guide. Rosie has already told him, at the time of his arrest, &dquo; ‘I felt all along you were not doing right things. This is karma. What can we do?’ &dquo. Here, close to the end of the novel, she is echoing Raju’s own thoughts at the beginning, when, meeting Velan for the first time in the shadow of the temple shrine, he wondered: &dquo;Have I been in prison or in some sort of transmigration?&dquo. At this early stage in his story, the reader is inclined to smile at Raju’s mild fantasizing, interpreting his manner of expressing himself as a sort of lazy figurative exaggeration. And so it is. At the same time, though, it carries a proleptic truth-charge: his prison experiences have changed him, by changing the context in which fundamentally stable aspects of his character are made to appear under different guises. Before he takes up his position at the shrine, the change is scarcely noticeable, and the phrase about transmigration sounds merely fanciful. But in the light of the account Raju gives to Velan about his earlier life, and later the way he is represented as behaving over the drought and the fasting, the reader retrospectively attributes to it a greater value. Raju’s passing thoughts about transmigration here might foreshadow as much of future rebirth as Rosie’s warning about karma looks back to past misdemeanours - not only in his present life as a tourist guide but in previous existences as wicked as Valmiki’s when he was a thief and a highwayman. Narayan’s extraordinary skill as a novelist lies in the way he brings both Western and Indian methods of storytelling to bear on the elucidation of this change in Raju’s character. Aspects of structure alone - the time shifts, changes in the point of view, alterations of register - can’t entirely account for this. It is also a matter of style. The descriptions of key phases in Raju’s growth towards self-knowledge and, ultimately, self-abandonment are written in a clear analytical prose deriving from the author’s reading of nineteenth-century and modem English fiction reminiscent of Meredith, Forster, and even James, at their most persuasive. For instance, this is how Narayan describes Raju’s first thoughts about how Velan’s faith has trapped him into adopting a pose, both physical and pedagogical, from

which nothing he can do will be able to release him.: He felt that he had worked himself into a position from which he could not get out. He could not betray his surprise. He felt that after all the time had come for him to be serious - to attach value to his own words. He needed time - and solitude to think over the whole matter. He got down from his pedestal; that was the first step to take. The seat had acquired a glamour, and as long as he occupied it people would not listen to him as to an ordinary mortal. He now saw the enormity of his own creation. He had created a giant with his puny self, a throne of authority with that slab of stone. He left his seat abruptly, as if he had been stung by a wasp, and approached Velan. His tone hushed with real humility and fear; his manner was earnest. Velan sat as if he were a petrified sentry.Irony is not quite the word to describe what is going on here - in the spaces between Narayan’s placing of Raju’s meditation in the context of Velan’s and the readers’ understanding of his position, and of his own assumptions about the movements he will need to take to escape from it. &dquo;He&dquo; is the subject of almost all of the sentences in the passage, but the more he stresses this fact, the more he shows how dubiously he is the subject of what follows, what little responsibility he bears for the effects of his actions. Everything he does swells &dquo;the enormity of his own creation&dquo; - against his better judgement, which is powerless to influence the issue. And the word &dquo;glamour&dquo; (another Naipaulian favourite, attaching here to a concept Naipaul understands well, though he has evaluated it differently) is so carefully chosen, with its hint of the meretricious not quite synchronizing with the movement from &dquo;pedestal&dquo; to &dquo;seat&dquo; to &dquo;slab of stone&dquo; across it. These are expressive devices available only to a writer who is finely attuned to the possibilities of English narrative prose, placed in the service of something that is not quite an expos6 of native superstition and corruption, but not quite a celebration of some sort of ineffable religious truth either. The same applies to Raju’s &dquo;vindictive resolution&dquo; to &dquo;chase away all thought of food&dquo; when he finally decides - if &dquo;decides&dquo; is the word for it - to occupy the position Velan and samsara and fate have together conspired to place him in: This resolution gave him peculiar strength. He developed on those lines: &dquo;If by avoiding food I should help the trees bloom and the grass grow, why not do it thoroughly?&dquo; For the first time in his life he was making an earnest effort; for the first time he was learning the thrill of full application, outside money and love; for the first time he was doing a thing in which he was not personally interested. He felt suddenly so enthusiastic that it gave him a new strength to go through with the ordeal. He ... repeated the litany. It was no more than a supplication to the heavens to send down rain and save humanity. It... lulled his senses and awareness, so that the world around became blank ... Lack of food gave him a peculiar feeling, which he rather enjoyed, with the thought in the background, &dquo;This enjoyment is something Velan cannot take away from me.&dquo; Again the prose entangles the pure religious impulse of the sanyasi - &dquo;no more than a supplication to the heavens&dquo; - with the eye to the main chance of the tourist guide - &dquo;learning the thrill of full application&dquo;; &dquo;something Velan cannot take away from me&dquo;. And again the precise form of words combines a sense of supreme spiritual elevation and self-annihilation with a registration of extreme bodily fatigue and mental exhaustion. (Contrast the fuss Golding makes of something not entirely dissimilar in The Spire.) However, reference to features of Western literary culture will only go so far. It takes no account of the

alternative sources of Narayan’s technique in his familiarity with the Hindu myths - as these have been passed down to him through the classical texts and his grandmother’s stories. Shirley Chew makes the point in her Routledge Encyclopaedia entry when she remarks that &dquo;a reading of The Guide which pursues it as individual romance, along the lines of the novel form borrowed from the West, produces Raju either as a sinner redeemed or as a supreme fraud. Locating the novel within the Hindu tradition, however, produces a reading which can entertain Raju as both trickster and swami,... and the concluding scene as mere illusion and yet also a vision.&dquo. Here the movement between human and divine states of consciousness is handled less in the psychological manner than a manner that simply accepts what is given. And what is given is usually a combination of divine and human characteristics drifting around and through the characters with an arbitrariness that would have astounded the ancient Greeks, let alone a modem reader who is heir to one or other of the monotheistic traditions of West. In the Ramayana and the Mahabharata the dividing line between levels of natural and supernatural identity is extraordinarily faint and wavering. The title of Narayan’s collection of Hindu stories, Gods, Demons and Others, is well chosen: those &dquo;others&dquo; enjoy an ambiguous and deliquescent status. The list of &dquo;The Gods of the Stories&dquo; immediately preceding the stories themselves simplifies the pantheon by advancing three discrete levels of divine existence: Narayana ; the trinity created by the Supreme Being’s descent to a practical plane in the forms of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva; and a host of minor gods (devas) who are sometimes clearly distinguished from the trimurti, sometimes closely identified with one (or more) of them. But since there are thirty-three million of these minor gods, it can be appreciated that they take up a lot of room. They get mixed up with human figures who in any case might become sexually involved with them or actually born to them. Even the trimurti have congress with lesser gods, or characters of uncertainly godlike status. And they all have avatars, earthly incarnations, who enjoy variable and contradictory status. Vishnu, for example, has had nine avatars, the seventh, eighth and ninth of whom were Rama, Krishna and Buddha. All of these figures are attributed different degrees of divinity, the nature of the difference usually depending on which stories about them one happens to be reading, and in which oral or literary version. If a highwayman can become Valmiki through a series of transformations in his progress according to karma, it follows that a tourist guide can become a sanyasi through a similar progress. It isn’t impossible to conceive that this progress might end in the condition of moksha, or liberation from the wheel of samsara, which would be the supernatural mirror image of the wholly natural exhaustion to the point of death it looks as if Raju is experiencing on the last page of The Guide. However, since The Guide is a novel and not a myth (or even a magical realist text), Raju’s transformation from one condition to the other is unlikely to be effected through his burying himself in an anthill and waiting for Brahma to arrive a few thousand years later. All the power of Western psychological realism has to be brought to bear on the issue - and then be shown to be inadequate to the task of fully accounting for it. For since Raju’s situation, understood from an orthodox Hindu point of view, combines a subjective experience and an objective condition which that experience can never fully account for, one is unlikely to achieve a successful description of it by exclusively psychological-realistic means. So the appreciation of passages from the text describing stages in Raju’s transformation in the manner attempted above isn’t irrelevent, but it is incomplete. It is

incomplete because it places all the emphasis on analysis of the registration of mental states, when those mental states are represented in the text as one side of a condition that has two sides. The second side is also face-up for inspection, but invisible to a critical eye that focuses on matters to which literary critics in the West are more inclined to pay attention. In his excellent chapter on The Guide,11 William Walsh shows how Narayan’s best work dramatizes the paradox that &dquo;the very conditions of human growth are individual discrepancy and communal collaboration.... a person feels himself to be not just a point in a continuous line of humanity but in some fundamental way at a distance from and set off against the rest.&dquo;11 Raju’s situation at the end of this novel demonstrates this most effectively. He has realized what is most valuable in himself by submitting himself to the communal invention of his saintliness. He has brought his individual personality into line with what others expect of him. Of course it could be argued that in doing this he has really achieved the fullest development of what it was in him to be, because it is precisely this selflessness - a crafty willingness to subordinate his own wishes, ideas and opinions to the demands of his clients - that made him a successful tourist guide. So it is possible to chart Raju’s development from tourist guide to spiritual guru by recourse to occidental notions of psychological develop- ment and the appropriate narrative devices used to represent them. But this isn’t just a matter of representation. It is also a matter of judgement. And it seems to me, as it does to Walsh (and I would guess most of Narayan’s readers), that it is impossible to disentangle the representation and the judgement in the process of reading the novels. The shift in Raju’s position from one sort of guide to another entails a shift from one plane of existence to another, even though the same psychological characteristics remain in play. Walsh explains this by contrasting Western and Hindu understanding of transformations of character that have the approval of the gods. Western versions, of whatever religious persuasion, always give priority to &dquo;intention, contradiction, sincerity, responsibility, emendation&dquo; - which is to say they emphasize the operation of entrenched spiritual condition and/or a deliberate exercise of the will. &dquo;But in the transformation in the Eastern tale the personality is relatively passive, the source of change is outside the psyche in some mysterious law of life, and the process itself is much more a matter of illusion as sincerity, of selfdeception as much as of know thyself’. At many stages in the unfolding of Raju’s story, it’s not difficult for the Western reader to appreciate what is happening in ways that make no special demands on his patience. There are excellent comic scenes between Raju and Gaffur, the Moslem taxi driver, who feels uneasy about the way he is being used as a convenience for Raju’s affair with Rosie; or the tensions in the family when Raju brings Rosie to stay in their house in Malgudi; or the first steps in the promotion of Rosie as a dancer at the Union function. All of these, as one might expect, belong to Raju’s firstperson account of his fortunes up to his meeting with Velan at the ruined temple. But even in the scenes at the temple many openings to comedy which it requires no special unrstanding of specifically Indian, or Hindu, habits of thought for the Western reader to enjoy. Even here, though, in the retrospective as well as the present narrative, there are occasions where wry amusement consorts oddly with a certain puzzlement about motives, aims and effects. For example, Raju’s scene with Rosie on the glass-fronted verandah at the Peak House works splendidly to isolate the pair from Marco and provide the occasion for their first tentative movements in each other’s direction. But how far is Raju in control of the situation? Raju is

the one making waves, but they tend to roll back over him in a way suggesting that really neither he nor Rosie is in command of it. And dquo;Here at last,&dquo; she says, &dquo;we have silence and darkness, welcome things.dquo; But Raju &dquo;couldn’t find anything to say ... I was overwhelmed by her perfume Anddquo. The welcome he feels for the night and the exotic creatures crossing their line of vision somewhere behind the glass is complicated by uncertainty about which animals they are likely to see. When Rosie laughs at his mistake about the lions - &dquo; ’Lions here?’ she said and began laughing. ’I have read they were only in Africa ...’ &dquo; - he tells his audience that he had &dquo;slipped&dquo;. But how deliberate was the slip? The breathless list of tigers and panthers and bears and elephants that follows makes it sound as if this might be, not a specimen of Raju’s grand strategy to detach Rosie from Marco, but another example of his tendency to passive drifting with the tide of events, the sort of thing it takes an accident in a temple to raise to a higher value and transform into a spiritual act. At the end of The Guide, the Western critic can be very clever and point to the way Raju and Velan have changed places. Raju the confidence trickster has become the man who has been tricked out of his confidence, 81 and Velan the unconfident, humble peasant has become the &dquo;master of ceremonies&dquo; (p. 214), calling all the shots and - who knows? - perhaps getting a handsome rake-off in exchange. This might be clever, but it is not profound. It is to respond to Narayan’s representation of what human consciousness is consciousness of as if that was the beginning and the end of our interest in it. But what is conscious of us might be worth writing about every bit as much as what we are conscious of. The difficulty lies in accommodating this insight within the narrow space of our individual consciousness. The modem novel is adept at describing individual states of consciousness and relations between people that derive from them. But that is largely because the modem novel is the expression of a culture predicated on the fact that this, exclusively, is the world, conceived in its ethical and metaphysical character. For Narayan, the world is more than this. Consequently the fictions he invents in order to represent the world have to do more than find a form and a style to incorporate this incomplete version of it. That is why he has had to supplement his reading of nineteenth- and twentieth-century realist fiction with his memory of the Indian stories told to him at his grandmother’s knee, sharpened by re-reading and translation of their sources in the Hindu classical texts. Narayan’s novels aren’t like the package Govind Singh didn’t dare to open in &dquo;Gateman’s Gift&dquo;. Addressing the man from the x-ray institute, Singh pleads: &dquo;They said you could tell me what’s inside without opening it.&dquo; Well, in &dquo;Gateman’s Gift&dquo; we see what’s inside the package, and that is what puts us more in mind of a Maupassant story than an episode from the Ramayana. The Guide, though, is a package unsusceptible to x-ray interpretation. To read it is to open it, and the opening of it is the substance of what is read. When Raju decides to open his own packages (first Marco’s Cultural History of South India, then the letter from the bank), it occurs both to himself and to the reader that the whole exercise might be a plot to ruin him. Certainly he is ruined - in any of the rational senses of that word. But whose is the plot? &dquo;What was the man’s purpose in sending it now? Why this sudden generosity to return her an old box? Was he laying a trap for her, or what was it?&dquo; (p. 182). In view of the court case Raju loses, and as a consequence of which he goes to prison, it may well be that Marco has set a trap and Raju has fallen into it. In spite of his apparent mildness, even generosity, there is something threatening, something of the rakshasa of the epic tales, about

Marco. But that doesn’t feel like the whole story, which takes Raju far beyond the prison into states of existence strictly unrelated, in the conventional sense of plot and character, to what has gone before. For who can tell what is the whole story? Who can tell what workings out of samsara, beyond all the manifestations of individual character, have produced the tourist guide and sanyasi that is &dquo;Raju&dquo; in these pages? &dquo;This 82 is karma? What can we do?&dquo; Or, as the master whispers to Raja through the bars of his cage when he bids him farewell at the close of A Tiger for Malgudi: &dquo;Both of us will shed our forms soon and perhaps we could meet again, who knows? So good-bye for the present.&dquo;

Critical appreciation of The Guide

 R. K. Narayan’s The Guide (1958) is a novel written in such a socio-economic context when India was still a tradition based country with the majority of her population living in the villages. People of these villages were mostly uneducated, simple, gullible and superstitious. Children here grew up hearing legends and myths of many gods, goddesses and sages, which entered into their intelligentsia and developed their aesthetic senses and moral values. Narayan himself may have heard many such stories from her grandmother and thus may have had a first hand experience of these believes of the village people. Hence, he chooses such a village to unfold the story of the novel in point. The guide is set in malgudi and it opens with its protagonist, recently released from prison, sitting on a granite slab beside an ancient shrine on a bank of the river sarayu, on the other bank of which is situated the village Mangal , where people are so simple and gullible as to be made to accept for granted even the most unbelievable things. It is a man called velan from this village, who first mistakes for a saint and gradually makes other people of his village believe to be a saint telling them of the miracle that he believes has performed to solve a crucial problem of his family., perhaps already having a lesson of his misdeeds, feels reluctant to play the role assigned by velan, but when velan tells his problem for a solution, cannot help asserting his old habit of getting “involved in other people’s interests and activities”. Irritated by the greatness thrust upon him, tells velan to bring his sister the next day and thus reluctantly accepts a position superior to velan’s.

Velan discovers having something of a saint in the posture in which he is sitting. Velan meets him “sitting cross-legged” on a granite slab “as if it were a throne, beside an ancient shrine”, a river flowing beneath it. Raju’s sitting cross-legged reminds one of the postures in which lord buddha kept sitting in meditation and in which Hindu religious gurus usually sit in meditation. The granite slab making a ‘throne’ for seems to provide velan with a symbol that implies a meaning related to the figure of a holy man. The sanskrit term of ‘throne’ is simhasns and it is derived from the two words simha meaning a lion and asana meaning a seat “because a high priest’s throne ought to be covered with a lion’s skin. The ancient shrine beside which is sitting and the river flowing beneath it two sacred symbols of India also seem to provide further archetypal symbols of holiness that possibly lead velan to take for a saint. As krisna rao observes: “the influence of the temple on the democratic consciousness is so profound and efficacious that it results in the ultimate transformation of”.

The recently released jailbird is a saint overnight because of two chances working together. It is a mere chance that he is sitting cross legged beside the ancient temple; velan mistakes him for a swami for it. It is also chance that velan’s sister has agreed to marry. She has agreed, not by being persuaded by, rather some good sense has occurred in her. But velan interprets her good sense to have been awakened by and forces upon him the greatness of a saint.

Raju’s life appears in three phases in the novel: his position as a tourist guide, his adventure with the dancer Rosie and her husband Marco, and finally his position as a swami at the village, mangala. In all these phases is a cheat. He cheats the tourists by giving exaggerated descriptions of things. As he says:

“If an innocent man happened to be at hand, I let myself go freely. I pointed out to him something as the greatest, the highest, the only one in the world. I gave statistics out of my head. I mentioned a relic as belonging to the thirteenth century before Christ or the thirteenth century after Christ, according to the mood of the hour. If I felt fatigued or bored with the person I was conducting, I sometimes knocked the whole glamour out by saying, ‘must be something built within the last twenty years and allowed to rack and ruin. There are scores of such spots all over the place”.

He tells lies to Rosie with explicit interest of getting her close to him. As the guide employed by Marco, it is his professional responsibility to guide them properly but, contrary to what is expected of a guide, he misguides Marco and seduces his wife. He cheats Rosie both emotionally and monetarily. When he is a sage at mangala, he is more of a hypocrite exploiting the honesty and simplicity of the innocent villagers. When velan comes with his sister and a basket filled with different items of fruits and food, the hypocritical, pretending to be a “perfect” saint, picks up the basket and ceremoniously places it at the feet of the image of a long abandoned god, saying, “it is his first. Let the offering go to him, first; and we will eat the remnant”. He even “grew a beard and long hair to fall on his nape” to enhance his ‘spiritual status’ for which Balaram Gupta calls “a classical example of a counterfeit guru, a hypocrite masquerading as a saint, a sinner in saffron” in his article, “a sinner is a sinner is a sinner a study of”. Thus in all phases of his life remains a bad man.

Yet signs of goodness rest in Raju’s heart. He tells lies as a tourist guide not to fulfill his selfish end, but solely to make his tourists’ excursions meaningful. The tourists come with preconceived knowledge that these or those are worth-seeing things at Malgudi and themselves give exaggerated descriptions of those things before opens his mouth and simply cannot but node only not to mar their interest. Tourists guided by him considered themselves lucky: “if you are lucky enough to be guided by, you will know everything. He will not only show you all the worth-while places, but also help you in every way”. Though his telling lies to Rosie seems intentional with explicit interest of getting her close to him, by telling lies he gives her what Marco as her husband has denied. While Marco has his interests in collecting and annotating ancient art and has little appreciation for Rosie’s talents as a classical dancer and always ignores and insults her interests: “anything that interested her seemed to irritate him”, is eloquent in praising her dance and wants to make her the best dancer in India. When Rosie is ignored and tortured and drags her existence miserably under the lordship of Marco, accommodates her and gives some meaning to her life. At the village Mangal, is a feigned sage, but he always speaks to them on godliness, cleanliness and speaks on Ramayana. Despite his pretence he has sincerest concerns for the welfare of those who have made him a sage. So, is a pretender more for serving and accommodating others’ interests than for his own. Mary Bettina writes in this regard that “from the beginning of his career, is an accommodator” and that his “attempts to accommodate, mundane as they are, nonetheless prepare him for the transcendent life he eventually achieves,” and narasimhaiah almost canonizes as a saint: “with all his limitations Raju’s is a very complex life achieving integration at last”.

The polarity in the character of is complex and misleading. While, on one hand, he is reluctant to play the role unwittingly given by velan, on the other hand he feels delighted at

the success of his playing the role perfectly and “no one was more impressed with the grandeur of the whole thing than himself. When he is still angry with Velan for forcing on him the role of a saint, he acquires beard and prayer beads to heighten his spiritual status. The uncritical faith of the simple villagers and their fine compliments bewilder, yet his uneasiness is only within him. He never makes any bold effort to clear his position. Thus oscillates between reluctance and eagerness. His reluctance is partly due to his innocence as he wants to tell velan: “I am not so great as you imagine. I am just ordinary and partly due to a covert fear that the high reverence of the humble folks and their unquestioning belief in his enormous “capacity” may bring him some unavoidable trouble. senses some danger implied in this reverence and feels reluctant to be what Velan wants him to be. But soon he agrees to play the role due to an inevitable necessity of his—the necessity of food. Once he discovers that his working, as desired by Velan, will provide him with a sure means for food, the cheat in him rises. Thus that his decision of pretending to be a saint is determined by his selfish motives is clear in the following lines:

Where could he go? He had not trained himself to make a living out of hard work. Food was coming to him unasked now. If he went away somewhere else certainly nobody was going to take trouble to bring him food in return for just waiting for it. The only other place where it could happen was the prison. Where could he go now? He realized that he had no alternative: he must play the role that Velan had given him.

Thus, completely motivated by a selfish end, decides not to leave the place where food comes to him unasked only in return for just waiting for it although at the same time fearing that someday the villagers might “come to the stage of thinking that he was too good for food and that he subsided on atoms from the air” a foreseen comment that comes true in a different way in his life. For this selfish attitude of, Bal arum Gupta labels him as “a selfish swindler, an adroit actor, and a perfidious megalomaniac”.

Nevertheless, a tout as he seems to be in all the phases of his life has some uniquely good sides of his character. He is a self made man, a type of his own, having enormous capacity of adopting himself to all circumstances. Very much like Camus’ meursault, has the unique capacity to love life wherever he is and to enjoy things around him in all situations. Despite his unedifying past lives the present in its every moment and accepts everything it offers. He even finds the prison “not a bad place” and feels sorry when released. When he is to play the part of a saint, he so successfully adopts himself to the circumstance that not only Velan and the simple villagers but also the village school master comes under his guidance.  However, while meursault is introvert and selfish, always working for his own pleasure and never getting involved in other people’s interests and emotions and is guided by an exalted philosophy of life, is extrovert and always works for others’ interests at the cost of his own freedom of choice. When he was a tourist guide, he had to act in accordance with the expectations of the tourists. His own likings and disliking were not important there. And when he is a spiritual guide, he has to come up to what the role thrust upon him demands. Therefore, if as tourist guide tells lies, he lies not for his personal benefit; rather the tourists want him to do so. And as sage, though a fake sage he is, he works for the wellbeing of the villagers and guides them to the right path as a true sage would have done. Thus is not basically corrupt at heart but appears so only because of his failure to say ‘no’ to what he does not like. As he says: “if I had had the inclination to say, ‘I don’t know what you are talking about, my life would have taken a different turn”.  This latent goodness of Raju’s heart for sacrificing his own interests for others’ gradually leads him to what can be called his martyrdom. Mary Bettina comments that “in the character of, Narayan portrays the enormous

proportion of the mundane in every man, which is constantly in conflict with transcendent urges, and which ever attempts to postpone or delay the integration to the very end”.

Even in the extreme danger of the villagers, Raju’s thoughts are guided by selfish motives. He feels alarmed over the growing unrest in the village and advises the villagers: “no one should fight”. He wants to establish order and unity among the villagers because the unrest “might affect the isolation of the place and bring the police on the scene. He did not want anyone to come to the village”. is so scared of being exposed as a fake swami if the police or anybody comes to the village that he stupidly says to Velan’s younger brother, one of the lesser intelligences of the village, who come with news about a further probable attack between the villagers:

“Tell your brother, immediately, wherever he may be, that unless they are good I’ll never eat,

Eat what? Rsked the boy, rather puzzled. Say that I’ll not eat. Don’t ask what. I’ll not eat unless they are goo”.

“this was frankly beyond the comprehension of the boy” and “he could not connect the fight with this man’s food. Consequently, the message is distorted. Velan and his company hear the message as “the swami, swami does not want food anymore because it does not rain”. Thus Raju’s fate is sealed by a village idiot. His threat of ‘not eating’ is mistaken for a ritual fast. Soon the unrest is gone and the villagers start prostrating before him, saying: “you are not a human being. You are a mahatma. We should consider ourselves blessed indeed to be able to touch the dust of your feat”. Thus the foolish villagers again impose a huge responsibility on by conferring on him a new title ‘mahatma’. Narayan uses the title ‘mahatma’ for Raju to prepare him for his transcendental journey. Mahatma was used to address Gandhiji who initiated the doctrine of ahimsha to fight against the British and undertook fast and sacrifices shortly before his deaBritish948 to end communal disturbance in independent India. The greatness of Mahatma Gandhi and his fast to bring peace and unity are well known to the people of mangala as well, as we find in waiting for the mahatma Gandhi visits Narayan’s fictional town of Malgudi during India’s liberation war. is far away from the essential Gandhi an ideology and a man of his type would not have believed in it perhaps, but he is entrapped by the villagers’ high estimation of his person:

This mangala is a blessed country to have a man like the swami in our midst. No bad thing will come to us as long as he is with us. He is like mahatma. When mahatma Gandhi went without food, how many things happened in India! This is a man like that. If he fasts there will be rain. Out of his love for us he is undertaking it. This will surely bring rain and help us.

Your penance is similar to mahatma Gandhi’s. He has left us a disciple in you to save us.

Raju’s real transformation sets in when he realizes that, while cheating the innocent villagers, he has made himself “a giant with his puny self” ” and has “worked himself into a position from which he cannot get out now”.  The onward journey of the hypocritical ends here and the covert goodness of his soul finds a way. Thus while under the threat of life he should have cursed the fools, he feels moved by the recollection of the big crowd of women and children touching his feet and by the thought of their gratitude. To bring about Raju’s real transformation and to make it plausible, Narayan uses the Indian Hindu context and culture. He arranges to perform a ritual fast, standing in knee-deep water for fifteen days. Water and ritual fast are two holy sources of purification in Hinduism.  The fast of each day seems to dry up Raju’s sins and the water purifying his soul by washing away its dirtiness.  Within five days of his ritual fast, is a changed man. He feels “enraged at the persistence of food-

thoughts”, perhaps realizing that it was the dire necessity of food for which he had to be a fake swami: “with a sort of vindictive resolution he told himself, ‘I’ll chase away all thought of food. For the next ten days I shall eradicate all thoughts of tongue and stomach from my mind’ “if by avoiding food I should help the trees bloom, and the grass grow”.  Thus a new is set to be born:

For the first time in his life he was making an earnest effort; for the first time he was learning the thrill of full application, outside money and love; for the first time he was doing a thing in which he was not personally interested.

As long as Raju’s thoughts are guided by mundane affairs: love, money, food and shelter, he has to remain a hypocrite, but the moment he sheds all his hypocrisy and forgets all mundane interests, his penance is that of a real saint.  From the sixth day Raju’s prayer to bring down rain from the heavens and save humanity is no longer a pretender’s but the true supplication of a saint who, absolutely free from the mundane, is absorbed in meditation, being in league with the divine.

Balarama gupta accuses Narayan of being less “scathing and more covert” in his attacks on, “because he can laugh at human follies and absurdities without any great involvement or a well defined commitment to human values”.  Balarama gupta perhaps reads the guide as a delightful exposure of the ignorance ridden Indian rural society as well as of typically Indian pseudo saints, but the reverence of the simple folks for the sanyasi and their unquestioning faith in the sanyasi can be attributed to their cultural heritage. From the beginning of her history India has adorned and idealized not soldiers and statesmen, not men of science and leaders of industry, not even poets and philosophers . . . But men who have stamped infinity on the thought and life of the country, men who have added to the invisible forces of goodness in the world.

In making a saint, it is not who himself plays any significant role; rather it is velan and his villagers whose reverence forces him to be a saint. The absolute reverence of the innocent villagers come to him as a sharp weapon at the end although should not certainly be allowed to go scot-free without owning partial responsibility for his fate. It is partially true that could have avoided his end had he not simply agreed but Raju’s failure to establish control over the situation initiated by velan is fateful. However, if is at last a saint, his transformation should not appear a miracle because such miracles are not impossible in India which has been a land of gods and goddesses and where traditional beliefs are more than knowledge despite the invasion of the west. Although western colonial machinery already brought about considerable changes in India’s many social and political levels, the knowledge of Indian classical myths remains almost unchanged in the psychological state of the people. In this regard Narayan himself comments: “with the impact of modern literature we began to look at our gods, demons, and sages, not as some remote concoctions but as types and symbols possessing psychological validity, even when seen against the contemporary background”. It is this hoary tradition of India that along with the unshakeable misplaced belief of the people of mangala goes hand in hand in making a saint.

It also seems that the traditional Hindu belief about a saint plays some role in the transformation of into a saint. In Hinduism such blind acceptance and consequent reverence for a saint are common knowledge. According to Hinduism, disciples should possess two qualities: susrusa and sraddha. Zimmer writes “susrusa is the fervent desire to hear, to obey, and to retain what is being heard; it implies dutifulness, reverence, and service. Sraddha is trust and composure of mind; it demands the total absence of every kind of independent

thought and criticism on the part of the pupil; and here again there is reverence, as well as strong and vehement desire”. The presence of these qualities in velan and others of his village is functional. is a saint not because he is a saint, but because velan and others of his village are perfect disciples embodying all these qualities: they are never tired of hearing and taking for granted everything narrates; not only velan, even the teacher of the village school obeys what says, and they hear and retain everything minutely in their minds; and they are so reverent towards that they do never question what he tells them because they believe, as nirad says that “it is Hindu conviction that no right path in religion can be found without instruction By a qualified guide”. Mercantile Stefano says that “these cultural factors display the wisdom of an uninterrupted ancient tradition that moulds the minds of the characters and influences, often unconsciously, their thoughts and behavior”. Hence, taking a rogue for a saint was not impossible for such people.

Narayan also seems to make a corrupt man a spiritual guide with the help of the mythic elements taken from Indian mythology. Raju’s transformation corresponds to the lives of many Indian mythical sages like nezam aoulia peer, or valmiki. Nezam aoulia, a thief by profession, one day comes across a pious man whom he wants to rob but the man asks nezam aoulia if his family members will share his sins. Nezam aoulia leaving the man tied with a tree in the jungle goes home and asks everybody if they will share his sins of robbing people but none agrees.  Nezam aoulia feels repentant and atones by watering a dead tree until the tree blooms flowers and he is accepted as a saint by people. Similarly valmiki, a forest plunderer, also becomes a saint by choosing a life of asceticism under a tree where he passes years until ants build a shelter above him.

Finally it can be said that it is not that worked to be a saint; rather he had to be a saint under a compelling pressure over which he could not establish any control. He just reluctantly accepts the greatness thrust upon him by the innocence, ignorance, superstition and deep beliefs in religion of the simple, rustic people of the village of mangala. Chance and incidence also play a dominant role in making him a saint. And theoretically Narayan makes a use of the religious, philosophical and cultural beliefs based on the great Indian epics, legends and folk tales to transform into a saint.

Transformation of Raju’s Character in “The Guide”

Raju lives in a village called Malgudi. In Malgudi, Raju aspires as whatever other people want him to be such as, he is a chameleon based on someone’s current need. For example of Raju’s malleability is when he begins managing a shop at the Malgudi train station and he is known by the village as a “Railway Raju”. In this role Raju builds himself as an expert guide and establish him to gain any and all items a person is searching for.

Raju also meets Rosie. She is a classical dancer and becomes his lover. Raju becomes Rosie’s guide and he establishes Rosie as a professional dancer. Raju is in deep financial problem. He decides to utilize Rosie’s dancing skill for monetary purpose. He succeeds in arranging a show for her and Raju is now her business manager. In this part, we see that Raju is a dishonest person. Raju also copies the sign of Rosie as a result he commits a crime.

Finally Raju ends up in prison because of his machinations. While there Raju again changes his personality not only respect him but also come to help others. In the Novel, the reader can see that Raju has an uncanny ability to effect change in other people as well as in him and

still he does not realize that he holds the extraordinary power. He sees his ability as survival mechanism and nothing more.

Raju is released from prison finally but he is not sure where he goes or what to do even with his life. At this point, he does not want to return home to Malgudi because he does not want to do deal with all the gossip and rejection.

Now Raju takes shelter in an old temple. In this holy place on the banks of the Suraya river, Raju is able to think a bit more and give himself time to come up with his next plan. When he is hiding out in the temple Raju meets a strange named Velan. Both begin talking and discussing about life and after a time Velan thinks that Raju as a holy man. With his talent for becoming whatever his beneficial to his circumstances.

Raju pick up on Velan’s mistake and plays. Later when Raju is forced to admit that he is not a holy man after all subsequently must reveal where he is from and who is really. He is somewhat shocked to find his ambition and guilt but initially thought to free him from the burdensome role of a holy man. Actually he was looking for the opposite effect. His revelation of the truth forces him further into the role of a holy man. In this way Raju’s making malleability a path that has brought him to this point. The true incarnation of a “Swamiji” a holy man. The reader narrates that at this point in Raju’s transformation he is finally able to overcome his previous need to be whatever people wanted him to be. He has no longer needs to be everything for everybody and he has come to place where he really lies him to Malgudi, Rosie and fame all peel away. Raju sees himself that what he truly just another individual is. He is now able to help others without an ulterior motive. His path has become clear and follows it selflessly.

Raju’s transition from conmen to holy man is both comical and didactic. Narayan’s narrative shows how people can be destined for great things without even realizing it. At the same time, it shows how people pasts are not entirely what defines them the people character like Raju.

Ultimately the narrator shows that there are often greater forces at work than what mankind perceives in a moment of choice whatever a good choice or not. There is good for mankind despite outward appearances. Raju’s journey is testament to this hope.

Chapter-VII

Findings

The Guide is the story of a true guide whatever the situation, location or time. Raju, the protagonist would play the role of a guide. As Raju is not only a guide but also symbol of wisdom, guidance and common sense. Thus the title evocative and symbolic. Actually The Guide by R.K Narayan is besed on the conflicts of human interest or nature. The story mainly settles between Rosie and his husband Marco. Raju who enters their life as a guide. I think that the picture of society that Narayan narrates is seen through the eyes of Raju. Raju is a driving specific end as he works of Rosie manager. That it is a financial gain, social acceptance and the conformist social path of a product based end. This compels led him to do some terrible things. Though ends up recognizing the folly of his own path and make a conscious choice to change it fasting for the villagers. Through this it is a picture of society where the individual process is the power to transform what should be. The pursuit of worldly ends is something that can substituted for a more spiritual notion of the good. Raju represents it doing something for a social statement to be made about individual and society itself can seek to achieve more spiritually elevated pursuit. In this light the picture of contemporary society offered is a transformative one. At first we see that Raju is a school going boy though he is not attentive student but would like to take care of his classmates. After his father’s date he becomes a shopkeeper of his father’s shop. Here he would like to guide his customers but he sells the shop because his ambition is high to be a guide. The advanture of a “Railway Raju” as a tourist guide. It is such a profession which beings him in contact with Marco and Rosie. Raju seduces Rosie. Rosie is a born dancer Raju arranges a show for her at very first she is a grand success. Raju copies the sign of Rosie for jewellery. As a result he is arrested by Police. Here we see that Raju is a dishonest person and a greedy person.

On release from jail, Raju take shelter in a deserted temple on the bank of the river Saraya, Mongla. Now he seems to be a saint because hair and beard was long. There Raju meets Velan both begin talking about their problem. The simple villagers take to be a Mahatma and request to worship for raining. There is a several famine drought to perform some miracle to being them rain. So he has to undertake a first but Raju realizes that ge was not a saint.

In the novel, the reader can see that Raju has an uncanny ability to effect change into other people as well in himself. We know that if anybody wants to transform his character from evil to good, he can like Raju. Raju also wanted to change his life though doing good works. Now Raju starts fasting. After eleven days past he indicates glad to look at the sky and fallen down. Raju also confesses the truth “If by avoiding food I should have the trees grows and the grows why not do it thoroughly.

At the very first though he was not a good man but at last part I think that really he could pure himself by his bloody fasting and I think it is only possible when a man thinks for others. Though one scene we see that Raju cheated with Rosie but when Rosie meets with Raju in the jail gate. He said to Rosie to wait for him until he come back. Here I think that

though he misused Rosie but he really loved her. And at the last part he faces near to the date for others.

We know that nobody completely good in all side in world. Most of the people of our society commits some crime in their young age which we consider because of young age, society effect, financial problems and so on. Raju does not prefer from that. I think that Raju has committed some crime. In his previous days but now he is transformed his character. In the novel The Guide, we see that in his prison life he released from jail before end up the time of his punished. So according to me in spite of his falseness, after all he is a good person now because in his last life he really did a lot struggle for the people of Mongla.

Chapter- VIII

Conclusion

Narayan in his novels has limited his characters to the cultural limitations of the India of that time and those m ale characters were often very weak and they could not break the barriers of the strong cultural effects. The culture was mainly the strict following of the caste system, creed and religion and any change or new traditions were strongly opposed. Narayan , in his novels, upholds the Hindu traditions and does not support mixed marriages, meaning inter caste and inter religion marriages. Narayan raised the issue of caste in Indian culture and tried to show the disparity of caste and differences of religion which still bring impediments to legitimate and valid marriages among the Hindus in India. Disparity of caste and creed are an insurmountable obstacle in a Hindu marriage in India, in Narayan's novels. The two most important time honored categorical imperatives of Hindu Society are Varna and Ashram. Apart from caste, there was a strong feeling of patriotism in the hearts of Indians and they were revolting against the British domination and power. Narayan beautifully depicts the characters as having a strong love of their country; despite the fact the characters are not very strong as individuals. Narayan also evaluated and exposed the issues of communalism in his various novels. The story is told in two-fold narration. The novel begins with the release of Raju from the jail. After releasing from the jail, Raju takes shelter in a deserted temple of a village named as Mangal. The simple villagers take him granted as a Saint. Reluctantly, Raju narrated his own past to his one of the most loyal devotees named as Velan. This narration unfolds the past of his life. Raju a fatherless child lives with his mother and known as Railway Raju. Later he becomes a tourist guide and hence known as ‘Raju Guide’ by the people and the tourists. The profession brought him in contact with Marco and his beautiful wife, a born dancer named as Rosie. She was so passionate dancer that her dancing changes the fate, destiny and future of her and Raju's life. Her dancing is so significant that it has been given place on the first page of the novel. Marco was against Rosie's interest in dance/art of dancing but she was not ready to leave it at any cost. Marco was interested in archaeology and Rosie was interested in dancing. Their passion of interests was a Lakshman-Rekha in their married life. Raju is fascinated by the charming personality of Rosie. He loves her and finally seduces her and enjoys good time with her. The fact is revealed to Marco. He becomes angry. He wants Rosie to go out of his life. Rosie pleaded and apologises for her blunder. Ultimately, Marco leaves Rosie behind and goes to Madras. Raju grabs this opportunity and gives shelter to Rosie in his home. Raju’s widowed mother dislikes Rosie’s entry, her dancing and the relationship of Raju with her. Raju’s mother left the home when the things go beyond her control. Now, Rosie gets full freedom for the practice of dancing. Raju becomes the managing director of Rosie and Rosie becomes the dancer. Rosie’s devotion, commitment and passion brought a grand success for her and she becomes a well known dancer. Their income grows tremendously. Raju thinks that it is his own success and started to live lavishly. He started to drink and gamble with his many rich friends. Everything was well and fine but there Raju made a mistake. He forges the signature of Rosie in order to 128 receive valuable jewellery which was lying in the bank on the joint account with her husband. The offence sent him in the jail whereas Rosie leaves for Madras. Afterwards, Rosie could do well without the help of Raju. Thus, the act of forgery made Raju and his beloved Rosie apart. In this sense, Raju’s childhood, guide ship, love affair and imprisonment is revealed in the flashback narration and narrated by Raju himself. Raju himself narrates the flashback to his loyal devotee named as Velan.

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Prepared by Shamaun Hossain