RK Narayan called the movie "The Guide" - “Misguided Guide”

He did not like the film version - especially the English one - but only after it flopped.

RK Narayan wrote a 80,000 word novel called “The Guide.” Earlier, I had a muse about the story itself.

Analyzing the Story of The Guide (author: Rasipuram Krishnaswami Narayanaswami)

Plot summary: Fresh out of prison, infamous ex-tourist guide, Raju, finds an unexpected sanctuary in an abandoned temple. Implicated in forgery by his girlfriend (Rosie), the wife of a tourist named Marco, Raju tries to lay low. But when villagers mistake him for a holy man, he embraces the charade, only to find himself inadvertently committed to a life-threatening fast until the rains come. The outcome is tragic.

*This* muse will delve into the process of writing the story and what followed.

Executive complaint: Mr Narayan complained about how the moviemakers (more in English than in Hindi) perverted *his* story.

Executive punch line: His complaint does not hold water.

Background

Those who have never read any story by RK Narayan, it is important to keep in mind that *all of his stories* were written in English and not in his mother tongue (Tamil). In the 1930s, when he started writing, it was not common for writers living in India writing stories or novels exclusively in English. He was one of the first Indo-Anglian writers.

Early in his career, Mr Narayan befriended Graham Greene getting his critical support. His works were published in the UK with that support. That, in turn, made it possible for Mr Narayan to make a living being an English language storyteller in India itself.

RK Narayan and the Nobel

Narayan got nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature starting in 1974 by Prabhakar Machwe as the Secretary of the Indian Sahitya Academy and by writer Ediriweera Ranjitha Sarachchandra of Ceylon. He was nominated later as well.

But the same year, 1974, Graham Greene was nominated by five people for the same prize. The actual prize went to two Swedish authors: Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson. Johnson had five nominations and Martinson had just two.

How did they win the Nobel with such thin support?

They happened to be members of the Swedish Academy, the body that selects the laureate! It is difficult to fight with an internal candidate, it is doubly difficult when there are two of them.

Graham Greene eventually garnered 35 nominations in 20 different years. When a Nobel committee member wrote, "Despite my admiration for several of his earlier works, I would not even then have placed him in the class where a Nobel laureate belongs," we know it was not to be.

Executive end result: In the end, neither Greene nor Narayan would win a Nobel.

When was The Guide written?

The clue comes from Mr Narayan himself in his book: My Dateless Diary. In this diary/book, he deliberately deletes all the dates of his entries.

In the Foreword, he writes:

“Datelessness has its limit. Sooner or later the seal of date shows up even in the most indifferently maintained diary. For example, the portion describing the progress of my novel, The Guide, is a date-seal, if you are watchful. The following pages arose out of a day-to-day journal kept when I first visited the United States of America on an invitation by the Rockefeller Foundation.”

He had chapter headings like “Guided Men” and “Super-Guide”. It is unlikely that he was *not* thinking about his forthcoming book title when he was writing his Dateless Diary.

The year was 1958 - the year Viking accepted to publish his book in the US. He is given a deadline. He does not tell us what the deadline was.

“I think of elaborate calculations: a thousand words a day and by February first I should complete the first draft. In order to facilitate my work I take a typewriter on hire, after three days of tapping away it gets on my nerves, and I lounge on the sofa and write with my pen. Whatever the method my mind has no peace unless I have written at the end of the day nearly 2,000 words. Between breakfast and lunch I manage five hundred words, and while the rice on the stove is cooking a couple of hundreds and after lunch once again till six, with interruptions to read letters and reply to them, or to go out for a walk along the mountain path, or meet and talk to a friend.”

He fretted about how it would be received.

“I had now an occasion to study my own methods dispassionately when I tried to find someone to type the manuscript of my new novel The Guide. No doubt sitting in the train from Washington, I could get through the manuscript but I did not stop to think how it might strike anyone else trying to read the manuscript. I realized my folly only when I promised to deliver the manuscript to Viking on a certain date, looked for someone to type my manuscript.”

“I am quite absorbed in The Guide, and realise with a great deal of relief for the first time that it does not bore.”

While Narayan does not tell us the dates of his travels, he does elaborate on the places he visited. He was in the US from January to November of 1958 leaving his daughter Hema back in India. His wife died when Hema was three. He collected signatures of Hollywood celebrities for his daughter.

“My companion admires the autographed Hollywood photographs that I have secured for my daughter, which I am carrying around before posting. The waitresses come over to see the photographs and all cry, ‘Gee! What a treasure!’”

He spends three months in California - most of that time is spent around Hollywood. He describes some of these visits:

“We were presently passing on to a stage crowded with people. The moment the door was shut behind me, I might, for all it mattered, be in Gemini Studios—the same groups of people—half of whom too tense and half too relaxed.

The cameraman was pointed out to me in respectful, nervous whispers, as an academy winner—a Chinaman, with his thick glasses and five-foot height who looked so much like Ramnoth, (of Gemini Studios at Madras) and moved about like him.”

Two facts emerge from his description: He was not visiting the studios as a tourist. He visits specific people: Producers and Distributors of movies. He also visits people like Geoffrey Shurlock.

“Afternoon occupy the motel on Sunset Boulevard according to plan. I’m now right in the heart of Hollywood. Call on Mr Geoffrey Shurlock, Vice President of the Motion Picture Academy who has taken over the functions of the old Hay’s Office, and applies the Production Code to new pictures; he is concerned with the censoring of scripts and reels.”

“Visit the famous Universal International Studios. Lunch with William Gordon—head of the international section, who feels disturbed by the attitude of Indian Government, who were understood to be hostile to Hollywood in general. Nothing disturbs film folk so much as the thought that they are not loved and admired. India Government somehow averse to Hollywood. Mr. Gordon projected for me Bengal Brigade, which was refused a certificate in India.”

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5hduir

[Bengal Brigade (also known as Bengal Rifles) 1954 starring Rock Hudson]

He proudly noted his familiarity with the ways of the film world:

"I am too experienced in the film world to take too much notice of anyone or offer my seat. It’s a free-and-easy world, where there is a lot of relaxed, mutual indifference, and the courtesies of the humdrum world are neither missed nor noticed."

Mr Narayan knew how the film world works. To wit, he was the writer of “Mr Sampat” that was made into a Hindi film in 1952 in Gemini Studios. He also mentions cameramen K Ramnoth of Gemini Studios.

Digression with a purpose: Ramonth directed a Tamil movie called Marmayogi in 1951 - an Indianized Macbeth starring MG Ramachandran (MGR). It was a big entry for MGR. It earned an “Adult” certificate - a first for a Tamil movie. Reason: There was a ghost as a character! Such strict were the censors. So, RK Narayan, with his close friendship with Ramnoth knew it back then how ridiculously strict Indian censors were.

Why was Narayan spending so much time around Hollywood? He was pitching The Guide as a possible English language movie to be financed by Hollywood producers to be released in India and elsewhere. That explains why he would visit not just the directors and the producers but also the censor boards.

“Mr. Gordon proved that India was a loser in the long run as every film producer interested in India would bring it at least two million dollars into this dollar-starved sub-continent. It was all high economics which I didn’t quite follow. Ultimately Mr Gordon hinted, that if the Government continued its unfriendly acts, Hollywood would be driven to making pictures of India uninhibited, faking all the background in Hollywood, stories wildly misinterpreting India, which would certainly create box office records all over the world. I said, ‘Why not?’ Instead of worrying over Delhi attitudes.”

Executive summary: RK Narayan was quite familiar with the movie business as he says, “I am too experienced in the film world”.

Change of narrative by RK Narayan…many years later

In his essay “Misguided Guide,” he writes

I recalled a talk with Satyajit Ray, the great director, some years earlier, when I had met him in Calcutta. He expressed his admiration for The Guide but also his doubts as to whether he could ever capture the tone and atmosphere of its background. He had said, ‘Its roots are so deep in the soil of your part of our country that I doubt if I could do justice to your book, being unfamiliar with its milieu…’.

Why did he meet Ray? Just to chitchat? Nope. He was pitching The Guide as a movie to Ray. Ray wanted full control of the story for the film version to be made in Hindi/Bengali. Narayan would not yield. They parted company.

Then he writes about his encounter with (not yet prime minister) Indira Gandhi (no relation to M K Gandhi).

“Later Mrs Indira Gandhi, whom I met after she had seen a special showing of the film, asked, ‘Why should they have dragged the story all over as if it were a travelogue, instead of containing themselves to the simple background of your book?’ She added as an afterthought, and in what seemed to me an understatement: ‘Perhaps they have other considerations.’”

Why was the special showing for Mrs Gandhi? She was the Minister for Information at the time. Narayan needed her stamp of approval to get past the censor board. In the paragraph above, Narayan is being coy about the *real* reason behind the special showing of the movie. Instead, he says:

“In my story the dancer’s husband is a preoccupied archaeologist who has no time or inclination for marital life and is not interested in her artistic aspirations. Raju the Guide exploits the situation and weans her away from her husband. That is all there is to it—in my story. But now a justification had to be found for adultery.”

He knew very well the model code for movies in India before he gave his permission to make a movie out of his book. He knew very well that adultery in the storyline would be an issue. He had worked with movies in Gemini Studios fifteen years before The Guide became a movie. He was the writer of the Hindi movie Mr Sampat. [It was later made into a Tamil movie by Cho Ramaswamy - no relation of Vivek Ramaswamy.]

Gemini Studios was famous for dialogues and songs in Tamil with double meanings. The words would be innocent sounding but they could be read as very sexually charged - often vulgar. They were put in to circumvent the censor board. For a man of literature, he would have known about them. The “double meaning songs” were much more popular in the 1950s and the 1960s when what you could show on the screen was very restrictive compared with today. Here is a recent example from 2002.

Narayan dissociated himself from the movie version of his book with a final pronouncement:

“Soon I trained myself to give up all attempts to connect the film with the book of which I happened to be the author.”

Here is the curious thing: He heaped all his criticism on the English version (called “The Guide”) of the movie rather than the Hindi version (called “Guide”).

Why?

He thought the English version would be a hit. After all, the script was written by Pearl S Buck. She was not just a Nobel Prize winner in literature, she was the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize in anything. She was also the first American to win a Nobel in literature. Narayan gushed to Greene about his fortune to have Buck as the script writer!

Bad Bet Buck

Perhaps in the pre-internet age he did not know that J Edgar Hoover had a long dossier on Buck trying to prove that she was a Chinese spy. The irony was that Hoover was a fan of Buck as a writer before he became an antagonist. Buck put in a lot of effort into the movie. She even taught the main actress (Waheeda Rehman) how to deliver lines in English.

Worse: In the 1950s and the 1960s, Buck was actively promoting the view that biracial people have superior intellect. She had adopted two of them. Back then, the approval rate of interracial marriage in the US was five percent. [Now it sits at 95 percent.]

Bottom line: Despite her Nobel Prize, in the 1960s, Pearl S Buck was an unpopular figure in the US. Her participation in the movie project of The Guide was not a money spinner.

He must have been disappointed to see the English version fizzle. Reportedly it cost US$800,000 in 1965. That would be equivalent to 40 average houses in the US.

Punchline: Narayan’s criticism was very muted against the Hindi version!

It was a hit. Reportedly, the Hindi version recouped all the money spent on the Hindi and the English versions together. Narayan wrote his criticism in 1980 - long after the fate of both the versions became very clear.

If you see the English version, you realize that it is a much closer rendition of the original text. Buck stayed true to the original story. Music, dancing and songs were at the center of the Hindi version but not in the English version. Instead, we get longer dance with the snake charmer and a tiger and a black panther hunting a deer. They were staged. Originally, the director wanted a fight between the tiger and the panther to death. They could not coax the animals to do so.

The next muse on this subject will take an unconventional look at the pair of movies: Guide (Hindi) and The Guide (English).

Postscript

In 2008, there was a special screening of the fully restored English version of the movie at the Cannes Film Festival - three hours long. The English version restoration underwent extensive re-editing. It added back nearly 40 minutes of extra footage.

https://www.festival-cannes.com/en/f/guide/

The average length of a Hollywood film has much shorter since the talkies began.

The Hindi version has been restored in 4K resolution (also called ultra high resolution of 4,000 pixels) - mostly technical fixes with missing or destroyed frames and sounds - no re-editing. It required working on 250,000 individual frames not to mention the soundtrack.

It was shown in the Ajanta Ellora Film Festival along with other restored films of Dev Anand.