IMAGING NARAYAN’S MALGUDI: A CRITICAL READING OF VIJAY ANAND’S 'GUIDE' (Pages 01-10) by Ms. Vyas Kruti in THE ENGLISH RESEARCH EXPRESS / ISSN:2321-1164 (Online); 2347-2642 (Print)

A railway guide with enforced mahatma hood, a Bharatnatyam dancer trying to wriggle free from a loveless marriage, an archaeologist hunting for hidden heritage in the gloom of caves and the ignorance and credulity of Indian villagers refusing to see through the holy disguise of a jailbird and the picturesque landscape of India forming the staple of Dev Anand’s cinematic text The Guide suggests an attempt on the part of the filmmaker to reorientalize India for the easy consumption of the western audience. The novel revolving around three characters—a wily mendicant, a dancer (courtesan?) and an unkind husband who cannot keep his own wife happy—may be the staple of an orientalist text. However, whereas Narayan resists the temptation of falling into the orientalist trap and transcends the oriental stereotypes by highlighting the resistance of Rosie and refusing to give an easy conclusion to his text, Dev Anand, through his cinematic deviation, not only alters the ethos and character of Malgudi and but also simplifies the spiritual conflict of a godman and evades the issue of woman’s resistance. Orientalism is all about creating images about the east and thus typecasting it as a space which occident is not. Cinema is all about images. The very opening of the film featuring a just-released convict in orange robes at the crossroads, whose final fast causes rain and rejuvenation, makes the intent of reorientalizing India very evident. The movie, although showcasing India’s transition from tradition to colonial modernity, can be interpreted as a cinematic text that revisits certain key images and ideas which were circulated by the west to classify Orient as retrogressive, gullible, and irrational. No wonder, we have a wife who feels incarcerated and enslaved by a cold and brutal husband; we have a neighbourhood of snake-charmers and a grippingly performed snake dance by Waheeda Rahman; and we have a guide who cons the woman he loves and rescues. Keywords: Cinema, Adaptation, Bollywood, Orient, Occident, Reorientalizing, Resistance.