Golden Era of Bollywood: Navketan's Guide- From Pages to Celluloid

Sunday 17 February 2019

Navketan's Guide- From Pages to Celluloid

After the Berlin Film Festival in 1962, Dev Anand and his wife travelled to London and later, at the invitation of the Nobel laureate, Pearl S Buck and the Polish-American TV film director, Tad Danielewski of Stratton Productions, to New York. It was while eating a dish called ‘Scorpion’ at a restaurant in ‘The Village’ (as Greenwich Village is commonly referred to), that Dev Anand presented Pearl S Buck with a copy of R K Narayan’s The Guide. He told them that he intends to make a film on this book.
Pearl and Tad were impressed by the possibilities of a cinematic adaptation of the novel, they had doubts about whether Narayan would be willing to part with the film rights of his novel.
R K Narayan 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 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. His first book "Swami and Friends" was published in 1935. 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; He wrote nearly three dozen novels and several short-story collections, The Guide was his thirteenth book and eighth novel. It was published in 1958.
Dev Anand in his Biography says “I read it at one go…I thought it had a good story, and the character of Raju, the guide, was extraordinary,”He first wrote a letter to R K Narayan, As per Narayan he got a letter from Anand, modestly describing himself as “a producer and actor from Bombay” and wondering, “I don’t know if my name is familiar to you.” In this letter, he wrote about his interest in making a great film on The Guide.

After his approval, Dev immediately sought an appointment with R. K. Narayan and signed a contract with him. There was also a broad consensus that the film is made in both English and Hindi. While Tad was de facto director of the English version, for the Hindi, it was a toss-up between Chetan Anand and Raj Khosla. Neither worked out. Finally, Vijay ‘Goldie’ Anand was chosen to direct the Hindi version.

Guide(Eng)-Pic-1.

Guide(Eng)-Pic-2

Dev Anand wanted to start English version and Hindi version simultaneously. The idea was to film the scenes common to both versions simultaneously, a Hindi shot to be immediately followed by the same shot in English, to save time and money but it could not be materialised because Vijay Anand was not happy with the script, he wanted to change the script and write a new script. The other reason for the delay of the Hindi version was the music composer S.D. Burman had suffered a heart attack and was not available for the music. Burman Dada advised Dev to sign on a new composer for Guide, but Dev put his foot down and insisted that Burman should first get well and then take over.
As we all know that in the novel the city taken by the author was an imaginary town Malgudi but in the film, Udaipur of Rajasthan was prefered by the director Tad. But it wasn’t only the locations, the scale and the general tenor that shifted from page to screen. It was the characters themselves. This annoyed R K Narayan but he was later convinced that Tad could not create the town similar to Malgudi. The next change was the name of the hero as Raju Guide whereas in the novel it was Railway Raju. Raju’s childhood and youth don’t appear in the film. Part of the reason lay in popular cinema’s need to be larger than life. All the small town specificity of Malgudi was erased. The film also has many sequences specifically inserted to impress the foreign audience as some kind of Bharat-Darshan.

Similarly, the Rosie who made it to the Hindi film screen was nowhere near as radical as the original Rosie – the Rosie created by RK Narayan, in his novel The Guide.
Narayan’s character had chutzpah, but he had his awkward moments. But the film was a star vehicle for Dev Anand, and its hero had to be more Dev Anand than Raju. So Anand’s Raju Guide has no self-doubt. He is never worried about the hairiness of his chest. He never wonders if he could be bold enough to woo Rosie. It is in relation to Rosie that he is most transformed – because Rosie herself has changed. Narayan’s Rosie is no sophisticated, but her ambition is never in doubt. Nor is the carnality of Raju’s interest in her, or her reciprocation of it. The novel has none of the high-mindedness that Hindi cinema forced upon its heroes and heroines so Raju can tell us the truth: he is attracted to Rosie; his support of her dance begins because it is the clue to her affections.

The novel’s Rosie is full of plans; Raju need only support them. But Vijay Anand’s film, keenly aware of his conservative audience, turns his Rosie into a bundle of nerves who tries three times to commit suicide, only to be saved each time by Raju, and berated: “Tumhari haalat aaj yeh isliye hai ki tumne apni haalat se baghaavat karna nahi seekha.”
The other sociological element that makes both book and film fascinating is that Rosie is a devadasi by birth, and her reclaiming of dance in a new secular public form formed a fictional counterpart to the actual national reclaiming of Bharatnatyam. Here, too, the film has Marco insult dance, while Raju delivers a lecture on how artists are no longer bhaands.
By June 1963, the shooting of the English version of The Guide was completed and Pearl S. Buck who viewed the rushes found it up to the mark. When Narayan saw the English version in January 1964, he wrote to Dev, labelling the film profound, artistic, and exquisite. In 1964, Dev began promoting The Guide in the US and the premiere elicited encouraging responses from a cross-section of viewers.
The English version premiered at the Lincoln Art theatre in New York in February 1965. The mainstream press in America including The New York Times and the Time magazine didn’t take a liking to The Guide.
The English Guide was a flop but Dev Anand was not bothered, he took the failure in his stride. “The film did not fare well, but it gave me a semblance of recognition in a new arena… The new experience was rewarding enough,” he writes in Romancing with Life.
Dev Anand had plans to release the Hindi version of The Guide by end 1965. But suddenly, he was faced with a barrage of protests from some quarters who strongly recommended that the film would be banned on grounds that it promoted infidelity, that too of a woman.
Finally, Guide released on 8 April 1966. It had a shaky start, for here was a film which didn’t present Dev Anand as the quintessential lover boy. Initially, the response was lukewarm but the film picked up after a few days when all the critics gave good reviews and also the music of the film became hit.

Narayan didn’t care for either of the movies, especially the depiction of Rosie as an all-around dancer rather than a Bharatanatyam exponent. Probably referring to the Hindi version, Narayan writes, it “converted my heroine’s performances into an extravaganza with delicious fruity colours and costumes”.