Guiding force

Dev Anand-starrer Guide effectively juxtaposes modern sensibility against age-old belief and prejudice, and desire against disillusionment. The film is a case study of Bollywood's 'success formula'

In the midst of volumes of accolades, the media is showering on the one and only Dev Anand following his passing away, it would be in context to reflect on the best film he gifted to Indian cinema from his production banner Navketan Films.

R.K. Narayan’s Guide won the Sahitya Akademi Award for the Best English novel. Many years later, Dev Anand decided to make a double version of the novel as a film. He asked his brother Vijay Anand to direct it. Vijay was initially against directing this film. When Dev approached Vijay again, he agreed with some reservations. It is an irony that Guide is regarded the best film Vijay Anand directed. The Hindi version was a boxoffice success but the English version, released in the US was a flop. Narayan won the Filmfare Award for the Best Story though he was reportedly disappointed with the film.

In 1967, Guide won the highest number of Filmfare Awards — Best Director, Best Film, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Story, Best Cinematography in Colour and Best Dialogue. It was one of the biggest boxoffice hits of the year. It was selected as the Indian Entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 38th Academy Awards but was not accepted as a nominee.

Guide was screened in the Classics section at the Cannes Festival in 2008. Guide is immortalised by the director’s unconventional strokes. Vijay showed a man and woman living together in 1965. It was a radical step in Hindi cinema filled with middle-class morality where marriage is sacrosanct.`A0Its two leading characters are frail human beings, who make mistakes in life, sin, and yet, are unapologetic.

Vijay Anand treated the subject aesthetically and sensitively, shaping it into an engrossing entertainer, working for the audience at different levels of cinematic experience. Recalling the best film under the Navketan banner, Dev Anand said,

"Somebody drew my attention to R.K. Narayan’s novel, The Guide. I read it and liked it. So when I met Buck’s director at the Berlin Film Festival where Hum Dono was being screened, I told him that I had a book worth filming. They invited me to America. I flew down and we agreed to make The Guide. I telephoned Mr Narayan in Mysore and asked for the rights of the book. On my return to India, the rights were bought and everything was finalised with the Americans. Buck’s Polish director, Ted Danielewski, directed the English version.

The guide, Raju, is the central character of the piece — a fascinating, unscrupulous go-getter (just released from jail after an affair with a married woman), who learns late the wise old saying about not being able to fool all the people all the time. The satire and humour of the novel are concentrated around him and the film makes full use of his human and inhuman traits in a role that fits Dev Anand the best. However, the cinematic changes in the character of Raju in the second half of the film are excessive and extravagant. It is this aspect of Raju’s character in which the film deviates to have its own development and denouement. Raju has been telling the villagers noble, mythological tales of self-sacrifice for a bigger cause. Then, famine strikes the village and he finds himself involved by mistake in a commitment about fasting for the rains. His life changes forever.

From a nationalist point of view, Guide represents a checklist of Bollywood’s ‘success formula’; the yearned-for right combination of elements rarely actualised at the boxoffice. Offering a generous ‘market mix’ of romance, melodrama, tragedy and satire, Guide is an extended commentary on the economic and sexual politics of performance and the performative dimensions of sainthood/philosophical humanism.

Guide is both a film of historical interest and a revealing instance of a particular mode of cinematic construction. It throws up the fantasy of the cinema as the agency that would transport a celebrated nationalistic tradition to the wider population. Raju as the promoter of Rosie-turned-Nalini’s dance recitals mentions artists like Balasaraswati and Uday Shankar during one of his sales pitches to ‘sell’ a recital.

In doing so, Guide shows how cinema, as agency, can and will continue to mix art with commerce, as it will explore the national through the international. The film both promotes and undercuts the lure of spectacle, the phenomenon of stardom, and the contingency of human affairs and thus, effectively juxtaposes modern sensibility against age-old belief and prejudice, desire against disillusionment, cynicism against redemption. — SAC