The Hindi 'Guide' is Audience-Adoring, But its English Version is Audience-Ignoring

A charming railway guide falls for a married woman, goes to jail and gets mistaken for a sage. This, in broad terms, is the story of The Guide, a novel by R.K. Narayan, which found two contrasting adaptations – one in Hindi, Guide, directed by Vijay Anand, and the other in English, The Guide, by Tad Danielewski. The latter was out of public sight for decades, seen only by a very few people, till a bootlegged copy surfaced online recently, piquing the curiosity of film buffs.

Both versions were shot in the same year, feature the same actors, tell the same story – and yet, they only look similar, like identical twins with different world views.

Unlike Guide, The Guide is a linear retelling of Narayan’s novel. The film opens to Raju (Dev Anand), a guide, explaining, with wit and aplomb, the delights of Malgudi (though shot in Rajasthan) to tourists. This feels like a relief, for Guide initially uses clunky devices – a sappy interior monologue and a jarring cut to flashback – to locate the core of the story: Raju meeting Rosie (Waheeda Rehman), a dancer married to a workaholic archaeologist, Marco (Kishore Sahu).

But The Guide requires its lead actors to perform in English, a challenge for Bollywood stars Anand and Rehman. That unfamiliarity results in some painful acting —  Anand’s affected accent improves during the course of the film, but Waheeda Rehman’s ludicrous monotone doesn’t (she was personally trained in speech by the novelist Pearl S. Buck, who scripted the English version).

Both films interpret the centrepiece, Raju, differently. In Vijay ‘Goldie’ Anand’s version, he’s a much subdued figure, mindful of keeping distance from Rosie. The Guide’s Raju, more faithful to the novel, is openly flirtatious and less hung-up on morals. Anand fashioned the script to make it more palatable to Indian audiences, providing a justification for Rosie leaving Marco.

Guide is aware of its locus and gaze – that it is headlined by popular actors backed by a respectable production house – causing it to uphold middle-class propriety and the inherent goodness of the hero. The Guide, directed by an American, is not bothered with such backstage context.

The film’s sexual candour is refreshing and honest, but it jumps into the extra-marital affair a little too quickly, disregarding the social realities of the adulterous Indian then.

Guide is audience-adoring; The Guide is audience-ignoring.

The Guide, a much leaner film, is shorter than its Hindi version by more than an hour. The narrative here looks substantially purposeful and, unlike Guide, doesn’t belabour the point. But Guide is lit by a luminous soundtrack – arguably one of the best in Bollywood’s history — imbuing the film with a joyous, almost mythical quality, befitting a story preoccupied with dharma and redemption.

But it’ll be inaccurate to suggest that a melodramatic Bollywood form naturally suits Narayan’s world, which is devoid of ornamental Indianness – descriptions of settings and a sense of history – and, instead, is informed by qualities hard to film: quiet irreverence, understated humour and cruel irony.

The Guide does inch close to a few sublime moments, such as the scene in the film’s climax where Raju, standing in a pond, is surrounded by villagers extending their arms and praying for a miracle. This fleeting moment, even though silent, says a lot about the lunacy of religion, the gullibility of people and the desperate need for myths in a land where reality is inadequate.

Also read: Remembering Dev Anand: Ten Evergreen Songs of the Debonair Lover Boy

This is perhaps because The Guide is seen from the outside – it isn’t burdened by expectations and doesn’t bind itself in rules. For a brief moment, it even shows us an alternate Bollywood – two stars, stepping down from their pedestals, playing regular, flawed figures who don’t crave the audience’s sympathy.

On its own, The Guide is fairly forgettable, but commenting on its undeniable mediocrity is less instructive and fascinating than noticing its few triumphs, which make us see the source material anew and question the different facets of the Hindi version — narrative, structural and thematic — which, even though fondly remembered and celebrated, is far from satisfying.

The Guide and Guide are pieces, not wholes. Like the parts of a jigsaw puzzle, they complete each other. It is not far-fetched to imagine that a near-perfect adaptation lies in a third film that is a precise concoction of the two – one that sheds the coyness to accept the imperfections in people, and yet not distant and cold, filled with a kind of magic that can only be sung, not be told.