If you call yourself a movie buff and haven’t yet seen Vijay Anand’s Guide , you must make up for that lapse soon — but for now, go to YouTube and type in “Guide snake dance”. Watch the scene where Rosie (Waheeda Rehman), a former dancer “rescued” from a courtesan’s life and now stifled in a marriage to a self-centred man, breaks her shackles during an outing with Raju, the guide (Dev Anand).
See the look on Rehman’s matchlessly expressive face as she watches a village girl perform the cobra dance; how Rosie, initially seated on a cane chair like a privileged memsahib , gets up and perches on the floor as the performance begins; how she begins to sway while still in that position, continues her graceful movements while rising, and then joins the dance. Note the long takes that follow — so characteristic of Anand’s cinema — culminating in the scene where the camera follows Rosie dizzily as she circles the arena, and how the sequence as a whole suggests that she is having something like a religious experience, the bliss of self-expression combined with the joy of having transgressed.
Now here is the equivalent passage from R.K. Narayan’s novel The Guide , two sentences in Raju’s voice: “She watched [the cobra] swaying with the raptest attention. She stretched out her arm slightly and swayed it in imitation of the movement; she swayed her whole body to the rhythm — for just a second, but that was sufficient to tell me what she was, the greatest dancer of the century.”
Rather terse, isn’t it, compared to that hypnotic scene?
Which is not to imply that the movie is “better”, or that Narayan’s cool, refined prose expresses Rosie’s circumstances less effectively than the combination of Rehman’s performance, S.D. Burman’s music and Fali Mistry’s camerawork do — it is just a reminder that a good commercial film may achieve its ends in very different ways from the literary work it was based on, and that it can be silly to compare two such disparate forms. These comparisons are usually more deferential to literature anyway, more sympathetic towards writers whose authorial visions were “ruined” by money-minded filmmakers. In an essay titled “Misguided Guide”, Narayan related, with dry humour, the processes by which his low-key, Malgudi-centred story was transformed into a colourful, pan-India extravaganza. But it should be possible to enjoy that essay even while appreciating how Guide uses cinematic form and language.
Those long takes, for instance, add dramatic intensity to many scenes and give the performances the dimensions of good theatre. Music — and the way it plays out on screen — is another of the film’s crowning achievements. (Would it be facetious to point out that the book has no soundtrack?) Look at the ‘Tere mere sapne’ scene where Raju plights his troth to Rosie. “ Khandaron mein guide khada hai ” (“There is a guide waiting for you amid the ruins”) he first tells her in dialogue, but prose is inadequate to this situation (a woman has just left her husband; a hitherto-carefree man is baring his heart to her), so he has to shift to the more exalted meter of verse. Though more than four minutes long, the sequence is made up of just three shots — there are only two cuts, each of which occurs after Rosie draws away from Raju; she is still conflicted, and the process of reassuring her begins anew, with the song’s lyrics as well as by the camera’s sympathetic, probing movement. This leads up to the pivotal final shot and a beautiful moment where Raju stands at a distance and holds his hand out, and the camera first tracks from him to Rosie, bridging the large gap between them, and then tracks back, this time “coaxing” her to him by not allowing her the option of “escaping” to another shot (via a third cut).
Music and visuals meld perfectly in other scenes too, such as the shot in ‘Aaj phir jeene ki tamanna Hai’ where Raju emerges from the darkness of a Chittoor Fort ruin precisely as Rosie sings the line ‘Kal ke andheron se nikal ke’. Or in the heartbreaking contrast between the tender union of Rosie and Raju in ‘Tere Mere Sapne’, and the distance that has opened between them in ‘Din Dhal Jaaye’.
Part of Narayan’s concern was that the film had made something too big-canvas out of his narrative about circumscribed lives. Yet the expansion of scale and setting doesn’t compromise the story’s essential concerns: how people and their power equations can change over time, how love can fade and be replaced by self-interest, and how, despite all this, a form of redemption may still be possible. Guide does have minor weaknesses: it uses the plot thread about Raju being mistaken for a holy man to indulge the traditional narcissism of the Hindi-movie hero; it seems a pity that a film with such a fascinating, ahead-of-her-time heroine should marginalise her in its final half-hour and end with a close up of its male star looking saintly, his voiceover saying ‘ Sirf main hoon ’ (words that would define Dev Anand’s later screen work). Happily, though, that pat ending doesn’t detract from the power of everything that went before it. Now 50 years old and yet timeless, this is one of our cinematic landmarks, and a testament to the possibilities of artistic collaboration.
