The+Guide-+A+Post+Colonial+Reading

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**//__A Postcolonial reading of The Guide- Gayatri Spivak__//** //The Guide//, to summarize briefly, is about Raju, who begins his life as a shopkeeper and tourist guide and later becomes infatuated with a dancer called Rosie. He becomes her manager, makes a considerable sum of money, overreaches himself, is sent to jail for forgery and later, against his will, becomes a saint. It is not without significance that the novel begins after the career is over, and we, as readers, overhear the past when it is told to a willing devotee. The novel continues to retain its place as one of Narayan’s most popular works, and its transformation into a movie has ensured its ongoing appeal. It is because we have accepted the Walsh mode of criticism for so long that Spivak’s analysis of The Guide comes to us as a major breakthrough. Spivak’s terms of reference are impressive. She is not only an insider but a formidable one at that. She begins by asserting that it is unfortunate that neither the student nor the teacher is willing to read texts historically and/or politically. And that is precisely what she goes on to demonstrate in her essay. Her positions as a feminist, deconstructionist and a member of the Subaltern Studies group are all constitutive aspects of her approach to the novel. Spivak prefaces her argument by stating that the Indo-Anglican writer must be seen as one who occupies a very different space from that of the vernacular writer. The issue goes beyond language to readership, neocolonialism, and class: If literature is a vehicle of cultural self-representation, the Indian cultural identity projected by Indo-Anglican fiction, and more obliquely, poetry, can give little more than a hint of the seriousness and contemporaneity of the many Indias fragmentarily represented in the many Indian literature (127). In short, according to her, reportorial realist writers such as Narayan become novelists of the nation as local colour, the nostalgic rather than the hyper-real (128). For the most part, Indo-Anglican writing, particularly in the few decades before and after independence, locates itself outside the multiple pressures of contemporary life and continues, in attenuated form, the tradition of colonialist writing. Referring specifically to //The Guide//, Spivak mentions that the novel stands out in this miniaturized world of nostalgia remote from the turbulence of post-colonial identity (129). Thus the novel draws on a particular tradition of cultural performance in order to satisfy the needs of a casual unmoored international audience (130). Her attempt, then, is to offer an alternative reading that would alert the reader to issues of agency and hegemony that are suppressed in the text. In a circuitous way, Spivak makes the point that Narayan’s own location as an Indo-Anglican writer, together with other biographical circumstances, has led to the representation of the dancer Rosie in a manner that marginalizes her. Spivak focuses entirely on Rosie as the historically oppressed figure. The dancer is the subaltern, and she, according to Spivak, has no voice or agency. Traditionally, the devadasis in India had little economic power or social standing. Their dependence on wealthy patrons led to different forms of exploitation. None of these concerns, according to Spivak, are addressed in the novel. In order to elaborate this point, the essay then moves to a lengthy discussion of the origins and evolution of Bharata Natyam. The discussion of the origins of this form is a way of signaling to the reader the ideological positioning of the text, and for good measure, the film version of the novel. According to Spivak, if the subaltern - and the contemporary devadasi is an example- is listened to as agent and not simply as victim, we might not be obliged to rehearse decolonization interminably from above, as agendas for new schools of post-colonial criticism. But the subaltern is not heard. And one of the most interesting philosophical questions about decolonizing remains: who decolonizes, and how? (138). It is not easy to disagree with Spivak. Her account of the tradition of temple dancing is, for the most part, accurate. Equally true are her comments about the oppression of temple dancers. That the novel does not choose to foreground the life of the dancer Rosie is also evident, although she is not entirely devoid of agency in the novel. There is obviously a need to read the novel with the kind of sensitivity that recognizes the structures of a system that marginalize those who are powerless. Beyond this point, Spivak’s argument becomes problematic. We may, if we choose to, come to an understanding of the functioning of society through our reading of literary texts. But to extract the figure of the dancer from the text and use that as a way of speaking about the subaltern and about decolonization amounts to a kind of misreading. The oppression of the subaltern is real, but when the presence of a subaltern figure becomes the occasion to ignore the text, the process of recuperation becomes suspect. The richness of the novel is lost in the critical approach, and the text serves the limited purpose of providing the occasion to historicize marginalized figures. The ideological position that Spivak brings to the text runs the risk of appropriating the narrative. There is no denying that any reading practice needs to be extremely sensitive to the omissions and exclusions in the text. The danger is that in the process of critiquing a text for what it does not say, we may ignore a whole literary tradition of which it is a part. From a pedagogical perspective, ignoring the literary tradition could well lead to a form of didacticism that detracts the students from a necessary rigor that comes with learning a particular literary tradition. The fact that Spivak spends a great deal of time discussing the film version of The Guide points to the danger of ignoring the novel as artifact in order to recuperate a historically marginalized figure. Curiously enough, this kind of framing is precisely what makes us uncomfortable with aspects of Walsh’s criticism. Walsh suggests a normative reading that is, in fact, clearly Eurocentric. Spivak advances a Marxist reading that follows a predetermined agenda. Spivak’s position is far more socially engaged, but the end result remains the same. Spivak's notion of decolonization involves the recuperation of the subaltern. There is no reason to disagree with that. But it is a very different matter to privilege that preoccupation when dealing with a text that self-consciously points to literary and cultural traditions that need to be understood in all their complexity. I would position myself very differently from Spivak by insisting that we first need to recognize that the text exaggerates in order to signal a departure from straightforward realism. Unless one holds a very essentialised view of India, it is hardly possible to assume that Raju’s rise to financial success through Rosie or his ascent to sainthood through Velan are meant to be seen as versions of realism. They are fictive creations, in a conventionalized narrative, in very much the same way that the Indian tradition of poetry functions with certain notions of convention. Narayan appears to be working with several cultural tropes - the householder, the wife, the dancer, and the renouncer. All these are literary tropes and cultural markers. Raju’s involvement with Rosie violates several codes. The text deliberately makes her a married woman to problematize her role. By the same token, Raju, by bringing Rosie home, becomes a de facto householder, although his position remains shaky. After his elaborate scheme to make money collapses, and his role as impresario fails, he skips one step in the teleology of life and becomes a sanyasin. These codes are defined spatially and temporally: locations are central to the novel. Domestic and public spaces are configured very carefully in the text, expressing social and economic hierarchies. Rosie too belongs to long tradition of literary writing. In fact, the South Indian epic Cilappadikaram (circa 4th century AD) foregrounds the role of the temple dancer in extremely complex terms. The novel implicitly invites the reader to position Rosie along such lines of literary representation. The major difference is that while the epic demands that attention be paid to the dancer, the novel doesn’t. Narayan’s ideological stance has to be noted, but it is hardly productive to persuade the reader to pursue the omission to the point of excluding the text. This line of argument can be taken a little further. Narayan is a South Indian novelist. What he depicts may well be hybrid and multiple, but the fact remains that his consciousness is shaped by a world view that is South Indian. He belongs to a tradition that goes back twenty centuries or more during which several forms of innovation came and went, bringing changes, resistance and subversion. Narayan is an inheritor of that tradition. It is impossible to see the novel without drawing attention to the nuances of the Bhakti tradition that formulated the intersection of religion and literature in a very complex manner. In Narayan’s novel, the landscape, the manner in which geography is invoked; the depiction of time and space, the food, the flora and fauna, the rituals and gods, the music and human relationships are to a large extent formed by a particular social and cultural tradition. Raju builds a world around him not because deception comes naturally to him or because the villagers are gullible, but because he inherits an ancient tradition of social interaction. The tradition that the text implicitly refers to might well pre-date the Bhakti period to a kind of situational literature in which the mountains and forests shaped a particular code of writing. The text cannot be seen outside that frame. It might well appear essentialist to classicize the novel, but the classical framework is a constitutive aspect of the overall design of the text. The inherent dangers of such a reading are obvious. On the one hand, the reference to a pre- colonial past might well be tantamount to a form of nativism. Several centuries of colonization and hybridity may be obscured by a maneuver that privileges a past that appears to have survived and resurfaced in a contemporary text. On the other, it is possible to argue that the essentialism that underscores such an interpretation signifies a form of appropriation. These are important concerns, but the task of interpretation necessarily involves a nuanced awareness of literary tradition. The figure of the ascetic is central to religious and literary traditions in India, and even if one regards the representation of Raju as parody, it is still necessary to see his portrayal against a long tradition. //The Guide// cannot be read without an acknowledgement of its complicity with modernity. Even the most perfunctory reading of the novel would alert the reader to the colonial and neocolonial dimension of the novel. As Spivak quite rightly points out, the film version of the novel highlights the modernist elements in the novel. Hybridity and capitalism are germane to the structure of the text. But the novel is also an inheritor of a long literary tradition that refracted the real in specific ways. Without a full understanding of that tradition, the novel would appear to be Universalist along Walsh’s lines or hegemonic in Spivak’s terms. Either way, the novel as artifice would be sacrificed. Narayan’s art is framed by an ideological stance that is conservative and patriarchal. His worldview demonstrates a particular bias. But unless that is woven very carefully into the critical process, literary criticism would serve the process of demonstrating that Narayan is upper- caste, upper class and patriarchal. It is clearly not very productive to go looking for details that would enable us to pursue a predetermined project. The novel includes many minor characters that may be considered marginalized or oppressed. The cowherd is clearly an Other, as are the caretaker and the car driver. It is unlikely that we would help anyone by using the novel as a way of seeking out a great deal of sociological information about cowherds in India. The role of the instructor, mediator or interpreter is crucial to the project of teaching unfamiliar texts. For the most part, the instructor is the figure of authority, the expert. The paucity of critical material about culturally different texts increases the responsibility of the instructor. Our own ideological stances may well become impediments as we approach texts. What we offer as a definitive reading might well be an ideological maneuver. Hence the need for us to recognize that a culturally different text cannot be meaningful unless the range of implicit cultural assumptions that frame that text are made clear to the audience. Cultures are not static; they are certainly not monolithic. But they function on the basis of shared assumptions. The draw their value from oral and literary traditions. Communicating a sense of cultural specificity without slipping into essentialist positions is central to what we do and how we approach texts. Narayan’s novel is about democratization, about economic changes and about upward mobility. It is clear that certain affiliations are transcended when the central character moves away from living as a shopkeeper to a kind of tour guide and impresario. It is possible to extend this reading to show a number of changes, including the alienation of the mother, dispossession, and so forth that follow the economic transformation of Raju. But the novel gets to be really interesting when the guide now becomes a fake guru. The would-be guru sitting in a temple and enjoying the attention of the villagers is not a stereotype. He recapitulates in some ways an interesting historical phenomenon. When colonization erased many of the structures that held social units together, religion asserted itself as a form of decolonization. The interplay between the discourse of Orientalism and the resurgence of religion was complex and nuanced. But the geography, the manner in which the asceticism is described, the neglect of the temple - all these suggest far more ancient traditions where certain locations appear to have determined social norms and conventions. Spivak does not fully recognize that Narayan as a South Indian novelist brings to his work a complex literary tradition. He is also a Brahmin; he tends to be conservative and his views may well be patriarchal. But the text recapitulates what often happened in South Indian history when external pressures, whether in the form of the Pallava or Telugu kings, disrupted local life: there was always a quiet but emphatic assertion of the autochthonous and the local. Teaching culturally different texts, particularly within a postcolonial framework, involves a rethinking of many assumptions that we have taken granted. We cannot teach Narayan the way we would teach, say, Patrick White. The terms we employ, the frames we use, and the criteria we adopt need to be assessed with a nuanced sense of historical and literary context. Decolonization in South Asia was not what it was in the Caribbean. The particular manifestation of Decolonization in the Northern part of India was not what it was in the South. The traditions that shape the North are different from those that shape the South. The linkages, departures and continuities of culture give rise to texts. As literary critics, we often desperately need the help of cognate disciplines, and social scientists tell us how literature shapes and is shaped by cultural and social modes. Teaching a culturally different text should not result in negating the integrity of the text or the significance of a literary history of which it is a part. In their analyses, both Walsh and Spivak occupy two ends of the spectrum, but neither one pays attention to the specificities of a relevant literary history.

The complexity of teaching culturally different texts is at least in part a result of uncertainties about constructing literary histories. Comparative models, political agendas, transnational movements, and a host of other factors have been sources of empowerment for readers and instructors. The richness of postcolonial theory is directly attributable to the multiplicity of historical and political contexts. The theory and practice of literary history has, however, not received the kind of attention it deserves. Spivak’s article offers the opportunity for postcolonialists to conceptualize and rethink the parameters of productive literary histories. As we become increasingly aware of the need to configure literary histories of Indo-Anglican writing in ways that accommodate diverse vernacular traditions, our response to individual texts will become more inclusive and relevant. Texts such as //The Guide// will then be judged in relation to a very different framework of cultural and social values.