TWO VIEWS OF GUIDE
Dev Anand and R.K. Narayan
Dev Anand*
In the early 1960s, Dev Anand resolved to act in a bilingual celluloid adaptation of R.K. Narayan’s celebrated novel The Guide. Eventually there were two very different films that were made: an English version scripted by Pearl Buck and directed by Tad Danielewski, and the Hindi film Guide directed by Vijay Anand—now considered a classic. What appears below are two rather contradictory (but curiously complementary) accounts of the first communication between Dev Anand and R.K. Narayan about the making of The Guide—and Narayan’s delightful recollections of the filming that followed.
Barbara, an intensely sexy German blonde, with searing blue eyes, enticing hair and buck teeth that looked ready to bite, was our hostess for the evening. She had been assigned to us by the German ministry of culture. Besides Mona, our stars, Sadhna and Nanda, Amarjeet and Goldie, who had done such an outstanding job with the script and the making of the film, Barbara was the one looking after the guests, interpreting our thoughts to the foreign delegates who did not speak English fluently. The party lasted till the early hours, with many saying ‘Good morning’ when they left, as they saw the dawn breaking outside.
The Polish–American director Tad Danielewski was also in the party. He was representing his and Pearl Buck’s film company from New York, and a film directed by him based on Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous play No Exit bagged one of the awards at the festival.
Tad Danielewski had earlier met me in Bombay along with Pearl Buck, the Nobel Prize winner for Literature. Both of them showed interest in casting me in an American film based on an English novel by an Indian author, and made me read the book. But I eventually declined the offer. I told them that keeping my star status in India in mind, I would accept a role only if it was really challenging and aroused my interest.
Tad’s presence in my party further strengthened our mutual desire to do a film together. It set me thinking seriously about going international, both as an experiment and to let my own growth as a star–actor continue. I started searching for a subject that would take me across to the other side of the Atlantic.
I was in London after the festival was over, for Mona had come back to Bombay to be with our kids. Somebody suggested a book called The Guide. I had not read it but felt curious. So I went to Foyle’s, the largest bookstore in London, and asked for the book. They did not have any copy left, but the sales girl at the counter promised me she would procure one for me if I left my address in London with her, which I did. The very next day, the receptionist at the Londonderry hotel called to say she was sending a parcel up to my room. I opened it to find The Guide, waiting to be devoured by me. I read it at one go, sitting on the balcony of my suite which overlooked Hyde Park. I thought it had a good story, and the character of Raju, the guide, was quite extraordinary. Then I suddenly remembered the novel had won the Sahitya Akademi award as the best work of fiction in the English language. R.K. Narayan, the author, was a very distinguished novelist, and had also made a name in the Western literary world.
I called Pearl Buck at her country estate in Connecticut. She picked up the phone, and I said, ‘It seems we can join hands on a project.’ She was immediately interested.
‘On a book by R.K. Narayan,’ I continued. She had heard his name.
‘It’s called The Guide,’ I said.
‘Of course!’ She was familiar with it. She said, ‘I believe there was a play based on it, performed off Broadway.’
I did not know this, but said, ‘I have read the book in one long sitting, and find it exciting, worthy of a film.’
She was eager. ‘Fly over to the States right away,’ she said. ‘Let’s talk about this.’
‘I can’t go to the USA, for I have no permission from my government to visit that country,’ I told her.
‘Isn’t that stupid?’ she commented.
‘According to the regulations of my country, I need an invitation from your side, to enable me to reach you,’ I explained.
She immediately posted an invitation to my London address and soon I was on a British Airways flight for my first trip to America.
Manhattan looked dynamic, overpowering and breathtaking, with its gigantic skyscrapers towering against the sky. I checked in at a hotel, and called Pearl.
‘Come over,’ she said, ‘we are sending a car to pick you up.’
Both she and Tad were waiting. We discussed the book and the possibility of the project over cups of coffee, sitting on the lawns of her sprawling estate. I left the novel with them, and went back to my hotel.
A couple of days later, I heard from her and Tad. They too had liked the book and agreed it would make excellent cinema, with a great part for me.
‘Do you own the rights to the property?’ they enquired.
‘No,’ I answered, ‘but where there is a will there is a way. I shall follow it up.’
I checked through my sources about R.K. Narayan’s whereabouts. Somebody confirmed that Mysore was his hometown, and that he visited the States off and on. We started conjecturing whether he would be in the country at that point of time, when another acquaintance of his said he was definitely in Mysore, and that ‘somebody’ in California positively knew his telephone number there. We called that ‘somebody’ in California, and the answering machine rattled, ‘I am out of town for a couple of days.’
I had planned to go to California as well. For being in the USA for the first time and not visiting Hollywood was unthinkable. I got Narayan’s number from the California contact, and called him from Hollywood.
The receiver was picked up and I heard a voice say, ‘R.K. Narayan here.’
‘Dev Anand!’ was my reply.
‘Dev Anand!’ He was curious. ‘Which Dev Anand?’
‘Dev Anand, the actor!’ I clarified.
‘Are you sure?’ He did not seem to believe me.
‘Yes, it is me,’ I assured him.
‘Nice talking to you, Mr Dev Anand,’ he said warmly. ‘Where are you calling from, Mr Dev Anand?’
‘I frantically tried to get hold of your number in New York …’ I said.
‘You did!’ he interrupted me, getting interested when he heard the word ‘frantically’.
‘Couldn’t get it from anyone, but now I am calling from Los Angeles, California,’ I finished.
‘I see.’
‘Hollywood,’ I emphasized.
‘Hollywood?’ he said quizzically.
‘A name associated with the best of show business!’ I enthused.
‘Of course, Mr Dev Anand.’ He played with my name and gave a friendly laugh. ‘Tell me, what can I do for you?’
‘We could shake hands on a project that can conquer Hollywood!’ I remarked.
He listened silently.
‘We want to put your story on the screen, for the world to look at and admire your work,’ I said.
‘What do you mean by “we”?’ He was inquisitive.
‘Have you heard of Pearl Buck?’ I asked.
‘The famous author? Who hasn’t?’
‘She and I are keen to film your great work of fiction!’ I flattered him.
‘Which one?’ he asked.
‘The Guide.’
‘The Guide?’ he laughed. There was a triumphant note in his voice.
‘The Guide,’ I repeated. ‘And I want to play the guide.’
‘I like the idea,’ he said.
‘But have you the rights? Somebody mentioned it was being performed as a play off Broadway!’ I said, wanting to clear this up.
‘I gave them only an oral consent,’ he said. ‘That can be sorted out. No problem at all, you can go ahead!’
‘But I need your blessings,’ I said. Seeking ‘blessings’ appeals to the Indian emotion, no matter how harsh and tough the person from whom it is sought might be.
‘I am with you.’ He was immediately patronizing.
‘Your whole-hearted blessings, besides your assurance that you will sell the rights to me for filming the book as we want.’ I spelt out my immediate requirement.
He gave a prolonged pause and then asked, ‘When are you coming back to India?’
‘Whenever you say. I have finalized the deal verbally, but without your signed approval, nothing can move further,’ I indicated the urgency.
‘I am going to be in Mysore the next few weeks. When you come to Bombay, give me a call at the same number.’
‘Wonderful, Mr Narayan,’ I thanked him.
‘You fly down from Bombay, I shall drive down to Bangalore from Mysore. Do you know Bangalore at all?’ he asked.
‘Very well. I always stay at the West End there.’
‘We meet at the West End then. I shall be waiting for your call.’ The receiver was put down with a bang, which seemed to indicate his excitement.
I was whistling with joy too, already filming The Guide in my thoughts.
R.K. Narayan*
The letter came by air mail from Los Angeles. ‘I am a producer and actor from Bombay,’ it read, ‘I don’t know if my name is familiar to you.’
He was too modest. Millions of young men copied his screen image, walking as he did, slinging a folded coat over the shoulder carelessly, buffing up a lock of hair over the right temple, and assuming that the total effect would make the girls sigh with hopeless longing. My young nephews at home were thrilled at the sight of the handwriting of Dev Anand.
The letter went on to say, ‘I was in London and came across your novel The Guide. I am anxious to make it into a film. I can promise you that I will keep to the spirit and quality of your writing. My plans are to make both a Hindi and an English film of this story.’ He explained how he had arranged with an American film producer for collaboration. He also described how he had flown from London to New York in search of me, since someone had told him I lived there, and then across the whole continent before he could discover my address. He was ready to come to Mysore if I should indicate the slightest willingness to consider his proposal.
I cabled him an invitation, already catching the fever of hurry characteristic of the film world. He flew from Los Angeles to Bombay to Bangalore, and motored down a hundred miles without losing a moment.
A small crowd of autograph-hunters had gathered at the gate of my house in Yadava Giri. He expertly eluded the inquisitive crowd, and we were soon closeted in the dining room, breakfasting on idli, dosai, and other south Indian delicacies, my nephews attending on the star in a state of elation. The talk was all about The Guide and its cinematic merits. Within an hour we had become so friendly that he could ask without embarrassment, ‘What price will you demand for your story?’ The chequebook was out and the pen poised over it. I had the impression that if I had suggested that the entire face of the cheque be covered with closely knit figures, he would have obliged me. But I hemmed and hawed, suggested a slight advance, and told him to go ahead. I was sure that if the picture turned out to be a success he would share with me the glory and the profits. ‘Oh, certainly,’ he affirmed, ‘if the picture, by God’s grace, turns out to be a success, we will be on top of the world, and the sky will be the limit!’
The following months were filled with a sense of importance: Long Distance Calls, Urgent Telegrams, Express Letters, sudden arrivals and departures by plane and car. I received constant summonses to be present here or there. ‘PLEASE COME TO DELHI. SUITE RESERVED AT IMPERIAL HOTEL URGENTLY NEED YOUR PRESENCE.’
Locking away my novel-in-progress, I fly to Delhi. There is the press conference, with introductions, speeches and overflowing conviviality. The American director explains the unique nature of their present effort: for the first time in the history of Indian moviemaking, they are going to bring out a hundred-percent Indian story, with a hundred-percent-Indian cast, and a hundred percent-Indian setting, for an international audience. And mark this: actually in colour-and-wide-screen-first-time-in-the-historyof-this-country.
A distinguished group of Americans, headed by the Nobel Prize winner, Pearl Buck, would produce the film. Again and again I heard the phrase: ‘Sky is the limit’, and the repeated assurances: ‘We will make the picture just as Narayan has written it, with his cooperation at every stage.’ Reporters pressed me for a statement. It was impossible to say anything but the pleasantest things in such an atmosphere of overwhelming optimism and good fellowship.
Soon we were assembled in Mysore. They wanted to see the exact spots which had inspired me to write The Guide. Could I show them the locations? A photographer, and some others whose business with us I never quite understood, were in the party. We started out in two cars. The American director, Tad Danielewski, explained that he would direct the English version first. He kept discussing with me the finer points of my novel. ‘I guess your hero is a man of impulsive plans? Self-made, given to daydreaming?’ he would ask, and add, before I could muster an answer, ‘Am I not right?’ Of course he had to be right. Once or twice when I attempted to mitigate his impressions, he brushed aside my comments and went on with his own explanation as to what I must have had in mind when I created such-and-such a character.
I began to realize that monologue is the privilege of the filmmaker, and that it was futile to try butting in with my own observations. But for some obscure reason, they seemed to need my presence, though not my voice. I must be seen and not heard.
We drove about 300 miles that day, during the course of which I showed them the river steps and a little shrine overshadowed by a banyan on the banks of Kaveri, which was the actual spot around which I wrote The Guide. As I had thought, nothing more needed to be done than put the actors there and start the camera. They uttered little cries of joy at finding a ‘set’ so readily available. In the summer, when the river dried up, they could shoot the drought scenes with equal ease. Then I took them to the tiny town of Nanjangud, with its little streets, its shops selling sweets and toys and ribbons, and a pilgrim crowd bathing in the holy waters of the Kabini, which flowed through the town. The crowd was colourful and lively around the temple, and in a few weeks it would increase a hundredfold when people from the surrounding villages arrived to participate in the annual festival—the sort of crowd described in the last pages of my novel. If the film-makers made a note of the date and sent down a cameraman at that time, they could secure the last scene of my novel in an authentic manner and absolutely free of cost.
The producer at once passed an order to his assistant to arrange for an outdoor unit to arrive here at the right time. Then we all posed at the portals of the ancient temple, with arms encircling each other’s necks and smiling. This was but the first of innumerable similar scenes in which I found myself posing with the starry folk, crushed in the friendliest embrace.
From Nanjangud we drove up mountains and the forests and photographed our radiant smiles against every possible background. It was a fatiguing business on the whole, but the American director claimed that it was nothing to what he was used to. He generally went 5,000 miles in search of locations, exposing hundreds of rolls of film on the way.
After inspecting jungles, mountains, village streets, hamlets and huts, we reached the base of Gopalaswami Hills in the afternoon, and drove up the five-mile mud track; the cars had to be pushed up the steep hill after encroaching vegetation had been cleared from the path. This was a part of the forest country where at any bend of the road one could anticipate a tiger or a herd of elephants; but, luckily for us, they were out of view today.
At the summit I showed them the original of the ‘Peak House’ in my novel, a bungalow built fifty years ago, with glassed-in verandas affording a view of wildlife at night, and a 2,000-foot drop to a valley beyond. A hundred yards off, a foot track wound through the undergrowth, leading on to an ancient temple whose walls were crumbling and whose immense timber doors moved on rusty hinges with a groan. Once again I felt that here everything was ready-made for the film. They could shoot in the bright sunlight, and for the indoor scenes they assured me that it would be a simple matter to haul up a generator and lights.
Sitting under a banyan tree and consuming sandwiches and lemonade, we discussed and settled the practical aspects of the expedition: where to locate the base camp and where the advance units consisting of engineers, mechanics and truck drivers, in charge of the generator and lights. All through the journey back the talk involved schedules and arrangements for shooting the scenes in this part of the country. I was impressed with the ease they displayed, in accepting such mighty logistical tasks. Film executives, it seemed to me, could solve mankind’s problems on a global scale with the casual confidence of demi-gods, if only they could take time off their illusory pursuits and notice the serious aspects of existence.
Then came total silence, for many weeks. Finally I discovered that they were busy searching for their locations in northern India. This was a shock. I had never visualized my story in that part of India, where costumes, human types and details of daily life are different. They had settled upon Jaipur and Udaipur in Rajaputana, a thousand miles away from my location for the story.
Our next meeting was in Bombay, and I wasted no time in speaking of this problem. ‘My story takes place in south India, in Malgudi, an imaginary town known to thousands of my readers all over the world,’ I explained. ‘It is south India in costume, tone and contents. Although the whole country is one, there are diversities, and one has to be faithful in delineating them. You have to stick to my geography and sociology. Although it is a world of fiction there are certain inner veracities.’
One of them replied: ‘We feel it a privilege to be doing your story.’ This sounded irrelevant as an answer to my statement.
We were sitting under a gaudy umbrella beside a blue swimming pool on Juhu beach, where the American party was housed in princely suites in a modern hotel. It was hard to believe that we were in India. Most of our discussions took place somewhat amphibiously, on the edge of the swimming pool, in which the director spent a great deal of his time.
This particular discussion was interrupted as a bulky European tourist in swimming briefs fell off the diving plank, hit the bottom and had to be hauled out and rendered first aid. After the atmosphere had cleared, I resumed my speech. They listened with a mixture of respect and condescension, evidently willing to make allowances for an author’s whims.
‘Please remember,’ one of them tried to explain, ‘that we are shooting, for the first time in India, in wide screen and Eastman Color, and we must shoot where there is spectacle. Hence Jaipur.’
‘In that case,’ I had to ask, ‘why all that strenuous motoring near my home? Why my story at all, if what you need is a picturesque spectacle?’
I was taken aback when their reply came: ‘How do you know that Malgudi is where you think it is?’
Somewhat bewildered, I said, with what I hoped was proper humility, ‘I suppose I know because I have imagined it, created it and have been writing novel after novel set in the area for the last thirty years.’
‘We are out to expand the notion of Malgudi,’ one of them explained. ‘Malgudi will be where we place it, in Kashmir, Rajasthan, Bombay, Delhi, even Ceylon.’
I could not share the flexibility of their outlook or the expanse of their vision. It seemed to me that for their purpose a focal point was unnecessary. They appeared to be striving to achieve mere optical effects.
I recalled a talk with Satyajit Ray, the great director, some years earlier, when I had met him in Calcutta. He expressed his admiration for The Guide but also his doubts as to whether he could ever capture the tone and atmosphere of its background. He had said, ‘Its roots are so deep in the soil of your part of our country that I doubt if I could do justice to your book, being unfamiliar with its milieu …’ Such misgivings did not bother the American director. I noticed that though he was visiting India for the first time, he never paused to ask what was what in this bewildering country.
Finally he solved the whole problem by declaring, ‘Why should we mention where the story takes place? We will avoid the name ‘Malgudi’. Thereafter the director not only avoided the word Malgudi but fell foul of anyone who uttered that sound.
My brother, an artist who had illustrated my stories for twentyfive years, tried to expound his view. At a dinner in his home in Bombay, he mentioned the forbidden word to the director. Malgudi, he explained, meant a little town, not so picturesque as Jaipur, of a neutral shade, with characters wearing dhoti and jibba when they were not bare-bodied. The Guide himself was a man of charm, creating history and archaeology out of thin air for his clients, and to provide him with solid, concrete monuments to talk about would go against the grain of the tale. The director listened and firmly said, ‘There is no Malgudi, and that is all there is to it.’
But my brother persisted. I became concerned that the controversy threatened to spoil our dinner. The director replied, in a sad tone, that they could as well have planned a picture for black and white and narrow screen if all one wanted was what he contemptuously termed a ‘Festival Film’, while he was planning a million-dollar spectacle to open simultaneously in 2,000 theatres in America. I was getting used to arguments every day over details. My story is about a dancer in a small town, an exponent of the strictly classical tradition of south Indian Bharat Natyam. The filmmakers felt this was inadequate. They therefore engaged an expensive, popular dance director with a troupe of a hundred or more dancers, and converted my heroine’s performances into an extravaganza in delirious, fruity colours and costumes. Their dancers was constantly travelling hither and thither in an Air-India Boeing, no matter how short the distance to be covered. The moviegoer, too, I began to realize, would be whisked all over India. Although he would see none of the countryside in which the novel was set, he would see the latest US Embassy building in New Delhi, Parliament House, the Ashoka Hotel, the Lake Palace, Elephanta Caves and what-not. Unity of place seemed an unknown concept for a film-maker. (Later Mrs Indira Gandhi, whom I met after she had seen a special showing of the film, asked, ‘Why should they have dragged the story all over as if it were a travelogue, instead of containing themselves to the simple background of your book?’ She added as an afterthought, and in what seemed to me an understatement: ‘Perhaps they have other considerations.’)
The cooperation of many persons was needed in the course of the film-making, and anyone whose help was requested had to be given a copy of The Guide. Thus there occurred a shortage, and an inevitable black market, in copies of the book. A production executive searched the bookshops in Bombay, and cornered all the available copies at any price. He could usually be seen going about like a scholar with a bundle of books under his arm. I was also intrigued by the intense study and pencil-marking that the director was making on his copy of the book; it was as if he were studying it for a doctoral thesis. Not until I had a chance to read his ‘treatment’ did I understand what all his pencilling meant: he had been marking off passages and portions that were to be avoided in the film.
When the script came, I read through it with mixed feelings. The director answered my complaints with, ‘I have only exteriorized what you have expressed. It is all in your book.’
‘In which part of my book?’ I would ask without any hope of an answer.
Or he would say, ‘I could give you two hundred reasons why this change should be so.’ I did not feel up to hearing them all. If I still proved truculent he would explain away, ‘This is only a first draft. We could make any change you want in the final screenplay.’
The screenplay was finally presented to me with a great flourish and expression of fraternal sentiments at a hotel in Bangalore. But I learned at this time that they had already started shooting and had even completed a number of scenes. Whenever I expressed my views, the answer would be either, ‘Oh, it will be rectified in the editing,’ or, ‘We will deal with it when we decide about the retakes. But please wait until we have a chance to see the rushes.’ By now a bewildering number of hands were behind the scenes, at laboratories, workshops, carpentries, editing rooms and so forth. It was impossible to keep track of what was going on, or get hold of anyone with a final say. Soon I trained myself to give up all attempts to connect the film with the book of which I happened to be the author.
But I was not sufficiently braced for the shock that came the day when the director insisted upon the production of two tigers to fight and destroy each other over a spotted deer. He wished to establish the destructive animality of two men clashing over one woman: my heroine’s husband and lover fighting over her. The director intended a tiger fight to portray depths of symbolism. It struck me as obvious. Moreover it was not in the story. But he asserted that it was; evidently I had intended the scene without realizing it.
The Indian producer, who was financing the project, groaned at the thought of the tigers. He begged me privately, ‘Please do something about it. We have no time for tigers; and it will cost a hell of a lot to hire them, just for a passing fancy.’ I spoke to the director again, but he was insistent. No tiger, no film, and two tigers or none. Scouts were sent out through the length and breadth of India to explore the tiger possibilities. They returned to report that only one tiger was available. It belonged to a circus and the circus owner would under no circumstances consent to have the tiger injured or killed. The director decreed, ‘I want the beast to die, otherwise the scene will have no meaning.’ They finally found a man in Madras, living in the heart of the city with a full-grown Bengal tiger which he occasionally lent for jungle pictures, after sewing its lips and pulling out its claws.
The director examined a photograph of the tiger, in order to satisfy himself that they were not trying to palm off a pi-dog in tiger clothing, and signed it up. Since a second tiger was not available, he had to settle for its fighting a leopard. It was an easier matter to find a deer for the sacrifice. What they termed a ‘second unit’ was dispatched to Madras to shoot the sequence. Ten days later the unit returned, looking forlorn.
The tiger had shrunk at the sight of the leopard, and the leopard had shown no inclination to maul the deer, whose cries of fright had been so heart-rending that they had paralysed the technicians. By prodding, kicking and irritating the animals, they had succeeded in producing a spectacle gory enough to make them retch. ‘The deer was actually lifted and fed into the jaws of the other two,’ said an assistant cameraman. (This shot passes on the screen, in the finished film, in the winking of an eye, as a bloody smudge, to the accompaniment of a lot of wild uproar.)
Presently another crisis developed. The director wanted the hero to kiss the heroine, who of course rejected the suggestion as unbecoming for an Indian woman. The director was distraught. The hero, for his part, was willing to obey the director, but he was helpless, since kissing is a cooperative effort. The American director realized that it is against Indian custom to kiss in public; but he insisted that the public in his country would boo if they missed the kiss. I am told that the heroine replied: ‘There is enough kissing in your country at all times and places, off and on the screen, and your public, I am sure, will flock to a picture where, for a change, no kissing is shown.’ She stood firm. Finally, the required situation was apparently faked by tricky editing.
Next: trouble at the governmental level. A representation was made to the ministry dealing with films, by an influential group, that The Guide glorified adultery, and hence was not fit to be presented as a film, since it might degrade Indian womanhood. The dancer in my story, to hear their arguments, has no justification for preferring Raju the Guide to her legally wedded husband. The ministry summoned the movie principals to Delhi and asked them to explain how they proposed to meet the situation. They promised to revise the film script to the ministry’s satisfaction.
In my story the dancer’s husband is a preoccupied archaeologist who has no time or inclination for marital life and is not interested in her artistic aspirations. Raju the Guide exploits the situation and weans her away from her husband. That is all there is to it— in my story. But now a justification had to be found for adultery.
So the archaeological husband was converted into a drunkard and womanizer who kicks out his wife when he discovers that another man has watched her dance in her room and has spoken encouragingly to her. I knew nothing about this drastic change of my characters until I saw the ‘rushes’ some months later. This was the point at which I lamented most over my naïvete: the contract that I had signed in blind faith, in the intoxication of cheques, bonhomie, and backslapping, empowered them to do whatever they pleased with my story, and I had no recourse.
Near the end of the project I made another discovery: the extent to which movie producers will go to publicize a film. The excessive affability to pressmen, the entertaining of VIPs, the buttonholing of ministers and officials in authority, the extravagant advertising campaigns, seemed to me to drain off money, energy and ingenuity that might be reserved for the creation of an honest and sensible product.
On one occasion Lord Mountbatten was passing through India, and someone was seized with the sudden idea that he could help make a success of the picture. A banquet was held at Raj Bhavan in his honour, and the Governor of Bombay, Mrs Vijayalakshmi Pandit, was kind enough to invite us to it. I was at home in Mysore as Operation Mountbatten was launched, so telegrams and long-distance telephone calls poured in on me to urge me to come to Bombay at once. I flew in just in time to dress and reach Raj Bhavan. It was red-carpeted, crowded and gorgeous. When dinner was over, leaving the guests aside, our hostess managed to isolate his Lordship and the Guide makers on a side veranda of this noble building. His Lordship sat on a sofa surrounded by us; close to him sat Pearl Buck, who was one of the producers and who, by virtue of her seniority and standing, was to speak for us. As she opened the theme with a brief explanation of the epochmaking effort that was being made in India in colour and wide screen, with a hundred-per-cent-Indian cast, story and background, his Lordship displayed no special emotion. Then came the principal demand: in order that this grand, stupendous achievement might bear fruit, would Lord Mountbatten influence Queen Elizabeth to preside at the world premiere of the film in London in due course?
Lord Mountbatten responded promptly, ‘I don’t think it is possible. Anyway, what is the story?’
There was dead silence for a moment, as each looked at the other wondering who was to begin. I was fully aware that they ruled me out; they feared that I might take 80,000 words to narrate the story, as I had in the book. The obvious alternative was Pearl Buck, who was supposed to have written the screenplay.
Time was running out and his Lordship had others to talk to. Pearl Buck began, ‘It is the story of a man called Raju. He was a tourist guide …’
‘Where does it take place?’
I wanted to shout, ‘Malgudi, of course.’ But they were explaining, ‘We have taken the story through many interesting locations— Jaipur, Udaipur.’
‘Let me hear the story.’
‘Raju was a guide,’ began Pearl Buck again.
‘In Jaipur?’ asked His Lordship.
‘Well, no. Anyway he did not remain a guide because when Rosie came …’
‘Who is Rosie?’
‘A dancer … but she changed her name when she became a … a … dancer …’
‘But the guide? What happened to him?’
‘I am coming to it. Rosie’s husband …’
‘Rosie is the dancer?’
‘Yes, of course …’ Pearl Buck struggled on, but I was in no mood to extricate her.
After several minutes Lord Mountbatten said, ‘Most interesting.’ His deep bass voice was a delight to the ear, but it also had a ring of finality and discouraged further talk. ‘Elizabeth’s appointments are complicated these days. Anyway her private secretary Lord__ must know more about it than I do. I am rather out of touch now. Anyway, perhaps I could ask Philip.’ He summoned an aide and said, ‘William, please remind me when we get to London …’ Our producers went home feeling that a definite step had been taken to establish the film in proper quarters. As for myself, I was not so sure.
Elaborate efforts were made to shoot the last scene of the story, in which the saint fasts on the dry river’s edge, in hopes of bringing rain, and a huge crowd turns up to witness the spectacle. For this scene the director selected a site at a village called Okhla, outside Delhi on the bank of the Jamuna river, which was dry and provided enormous stretches of sand. He had, of course, ruled out the spot we had visited near Mysore, explaining that two coconut trees were visible a mile away on the horizon and might spoil the appearance of unrelieved desert which he wanted. Thirty truckloads of property, carpenters, lumber, painters, artisans and art department personnel arrived at Okhla to erect a two-dimensional temple beside a dry river, at a cost of 80,000 rupees. As the director kept demanding, ‘I must have 100,000 people for a helicopter shot,’ I thought of the cost: five rupees per head for extras, while both the festival crowd at Nanjangud and the little temple on the river would have cost nothing.
The crowd had been mobilized, the sets readied and lights mounted, and all other preparations completed for shooting the scene next morning when, at midnight, news was brought to the chiefs relaxing at the Ashoka Hotel that the Jamuna was rising dangerously as a result of unexpected rains in Simla. All hands were mobilized and they rushed desperately to the location to save the equipment. Wading in knee-deep water, they salvaged a few things. But I believe the two-dimensional temple was carried off in the floods.
Like a colony of ants laboriously building up again, the carpenters and artisans rebuilt the set, this time at a place in western India called Limdi, which was reputed to have an annual rainfall of a few droplets. Within one week the last scene was completed, the hero collapsing in harrowing fashion as a result of his penance. The director and technicians paid off the huge crowd and packed up their cameras and sound equipment, and were just leaving the scene when a storm broke—an unknown phenomenon in that part of the country—uprooting and tearing off everything that stood. Those who had lingered had to make their exit with dispatch.
This seemed to me an appropriate conclusion for my story, which, after all, was concerned with the subject of rain, and in which nature, rather than film-makers, acted in consonance with the subject. I remembered that years ago when I was in New York City on my way to sign the contract, before writing The Guide, a sudden downpour caught me on Madison Avenue and I entered the Viking Press offices dripping wet. I still treasure a letter from Keith Jennison, who was then my editor. ‘Somehow I will always, from now on,’ he wrote, ‘associate the rainiest days in New York with you. The afternoon we officially became your publishers was wet enough to have made me feel like a fish ever since.’
*An extract from Dev Anand’s autobiography Romancing with Life.
*This is the complete text of R.K. Narayan’s essay ‘Misguided Guide’.