R.K. Narayan's The Guide - Character of Rosie

R.K.
Narayan’s The Guide – Character of Rosie
In Rasipuram Krishnaswamy Narayan’s The Guide, Rosie is as multi-faceted a personality

as Raju. This is only to be expected from a character who moves from being a ‘devdasi’, to
an M.A. in Economics to a house wife, to a woman who is rejected by her husband for
infidelity but nevertheless becomes a successful professional dancer – and yet continues to
regret her failed marriage. At first glance, it is difficult to understand Rosie’s contradictory
motives. She seems to be at one and the same time conservative and self-assertive. She is
child-like in following her desires without giving thought to consequences, and a woman of
the world in the way she manages her carrier after her break with Raju. She can be naïve
and willful, and she may well be criticized for being responsible in her personal
relationships. Yet she is not only utterly sincere and totally committed to her are, but also
has considerable knowledge of its classical traditions. She challenges the orthodox Hindu
conception of what a woman should be, and yet there is a part of her nature that is intensely
orthodox. Rosie, like Raju, reveals the complexity of human nature.
The non-traditional name is a marker of Rosie’s social hybridity, which is emphasized in

The Guide. Rosie belongs to a caste and a class outside the pale of organized patriarchal
Hindu society. Rosie hails from a family of ‘devdasis’ and is under no illusion as to how they
are regarded – ‘We are viewed as public women … We are not considered respectable; we
are not considered civilized’. To signify Rosie’s ‘difference’, and her position outside the
boundary of ‘normal’ society, she is associated in the novel with nature in its most primal
and unfettered manifestations. She is completely at ease during the night vigil at the Peak
House in the dense jungle high up on Mempi Hills where panthers, bears and elephants
prowl at night. But the most crucial comparison from nature for understanding her
character is the identification of Rosie with the snake, the cobra. When she becomes famous
dancer, Rosie’s greatest performance, her ‘masterpiece’ is the ‘snake dance’. Again, Raju’s
mother abuses Rosie as a ‘serpent-girl’, implying that Rosie is like a snake in having a
venomous and destructive nature. The symbolism of the snake has far deeper
reverberations in the novel.
Rosie’s spiritual transformation through dance is signified in the changing of her name from
‘Rosie’ to ‘Nalini’. Raju actually compares this change to a kind of rebirth or reincarnation.
The Westernized name ‘Rosie’ had marked out her state of social exclusion. But ‘Nalini’
means ‘lotus’, the seat of the goddess Lakshmi. Brahma, too, ‘the four-faced god and Creator
of the Universe … rests on a bed of lotus petals in a state of contemplation’. Through the
change of name, Rosie symbolically seeks an entry into the orthodox society that rejects her,
but it also points to her creativity which is expressed through her dance. Indeed, the
metaphor of the ‘dance’ defines Rosie’s fate in the same way tat the metaphor of the ‘guide’
defines Raju’s. It is her deep love for dance that brings trouble into her life – she gets
frustrated with Marco because he forbids her to dance, and gets seduced by Raju because he
appreciates her dancing. But Rosie’s attitude to dance is completely different from Raju. For
Raju, dance is a cultural commodity which can be exploited for money and fame. For Rosie,
dance is a vocation. This soon leads to conflict, and this rift in their values eventually leads
to their separation.
Rosie’s identity as a temple dancer and as the exponent of Bharat Natyam, the centuries-old
temple dance of southern India dedicated to Shiva-Nataraja, also helps to explain the
apparent contradictions in her character which puzzle Raju so much. For a woman who
jeopardizes her marriage for a casual acquaintance, Rosie seems to have extremely old-
fashioned notions about the relationship between husband and wife, and about the role of
women in society. Even as a successful professional dancer, she seems to be almost
ashamed of being spirited and talented and a woman of wealth and social standing in her
own right. These contradictions appear to stem partly from her ingrained traditional values,
which she imbibed from the sacred environs of the temple and partly from the sense of
being a social outcast, which was the actual lot of the temple-dancer. Rosie’s desire to serve
food to her husband and Raju at the Peak House during their happier days and ‘be the last
to eat like a good housewife’, can easily be understood as her delight in having a regular
home life, a common enough experience for most women but one which is usually denied to
the ‘devdasis’. Her gratitude to Marco for having married her and her abiding sense of guilt
at having betrayed his trust can be traced to the same reason. Again, she also shows her
sense of duty towards Raju by financially helping him to fight the criminal case. But she
would rather, if she could, go back to Marco who, however, will not have her again. As a
votary of Nataraja, it is the traditional Hindu world-view that defines her horizon. It is this
deep-seated sense of identity with her own culture that accounts for Rosie’s veneration for
the institution if marriage, as well as for the traditional roles of husband and wife.
Thus Rosie is caught in a contradiction between the dedication to dance and its patron god
on the one hand, and the cultural norms and values that are predicated by her vocation on
the other. Paradoxically, it is this same almost religious, dedication to dance that turns out
to be the core of her inner strength. Marco had attempted to make Rosie feel ashamed of
dance because he associated it with the cults of the ‘devdasis’. Raju, on the contrary, wanted
her to be proud of her career as a dancer, but only because it brought in money and fame.
Both of them misunderstood the way Rosie felt about dance. For her it was a form of self-
expression and a way to show her devotion to her god. Though she feels grateful to Marco
for marrying her in spite of her low caste status, his ban on her dancing had begun to
suffocate her. She is attracted to Raju only because she believes that he appreciates dance,
and she leaves him when she discovers that this is not so. In our final estimate, caught
between the pressures of the Old and the lure of the New, Rosie does venture to realize her
potentialities only to face hostility and end up in failure: Rosie is like a tide that rises,
reaches at the climax, and then recedes to the centre.

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R.K.

Narayan’s The Guide – Character of Rosie

In Rasipuram Krishnaswamy Narayan’s The Guide, Rosie is as multi-faceted a personality

The non-traditional name is a marker of Rosie’s social hybridity, which is emphasized in

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