The Guide as a Postcolonial Text: An Introspection

R. K. Narayan’s The Guide has been studied through multiple lens by multiple critics and scholars so far. And most of the studies were with the conclusion of Narayan’s proneness to a sandwiched culture meant for progress. But this article is dedicated to assert how Narayan is adept enough to write back his nation’s ethos out of ‘postcolonial discourse’. Actually, the readers and scholars felt Narayan’s bona fide stance of postcolonialism through an acute avoidance of any British scene and character in his novels till the end of British rule in India. But in 1950S we saw a different tone and style of Narayan. Many of his post-independent works are embedded with character and culture both from East and West. A transitional grey approach seems to come on the fore in his master-piece The Guide. This is most likely to be the cause that the scholars start to see through a different lens to the post-colonial novels of Narayan. And his The Guide has been a study in ambivalence in its postcolonial exegesis. By the bye, the term ‘postcolonialism’ may mean, with the sense of the prefix, the aftermaths of the colonial rule, but after its being a theory, it has developed many critical approaches which the readers and scholars should use to study a text of literature in the field of postcolonialism. However, this article is dedicated to discern the true stance and texture towards postcolonialism in R.K. Narayan’s most acclaimed novel The Guide.