Figuring the guide in Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘Interpreter of maladies’, R.K. Narayan’s The guide and E. M. Forster’s A passage to India

Abstract

The article offers a new comparative focus on E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), R. K. Narayan’s The Guide (1958) and Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘Interpreter of Maladies’ (1999) and critical insight into a certain mode of prescriptive postcolonial reading, represented here primarily by Spivak. Set alongside metaphors relating to tourism, the figure of the guide and the guided in their various literal manifestations are explored alongside readings of the guide as a figurative authorial and critical avatar, with the guided as readers. As paths are traced amongst the three texts, a link between guides and interpreters emerges, and it is suggested that another common metaphor, that of ‘translation’, might usefully be complemented, or indeed replaced, by that of ‘interpreting’.