The guide is a story of self deception resonating well beyond it’s apparent simplicity.

Rosie is as multifaceted a personality as Raju. This is only to be expected from the character
who moves on from being a devdasis to an M.A. in economics, a housewife, a women
rejected by her husband for infidelity, but nevertheless becomes a successful professional
dancer and yet regrets her failed marriage. At the first glance, it is difficult to understand
her complicated 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 thoughts to the
consequences and the women of the world in the way she manages her career after her
break with Raju. She can be naïve and willful and she can well be criticized for being
irresponsible in her personal relationships. She is not only utterly sincere and totally
committed to her art but also has the considerable knowledge of its classical tradition. She
challenges the orthodox Hindu conception of what a women should be and yet there’s a part
in her that’s intensely orthodox. Rosie, like Raju reveals the intricacies of life.

The nontraditional name of Rosie is a marker of Rosie’s social hybridity, which is emphasized
in the novel. She belongs to a caste and a class outside the pale of organized patriarchal
Hindu society. She is unable to give her father’s name and thereby locate her social identity,
when Raju’s mother cross-questions her. Rosie hails from a family of devdasis who are
considered as public women. Raju’s mother echoes the conventional wisdom when she
warns her son that they don’t have anything to do with these dancing women who are all a
bad sort. Raju’s uncle hectors her. But, it is shocking that they completely ignores in their
prejudice Rosie’s other identity as an educated women with an M.A. degree. Raju was surely
inhabiting a fool’s paradise when he had bravely assured Rosie earlier saying “All that
narrow notion may be of old days but it is different now. Thing have changed.”

She is also associated in the novel with nature in its most primal and unfettered
manifestations as she’s completely at ease during the night vigil at the peak house in the
dense jungle up on the mempi hills where wild animals prowl at night. But the most crucial
comparison from nature for understanding her character is the identification of Rosie with
the snake, the cobra.

Swaying of her hands and body with the rhythm in the imitation of the graceful movements
of the snake fascinate him too much. Her rapt attention while he, himself, is repelled by the
big hooded cobra startles him even more. But, In the later years, we come to know that it is
a special program, the masterpiece in her shows. Thus, Raju’s mother totally misses the
dancer’s aesthetic appreciation for form and movement; it’s merely an artiste’s obsession in
a thing of beauty, rather than Rosie’s venomous and destructive nature. In identifying Rosie
with the king cobra, Narayan associates her with instinctive or creative energy as
represented through dance, thus contrasting her both with Marco’s carefully cultivated
academic learning, and with Raju’s passionate quest for self gratification.

For a dancer in India, moreover, the snake has yet another connotation, emblem of the
cosmic dancer, Shiva-Nataraja. Thus, she dedicates herself to the god as the guardian of her
art, which lifted her out of her socially stigmatized class into a creature of grace and divinity.
It is surely ironic that the girl who is not accepted by orthodox Hindu society should have a
truer understanding of religion than the conservative citizens of Malgudi.

Indeed, the metaphor of dance defines Rosie’s fate in the same way that the metaphor of
the guide defines Raju. To Rosie, it’s her deep love for the dance that brings all manners of
vicissitudes-she gets frustrated with Marco as he forbids her to dance and gets seduced by
Raju as he applauds her dancing. But Rosie’s attitude to dance is completely different from
Raju’s. For Raju, it’s a cultural commodity and for her, it’s a vocation. This rift in their values
eventually leads their separation.

For a woman, who jeopardizes her marriage for a casual acquaintance, Rosie seems to have
extremely old fashioned notions about husband-wife relationship. And when she holds the
hand of anyone offering help for her ardent love for dance seems a bit of modern thoughts.
These contradictions appear to stem partly from her ingrained traditional value, which she
imbibed from the sacred environs of the temple and partly from her extreme obsession of
her worship to god through the dance.

Rosie’s desire to serve food to her husband at the peak hose and be the last to eat the
supper, her delight in having a regular home life, unlike devdasis, her gratitude to Marco for
marrying her in spite of her background, her abiding sense of guilt at having betrayed his
trust for all that they were absolutely incompatible (infidelity), her defending of Marco
saying had anyone else in his place, the situation had worsen shows a good housewife in
her. And even after Raju’s enormous help, her attitude towards Marco remains one of
submission and subservience. Raju is appalled and bewildered at this duplicity of her heart.
Though she repeatedly refers to their liaison as sinful and though Raju clearly betrayed her
by forge signature, she shows her sense of duty by financially aiding him to fight the case.

Thus Rosie is caught in a contradiction between her 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. But neither Raju nor Marco understood the way
Rosie felt about the dance. Marco had attempted to make her feel ashamed of dance as it is
associated with cult of devdasis. On the contrary, Raju make her feel proud as it brought in
fame and money. But for her, it was a form of self expression and a way to show her
devotion to her god.