From Annamaya to Anandamaya: A Panchakosha Reading of Selfhood and Transcendence in R. K. Narayan's The Guide

Abstract

R. K. Narayan's The Guide (1958) has long divided its readers over a single question: is Raju's terminal fast a genuine transformation, an accident, or a fraud that a credulous village mistakes for sainthood? The dominant critical answers; ironic, existentialist, psychoanalytic, and postcolonial read an Indian novel with tools shaped for other traditions. This paper reverses that procedure, reading The Guide from inside the intellectual world that gave the novel its meaning. It argues that Raju's life is not a random slide into fraud but a structured movement inward that the Panchakosha of the Taittiriya Upaniṣad—the five sheaths through which the self passes from the body of food (annamaya) to the ground of bliss (anandamaya) maps with striking precision. Read alongside the Bhagavad Gītā's teaching of Nishkama Karma, action performed without attachment to its fruit, this framework dissolves the saint-or-fraud impasse: the authenticity of Raju's final act lies not in its outcome but in the emptying of self behind it. Situating the reading within current debates on indigenous critical methods, the paper argues that Indian Knowledge Systems can function not as a decorative source of themes but as a rigorous, working method for reading Indian English fiction.