Raja Rao - A great Indian novelist of the 20th century

Following the last week's Cultural Scene on Indian born writers and their work, this week I would like to focus on one of the fine Indian born writers who has made a great impact on the West through his writings.

Raja Rao was born on November 8, 1908 in Hassan, in the state of Mysore (now Karnataka). He was the eldest of nine siblings and despite his Brahmin origin his native language was Kannada. Rao was father was a language teacher and he taught Kannada at college.

Despite his Brahmin upbringings, Rao was educated at Muslim schools, the Madarsa-e-Aliya in Hyderabad and later at the Aligarh Muslim University where he began learning French. After his matriculation examination in 1927, Rao returned to Hyderabad and studied for his degree at Nizam's College. Finally he graduated from the University of Madras, majoring in English and History. On a scholarship from the Government of Hyderabad in 1929, he moved to France and first studied at the University of Montpellier where he studied the French Language and literature and later at the Sorbonne working on the Indian influence on Irish literature.

Of the early Indian writers of early 20thcentuary Raja Rao's work is very important for several counts. Firstly, his works are deeply rooted in Brahmanism and Hinduism. Secondly, these spiritual searches are intrinsically intertwined with his deep affection with his native country despite his global roaming. In his writings he also looked for spirituality as a means of liberation. His semi-autobiographical novel, The Serpent and the Rope (1960), is based on a story of a search for spiritual truth. This novel established him as one of the finest Indian stylists.

Writing to Raja Rao's short biography, Professor Makarand Paranjape of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi writes: "Although Rao lived abroad, he never ceased to be an Indian in temperament and sensibility. In fact, his awareness of Indian culture grew even though he could not settle down permanently in India. He became a compulsive visitor, returning to India again and again for spiritual and cultural nourishment; in

deed, in a sense, Rao never completely left India."

Professor Pranjape explains: "Raja Rao considered his writing a sadhana, a spiritual discipline. Reading him is also a sadhana. Like the great Russian writers Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, his fiction elevates the spirit, taking the reader to a higher plane of consciousness."

According to some critics the uniqueness of "Raja Rao ... is not just the highly innovative, experimental, and dynamic English prose style that he developed much before Salman Rushdie, but the deeply spiritual content of his works."

Despite his roaming and his understanding and knowledge of English and French languages he never divorced himself from his roots in India. India was not a mere country or the native land for him. India according to Raja Rao, "is not a nation, like France or Italy or Germany: India is a state of being..." Rao wrote that India is "an idea, a metaphysic. My India I carried wherever I went …"

This trait and attachment to India can be traced back to his writings particularly in his semi-autobiographical novel and his widely acclaimed work

Raja Rao was born on November 8, 1908 in Hassan, in the state of Mysore into a Brahman family. Rao's mother tongue was Kanarese, but all his publications in book form were in English.

Rao's first novel, Kanthapura (1938), dealt with the Indian independence movement. This major work considered the first major Indian novel written in English. It focuses on the Civil Disobedience movement of the 1930s looking at the participation of a small village of South India as a part of the national struggle called for by Mahatma Gandhi. Imbued with nationalism, the villagers sacrifice all their limited worldly possessions, depicting how during the Gandhian movement Indian people shed their innate biases and united under a common value of the non-violent civil resistance against the British Raj. Kanthapura was first published in London in 1938 and was written when Rao was in France:

In the foreword to this widely acclaimed Kanthapura (1938) Rao admitted the difficulties in using "a language that is not one's own, the spirit that is one's own. He highlighted and wrote on "the various shades and omissions of certain thought-movement that looks maltreated in an alien language."

This perhaps, is one of the predicaments that translators face in converting native patterns of thinking literary into a foreign tongue. For instance, diverse tropes generated in Sinhalese can not be translated into English in their literary forms which lead to confusion in the target language. This is valid for expressing one's own spirit through a foreign tongue.

Rao's best-known novel, a semi-autobiographical The Serpent and the Rope (1960), is an account of a dissipating marriage of the main protagonist who is an intellectual Brahmin married to a French woman. In this novel Rao focuses not only on the division that exist between Hinduism and Western attitudes but on religion, philosophy, history, and literature.

His other novels include The Cat and Shakespeare (1965), a philosophical treatise packaged as fiction, and Comrade Kirilov (1976), is a parody based on a sketch of a South Indian man, Padmanabha Iyer, whom the Rao-like narrator Kirillov.

This short novel covers the 1930s and 1940s, to Indian independence and beyond. As the narrator of the novel identifies, Kirillov is torn between the Indian tradition that remains a part of him and the new-found ideology that he has embraced Look at among other things Westernized advocate of Indian national independence. Rao's fictional creativity is also effectively represented in his short stories The Cow of the Barricades (1947), The Policeman and the Rose (1978), and On the Ganga Ghat (1989).

From 1965 until his retirement, Raja Rao worked as Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin. In that same year, 1965, he married dancer and stage actress Catherine Jones who was his second wife. In 1986, after his divorce from Katherine, Rao married Susan who looked after and cared for him until his death at the age of 97.

He passed away Saturday July 8th 2006 in Austin, Texas. An important aspect of Rao's life and his corpus of works is that omni- present 'cultural otherness', a phenomenon that most of the expatriate writers encounter despite their mastery of 'a language that's not one's own'.