A brief critical overview of the selected works of Raja Rao

Raja Rao's works constitute a new departure in the direction of philosophical statements in symbolic fictional terms as he tried to incorporate Indian metaphysics and philosophy into his fictional work.

“India is not a country like France is, or like England; India is an idea.” These lines from Raja Rao’s seminal novel The Serpent and The Rope exemplify, in a sense, his approach to writing.

Raja Rao was an active and an important part of the Quit India Movement that took place in 1942. Raja along with Ahmad Ali co-edited a mind-blowing journal, Tomorrow.

Rao has always played a dynamic part in the nationalist movements. During his time in Bombay, Raja had an association with Chetana, the cultural society that is known to propagate Indian thoughts and values.

Rao's spiritual quest took him to various ashrams: he met Sri Aurobindo at Pondicherry, Ramana Maharshi at Tiruvannamalai (in Tamil Nadu), and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in Sevagram. In 1943 Rao succeeded in finding his guru, Sri Atmananda Guru, in Trivandrum: the epigraphs of Rao's novels The Serpent and the Rope and The Cat and Shakespeare are taken from Atmananda Guru's works on Vedanta.

"The Expiation of a Heretic" (1933), an autobiographical poem expressing the feeling of an Indian expatriate, is Rao's only excursion into Kannada verse.

The concept of life as lila ("play of the Divine") is present in The Cat and Shakespeare

The Meaning of India (1996) brings together his nonfiction work published earlier in journals as varied as The Texas Quarterly, Encounter, and The Literary Criterion (Mysore). The Meaning of India also includes articles as well as speeches (such as his acceptance speech of the Neustadt International Prize in 1988) and prefaces to anthologies of essays (such as the memorial volume to Indira Gandhi). Just one piece, "The Silence of Mahatma Gandhi," was written especially for this collection.

Novels of R. K. Narayan

Kanthapura :

Raja Rao’s Kanthapura is one of the finest novels to come out of mid-twentieth century India. On the surface level, the novel ‘Kanthapura’ (1938) by Raja Rao recounts the rise of a Gandhian nationalist movement in a small South Indian village of the same name. The story is narrated by Achakka, an elder Brahmin woman with an all-encompassing knowledge about everyone in her village. She narrates the story in the style of a sthala-purana, a traditional history of a village, its people, its gods, and local practices. It is the story of how Gandhi’s struggle for independence from the British came to a typical village, Kanthapura, in South India. Young Moorthy, back from the city with “new ideas,” cuts across the ancient barriers of caste to unite the villagers in non-violent action––which is met with violence by landlords and police. The dramatic tale unfolds in a poetic, almost mythical style which conveys as never before the rich textures of Indian rural life.‘Kanthapura’ begins by Achakka's lengthy first sentence, which situates her village in the broader context of India and the British Empire as a whole. Dominant castes like Brahmins are privileged to get the best region of the village, while lower castes such as Pariahs are marginalized. Despite this classist system, the village retains its long-cherished traditions of festivals in which all castes interact and the villagers are united.The village is believed to be protected by a local deity named Kenchamma. She supposedly battled a demon “ages, ages ago” and has protected Kanthapura’s people ever since. The villagers frequently pray to her for help, perform ceremonies to honour her, and thank her for their good fortune. Kenchamma exemplifies the traditional religion that Kanthapura’s people gradually come to leave behind.In the novel, the protagonist Moorthy is a Brahmin. Everybody in the village calls him as ‘corner house Moorthy’ or ‘our Moorthy’. The villagers treat him as a ‘small mountain’ while Gandhi as ‘big mountain’. Moorthy goes from door to door carrying the message of Gandhi even to the Pariah Quarter and makes known about the political, social, economic resurrections. The British government accuses Moorthy of provoking the townspeople to inflict violence and arrests him. While Moorthy spends the next three months in prison, the women of Kanthapura take charge, forming a volunteer corps under Rangamma's (major female character) leadership. Rangamma instills a sense of patriotism among the women by telling stories of notable women from Indian history. The novel ends with Moorthy and the town looking to the future and planning to continue their fight for independence.

Thus, ‘Kanthapura’ evokes a sense of community and freedom, construed as a spiritual quality which overcomes all bounds and crosses all barriers. In his foreword to Kanthapura , Rao writes, "There is no village in India, however mean, that has not a rich sthala-purana, or legendary history, of its own. . . . One such story from the contemporary annals of my village I have tried to tell." The novel describes the impact of Gandhi and the struggle for freedom on a small village in southern India. Through his narrator, a garrulous grandmother, and his range of characters, Rao re-creates village life and reveals human nature in its rich diversity. Two stock elements of the village, the temple and the greedy moneylender, are present, but in Kanthapura the baseness of Bhatta, the village priest who grows rich by lending money, is a study of the degeneration of the Brahmin. Rao also gives a graphic account of the exploitation of the coolies in the nearby Skeffington coffee estate. The novel was a pioneering effort; Meenakshi Mukherjee refers to Kanthapura as "a remarkably radical text, in which he [Rao] experimented with language and used a collective feminine perspective, fusing myth and history in an innovative narrative mode." The narrative structure of Kanthapura exhibits many features of the Puranas, such as the upakatha ("subsidiary narrative"), which allows the narrator to digress freely. Like the harikatha, an oral performance of the Purana by a single speaker, the idiom of Kanthapura is colloquial, and the narrator uses songs to enliven the story. Rao never presents Mahatma Gandhi as a flesh-and-blood character in his novels; he shows Gandhi's impact through the influence of Moorthy, an educated young villager who has a mystic vision of the Mahatma. Kanthapura is a work of social realism, but it is not confined to that plane alone; as critic H. M. Williams has observed, "Kanthapura, which looks in many ways like a realistic epic of the freedom struggle, turns out on introspection to be the first of Raja Rao's explorations of the nature of India." R. Parthasarathy calls the novel a “microcosm of village India” and that was perhaps Rao’s ultimate aim with Kanthapura.

The Serpent and the Rope:

Rao’s second novel, The Serpent and the Rope (1960) is the recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1964. The book explores themes of reality, existence, and self-realization. Throughout the novel, protagonist Ramaswamy's thought process develops in line with Vedantic philosophy.It is an autobiographical account of the narrator, a young intellectual Brahman, and his wife seeking spiritual truth in India, France, and England. The novel takes Rao’s first marriage and its disintegration as its subject. Reflecting the flavor and wholeness of the traditional Indian way of life, where fact and fable, philosophy and the matter-of-fact blend into one, this semi-autobiographical novel can be called timeless, just as India herself seems timeless and other-worldly by virtue of her unchanging rituals.Rama is described as a kind young man who is somewhat frail because of his tubercular lungs. He has been living and studying in France and has married a French woman, Madeleine. Rama plans to finish his thesis on the Albigensian heresy and then to move back to India, bringing Madeleine with him. Early on in the novel, from the moment Rama first references his wife, the reader gets a sense that something is not right in their marriage.The novel also portrays a very definite period of time, describing the full implications of the meeting of East and West on the most intimate plane through the story of Rama, an Indian, and Madeleine, a French girl, who meet at a French university shortly after World War II.in Rao's novel, the West is not merely Madeleine, whom Ramaswamy marries, but a multitude of characters: her cousin Catherine; her uncle Charles Rousselin and aunt Zoubeida; Lezo, the exile from Spain; the religious Russian, Georges Khuschbertieff; the French taxi driver, Henri; the porter at Girton College, Cambridge; and the patron at the café at Aix. Their marriage is the central theme of the book, and it is in telling the story of this marriage that Rama reveals, more deeply than most writers are able to suggest in their lifetime, the meaning of love. For these two people it becomes a question either of preserving their identities or of sacrificing an inherited background to make their marriage a success. Rao explores the theme of marriage through parallel instance: Tristan and Isolde, Abelard and Heloise, the Upanishadic story of sage Yajnyavalkya and Maitreyi, Satyavan and Savithri, Rama and Sita, and Krishna and Radha. Many other repeated motifs relate to Buddha's great renunciation, Paul Valéry 's "Le Cimetière Marin," and the Cathars. The scene shifts back and forth in time and space with frequent flashbacks. Rao has said that the novel is an attempt at "a Pauranic recreation of Indian storytelling: that is to say, the story as a story is conveyed through a thin thread to which are attached (or which passes through) many other stories, fables and philosophical disquisitions, like a mala ".Family ties on both sides do not help, and Rama's trip back to India for his father's illness forcibly reminds him of the underlying contrasts between India and Europe, and of a certain conflict between them and himself. While there he meets his friend Pratap's fiancée, Savithri, an event which is to bring many forgotten questions to the surface and to alter the whole perspective of his life. The folktale about Prince Satyakama and the princess who comes out of a pumpkin provides a parallel to the life of Ramaswamy and Savithri. When Rama returns to France, he and Madeleine have to face their problems and find their own solutions in parting their ways. Rao attempts to infuse something of the rhythms of Sanskrit into his English prose. Some Sanskrit literary texts mix prose and verse (champu-kavya). Rao incorporates poetry (French and German), Sanskrit hymns and chants, the bhajans of Mirabai, Provençal songs, snatches of opera (with musical notations), diary entries, legends, and folktales to give his prose a distinctive texture.

The Cat and Shakespeare

It was published in 1965. It is also philosophical, but in the comic mode, and presents an authentic picture of life in India in the 1940s. It is a kind of sequel to The Serpent and the Rope, which posited mukti (salvation) through jnana (knowledge). The symbol of the cat is from the philosophy of Ramanujacharya, which lays emphasis on Divine Grace, and salvation through bhakti (devotion). Just as the kitten allows itself to be carried by the mother cat, so humanity can attain salvation by complete surrender to the Divine. An earlier version called "The Cat" was published in The Chelsea Review in 1959, but in terms of composition, the novel came earlier. According to Naik, "The Cat and Shakespeare was actually written about two years after The Serpent and the Rope was completed in 1955-1956."

Ramakrishna Pai, the narrator, and Govindan Nair are clerks in a government rationing office in Trivandrum in the 1950s. Pai's wife, Saroja, is so busy managing the ancestral property that she has no inclination to travel to Trivandrum to look after her husband. Nair, Pai's neighbor, helps him at every step; through his grace, Pai is vouchsafed a mystic vision. The novel includes bizarre incidents such as a scene of cat worship in the ration office and a trial in which the cat is a witness. While The Serpent and the Rope shows the hero struggling for enlightenment and looking for a guru, The Cat and Shakespeare shows the grace of the guru in operation. Holy men are stock characters in Indian fiction. The majority of novelists--for example, Anand, Khushwant Singh, Narayan (in The Guide [1958]), and Manohar Malgonkar--present them as frauds who exploit the faith of gullible people. Rao's Govindan Nair is far from the popular image of the holy man; that this guru is credible is a measure not only of Rao's talent as a novelist but also of his deep understanding of the Indian spiritual tradition and the concept of the jivanmukta, a person who has attained salvation while continuing with worldly life. The language of The Cat and Shakespeare is simple; yet, Nair can express complex truths because he works through parables similar to those in the Upanishads.

Comrade Kirillov (1976),

It was written a few years before The Serpent and the Rope, is a sketch of an Indian communist whose real name is Padmanabha Iyer. It was first published in a French version by Georges Fradier in 1965. The epigraph of the novel is from Dostoevsky's The Possessed (1872), and Rao's characters are as obsessed with India as Dostoevsky's Shatov is with Mother Russia. The style is involved, featuring long words and sentences. Critics such as Naik, D. S. Maini, and Narsingh Srivastava feel that this novella lacks form and seems to be merely a rehash of material left undeveloped in Rao's earlier work. P. K. Rajan admires the book for its satire, though he feels that the novel is "divested of literary form" and is "deficient in what precisely is Raja Rao's superb achievement in Kanthapura, a sublime artistic cohesion." But other critics--such as Esha Dey, V. V. Badve, and Vineypal Kaur Kirpal--praise its form; Kirpal, in fact, believes that the novel has "perfect structural unity."

The narrator, "R," a friend of Padmanabha Iyer (Kirillov), resembles the novelist himself. Kirillov marries a Czech girl, Irene, and they have a son, Kamal. When Irene dies in childbirth a few years later, Kamal is sent to his grandfather in south India. The novel is lyrically intense in its description of "R" taking the child to the temple of the Virgin Goddess at Kanya Kumari and thus providing a kind of vicarious homecoming for the Moscow-bound Kirillov and Irene, who loved India. The narrative is interspersed with a twenty-six-page excerpt from Irene's diaries covering the period 1939-1945, which provides a different perspective on events. The book includes interminable discussions of communism and allied matters. Rao appears to be saying that an Indian communist is a contradiction in terms, that an Indian can only be a Gandhian.

The Chessmaster and His Moves

If The Serpent and the Rope highlighted binaries in metaphysics, a certain form of non-dualism emerges in The Chessmaster and His Moves. In The Chessmaster and His Moves worldly existence is likened to a game of chess. Many literary critics believe that Rao modelled this novel on the principle of Advaita Vedanta, or the belief that the true self or atman is the same as brahman or the highest metaphysical reality.

The novel consists of deep meditations on life, death, divine unity, time and love. The protagonist of the novel is Sivarama, a Tamil Brahmin mathematician. Rao was obviously attempting to play on the much-discussed mathematical dimension of Indian metaphysics, particularly the concept of brahman. At one point in the novel, Sivarama says, “My mind was essentially metaphysical… thus evading humans. For after all, the human has no ultimate significance.”

In the midst of all these complicated questions, the most prominent one the novel seeks to address is the fundamental question that every human asks himself or herself at some point in time — “Who am I?” This is a question that haunted Rao throughout his life as he attempted to arrive at some reconciliation about himself as an Indian author writing in English about Indian sensibilities in a foreign land.

Critical opinion is sharply divided on the merits of The Chessmaster and His Moves. Edwin Thumboo calls it "the most international novel we have" and "Rao's greatest achievement." R. Parthasarathy considers it "a metaphysical novel without equal in our time." Prema Nandakumar, however, is forthright in condemning it in her book review published in The Hindu: "The tedium is often unbearable . . . Raja Rao goes on and on mesmerized by his own voice." Naik feels that The Chessmaster and His Moves is little more than a reworking of material already presented. As he says in Indian English Literature 1980-2000: A Critical Survey: "The chief difficulty with The Chessmaster and His Moves is that at every step, it fills one with an uncomfortable sense of déjà vu; the narrative reads almost like a more prolix and rather confused retelling of Raja Rao's acknowledged masterpiece, The Serpent and the Rope."

Short Stories of Raja Rao

On the Ganga Ghat (1989) is a series of stories delineating a variety of characters, including birds and animals, in the holy city of Benares. Rao's claim that the eleven chapters are part of a linked narrative "so structured that the whole book should be read as a single novel" is difficult to justify. The last chapter includes musings on life in general and on Benares in particular.In the first story "The Cow of the Barricades," the title story of the earlier collection, has an allegorical dimension. This story is about India's struggle for independence (the theme of Kanthapura), the cow is a real creature as well as a symbol of Mother India, and the "Master" parallels Mahatma Gandhi. In "India: A Fable," too, the subjects are valid both as symbols and at the realistic level. Critics have praised this story, which mixes fact and fancy, but the uninitiated reader may find the philosophy obtrusive. the holy cow named after the goddess Gauri is an expressive symbol of the Indian synthesis of tradition and modernity. The sacred cow dedicated to a god is a part of ancient Indian tradition, but Gauri, who dies of a British officer's bullet during the riots for freedom, becomes a martyr in the cause of modern Indian nationalism. "Narsiga" shows how the national consciousness roused by the Gandhian movement percolates in the simple mind of an illiterate urchin. In the process, however, the ancient legend of Rama gets inextricably mixed in with Gandhi's life and character as Narsiga imagines the modern Indian leader "going in the air … in a flower-chariot drawn by sixteen steeds." "In Khandesh" recaptures evocatively the commotion caused in a sleepy little village by which the British viceroy's special train is to pass.The True Story of Kanakapala, Protector of God" and "Companions" are legends from serpent lore, a traditional subject in a land in which a serpent festival is still celebrated. "The Little Gram Shop," on the other hand, is a starkly realistic study of Indian village life, and "A Client," the only story in the collection with an urban setting, provides an amusing glimpse into the Indian system of arranged marriages. Two of the three new stories in The Policeman and the Rose show how in his later work Rao's interest shifted from the social and political planes to a metaphysical apprehension of life. Only one story in this collection is a character sketch in the manner of earlier efforts like "Javani" and "Akkayya." "Nimka" is a portrait of a White Russian refugee whom the Indian narrator meets in Paris. A princess by blood, she now ekes out a living by serving as a waitress in a restaurant. Drawn to India through Tolstoi and the narrator, she declares that India for her is "the land where all that is wrong everywhere goes right."

It is in "India: A Fable" and the title story, "The Policeman and the Rose," that Rao has successfully made shorter fiction the vehicle of profound metaphysical statement. The central theme in both stories is humankind's quest for self-realization, though "India: A Fable" presents the theme with far greater economy of narrative content. The narrative in "The Policeman and the Rose" makes strange reading until one understands the key symbols. The narrator, who declares that every man is arrested at the moment of his birth by a policeman, recounts the story of his several births in past lives, since the day he was a contemporary of ancient Rama. In his latest birth in modern India, he goes to Paris, opens a "shop of Hindu eyes," and earns a reputation as a man of God. Upon his return to India, he falls ill, and he then goes back to Paris a much chastened man only to find that he has been declared dead and a statue erected to him. His return in flesh being now inconvenient, he is compelled to return to India, where at last he offers his red rose at the lotus feet of his guru at Travancore, the retired police commissioner. Finally getting rid of his policeman, he becomes free. The major symbols here are the policeman, who arrests everyone at birth and who is the ego sense (the guru, who has overcome his ego, is a retired police commissioner); the red rose, standing for rajas, or passion; the lotus, standing for truth; and the eye, which is the eye of religious faith. The entire narrative is thus a fictional statement indicating that salvation lies in surrendering one's ego at the feet of the M. K. Naik

Spoke of Rao that his short stories, though small in number, encompass Indian life and culture on individual, social, political, and metaphysical planes, and they offer authentic glimpses of Indian character and thought. Their English is imbued with a strong Indian flavor.

The Great Indian Way: A Life of Mahatma Gandhi, is a biography of Gandhi.

"Without Gandhi," wrote Raja Rao once, "there can be no world of tomorrow." Now at the dawn of a new millennium, and Gandhi internationally acknowledged as a most influential figure of the twentieth century, the Great Indian Way offers fresh, important perspectives on his life — and Gandhism.

The book focuses especially on Gandhi’s South African days. The birth of Gandhism, Raja Rao holds, lay in the confrontation between the Briton, the Boer and the Indian "coolie". Gandhism was tested and fashioned in many a struggle in the "dark continent": the most cataclysmic of all, perhaps, the mass strike by Indian coal miners in Newcastle against the move to hold Indian marriages invalid. Thus was born the truth-warrior — and satyagraha and non-violent resistance forged — in a pilgrimage processional almost, the great march by more than two thousand Indian men, women and children from Newcastle to the Transvaal frontier. Gandhism touched the very nerve centre of the British Empire and within fifty years catalysed the political transformation of India and the world.

In South Africa too it was that Gandhi sought the right way to live and experimented with all that he later practised both in his public and private life. By the time Gandhi left South Africa for India in 1914, the manifesto for India’s freedom was already well scripted. In India, it unfolded on a much grander scale.

Raja Rao weaves together the whole chronicle in epic dimensions — in vigorous, rhythmic, moving cadences, uncovering hidden meaning in an aside here, a parable there unfolding the Mahatma’s life and the meaning of Gandhism on a vast canvas.

Resources :

• https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raja_Rao&ved=2ahUKEwiDgJXV_Kz8AhWkS2wGHc8jCKMQFnoECBAQAQ&usg=AOvVaw0ZJ4JLvwNY8MHKjDcYqWvu
• https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.indiaonline.in/about/amp/personalities/writersandpoets/raja-rao&ved=2ahUKEwiDgJXV_Kz8AhWkS2wGHc8jCKMQFnoECC0QAQ&usg=AOvVaw3F5b0ppSbp7YZMpLyg2L06
• https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://theprint.in/theprint-profile/raja-rao-the-author-who-attempted-to-decipher-the-self-through-his-writings/316994/%3Famp&ved=2ahUKEwiDgJXV_Kz8AhWkS2wGHc8jCKMQFnoECCsQAQ&usg=AOvVaw2X6onqvmAynr_VsAbab9ta
• https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/raja-rao-1908-2006/231843/amp&ved=2ahUKEwiDgJXV_Kz8AhWkS2wGHc8jCKMQFnoECGsQAQ&usg=AOvVaw2WoyLhx6A0o5p49XrnR4RC
• https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://literariness.org/2020/06/29/analysis-of-raja-raos-novels/amp/&ved=2ahUKEwiDgJXV_Kz8AhWkS2wGHc8jCKMQFnoECC4QAQ&usg=AOvVaw2wSMWSbPsaFVCkO1puSrx-
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Picture courtesy : Google

Anushua Chatterjee.