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THE Indian novel in English owes its development to the trinity of R.K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao, each working in his own defined terrain. While Narayan emerged as a regional novelist dramatising the small-time world of the South, ranging from vendors, sweet-makers, guides, fakes and fakirs to dissemblers and their ilk, Anand described a journey from the Gandhian philosophy to the Marxian socialist world-view with the British Raj as the target of his satire. It was left to the Mysorean Raja Rao to interpret the metaphysical, philosophical, Vedantic India. It’s then Raja Rao who best catches the poetry and spirit of that India which is "a state of mind", though, as I hope to show, he became, en route, a confused pilgrim of the primordial India, and drifted into an elitism of thought and temperament and became a juggler of ideas, words, aphorisms and abstractions. Raja Rao’s vision remains static, despite his Brahminical subtleties. The apotheosis of the self as a metaphysical necessity has led him into a position where all economic dilemmas become irrelevant in his scheme of things. No wonder, some of his mouth-pieces or alter-egoes become metaphysical rogues, and enact an ethic of wantonness. Mavericks, they enact a theatre of the philosophical "absurd", and a song of dubious virtues. Rationalisations replace arguments, and make the discourse a meandering river of Vedantic flotsam and driftwood. Kanthapura which, to my mind remains his most achieved piece of fiction, despite the tremendous reputation of his later novel,The Serpent and the Rope. The power of Kanthapura has much to do with the vigour of his vision, technique and style. The aroma of place names is evoked in iconographic detail. To catch the slow rhythm of village life, the old granny-tale technique is pressed into service. To story of "our Murthy", the village Gandhi of Kanthapura, assumes symbolic dimensions. Since the reminiscenes of old Achakka are presented as though they were moments in the present, the mixing of the tenses is a stylistic device to enhance the sense of life’s continuity. The insistent use of the conjunctive "and" — there are 44 "ands" in one long sentence —shows that Raja Rao was seeking to create the linked colloquial rhythm of the katha with a view to establishing the sanctity of the past. The celebrated metaphysical romance, The Serpent and The Rope (1960). The first-person narrator, Ramaswamy (no other than Raja Rao himself), unlike the Murthy of Kanthapura fails to "distance" himself. Settled in France (like Raja Rao), Ramaswamy’s wife, Medeliene, grief-stricken over the death of their little son, Pierre, makes him plunge into the mystery and metaphysics of death. The entire baggage of Karma, "the twice-born" and eternity is, somehow, dragged into the tale. And, in this connection, he muses over Little Mother, his 26-year-old step-mother, and over his half-sister, Saroja, on whom the adoring son and brother has an Oedipal and incestuous "crush". It’s, thus, that later in the novel, he goes on to justify Ramaswamy’s escapades and infidelities. This kind of metaphysical profligacy, he spouts, is the hell-mark of the princes, and of the twice-born. In this perverted interpretation of polygamy (four wives in Islam), he presents that religion as more natural, more human than Hinduism or Christianity. This "metaphysicalisation" of a common human failing is only another mask for his forays into the fields of flesh. The Serpent and the Rope has so many tangled ideas, framed like a Chinese box, a box within a box, within a box that it becomes difficult to even present a summary of Raja Rao’s palace of thought. The only other novel, The Cat and Shakespeare, an enigmatic title, certainly, has its moments of brilliance. It’s a "metaphysical comedy" and "a teasing fable", written in a lighter parabolic vein. And yet Shakespeare remains unassimilated, and is just a sleight-of-hand that doesn’t quite succeed. The narrator, Ramakrishnan, a faded and insignificant copy of Ramaswamy, is not really the centre of the story. The philosophy of the book is exemplified in the life of his friend, Govindan Nair. The narrator and the hero, thus, form a pair of metaphysical mates. Comrade Kirillov (1976) is just a 20000-word tale, almost wholly devoid of tension, despite an induced ideological "conflict". It is the product of an aging intellect. There is a grievous decline in style, fabulation and rhetoric. Once again, the narrator technique is employed. His commentary is virtually Raja Rao’s own, and, to that extent, fails as a technique. The novelist’s own brief appearance in Irene’s diary makes little difference in the end. The time is the Moscow Purge Trials, and Comrade "K", we understand, is working on Mahatma Gandhi: A Marxist Interpretation which gives Raja Rao an excuse to examine Marxism from a Vedantin’s point of view. The ideological polarities are reduced to a barren debate. Though Raja Rao has a scintillating intellect and a wide-ranging imagination, his elitist vision is unsuited to modern ideas. He cannot see a point of convergence between the passive, poetic East and the radical humanist West. The Kiplingesque dichotomy abides. The only India, however, is not the India of his Brahminical fancy. To treat India as a huge metaphor beyond science, beyond the pull of reality (which is, indeed, beyond history) is to wilfully perpetuate a myth. He keeps hugging an illusion within an illusion. |
