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Raja Rao popularised
the idea of India as a perspective and not just a country, writes Usha
Bande, who specialises in Indian English
literature.
Raja Rao, of Kanthapura-fame, who died at 96 was the last of the Big-three of Indian writing in English–(the other two being R.K. Narayan and Mulk Raj Anand)—whose tales gave credibility to Indian writing in English at a time when it was a much-debated genre, considered weak and not of the soil. Raja Rao had proclaimed boldly in his foreword to his first novel Kanthapura, as early as 1938, "We cannot write like the English. We should not. Our method of expression therefore has to be a dialect, which will some day prove to be as distinctive and colourful as the Irish or the American. Time alone will justify it." Born on November 8, 1908 in Hassan, near Mysore in Karnataka, into a well-known Brahmin family, he was educated predominantly in Muslim institutions. After receiving his degree from Madras University he left for France at 19, to study at the International University of Montpelier. He remained there for a decade. Though his native language was Kannada, his early eduaction was in the English medium, and since his postgraduate education was in France, he chose French for creative writing. Later, he shifted over to English but with an express specification, "I will not write like the English. I can only write like an Indian."
Young Moorthy, back from the city with Gandhian ideals and the idea of Satyagraha, 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 the rich textures of Indian rural life through the Harikathaman who uses the traditional Harikatha style and the old woman who is imbued with the legendary history of the region comments on the characters with sharp-eyed wisdom. E.M. Forster considered Kanthapura to be the best novel ever written in English by an Indian. Rao returned to the theme of Gandhism in the short story collection The Cow of the Barricades, 1947. In 1998, he published Gandhi’s biography Great Indian Way: A Life of Mahatma Gandhi. In 1988, he received the prestigious International Neustadt Prize for Literature. The Serpent and the Rope was written after a long silence during which Rao returned to India. The serpent in the title refers to illusion and the rope to reality. Cat and Shakespeare written in 1965 is a metaphysical comedy that answered philosophical questions posed in the earlier novels. The Serpent and the Rope records the disintegration of a marriage, mainly on philosophical grounds, of a very scholarly Indian Brahmin and a French woman professor. Commenting on the novel U.R. Ananthmurthy says, "The union flounders on the incompatibility of the Brahmin’s Vedantic conviction that ‘Reality is my Self’ and the wife’s Western belief—even though she has become a Buddhist—that the evidence of our senses is based on an objective reality outside ourselves." The Chessmaster and His Moves (1988) can be called Rao’s magnum opus in which he again looks at the Indian metaphysical tradition. The novel seeks to illuminate in the form of an epic novel encompassing three countries—India, England and France—besides the fourth one, of the human mind. It is structured as a bhashya or commentary on the esoteric knowledge of India often expressed in the terse, aphoristic style, totally indigenous in narrative style. The Meaning of India holds that India’s civilisation and meaning can only be known by understanding the truth about one’s own existence. Rao sees woman in the traditional light. She is the feminine principle. As a writer, Rao’s concern is with the human condition rather than with a particular nation or ethnic group. He enabled modern readers of English to experience the spiritual depths of Indian culture. All his works involve a search for the fundamental reality in life, which led him to an investigation of the very nature of writing. Not that Raja Rao always wrote of the higher spiritual necessities of man away from the everyday realities of life. He looked at the social concerns in his short stories, particularly in the earlier phase of his writing career. In the story Akkaya for example, shows the plight of a child-widow in an orthodox society. In Javni, he evokes the village atmosphere and portrays the travails of a low-caste servant woman. In The Cow of the Barricade, the cow becomes the symbol of India – meek and in bondage. His short story collections The Cow of the Barricade, The Policeman and the Rose and On the Ganga Ghat have been acclaimed for simplicity and beauty of subject matter and language. For him, writing was a sadhana,
and words, the mantras. He loved India and missed it though he
stayed for the major part of his life outside India. He once observed,
"I am a proud Indian. It is my karma that has destined me to live
more than half my life outside this Punyabhumi. India indeed is
the land of the ultimate value. The Truth. Hence we can believe and
shout Satyameva Jayate."
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In 1931, Rao married a
French academic, Camille Mouly, but the marriage disintegrated. On
return to India, he got involved in the freedom struggle for some years
and the impact of the nationalist movement and the Gandhian thought is
reflected in his first two works. He wrote Kanthapura in 1938.
The book shows the impact of the non-violent resistance on a small
Mysore village. Borrowing the style and structure from the Indian
story-telling tradition, he evokes the spirit of India’s traditional
folk-epics. Rao opined as he set his story in a village, "There is
no village in India, however mean, that has not a rich sthala-purana,
or legendary history, of its own."