On the occasion of Raja Rao’s 113th birth anniversary, Khushbu Kirti pays tribute to the man who was among the first to infuse Indian sensibilities and metaphysics into the English narrative
Raja Rao (November 8, 1908 - July 8, 2006), the profound writer, is renowned for appropriating English for the Indian narrative, while very much keeping Indian values and ethics alive in the writings. The novelist and short story writer was a path-breaker in Indian writing in English. He was one of the three founding pillars, along with RK Laxman and Mulk Raj Anand, of the same. Rao set the standards high and extensively used the technique of Indian metaphysics and sensibilities to embellish his writings. His thought-process can be attributed to his Vedantin grandfather.
Born in Hassan, Mysore, he was an exemplar scholar who completed his graduation from Madras University and, subsequently, went to the University of Montpellier, France, on a scholarship. Much like his protagonist Rama, from The Serpent and the Rope, Rao was an intellectual who always only added to the oblivious universe of definitions for the Truth. Even though he lived outside, he couldn’t accept the binary opposites of the West, couldn’t and didn’t want to fight the Indianness out of him. Rama says, “Duality is anti-Indian; the non-dual affirms the truth.” Only in The Chessmaster and His Moves, does it seem that the writer arrives at some semblance of a metaphysical unity.
While a lot of readers called his writings convoluted, I find divinity in them, truth submerged in mystery and oblivion, but truth itself. While Madeline finds Rama to be abstract, I felt he knew and felt things in a very different manner. He said, “Man is, and cannot be happy but be happiness itself.” Herein, lies the essence of man. Humans are abstract in nature, we are the emotion itself and accepting this fact is hard for a lot of people. Here’s what Sartre had said, what all philosophers ultimately say — ‘the truth is the Is-ness’, that action and existence is the only reality. Rao believed that and explained what spirituality in East actually was, only in between the lines of his masterpieces of novels, unpolluted by the occidental touch.
He taught courses like Marxism to Gandhism, Mahayana Buddhism, Indian philosophy, Metaphysics, and so on, at the University of Texas, Austin, as professor of Philosophy.
For him, India was ‘mysterious and infectious’. He felt pure bathing in the Ganges. He was on an enterprise, like we all are — “Life is a pilgrimage I know, but a pilgrimage to where, and of what?” He returned to India, looking for answers, lived in the ashram of Gandhi and got in touch with Nehru.
He was a part of the Indian movement as a writer. Not only did he edit the anthology, Changing India, wrote essays like Whither India, The Meaning of India, and so forth, but also participated in the Quit India Movement in 1942. He also published a biography of Gandhi called Mahatma Gandhi: The Great Indian Way in 1998.
The Padma Bhushan and Padma Vibhushan awardee went on to win numerous awards, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1988. He also received the Sahitya Akademi Award for The Serpent and the Rope in 1964. The novel is famously called his ‘spiritual autobiography’.
In one of his most seminal works and his first novel, Kanthapura, he expressed discomfort writing in English, an ‘alien’ and colonial language.
Rao maintained in the much-celebrated preface of the novel, “The telling has not been easy. One has to convey in a language that is not one’s own the spirit that is one’s own. One has to convey the various shades and omissions of a certain thought-movement that looks maltreated in an alien language.”
Thus, began his quest to accurately translate Indian sensibilities in English in the narrative, so as to convey the true meaning of Indian essence to the world.
EM Forster praised Kanthapura as ‘the finest novel to come out of India’. Kanthapura, the village, is the microcosmic representation of the macrocosmic reality of the nation at the time, bringing at the surface the fight by Gandhi. Hence, he documented the freedom struggle in a small space. Like him, the protagonist here, Moorthy, too, fights not only with the outside world (physically) but also has on-going internal battles. The struggle between good and evil is rampant in this post-colonial novel.
It is interesting to note that Rao never translated the Indian words that didn’t have equivalent meanings in English. He took to an old ideology of Indian narration style and, thus, also has as the narrator — Achakka, his mouth-piece (the old lady who always narrates tales).
Rao wrote other significant works like the metaphysical and philosophical comedy, The Cat and Shakespeare: A Tale of India (1965). The blend of fantasy and realism has, at its background, the famine of 1942. Some popular short stories by him incorporate On The Ganga Ghat, and The Cow And The Barricades.
The Raja Rao Award for Literature was especially created in 2000 to honour the man, with his permission. It was bestowed seven times to recognise writers between the years 2000-2009.