Raja Rao
Raja Rao is an Indian writer of English language novels and short stories, whose works are deeply rooted in Brahmanism and Hinduism. Raja Rao's semi-autobiographical novel, The Serpent and the Rope (1960), is a story of a search for spiritual truth in Europe and India. It established him as one of the finest Indian stylists.
Raja Rao was born on November 8, 1908 in Hassan, in the state of Mysore in South India, into a well-known Brahman family. His native language was Kanarese, but his post-graduate education was in France, and all his publications in book form have been in English. Rao has been concerned with language and consciousness.
Rao was educated at Muslim schools. After receiving a degree from Madras University, he left India for Europe, where he remained for a decade. In 1931 he married a French academic, Camille Mouly. Later he depicted the breakdown of their marriage in The Serpent and the Rope. His first stories Rao published in French and English. During 1931-32 he contributed four articles written in Kannada for Jaya Karnataka, an influential journal.
Rao's involvement in the nationalist movement is reflected in his first two books. The novel Kanthapura (1938) was an account of the impact of Gandhi's teaching on non-violent resistance against the British. The story is seen from the perspective of a small Mysore village in South India. Rao borrows the style and structure from Indian vernacular tales and folk-epic. 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 work dramatized the relationships between Indian and Western culture. The serpent in the title refers to illusion and the rope to reality. Cat and Shakespeare (1965) was a metaphysical comedy that answered philosophical questions posed in the earlier novels.
Bibliography
- Kanthapura, 1938
- Changing India, 1939 (ed., with Iqbal Singh)
- The Cow of the Barricades, and Other Stories, 1947
- Whither India, 1948 (with Iqbal Singh)
- The Serpent and the Rope, 1960
- The Cat and Shakespeare, 1965
- Comrade Kirilov, 1976
- The Policeman and the Rose: Stories, 1978
- The Chessmaster and His Moves, 1988
- On the Ganga Ghat, 1993
- The Meaning of India, 1996
- Great Indian Way: A Life of Mahatma Gandhi, 1998
- The Best of Raja Rao, 1998