Contribution of Raja Rao to Indian English literature.
Chief among
the great trio of Indian English fiction Raja Rao is remembered mainly for his
employment on Hindu mythology, religion and culture in his novel. He comes of
very old South Indian Brahmin family in 1909. Raja Rao was a child of Gandhian
Age who looked upon the ‘Mahatma’ as mythical hero such as ‘Rama’ or ‘Lord
Krishna’. He was an ardent follower of Gandhian principles and hence when he
took up writing his novels and short stories, always reflected his inner
conviction in the teaching of Mahatma Gandhi. Added to, this was a great love
for the rich past of traditional India and its spiritual heritage. There are
metaphysical speculations in his novels of which he himself tells E.M Forster
in 1945 then he had “abandoned literature for good and gone over to
metaphysical”
Raja Rao is not a
professional writer. He writes slowly; revises meditatively. Naturally there
are long intervals between his works. Raja Rao’s earliest novel was Kanthapura(1938)
an Indian epic or “Purana” in English language. The novel echoes the spirit of
Gandhi’s impact on a remote south Indian village and is recorded in the chatty
language of a village grandmother. For her, Gandhi is Rama, the red foreigners
or the brown inspector Police is soldier in ten-headed Ravana’s army. The novel
has often been called “Gandhipurana” because of its avowal of Gandhian
politics.
Kanthapura was followed
by twenty years of prolonged silence after which came Raja Roy’s second novel The
Serpent and the Rope. It has been called the ‘spiritual autobiography’ of
the novelist. It appeared in 1960 and critics who called Kanthapura as Raja Rao’s Ramayana called
this book as Mahabarata.The novel records the journey of an Indian Lord
Ramaswamy through the trouble of life both in India and abroad and culminates
in his search for the “Guru. He travels to France and married Medeleine,has a
child who dies within one year of birth, separated from his wife and returns to
India. He realizes that “the serpent” is “Maya”, the reality is the “rope”-but
the “Guru” with lantern is required to reveal this.
Next came The Cat and
Shakespeare in 1965 which is best be called a ‘philosophical comedy’.The
sub-title o the novel is A Tale of Modern India. The background of the
novel is provided by the famine of 1942.The narration is a curious mixture of
fantasy and realism. This was followed by Comrade Kirilliov(1976), a spiritual
autobiography. Rao’s most recent novel is The Chase master and His Moves(1988).The
novel deals with a tale of doomed love between Shibaram Shastri an Indian
mathematician and a married woman.
Raja Rao’s credit also rest in
his collection of short stories. He wrote three short stories collections- The
Cow and The Barricades(1947),The Policeman and the Rose and Other
Stories(1978) and On The Ganga Ghat(1993).These stories dealt with
the same theme as his novels and have received a high critical acclaim. Besides,
Raja Rao also wrote some non-fictional prose such as The Meaning of India,
a collection of seventeen essays and a biography of Mahatma Gandhi entitled The
Grater Indian Way(1998).
Raja Rao was a writer with a
metaphysical bent who imbibed into English language the idiom, the rhythm and
love of his vernacular (i.e Kannada).He was a great spiritual thinker and his
work depicts a unique blending of the spiritual, the regional and political ideals.
He was also a worshipper of the ‘feminine principle’. Santa Rama Rao considered
Raja Rao as “perhaps the most brilliant and certainly the most interesting
writer of modern India”.
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