Raja Rao — GoBasics Literature

Life & Background

Raja Rao was born in 1908 in Hassan, Mysore, into a Kannada-speaking Brahmin family, and was educated in Hyderabad and at Nizam College before winning a scholarship to the University of Montpellier in France. He studied French literature, married a French academic, and spent much of the 1930s in France, writing Kanthapura in a thirteenth-century castle in the Alps. He returned to India and was drawn into the independence movement and into a long search for a spiritual teacher, described in The Serpent and the Rope. From 1966 he taught Indian philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin for two decades. He wrote slowly — four novels across fifty years — and his fiction became increasingly metaphysical. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Neustadt Prize, and died in Austin in 2006 at ninety-seven.

Kanthapura

1938

Plot summary

A South Indian village narrated by Achakka, an elderly Brahmin widow who tells the story as a village grandmother would, with digressions and repetitions. Kanthapura is divided by caste into quarters and dominated by the Skeffington Coffee Estate, where labourers are recruited and abused. Moorthy, a young Brahmin who has been to the city, returns as a Gandhian, breaks caste rules by entering the pariah quarter, and is excommunicated by the priest and disowned by his mother. He organises the village — a Congress committee, spinning, picketing of the toddy shops — against the opposition of Bhatta the moneylender and the Swami backed by government. Rachanna's wife and the other women take on leadership as the men are arrested. Police violence escalates, the village is burned and abandoned, and its people scatter to another settlement, leaving Kanthapura empty.

Literary analysis

The foreword is as famous as the novel and is examinable in its own right: Rao states that one has to convey in a language that is not one's own the spirit that is one's own, and that Indians must write an English which is the dialect that will some day prove as distinctive and colourful as the Irish or the American. The novel executes that programme — Kannada sentence rhythm, run-on sentences without English punctuation logic, untranslated words, the sthala-purana or legendary village history as its structural model, and an oral narrator who addresses the reader directly. The Gandhian movement is filtered entirely through village perception, so Gandhi himself becomes a mythic figure closer to an avatar than a politician, which is both the novel's method and its argument about how political ideas actually travel.

Why Raja Rao Matters

Kanthapura is the founding novel of Indian English fiction's attempt to indigenise the language, and Rao's foreword is the single most quoted statement of the problem — set as a standard question against Achebe's and Ngũgĩ's positions on writing in English. With R.K. Narayan and Mulk Raj Anand he forms the trinity through which the first generation of Indian English novelists is taught. The Serpent and the Rope, his Advaita-inflected novel of a marriage and a spiritual search, is his most ambitious book.

Key Facts

The 1938 foreword

His statement about conveying an Indian spirit in a borrowed language is the founding document of Indian English poetics.

Written in the French Alps

He composed Kanthapura in a castle in France, having spent the 1930s studying at Montpellier and the Sorbonne.

The village trinity

With R.K. Narayan and Mulk Raj Anand he is one of the three founders of the Indian English novel.

Taught philosophy in Texas

He spent twenty years as a professor of Indian philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin.

All Major Works

Kanthapura1938
The Cow of the Barricades1947
The Serpent and the Rope1960
The Cat and Shakespeare1965
Comrade Kirillov1976
The Chessmaster and His Moves1988