Raja Rao

1
Raja Rao
(1908-2006)
India's finest writers in English, the 1988
winner of the prestigious 25,000 Neustadt
International Prize for Literature. Rao defines
the major theme of all his fiction as the search
for the truth man's search for ultimate values.
It is a search that has consumed much of his life.
2

• Rao grew up in Mysore, an area of coffee
  plantations and famous old temples, in the south
  of India. He was a member of an old and respected
  Brahmin family. He did not study fiction writing,
  but came to it naturally. "I wrote as a man of
  sixteen or seventeen," Rao says. "I wrote in
  English. I was sent to a very snobbish English
  school. I learned English from English people in
  India. I learned Sanskrit much later."

3

• His father was a scholar and professor. But it
  was from his grandfather, who spoke not a word of
  English and meditated at length, that Rao got his
  philosophical bent. "My grandfather started me on
  the search," he says. "Philosophical inquiry is
  personal contact. Not merely philosophical
  thinking. Indian philosophy is thought in the
  West to be mystical. But it's really logic.
  Logical and metaphysical."

4

• He went to the Aligarh Muslim University and to
  Nizam's College, Hyderabad, in India. At the age
  of nineteen, he went to France, where he studied
  at the University of Montpellier and later at the
  Sorbonne. He left France in 1939, fifteen days
  before the outbreak of World War II. "If I'd been
  there fifteen days more, I'd not be alive today,"
  he says, because of his opposition to Hitler. "I
  was just lucky. When I got to India, I went
  straight to a sage."
• France, to my mind, is still the heart of Western
  civilization," Rao says. His first wife was a
  professor of French, and for about thirty years
  he lived six months in France six months in
  India. For a time he considered becoming a monk.
  

5

• His first novel, Kanthapura, about a village in
  South India affected by the spirit of
• Gandhi, was published in the United States in
  1938.
• The Serpent and the Rope was published in 1960.
• Other works include a collection of stories
  written earlier, The Cow of the Barricades, but
  published in 1947
• The Cat and Shakespeare in 1965
• Comrade Kirillov in 1976
• The Chessmaster and His Moves in 1988.
• In the years since, Rao had been working on a
  sequel to this last novel, which has Indian
  Vedantic philosophy at its core.

6

• In the '60s and '70s the search for values was
  very remarkable. I was really thinking America
  would be the greatest nation..." Rao points out
  that America had been fascinated by India even
  earlier. "The 19th century transcendentalists--Tho
  reau, Whitman, Emerson--were all influenced by
  India. The pragmatic American, I think, has not
  got time for India."

7

• The novel Kanthapura is set against the backdrop
  of a southern Indian village in the 1930s where
  the villagers are content and dependent in
  their own homogenous culture and tradition. The
  novel is a long oral tale narrated by Achakka, an
  old Brahmin grandmother of the village.

8

• Into this sociocultural life of set rituals comes
  a firebrand Gandhian, the educated and radical
  Moorthy .The novel relates the villagers
  involvement with the Indian freedom movement and
  an extremely lifelike presentation of the
  Gandhian struggle for independence from British
  colonial rule. Raja Rao merges the myth ridden
  beliefs of the villagers with that of rational
  explanations of Moorthy, who as the central
  character is highly pragmatic yet deeply
  traditional.

9
Foreword to Kanthapura

• There is no village in India, however mean, that
  has not a rich sthala-purana, or legendary
  history of its own. Some god or godlike hero has
  passed by the villageRama might have rested
  under this peepal treee. Sita might have dried
  her clothes, after her bath, on this yellow
  stone, or the Mahatma himself, on one of his many
  pilgrimages through the country, might have slept
  in this hut, the low one, by the village gate.

10
Indian English said farewell to British English
in 1938 when Rao wrote his credo for
creativity(Kachru 81

• .In this way the past mingles with the present,
  and the Gods mingle with men to make the
  repertory of your grandmother always bright. One
  such story from the contemporary annals of my
  village I have tried to tell.
• The telling has not been easy. One has to convey
  in a language that is not ones own the spirit
  that is ones own. One has to convey the various
  shades and omissions of a certain thought-
  movement that looks maltreated in an alien
  language. I use the word alien, yet English is
  not really an alien language to us. It is the
  language of our intellectual make-up- like
  Sanskrit or Persian was before---but not our
  emotional makeup. We are all instinctively
  bilingual

11
Foreword to Kanthapura

• "We cannot write like the English. We should not.
  We cannot write only as Indians. We have to look
  at the large world as part of us. The tempo of
  Indian life must be infused into our English
  expression. We, in India, think quickly, we talk
  quickly, and when we move we move quickly. There
  must be something in the sun of India. And our
  paths are paths interminable

12

• I was to write... my English, yet English after
  all--and how soon we forget this--is an
  Indo-Aryan tongue. Thus to stretch the English
  idiom to suit my needs seemed heroic enough for
  my urgentmost demands. ... So why not Sanskritic
  (or if you will, Indian) English? ...to integrate
  the Sanskrit tradition with contemporary
  intellectual heroism seemed a noble experiment to
  undertake. Thus both in terms of language and of
  structure, I had to find my way, whatever the
  results. And I continued the adventure in lone
  desperation.

13

• When I published my first stories in Europe...
  Romain Rolland and Stefan Zweig wrote
  enthusiastic letters to me about them. And
  Kanthapura, my first novel, was mostly written in
  a thirteenth-century castle of the Dauphine in
  the heart of the Alps, and when it came out, E.M.
  Forster spoke so boldly of my rigour of style and
  structure, I had, so to say, entered the literary
  world."

14

• The most suggestive and loaded metaphor indeed to
  critics of Indian English was Calibans tongue.
  It symbolized how Caliban had acquired a voice
  and used it as a linguistic weapon. But not for
  Rao.There is no Caliban here, nor is Rao using
  English from the periphery. He brings English,
  and its functions, to the centre of his
  creativity, to the centre of Indianness.In his
  hands the crossover of the language is on Raos
  terms(Kachru 78)

15
USE OF INDIAN SENSIBILITY IN RAJA RAO'S NOVEL

• Indian Method of Story-telling The method of
  describing of the novel is characteristically
  Indian. The Indian grandmother can be considered
  to be the earliest and most typical of story
  tellers. Achkka is the storyteller of the novel,
  who is just like a grandmother. She tells the
  story to every new comer to Kanthapura. According
  to Raja Rao, Achakkas exceedingly long
  sentences, use of blanks, and expressions like
  this and that, here and there are
  meaningful. She gives us complete
  character-sketch of Sankar, Bhatt and Rangamma.
• They are very much informative, as well as vital
  for the narrative. In this way, one episode leads
  to another, and so the tale tends to be
  interminably long. This also makes the narration
  episodic.
• There are so many episodes in the novel. Thus,
  the narration is characterized by verbosity and
  garrulity, which are the features of the Indian
  folklore. Raja Rao wanted to stress this admired
  tradition. As a result he didnt feel it
  necessary to divide the novel into chapters.
• In his Foreword to Kanthapura Raja Rao clarifies
  that the novel is to be judged with reference to
  the conventional Indian tradition and not with
  reference to Western methods of story-telling and
  theories and of the novel writing.

16
The opening paragraphs of Kanthapura

• begins with The breathless narration by the
  garrulous Achakka, playing many roles, recalling
  the orality of past traditions
• Our village---I dont think you have ever heard
  about it---Kanthapura is its name, and it is in
  the province of Kara. High on the ghats is it,
  high up the steep mountains that face the cool
  Arabian Seas, up the Malabar coast is it, up
  Mangalore and Puttur and many a center of
  cardomom and coffee, rice and sugarcane(Rao 1).

17

• It is Achakka who goes on to show how the village
  is presided over by the overpowering legend of
  Goddess Kenchamma
• Kenchemma is our goddess. Great and bounteous
  is she. She killed a demon ages, ages ago, a
  demon that had come tom demand our sons as
  food.(Rao 1-2)

18

• The protagonist Moorthy is introduced by the
  narrator Achakka in familiar terms Cornerhouse
  Narsammas son Moorthy-our Moorthy as we always
  called him(Rao 7). To describe with consummate
  skill a character as paradoxical as Moorthy and
  a theme as complex (Sankaran 43) with its
  intricate mingling of the mythic and the
  rational, required great skill in narrative
  strategy.

19

• Moorthy offers a vision of reconstruction and of
  integration of the possibilities and
  impossibilities of the philosophic whole, where
  even intense inward questionings betrayed no
  jarring collusion or confrontation. The
  culmination of the conversion of Moorthy is Saint
  Sankaracharyas chant
• and closing his eyes tighter, he slips back
  into the foldless sheath of the Souland sends
  out rays of love to the east, rays of love to the
  west,. And when he opens them to look around, a
  great blue radiance seems to fill the whole
  earth, and dazzled, he rises up and falls
  prostrate before the god, chanting Sankaras
  Sivoham, Sivoham, I am Siva.I am Siva.Siva am
  I. (Rao 67).
•  

20

• This variability in interpretation integrates
  certain terms such as taste or essence (rasa) and
  sound (dhvani-), which reconcile theories of
  linguistic expressionism with emotional nuances.
  What Raos mantra did was to create what has
  been called unselfconsciousness about English,
  about creativity in this language, about
  Indianness(Kachru 82), where English is
  ritually de-anglicized(Parthasarathy 13).

21

• The detailed descriptions, sobriquets and labels
  of persons, as for eg. Waterfall Venkamma(Rao
  16), Maddur Coffee planter Venkatanarayana(Rao
  37), pock marked Sidda(Rao 5), and of local
  sights- Now when you turned round the potters
  Street and walked across the Temple square, the
  first house you saw was the nine beamed house of
  Patel Range Gowda(Rao 60), combined with the
  abiding presence of the great river Himavathy

22

• The slowmoving carts begin to grind and to
  rumble, and then the long harsh monotony of the
  carts axles through the darkness.the noise
  suddenly dies into the night and the soft hiss of
  the Himavathy rises in the air (Rao 1). The
  reversal of the sentences, the flavour and nuance
  of the long sentences joined by idioms and
  expressions, as in the dialect of spoken Kannada
  of South India simulates the suggestive word,
  implying suggestive meaning and the power of
  suggestion.

23

• In Vaisakh men plough the fields of
  Kanthapura.The rains have come, the fine, first
  footing-footing rains that skip over the bronze
  mountains, tiptoe the crags, and leaping into the
  valleys, go splashing and wind-swung, a winnowed
  pour, and the coconuts and the betel-nuts and the
  cardomom plants choke with it and hiss
  back(Rao114).

24

• Reading this parable like tale is a recollection
  and recreation of not only myth but social
  transactions rendered authentic in terms of art
  by the villagers patois, their sing song
  syntax(Narasimhaiah 54). Whereas the story here
  as such is involved in arrangement and sequence
  of juxtaposition, whose endless play of meanings
  against the visual and graphic is constantly
  breaking itself off, with the repetitions of
  images and metaphors, in a design which is often
  a flow of words, a perspective of the whole
  order.

25
Rao celebrates the crossover as a sort of native
parampara, which is a sociocultural bonding.

• With the passing years since Kanthapura was first
  written we see that Raos mantra established a
  subtle connection between the English language
  and Indias linguistic and cultural parampara and
  its assimilative literary culture (Kachru 81).
• In infusing his language with a distinctive
  Indian idiom, Rao maneuvered and moulded the
  figurative and the literal, making schematic
  distinctions fade, combining and interacting
  between the various sound patterning to enunciate
  a different kind of essence, the soul of Indian
  poetics, of rasa-dhvani, a completeness of
  response in an all aesthetic experience.

26
(No Transcript)
27
Use of Religion

• Indian philosophy is basically religious and even
  politics is also spiritualized in India. Indias
  so many prominent social reformers and political
  leaders were great religious figures. In India,
  communal and political goals have been attained
  with the help of spiritual activities.
• The same thing happens in the novel, in the case
  of Gandhi and his freedom struggle. According to
  a Narsimhaiah, there are at least three strands
  of experience in the novel the political, the
  religious and the social. To the uneducated
  villagers, Kenchamma is a kind and helpful
  goddess. Their attitude is extremely religious.
  As the story progresses the three threads of
  experience become one the religious, social and
  political issues become one and the same.

28

• Theme of Shakti Worship Shakti-worship is a
  basically Indian theme and it is present
  throughout the novel. In this Gandhian freedom
  struggle, the ladies of the Kanthapura play a key
  role. The author has painted them as energetic
  forms of Shakti. It can be said that Indian women
  are solid as rock, and they can easily bear the
  pain. Shakti(energy) rises in them, and each of
  them is inspired at a particular time. One
  noticeable thing in the novel is that in the last
  phase of nonviolent struggle, it is a lady named
  Ratna, who takes over from Moorthy and leads the
  movement.
• The language of the novel is flooded with the
  Indian phrases, Indian similes and rustic color.
• You can find so many sentences in the novel that
  are exactly translated from Kannada into English.
  Sometimes, there is breaking up of the English
  syntax to express emotional disturbances and
  feelings. Many words are taken from local Indian
  languages. The author has used them as they
  are. He didnt feel it necessary to translate
  them into English

29

• .
• In the novel, you can get words likeAhimsa,
  Dhoti, Harikatha, Mandap etc. Raja Rao has
  repeatedly used village proverbs, and folklores
  according to his requirement. For example,
• (1) Every squirrel has his day,
• (2) our hearts beat like the wings of bats,
• (3) and yet he was as honest as an elephant,
• Likewise, you can found so many proverbs and
  sayings from the language of illiterate people in
  the novel. For example
• (1) The policemen are not your uncles sons,
• (2) the first daughter milks the cow when the
  mother is ill,
• (3) saw you like a rat on your mothers lap,
• (4) there is neither man nor mosquito in
  Kanthapura (5) you cannot straighten a dogs
  tail,
• (6) land, lust and wifely loyalty go badly
  together.
• Sometimes Raja Rao doesnt hesitate to use a rude
  and offensive language of the villagers. He uses
  this type of language when it is necessary

30

• When a non native English writer, such as Rao,
  chooses this specific genre rather than one that
  is traditional to his own culture, the epic, for
  instance, and further chooses this genre in a
  second language, he takes upon himself the burden
  of synthesizing the projections of both cultures.
  Out of these circumstances, Rao has forged what I
  consider a truly exemplary style in South Asian
  English.in fact in World Literature.He has above
  all.tried to show how the spirit of one culture
  can be possessed by and communicated in another
  language.(Parthasarathy 9)
•  

31

• I am a man of silence. And words emerge from
  that silence with light, of light, and light is
  sacred. One wonders that there is the word at
  allsabda-and one asks oneself, where did it come
  from? How does it arise?. The word seems to come
  first as an impulsion from nowhere, and then as a
  prehension, and it becomes less and less
  esoteric-till it begins to be concrete

32

• The writer or the poet is he who seeks back the
  common word to its origin of silence, that the
  manifested word becomes lightwhere does the word
  dissolve and become meaning? Meaning itself, of
  course, is beyond the sound of the word, which
  comes to one only as an image in the brain, but
  that which sees the image in the brain (says our
  great sage of the eight century, Sri Sankara)
  nobody has ever seen. Thus the word coming of
  light is seen eventually by light(Paranjape
  ed.xxv)