Last of the pioneers of Indian writing in English

Raja Rao, the last of the great triumvirate of Indian writing in English of the early 20th century that included R.K. Narayan and Mulk Raj Anand...

Raja Rao, the last of the great triumvirate of Indian writing in English of the early 20th century that included R.K. Narayan and Mulk Raj Anand, passed away in Austin, Texas on Saturday. He was 96.

In a body of work that spanned seven decades, his first novel remains the most influential in the way Indian stories were told. Kanthapura was published in 1938, when Raja Rao was just 30 years old. It examined the currents of modernity and awareness streaming into an almost timeless village in his native Mysore. Mahatma Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement was brought into the village and it set off a reconfiguration of the chess board among aspirants and wielders of powers: the landowners, the colonial administration, the agents of empowerment energised by the call for revolt against the established elites, and the entrenched representatives of older caste hierarchies.

Kanthapura provided a vivid imaging of the changes touched off by a Gandhi-like figure in the village who goes into lower-caste quarters to mobilise people for better hygienic conditions and education. But Kanthapura’s power lay in the way Raja Rao told his story. In a famous note, he wrote of the dilemma of how to imbue in a language that is not one’s own the spirit that is one’s own. To do so, he drew on folk narrative and the local idiom to give his novel an everlasting freshness in rhythm and cadence.

It was the Midnight’s Children of the 1930s.

Raja Rao would return to Gandhiji in one of his last works in 1998 The Great Indian Way: A Life of Mahatma Gandhi. By then he had retired from teaching philosophy at the University of Texas (1966-83). Philosophical debates would form the crux of two other of his key works, The Cat and Shakespeare and The Serpent and the Rope. Higher studies at the Sorbonne in his twenties, a lifetime of engagement with philosophy and spirituality and an abiding interest in exploring the ways in which language could convey thought (in French, English and Kannada) made Raja Rao increasingly more inquiring with time.