Raja Rao wants to write his last novel in Kannada

The Best Of Raja Rao and Word As Mantra: The Art Of Raja Rao represent the author’s quest into the rich and varying culture and tradition of the country, ruptured, melted and moulded under centuries of vicious changes.

Born on November 8, 1908 in Hassan, Karnataka, Raja Rao now stays in Austin, Texas with his wife Susan. He told Makarand Paranjape, who edited the two recently released books, that he dreams of writing his last novel in his mother tongue.

Sixty years after he wrote his first novel, Kanthapura, Indian writing in English today stands at a high pedestal,the foundation of which was laid by Raja Rao along with Mulk Raj Anand and R K Narayanan. Described by E M Foster as the “best novel ever written by an Indian in English”, Kanthapura (1938), his tryst with the sacred, put Indian writing in English on the world literary map through its simple and straightforward presentation of ancient Indian philosophy.

Though he has so far published only five novels, three collections of short stories, a biography of Mahatma Gandhi and a collection of essays, the overflowing creativity overshadows the quantum of his works.

The Best Of Raja Rao features excerpts from Kanthapura, The Serpent And The Rope, Comrade Kirillov, The Chess Master And His Moves and The Cat And The Shakespeare along with short stories like The policeman And The Rose and Bhim, The Parrot besides some essays.

The book, published by Katha in its Katha classics series, gives an ideal blend to those initiated into Raja Rao as also tothose who want to discover the man and his works.

If Kanthapura was rich and luminous for its humanitarian values The Serpent And The Rope and The Cat And The Shakespeare, fusing illusion and reality, are metaphysical novels probing individual destiny.

“My main interest is in showing the complexity of human condition and the symbolic construct of any human expression,” Rajo Rao says.

Much of the author’s works, who later took up a job of teaching vedanta and Indian philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin, in 1966, remains unpublished.

The passage from The Chessmaster And His Moves, his fifth novel, published 28 years after his previous novel, The Serpent And The Rope, contains the famous conversation between the Brahmin and the Jew. Ranchoddoss and his daughter, Sudha is taken from On The Ganga Ghat (1989), a collection of eleven short stories. An inscription by the author on the editor’s copy of the work reads “hoping this book when read would belike a dip in the waters of Benares”.

In the early 60s, Raja Rao wrote to a friend “curious as it may seem, the writers in the regional languages look outward for inspiration and dialogue, and the writers in English look inward and to tradition”. Raja Rao led from the front in attempts to rediscover values and techniques within one’s own traditions.

“I went to Benares, once. I was twenty-two then, and I had been to Europe I came back when father became ill. Little mother was proud of me – she said, he’s the bearing of a young pipal tree, tall and sacred, and the serpent-stones around it. We must go round him to become sacred”: The passage from The Serpent And The Rope underlines the quest for looking inward to find solutions rather than searching outside in vain. The novel, considered by many as the “most stylish ” of his works, had come 22 years after he published Kanthapura.

His novels can be read as attempts to validate and mediate for the contemporary world a philosophicaloutlook that might loosely be termed advaita, says the editor in the introduction to the book.

At the age of 90, he is still working hard on his unfinished works. He says he has to complete the last ten page of a new novel he wrote in 1993. He is also reported to have started a new novel last year.

“We cannot write like the English. We should not. We can write only as Indians. We have grown to look at the large world as part of us. Our method of expression therefore has to be a dialect which will some day prove to be as distinctive and colourful as the Irish or the American. Time alone will justify it,” thus wrote Rao in his foreword to Kanthapura. Events later have proved that he was right.