Raja Rao (8 November 1908 – 8 July 2006) was an Indian-American writer of English-language novels and short stories, whose works are deeply rooted in metaphysics. Rao has been described as a powerful writer and a scholar well versed in the Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian philosophies. The Serpent and the Rope (1960), a semi-autobiographical novel recounting a search for spiritual truth in Europe and India, established him as one of the finest Indian prose stylists and won him the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1963. For the entire body of his work, Rao was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1988. Rao's wide-ranging body of work, spanning a number of genres, is seen as a varied and significant contribution to Indian English literature, as well as to World literature as a whole.

Early life

Raja Rao was born on 8 November 1908 in Hassan, in the princely state of Mysore (now in Karnataka in South India) into a Kannadiga Hoysala Karnataka Brahmin family

Rao was educated at a Muslim school, the Madarsa-e-Aliya in Hyderabad. After matriculation in 1927, he studied for his degree at Nizam's College. Osmania University, where he became friends with Ahmed Ali. He began learning French. After graduating from the University of Madras, having majored in English and history, he won the Asiatic Scholarship of the Government of Hydrabad in 1929, for studying abroad.

Rao moved to the University of Montpellier in France. He studied French language and literature, and later at the Sorbonne in Paris, he explored the Indian influence on Irish literature. He married Camille Mouly, who taught French at Montpellier, in 1931. The marriage lasted until 1939. Later he depicted the breakdown of their marriage in The Serpent and the Rope. Rao published his first stories in French and English. In 1931 to 1932, he contributed four articles written in Kannada for Jaya Karnataka, an influential journal.

Nationalist novelist

Returning to India in 1939, he edited Changing India with Iqbal Singh, an anthology of modern Indian thought from Ram Mohan Roy to Jawaharlal Nehru. He participated in the Quit India Movement of 1942. In 1943–1944 he co-edited a journal from Bombay called Tomorrow with Ahmad Ali. He was a prime mover in the formation of cultural organisation Sri Vidya Samiti, devoted to reviving the values of ancient Indian civilisation.

Rao's involvement in the nationalist movement is reflected in his first two books. The novel Kanthapura (1938) was an account of the impact of Gandhi's teaching on nonviolent resistance against the British. Rao borrows the style and structure from Indian vernacular tales and folk-epics. He returned to the theme of Gandhism in the short story collection The Cow of the Barricades (1947). The Serpent and the Rope (1960) was written after a long silence, and dramatised the relationships between Indian and Western culture. The serpent in the title refers to illusion and the rope to reality. Cat and Shakespeare (1965) was a metaphysical comedy that answered philosophical questions posed in the earlier novels.

He had great respect for women, and once said, "Women is the Earth, air, ether, sound, women is the microcosm of the mind".

Later years

Rao relocated to the United States and was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin from 1966 to 1986, when he retired as emeritus Professor. Courses he taught included: Marxism to Gandhism; Mahayana Buddhism; Indian philosophy: The Upanishads; Indian philosophy: The Metaphysical Basis of the Male and Female Principle; and Razor's Edge.

In 1965, he married Katherine Jones, an American stage actress. They had one son, Christopher Rama. In 1986, after his divorce from Katherine, Rao married his third wife, Susan Vaught, whom he met when she was a student at the University of Texas in the 1970s. In 1988 he received the prestigious International Neustadt Prize for Literature. In 1998 he published Gandhi's biography Great Indian Way: A Life of Mahatma Gandhi.

Rao died of heart failure on 8 July 2006, at his home in Austin, Texas, at the age of 97.

Raja Rao Award for Literature

The 'Raja Rao Award for Literature' was created in Rao's honor, and with his permission, in the year 2000. It was established "to recognize writers and scholars who have made an out standing contribution to the Literature and Culture of the South Asian Diaspora." The award was administered by the Samvad India Foundation, a nonprofit charitable trust named for the Sanskrit word for dialogue, which was established by Makarand Paranjape of Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi to bestow the award and to promote education and cultural contributions to India and the South Asian diaspora. Other recipients were Yasmine Gooneratne of Sri Lanka, Edwin Thumboo of Singapore, Harsha V. Dehejia of Canada, David Dabydeen of Guyana, Varadaraja V. Raman of the United States, and Vijay Mishra of Fiji. Meenakshi Mukherjee, chair of the last awarding jury, died in 2009, and the award was discontinued that same year, Braj Kachru,

Bibliography

Fiction: Novels

  • Kanthapura (1938), Orient Paperbacks
  • The Serpent and the Rope (1960), Penguin India
  • The Cat and Shakespeare: A Tale of India (1965) Penguin India
  • Comrade Kirillov (1976), Orient Paperbacks
  • The Chessmaster and His Moves (1988), Orient Paperbacks

Fiction: Short story collections

  • The Cow of the Barricades (1947)
  • The Policeman and the Rose (1978)
  • On the Ganga Ghat (1989), Orient Paperbacks (Vision Books)

Non-fiction

  • Changing India: An Anthology (1939)
  • Tomorrow (1943–44)
  • Whither India? (1948)
  • The Meaning of India, essays (1996), Penguin India
  • The Great Indian Way: A Life of Mahatma Gandhi, biography (1998), Orient Paperbacks

Anthologies

  • The Best of Raja Rao (1998)
  • 5 Indian Masters (Raja Rao, Rabindranath Tagore, Premchand, Dr. Mulk Raj Anand, Khushwant Singh) (2003).
  • Indian Ethos and Western Encounter in Raja Rao's Fiction - Editor : Dr. Madhulika Singh - Published by Rajmangal Publishers.

Awards

  • 1963: Sahitya Akademi Award
  • 1969: Padma Bhushan, India's third highest civilian award
  • 1988: Neustadt International Prize for Literature
  • 2007: Padma Vibhushan, India's second highest civilian award

See also

  • List of Indian writers
  • Katha Upanishad, ancient Hindu text containing the razor's edge metaphor used by Rao, and others:
  • For example, Somerset Maugham's novel, The Razor's Edge

References

Further reading

  • "To Raja Rao", a 1969 poem by Czeslaw Milosz, the Nobel laureate's only English poem.
  • Singh, Madhulika (2023). Indian Ethos and the Western Experience: A Study of the East-West Encounter in Raja Rao's Fiction.  Rajmangal Publishers. Aligarh.
  • Raja Rao Website, sponsored by the Raja Rao Publication Project at the University of Texas.
  • Aikant, Satish. (11 July 2006) [First published 23 January 2004]. "Raja Rao". The Literary Encyclopedia.