Reading India in a Transnational era: The Works of Raja Rao 9781138550292, 9781032050560, 9781003195801

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READING INDIA IN A TRANSNATIONAL ERA

This anthology demonstrates the significance of Raja Rao’s writing in the broader spectrum of anti-colonial, postcolonial, and diasporic writing in the 20th century. In addition to highlighting Rao’s significant presence in Indian writing, the volume presents a range of previously unpublished material which contextualises Rao’s work within 20th-century modernist, postmodernist, and postcolonial trends. Exploring both his fictional and non-fictional works, Reading India in a Transnational Era engages with issues of subaltern agency and national belonging, authenticity, subjectivity, internationalism, multicultural politics, postcolonialism, and literary and cultural representation through language and translation. A literary volume that discusses gender and identity on socio-political grounds, apart from dealing with Rao’s linguistic experimentations in a transnational era, will be of interest among scholars and researchers of English, postcolonial and world literature, cultural theory, and Asian studies. Rumina Sethi, Professor of English and Cultural Studies at Panjab University, Chandigarh, is a member of the General Council of the Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi. She obtained her PhD from Trinity College, Cambridge, and held the British Academy Fellowship at the University of Oxford. Her books include Myths of the Nation (1999) and The Politics of Postcolonialism (2011). Letizia Alterno, Teaching Fellow of Advance HE, is Honorary Research Fellow in Postcolonial Studies at the University of Manchester, UK. She has authored the monograph Raja Rao: An Introduction for the Contemporary Indian Writers Series (2011), Rao’s obituary in The Guardian (2006), and an article on his legacy in The Times of India (2010).

READING INDIA IN A TRANSNATIONAL ERA The Works of Raja Rao

Edited by Rumina Sethi and Letizia Alterno

First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Rumina Sethi and Letizia Alterno; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Rumina Sethi and Letizia Alterno to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-55029-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-05056-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-19580-1 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

Acknowledgementsviii Forewordix HARISH TRIVEDI

Introduction

1

RUMINA SETHI AND LETIZIA ALTERNO

PART I

Re-routing Raja Rao’s politics, national identity, and postcolonial criticism

19

  1 The lure of monarchy in the pursuit of truth: Raja Rao’s royalism in The Serpent and the Rope21 ALASTAIR NIVEN

  2 From national to metaphysical: Raja Rao’s idea of India in a transnational era

35

RUMINA SETHI

  3 Resisting the British empire: Raja Rao’s two political anthologies Changing India and Whither India?50 LETIZIA ALTERNO

  4 Threads of identity: caste, clothing, and community in Raja Rao’s Kanthapura59 RAHUL K. GAIROLA

 5 The Cat and Shakespeare, the problem of the ego-self, and the vagaries of literary reputation JOHN C. HAWLEY

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C ontents

PART II

Philosophy, aesthetics, gender, and the novel

87

 6 Comrade Kirillov: ‘a New Novel’ newly understood

89

PAUL SHARRAD

  7 Women and the narrative of nationalism in Raja Rao’s The Cow of the Barricades102 SAKOON SINGH

  8 Posthumanism in Raja Rao’s The Cat and Shakespeare: redrawing the boundaries

115

CHITRA SANKARAN

  9 The cat and the chessmaster: deconstructing ‘Play’ in two novels by Raja Rao

129

JANET M. POWERS

10 The unknown quantity: mathematics and metaphysics in Raja Rao’s The Chessmaster and His Moves144 NEELUM SARAN GOUR

PART III

Multicultural politics, habitat, and translation

155

11 ‘I Am Not Gandhi’: Kanthapura and the problem of allegory

157

ULKA ANJARIA

12 Nature and landscape: an evolutionary psychological analysis of Raja Rao’s writing

171

DIETER RIEMENSCHNEIDER

13 Search in confusion: reading transnational friendships in Raja Rao’s Kanthapura and Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi181 WASEEM ANWAR AND FARRAH FATIMA

14 On translating Raja Rao in the transnational era ALESSANDRO MONTI

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196

C ontents

PART IV

Reminiscences205

Raja Rao at his bed table

207

SUSAN RAJA RAO



Raja Rao: the untold story

210

MAKARAND R. PARANJAPE



Krishna: (for Raja Rao)

224

EDWIN THUMBOO

Afterword

226

VIJAY MISHRA

Glossary230 List of contributors 233 Index238

vii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This long-standing project would not have seen completion had it not been for the good fortune we had to embark jointly on this co-editing adventure. We would like to praise the unfailing dedication of our committed contributors, whose precious academic time and original works have been testaments of their intentions to make a change in Raja Rao’s criticism. We have all benefited from the rigour and dedication of our editorship, which has ultimately rewarded us in so many profound ways. We wish to thank Routledge for believing in this project, especially Brinda Sen and Aakash Chakrabarty for having corroborated our editing efforts. We are equally indebted to Sathish Mohan for his meticulous handling of the copyediting of the volume. Special thanks go to Susan Raja Rao and Penguin Random House publishers for granting us full permission to reproduce material from all of Raja Rao’s works.

viii

FOREWORD Harish Trivedi

Indian fiction in English is famously called the ‘twice-born’ fiction, a term often (mis)understood to mean a high-caste, privileged, Brahmanical literature. If this is indeed so, then it was Raja Rao who performed for it the sacred-thread ceremony, thus conducting a ritual of shuddhi [purification] for this hybrid, mixed-blood offspring of the liaison between the English language and an Indian sensibility. It was Raja Rao who gave to the theme of the East–West encounter—which Ruth Jhabvala and Anita Desai were content to explore on social, cultural, or racial terms—a deeper spiritual dimension. Raja Rao, who passed away on 8 July 2006 at Austin, Texas, at the age of 97, was born on 8 November  1908 in Hassan (Karnataka). After the death of his mother when he was four, he was brought up in Harihalli by his grandfather who was a Sanskrit-knowing Vedantin, conversant with the philosophy of the Vedas and the Upanishads, which Raja Rao himself grew a fascination for, as reflected in several of his novels. He went to an elite Islamic school or madrasa in Hyderabad (where his father worked) and then to the Nizam College, later moving on to the Aligarh Muslim University where he was reportedly the only Hindu boy in his class. Next, he was off on a scholarship to Montpellier and then to the Sorbonne, where he researched the Indian influence on Irish literature. His education was thus a blend not only of East and West (which has since become common enough in modern India), but also, so to say, of South and North and of Hindu and Muslim. Jawaharlal Nehru was to tease Raja Rao about his imperfect Hindustani (presumably acquired at Aligarh) during a meeting in Switzerland, while Nehru’s terminally ailing wife Kamala, whose Hindi incidentally was better than Jawaharlal’s, kindly sought to defend and protect Rao. This occasion is recounted by Rao with gentle humour in his book of essays and sketches, The Meaning of India (2007: 40–1). Meanwhile, in Paris, Raja Rao had in 1931 married a French woman, Camille Mouly, and encouraged and supported by her, put his PhD aside and launched on his first novel in English. This was Kanthapura (1938), which appeared by coincidence at about the same time as the first works of fiction ix

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by Mulk Raj Anand and R. K. Narayan, who had both made their fictional debut in 1935, with Untouchable and Swami and Friends, respectively. These three novelists were to go on to constitute the Holy Trinity of Indian Fiction in English for the succeeding half-century. Kanthapura begins with the kind of breathtaking artistic boldness and ambition that no Indian writer of English was to match until Midnight’s Children 40 years later. Its short ‘Foreword’ has been quoted so frequently in critical discussions of the Indian novel in English that it has become, in effect, the manifesto of all Indian Writing in English. ‘The telling has not been easy’, Raja Rao here said with fetching honesty—and then explained the nature of the creative difficulty, in terms so simple and true that they still have not been improved upon: ‘One has to convey in a language that is not one’s own the spirit which is one’s own’ (1938: 5). He predicted that with constant use, Indian English will emerge as a distinct if not autonomous variety, like American English or Irish English. Kanthapura is a stirring depiction of how the Gandhian nationalist movement of 1930–31 reaches out to permeate a remote and supposedly ‘unchanging’ village in Karnataka and to transform it radically. As a result of the impact of ‘Gandhi Mahatma’, the pariahs are no longer treated as untouchables, and even pious, illiterate grandmothers are motivated to go on a march to picket toddy shops and to protest against the cruel injustice of ‘Hunter sahib’, the owner of a neighbouring coffee estate. Gandhi is deified and taken by the simple villagers to be an avatar of Krishna; in fact, the first edition of the novel carried an epigraph on the title page citing Krishna’s assurance from The Bhagavadgita: ‘Whenever there is misery and ignorance, I  come’ (The name that they share, ‘Mohana’, is exploited by Raja Rao to reinforce the conflation). In recent years, the subaltern historians have often denigrated Gandhi by alleging that his message was no less religious than it was political. Kanthapura offers proof positive that this was indeed so and that this was precisely where Gandhi’s irresistible and incomparable appeal lay.1 In any case, it is not as if Gandhi is sentimentally and uncritically iconised in this novel. In the end, the satyagrahis have been brutally pulped into defeat; they must retreat even from their village Kanthapura to go and settle elsewhere, and their leader, the young Moorthy, who was the first among them to have been fired up by the Gandhian message, now turns away from Gandhi and feels more drawn to the socialist, ‘equal-distributionist’ Nehru (Rao 1938: 183). Kanthapura remains Rao’s most widely read novel in India and abroad, both generally and in college classrooms, mainly because its early and extensive treatment of Gandhian nationalism and the stylistic experimentation through which Rao sought to give his English a Kannada–Sanskritic flavour and cadence are both concerns that tie in aptly with the current postcolonial modes of reading literature. Indeed, Kanthapura is one of the most evocative x

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and nuanced novels about Gandhian nationalism not only in English but in any Indian language, with only Premchand’s great Gandhian epic Rangabhumi (1925) preceding and excelling it in scope and political radicalism. At the same time, the eponymous village in which Kanthapura is set is infinitely more remote than the village in which Premchand had partially set Rangabhumi. The process of indirect patriotic filtration through which this village at the back of the beyond gets caught up in the nationalist mainstream is one of the aptest illustrations of the notion of the nation as an ‘imagined community’, in not a sceptical and negative but in a positive and enabling sense. After this stunning debut novel, Raja Rao moved resolutely away from literature. Turning his back on France and his French wife, he returned to India to launch on a long quest for a guru who would lead him to the Truth, no less. His quest took him to many ashramas including Gandhi’s Sevagram; his account of the power of Gandhi’s ascetic personality, including his intense silences, is rendered with a novelist’s delicate suggestiveness. Ultimately, Raja Rao found the guru he sought in Swami Atmananda, in Thiruvananthapuram. When E. M. Forster, who had acclaimed Kanthapura as ‘the finest novel to come out of India in recent years’,2 visited Jaipur in 1945 to attend a writer’s conference and wondered why Raja Rao was missing, Rao wrote to explain: ‘I have abandoned literature for good and gone over to metaphysics.’ Fortunately for literature, this did not quite prove to be so. In 1960, after a 22-year silence, Raja Rao returned to fiction with a novel titled The Serpent and the Rope—a metaphor which harks back to the great exponent of the advaita philosophy, Sankaracharya. As an ignorant man mistakes a piece of rope to be a serpent, so he mistakes this world, which is merely maya, to be the reality. This foundational Hindu world-view is fleshed out in this clearly autobiographical novel through the attraction and love as well as conflict between the Indian hero Ramaswamy and his French wife Madeleine, with two other Indian women playing supportive allegorical roles. Raja Rao’s next work of fiction, The Cat and Shakespeare, published in 1965, again evokes a metaphor from Sankara recommending that one should surrender oneself totally to Providence, as a kitten does to the mother cat, which carries it around in its mouth with the most tender care. It is a gently humorous and whimsical novella set in Thiruvananthapuram, and both the tone and the locale are in some ways reminiscent of Malgudi: ‘Our Revenue Board Third Member, Kunni Kutta Nair, fell with a thud into his courtyard, and blood came out of his nose. It was diagnosed as one thing, and he died of another’ (1971: 15). The humour seems a bit forced and the touch less sure, however, in Rao’s other novella from this period, Comrade Kirillov (published in French in 1965, in English in 1976), in which an Indian Marxist rails against Gandhi and Vedanta and is in turn trenchantly satirised by the novelist. xi

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Raja Rao had meanwhile moved to America and, from 1966 to 1980, taught at the University of Texas in Austin, where enrolment in his classes often exceeded 200. Honours and awards multiplied: the Padma Bhushan in 1969, the Neustadt Prize in 1988 (the so-called pre-Nobel or alternative Nobel, also won by Marquez, Milosz, and Paz but by no other Indian), and at home, the Sahitya Akademi prize in 1964 and then its Life Fellowship, a far rarer honour, in 1997. Meanwhile, true to pattern, Raja Rao broke another two-decade long silence to publish in 1988 his longest and most ambitious novel, The Chessmaster and His Moves, in which the chessmaster is God himself and his moves are the leela or play through which the cosmos is created and sustained. The novel appeared to be either his life’s crowning achievement or essentially a fond elaboration of The Serpent and the Rope, and evoked widely varying responses.3 Though Raja Rao has, with Anand and Narayan, been canonised as one of the three founding fathers of the Indian novel in English, it is doubtful whether he saw himself primarily as a novelist. The courses he taught in America were not in literature but in Indian philosophy, and he spoke of the act of writing fiction as a form of sadhana or spiritual discipline and striving. In one of the last public speeches of his life, delivered when the fellowship of the Sahitya Akademi was conferred on him in 1997 at a special ceremony in Austin, Texas, he referred to India as a ‘punya-bhumi’, a sacred land, and said: ‘To have been born in India and not have written in Sanskrit, or at least in Kannada is, believe me, an acute humiliation’ (1998: 175). Such a nativist cry of the heart may in the present times sound a little embarrassing if not politically incorrect, but it does perhaps represent an act of resistance to a real cultural threat in this age of Anglophone cosmopolitanism and monolingual globalisation. Raja Rao was a deeply contemplative and charismatically attractive man. Though of slight build, he looked like ‘part Hamlet and part Krishna’, as the British critic Alastair Niven fancifully described him in an obituary tribute (2006)! He married three times, and when he once went to give a lecture to the students of the MA class in English in Mysore, the women students had a look at his American wife and wondered what she saw in him—but as the literary historian Shyamala Narayan (who was one of the students present) recalls, when Raja Rao had finished speaking, all the women ­wondered what Rao saw in her, for each of them wanted to marry Rao herself.4 Raja Rao believed in austere living and high thinking. His novels are not everyone’s cup of tea, and some readers have found him affected, ­pretentious, and exasperating. But he had a sense of comic enjoyment—of rasa and leela, in his own favoured terms—and like a true creative writer (or even a true seeker of the Truth), he spoke not of certainty of belief but of constant search and doubt and conflict. The clearly autobiographical hero of The Serpent and the Rope says in the very opening sentence of the novel: ‘I was born a Brahmin—that is, devoted to Truth and all that’ (1960: 5). As xii

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the wry tone indicates, high metaphysical Truth in Raja Rao came always wrapped up in plenty of fictional and imaginative ‘all that’, and that is what makes for the rich humanity of his work. With the passing away within the last few years of Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan, and then Raja Rao, each in their 90s, an era of Indian writing in English came to an end. Like the Trimurti, each of them faced in a different direction: Anand with his explicit political radicalism, Narayan with his gentle comedy and tolerance, and Raja Rao with his spiritual consciousness and questing. While they were great contemporaries who were often bracketed together and mentioned in the same breath, they could not have been more different temperamentally even if they had tried. As with the Triveni or the confluence of three rivers at the sangam in Allahabad, Narayan in his vision was the vast and serene Ganga, Anand the darker and more turbulent Yamuna, and Raja Rao the invisible but subterranean (antahsalila) Saraswati, best seen through the eye of faith. In their style and idiom too, Narayan wrote English as if it was unself-consciously and unproblematically his own language, Anand rode this foreign beast roughshod, prodding it along with earthy exhortations of four-letter words in Punjabi, while Raja Rao sought harmoniously to domesticate English under the same roof as Kannada as if they were co-wives. Towards the end of their lives, all these three writers were somewhat eclipsed in these market-driven ‘liberalised’ times by a younger generation of Indian novelists in English, but that does not take away from the fact that they were the brave pioneers of the genre at a time when many thought it lacked credibility and viability. Anand, Narayan, and Rao each became a classic in their own lifetimes, and now that all three are gone, we are left with mere contemporaries.5

Notes This is a revised and augmented version of an obituary note on Raja Rao, first published as ‘Raja Rao: The Twice-Born Novelist’, in Indian Literature, 235 (Sept– Oct 2006): 8–12. 1 For a discussion, see Trivedi (2000: 107–20). 2 Kanthapura, cited on the front cover (1938). 3 For a comprehensive and sympathetic discussion, see Paranjape (1998:108–32). 4 Personal information, from Professor Shyamala Narayan. 5 For a thoughtful discussion of Raja Rao vis-à-vis Salman Rushdie in terms of their surprisingly similar approaches to the issue of writing in English, see Kachru (1998: 60–87).

References Kachru, Braj B. 1998. ‘Raja Rao: Madhyama and Mantra’, in Robert L. Hardgrave Jr. (ed), Word as Mantra: The Art of Raja Rao, pp. 60–87, New Delhi: Katha. Niven, Alastair. 2006. ‘Raja Rao’, The Independent (UK), 19 July.

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Paranjape, Makarand. 1998. ‘The Difficult Pilgrimage: The Chessmaster and His Moves and Its Readers’, in Robert L. Hardgrave Jr. (ed), Word as Mantra: The Art of Raja Rao, pp. 108–32, New Delhi: Katha. Rao, Raja. 1938. Kanthapura, New Delhi: Orient. ———. 1960. The Serpent and the Rope, New Delhi: Orient. ———. 1971. The Cat and Shakespeare: A Tale of Modern India, New Delhi: Hind Pocket Books. ———. 1976. Comrade Kirillov, New Delhi: Orient. ———. 1998. ‘Acceptance Speech’ [on being conferred the Fellowship of the Sahitya Akademi in 1997], in Robert L. Hardgrave Jr. (ed), Word as Mantra: The Art of Raja Rao, pp. 174–5, New Delhi: Katha. ———. 2007. ‘My First Meeting with Pandit Jawaharlal’, in The Meaning of India, pp. 29–43, New Delhi: Vision. Trivedi, Harish. 2000. ‘Gandhian Nationalism: Kanthapura’, in Richard Allen and Harish Trivedi (eds), Literature and Nation: Britain and India 1800–1990, pp. 107–20, Milton Keynes and London: The Open University/London: Routledge.

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INTRODUCTION Rumina Sethi and Letizia Alterno

Recently, while preparing a list of Modern Classics in the English language, the Sahitya Akademi at New Delhi found it impossible to ignore Raja Rao’s writing despite severe competition from the post-1980 writers. This might come as a surprise to the new generation of readers that Raja Rao continues to be celebrated despite being identified as a writer belonging to the 20th century when every literary anthology could begin only by invoking his name. But perplexingly, the existing criticism of his fiction, prose, and short stories has congregated more conspicuously on metaphysical and national Indian themes. To this day, literary criticism has approached Rao’s work primarily from the national perspective: right from Kanthapura, his first novel, to his short stories such as The Cow of the Barricades to his magisterial The Serpent and the Rope (1960), readers and critics have not been able to prize apart Rao’s slant towards a national metaphysic from the literary worth of his writings. Rao’s criticism has so deeply been enshrined in a strongly guarded Indian ethos, it has made post-national thinking about his themes almost irrelevant. When we read Rao again in a different historical milieu with a new conceptual outlook, in a transnational era so to speak, should we continue to work within that one-dimensional focus or facilitate alternative readings to yield different insights? The anthology was conceptualised within the ambit of this primary question: whether readers would persist in thinking unilaterally about this author and see only a Hindu-Indian thematic or whether they could conceive of Rao’s work beyond this accepted and well-entrenched threshold. As its editors, we wish to emphasise the critically underestimated complexity of Rao’s post-independence work that emerges from its intertextuality and postcolonial setting. In our view, Rao moves from the oppositional agency of the Indian peasant-subaltern emerging in Kanthapura towards a representation of the self-expressing middle-upperclass diasporic, cosmopolitan, Indian migrants of the 1950s and 1960s who populate his later novels. As contemporary India surges ahead to a closer embrace of Hindu ideology, and simultaneously becomes part of a growing market capitalism, it becomes necessary to revisit Raja Rao’s writing, especially in the first half of the 21st century, and ascertain whether Rao could 1

R umina S ethi and L etizia A lterno

be read against the grain and how his work still continues to hold the thrust it enjoyed in the past. In the last several decades, ‘Commonwealth Literature’ in the former colonies blossomed into ‘Postcolonial Studies’ as the desire to shed the connection with the colonial past became strong and binding. The ‘postcolonial’ tag, however, factored in a variety of subjects from marginality to diasporic studies in the United States, some usages pertinent and others indiscriminate. Though the term ‘postcolonial’ paradoxically also continued the connection with the past, one major contribution of postcolonial readings, for better or worse, was the interrogation and re-interpretation of the nation-state, which became necessary in the transnational era. The ‘nation’ would now be regarded as a cultural imaginary, whereas the ‘nation-state’ that was the prized inheritance of decolonisation struggles would become obsolete with increasing emphasis on globalisation. Globalisation itself would be elevated to a prime focus of postcolonial studies in academic circles, including recent theorisations favouring or questioning world system theory, pushing the nation towards its decline, at least in the academy.1 Yet, in real terms, the global sweep of the economy does not necessarily coincide with a corresponding tolerance and broadmindedness. In India, for example, right-wing forces are considerably on the rise even as economic liberalisation is well underway. Regardless of the governments in power, we observe staunch declarations of nativism with equally strong investments in foreign technology. Ideological purism seems to run hand in hand with an increasing nation-scale corporatisation. In this climate of ideological ambiguity, one can no longer speak of one culture or one nation. It is within this scenario of the virtual absence of the nation at a global level and the strength of nativism locally that we would like to situate Raja Rao, to examine how one can continue to engage with his literary corpus in productive ways. When we decided to explore the representation of India in the writings of Raja Rao in a transnational era, the idea was to shed traditional criticism and focus instead on pushing the boundaries. Since the nation-state has been used as a self-evident overriding focus in Rao’s criticism by so many scholars, it became important to question and re-examine his writing with the view that enduring work emerges not merely for the sake of the greater national good but takes cognisance of the dynamism of history as well. Albeit struggling to define themselves in relation to modern ideas of nation, history, language, and culture, Rao’s anguished characters equally negotiate elements of constructedness, artificiality, elusiveness, and undefinability in their postmodern identities.

Transnationalism and the nation Partha Chatterjee’s view that nationalism in postcolonial countries is characterised by its variance from the existing ideology or ‘modular’ form of the 2

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national society, which underlines the historical experience of nationalism in western Europe, is evinced in virtually all of Raja Rao’s body of work (1993: 4–5). As Chatterjee argues, nationalism would be a mere ‘caricature’ of itself if the indigenous elite were to not create an ideological division between the spiritual and the material (5). Ignoring the imitations that exist on the material plane from which borrowing cannot be avoided, the nation declares itself ‘sovereign’ on the spiritual level with the painful awareness that the state remains in control of the colonial machinery (6). Whereas it can be challenged that the categories of spiritual/material are quite obviously orientalist, even essentialist, Chatterjee through his argument throws light on the marvellous possibilities that exist for invention and imagination even within oppositional categories, which can be extended to include Rao’s literary production. If we were to advance the argument of an East–West divide in Rao’s writing, we would risk creating a culture of timeless romantic typologies, which could conveniently be termed mythical and ahistorical—as a view of the ‘real’ abstracted from history. Contrarily, if we were to speak from an alternative standpoint to dispel the notion of this non-western ‘realism’, which Rao might himself have championed his readers to experience, we are no closer to the writer’s meaning. Notwithstanding the dilemmas of reading Raja Rao, his novels are evidence of a lifelong investment in Indian history, colonialism, and decolonisation within which the writer is as much a participant as he is a resisting subject. His characters’ constructions of India as ‘timeless’ must strategically mediate between a western teleology of progress and the alleged ‘irrationality’ of the East so that Rao might be evaluated on his grounds alone from a standpoint where indigenous categories of narrative are equally significant as the historically material. Suffice it to say that the complexity of such intermingling must be kept in mind while reading Rao’s works. Since borders and binaries have been challenged by contemporary postmodern theory, an interrogation of polemic forces becomes urgent. Indeed, the abundance of terms such as diaspora, hybridity, difference, migrancy, alterity, ambivalence, and metropolis in the academy, which can be both limiting and enabling, underscore the crisscrossing of ‘roots’ and ‘routes’, as Gilroy so appropriately put it (1999: 19). Within such problematics and the rising cosmopolitanism and creation of global markets in the world, the issue of national identity and metaphysics, authenticity and purity, which are uppermost in Raja Rao’s theory of the novel, must be both situated and transcended without mandating either position. The inevitable interaction in late capitalist society with the forces of globalisation today compels us to examine the uncharted space beyond centre–periphery models, towards what Vertovec calls the ‘most globally transformative processes and developments of our time’ (1999: 459) from which detachment is impossible. Vertovec identifies six primary concepts 3

R umina S ethi and L etizia A lterno

of the current transnational climate: social morphology and the influence of new technology networks, gradually increasing hyphenated communities or a diasporic consciousness, a carefully selected cultural production of identities enabled through media, the investment of economic capital in the home country by non-resident nationals, the distribution of resources by non-governmental organisations involved in addressing the rights of the marginalised as well as environmental concerns, and finally, the recuperation of nostalgia and its grafting on to a new locale (1999: 449–56). So how does the notion of strongly guarded national boundaries witnessed in Raja Rao’s writing tie up with a more globalised world view? We witness the staunch connection with the land of one’s birth, and simultaneously a challenge to that very concept of origins by the flexibility of border crossing and migration. Rao’s position is peculiar. Having lived in both Europe and America, he qualifies as a transnational hybrid, but he has also remained utterly loyal to his soil, culture, and metaphysics. If we were to follow Vertovec’s six-tier recognition of the paradigm of transnationalism, Rao’s reach would approximate to either all or none of those categories. In Vertovec’s scheme, contemporary civilisation is characterised by living ‘dual lives’, which implies being ‘both here and there’ or ‘neither here nor there’ (Munro 2015: 4). It is difficult to slot Rao as living within or outside such a dualism, especially in view of his strong repudiation of a characteristic diasporic sensibility and deliberate choice of an India-centric national identity. Rao’s life outside India finds few parallels with those individuals whose travel or migration is dictated by the rise of global capital or the compelling nature of market forces. Travelling across nations as a result of market impetus is common among migrants who are looking for opportunity and the accumulation of wealth. But such a perspective does not define Rao as he cannot be assumed to have travelled overseas out of economic necessity. Despite his migration initially to France and later to the United States, Rao has scarcely ever been able to disconnect from his attachment to India and its traditions. Correspondingly, his novels can be seen not simply as cultural affirmations of an India-centric identity but also as political testaments of their time in resisting colonialism and thus becoming historically empowering. One can go even further and suggest that in his early writing especially, Rao invokes popular memory and recuperates the history of resistance which contributes to the production of a transformative history. If we were to follow the trajectory of heterogeneity, the issue of rescuing the nation-state politically—and not just culturally—that plays an important part in the formation of national identities would be sacrificed. A dismantling of the historical material rootedness of national identity would achieve, at best, only a discursively constructed nation (Sethi 1999). The advocates of transnationalism and globalisation have no doubt offered persuasive arguments by asserting that nationalism is more cultural than political, or 4

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that it is derivative of western ideologies, and hence lacking in national consciousness. To dispel the first argument, it is important to state that cultural artefacts are often summoned to secure a sense of sovereignty since the state continues to be subordinated to colonial power (Chatterjee 1993). The second argument—that the nation is a consequence of ideas imported or derived by the nation’s elite from the West—cannot be sustained with much conviction either because nationalist sentiment generated by a western-­ educated intelligentsia is not necessarily part of mass mobilisation movements. Examples range from the Bardoli struggle in Gujarat in 1927–29—a decade prior to the publication of Kanthapura—to the long march by the farmers of Andhra Pradesh in 1938, the same year that Kanthapura was published. The former, which cannot be called a protest serviced by nationalist intellectuals, was undoubtedly linked with swaraj or home rule, which in turn took off from extremely rooted constructive activities widespread in the area. The latter was backed by the initiatives of protest among the peasants rather than by nationalist sentiment. While the stirring up of nationalist sentiment is often traced to leaders and intellectuals, nationalism is a very mixed bag of ‘enmeshed, intertwined and imbricated web of narratives’ (Amin 1996: 194) of which cultural construction or derivativeness forms only a small part. Thus, transnational themes, despite the loosening of national frontiers, obstruct the ideology—indeed the necessity—of resistance that could lead to the formation of nation-states or, for that matter, to the significance of location. Even though the nation is virtually missing in a globalised world we live in, it is ‘still the category with which concepts of identity must first contend (although ethnicity and religion have seen a rapid rise in importance in identitarian politics)’ (Ashcroft 2017: 6). Aijaz Ahmad has stridently critiqued those theorists who suggest unmooring the nation from its third-world location and thus from a commitment to radical alternatives (1993, 1995). Having said that, we are simultaneously aware that Raja Rao’s espousal of nationalist consciousness, or even striving for the political nation, is often interpreted as a kind of overvaluation of Indian sentimentality or even essentialism. Despite arguing and giving evidence that nationalism is a reality and nation formation a movement, it cannot be denied that Rao’s representation of the East and the West often appear to be polemical categories in his novels and short stories where the difference between the Indian metaphysical tradition and the absence of that rich potential in countries outside India is easily discernable. The Serpent and the Rope, of all his writing, places Rao squarely as a representative of an ‘intuitive’ Indian tradition in opposition to a ‘western’ intellectual one. Even Kanthapura, the most politically radical of Rao’s novels, imparts the Indian struggle for independence from the British an almost heavenly sanction from the gods so that the country’s freedom becomes a reverential mission. In quite a similar way, Rao’s short stories, particularly ‘Narsiga’ and ‘The Cow of the Barricades’, are overtly 5

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symbolic: the Hindu iconography of symbols such as the cow are kept alive through the confluence of history and myth. Can we say, then, that Rao’s writing is an orientalised image of India? Except that, if we were to reverse the argument, Rao’s essentialising of the East, however problematic, signals a strategic response to the western colonising power which had denied and repressed its cultural and historical worth. Read differently, outside allegations of polemics, Rao’s postindependence work is also, to use Stuart Hall’s terms, positioned directly in relation to his evolving ideas on identity, history, and the nation (1993). The Serpent and the Rope, The Cat and Shakespeare, and The Chessmaster and His Moves, written in and from an historically postcolonial context, suggest a change of positioning in the writer’s engagement with history, detectable through the efforts of their protagonists to come to terms with their self-definition, cultural hybridity, and national belonging. Sivarama’s sense of dislocation from any sort of national ‘belonging’ in The Chessmaster and His Moves, for instance, is evidence of an identity negotiation process that goes beyond the reductive geography of confined national borders,2 hence becoming transnational: ‘To what country did I  belong? And to whom, lord, to whom? I felt no orphan but a man lost in space, in the immensity of such silence, the eardrums would tear’ (Rao 1988: 247). Rao’s transnational imagining may appear as utopian thinking, but it crucially locates a state of in-betweenness which addresses the confining boundaries of postmodern identity formation in national and cultural discourse (Alterno 2011: 162). Thus, we can argue with conviction that Raja Rao’s India does not come ‘to the service of Orientalism’s broadly imperialist view of the world’, which would otherwise underline India’s ‘eccentricity, its backwardness, its silent indifference, its feminine penetrability, its supine malleability’ (Said 1978: 15, 206), but is construed precisely to counter-argue such a view. Rao’s is in some ways a sort of reversed Orientalism which responds with a depiction of a civilisationally dignified India.3 Despite having been accused (together with other expatriate writers) of projecting the image of an idealised country which may be far from the everyday India or as ordinarily experienced by its citizens (hence by its ‘insiders’, not ‘exiles’ like Rao), his entire work has always remained focused on a more metaphysical exploration of India, strategically demanding the reader—the one who ‘has to apprehend’ (Rao 1996: 153)—to make an effort in understanding its difference. Yet it is precisely the encounter between Hindu mythologies from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, the tradition of the self expounded in the philosophy of non-dualism or advaita vedanta, and modernist concerns about alienation and the changing relationship between the individual and how he or she is positioned in time and space that constantly problematise the shaping of the identities of Rao’s protagonists. Their self-interrogations and their identity negotiations permeate his later narratives and are expressed through 6

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anxious questions, which make a reading of his work relevant for current postcolonial theory and criticism. What the author seems to offer his readers through his writing—and this is what contributes to justify the unique style of this writer, to whom the issue of being published has always proved extremely difficult—are the numerous accompanying hints and keys for an understanding of his ‘authentic’ India. Though this could risk being read as an elite writer’s move to secure a restricted, elect public for his writing, it can also be interpreted as part of Rao’s strategy of refusing western cultural translation and assimilation. In one of his last interviews in 1997 with Austin American-Statesman journalist Anne Morris, Rao replied in the negative to the question whether he translated India for the West: ‘No. I just do it for myself. I make no concession to the West’ (1998: 194). What appears to be a sign of elitism or even contradiction in Rao is his resistance to the putative, time-honoured view of modernisation, which is nationalism’s other face. It is nationalism-without-modernisation that creates the paradox of embracing antiquity over newness. Partha Chatterjee’s Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World precisely sums up this dichotomy or ‘unresolved contradiction’ in all nationalist thought (1986: 80) by citing the difference of perspective between Bankimchandra Chatterjee and Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. Partha Chatterjee invokes the categories of the ‘problematic’ and ‘thematic’ in a nation-state (36–9), the former, in what is our context here, being the conundrum of reconciling tradition with modernity, whereas the latter would have to be its presentation in ideological terms; whereas Bankim feels ‘compelled to backtrack’ into tradition, Nehru represents the ‘moment of arrival’ which embraces progress, reason, and rationality (65; 51). It would not be off the mark to find parallels between Bankim and Raja Rao and provide an explanation for Rao’s endeavours to appropriate a cultural distinctness which remains at variance with the western as well as the modern. Rao’s recollections on first meeting Nehru in a sanatorium in Germany, where his wife Kamala was convalescing, so fascinatingly gives evidence of this contradiction. The section is quoted at some length from his essay ‘My First Meeting with Pandit Jawaharlal’ and is part of his collection of essays, The Meaning of India: So there was the lunch, the thickening of outside air, the hushed temper of a pension where the parents and friends of the sick stay visiting those at the sanatoria.  .  .  . But we were high up, in the nowhere which is India. ‘You certainly believe in something, Panditji? In some form of Deity, in philosophy?’ ‘Deity, what Deity?’ He twitched angrily. ‘Why, Siva and Parvati, Sri Krishna!’ 7

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‘Three thousand years of that and where’s that got us—slavery, poverty.’ ‘And incomparable splendour, even today.’ ‘What, with twenty-two and a half years of life-expectancy and five pice per person per day of national income? We’ve had enough of Rama and Krishna. Not that I do not admire these great figures of our traditions, but there’s work to be done. And not to clasp hands before idols while misery and slavery beleaguer us.’ ‘Yes, and after that?’ I asked, as if to myself, somewhat timidly. He seemed angry, ‘Now, now, don’t make me say this matter is matter,’ he said, touching the table. . . . ‘There’s an intelligence about the world. There’s harmony. I am convinced we’re linked to that harmony. Individually linked,’ he added with deliberation. . . . ‘So God is mathematical.’ ‘Well, perhaps. Why worry? And man is not just a . . .’ ‘Just what? . . .’ ‘A biological phenomenon.’ ‘A creature of the “eighteen aggregates”.’ ‘Yes, Buddhism comes quite near it; that is, there is something which must be, and which connects and sustains.’ ‘But that’s Vedanta,’ I interrupted. ‘The Buddha was a phenomenologist. Beyond manifestation, the void.’ The meat by now had become cold. So had my spinach. (Rao 1996: 36–8) While the dialogue above seems to encapsulate the concerns of the entirety of Raja Rao’s writing, one of the predicaments arising from their interaction that upsets Nehru is best summed up in the question Partha Chatterjee raises: ‘why is it that non-European colonial countries have no historical alternative but to try to approximate the given attributes of modernity when that very process of approximation means their continued subjection under a world order which only sets their tasks for them and over which they have no control?’ (1986: 10). This is the particular problem of bourgeois-­rationalist thought, outlines Chatterjee, that ‘simultaneously rejects and accepts the dominance, both epistemic and moral, of an alien culture’ (11). Rao’s insistence on a national culture, from this point of view, would be nothing but the playing out of an innate desire to repudiate western superiority. While for Chatterjee, native subordination and inferiority are internalised, for Rao there appears to be a way out of this entrapment: he liberates cultural pride from national progress. Just as Bankimchandra transforms Spinoza and Spencer into ‘European Hindus’ in Dharmatattva while attempting to harmonise Vedanta with European philosophy (Mukherjee and Maddern 1986: 170), Rao too constructs human universals, which are timeless 8

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but necessarily Indian. If for Partha Chatterjee the ‘bourgeois-rationalist’ thought ‘prevented a truly autonomous discourse from taking shape’ (Chibber 2013), for Rao that autonomy can be seized in the ‘eighteen aggregates’ contained in India. Discerning critics and readers who are willing to explore Rao’s ­otherness in his writing are hence invited to discover his India together with the author— the one, for Rao, who ‘has to indicate’ (1996: 153)—throughout the pages of his writings. The choice is ultimately left to the reader to decide whether or not to accompany Rao on such explorative journey. Metaphorically, such a journey is also an Indian writer’s pilgrimage towards re-appropriation, one which—as Edward Said reminds us—subverts Orientalism and its ‘will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world’ (1978: 12).

Transnationalism and language Despite Raja Rao’s engagement with rootedness and authenticity, one of his greatest experiments in ‘cultural blending’4 or transcending this vexed notion of national identity might be evinced in the flexibility he introduced in the English language to carry out his experiment with indigenisation. In the specific case of Rao’s writing, most of his critics have recognised the fundamental role he played in the establishment—as early as November 1937, when formulating his foreword to Kanthapura while India was still under the British colonial government—to enable a strategic appropriation of the English language, not as an alien language any longer but as one of the Indian languages. Often referred to as the ‘hybridisation’ of English, Rao was among the earliest writers of the English language in India to create what Salman Rushdie would later call ‘chutnification’. Although Rao attempts to create, in his own words, an ‘Indian’ expression and style (1938: 5–6), his narrative betrays his intention. His Indian expressions do not—indeed cannot—remain pure and unaltered. While we cannot deny that Rao is subverting the English language, we also cannot accept the oversimplified rationality of having evolved an autochthonous style of storytelling. We cannot bypass the insistence upon bilingualism in the foreword, a term that is reiterated forcefully through the use of a prefix—‘instinctively’ (1938: 5). This interdependence with English is nothing but a sign of cultural exchange, perhaps even cosmopolitanism, marked by a dynamic complexity, a mix of identities that cannot be compromised by the acceptance of restrictive binaries like coloniser and colonised. Rao’s hybrid experiment with language departs from the centre–periphery distinction and undergoes a process of creolisation. There, however, appears to be a centre–periphery politics at work even in the representation of Indian Anglophone writing. The very absence of 9

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Raja Rao’s name from some existing ‘histories’ conceals an unjustifiable lacuna as well as a measure of western cultural imperialism, as for instance in Salman Rushdie’s two well-known critical surveys, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (1992) and The Vintage Book of Indian Writing: 1947–1997, which he co-edited with Elizabeth West. The way Rushdie deliberately excludes Rao’s work from ‘the best Indian writing of the half-century since the country’s independence’ is quite remarkable (Rushdie and West 1997: ix). In the preface to the volume, Rushdie argues that Indian fiction in English has proven to be ‘the most valuable contribution India has yet made to the world of books’ (x). His claim is supported not only by the ‘burgeoning’ of this kind of literature, but also by its unique way of treating and working with the English language. Explaining why Indian fiction in English has been called ‘twice-born’ by Meenakshi Mukherjee, Rushdie affirms authoritatively that such a view rests ‘on the false premise that English, having arrived from outside India, is and must necessarily remain an alien there’ (xii; emphasis added). Like Urdu, he continues, English has become ‘naturalised’ and can now be called an ‘Indian language’ (xii–xiii). What is dangerously at stake in Rushdie’s claim here is not that his views might echo his thoughts on the English language, but that he ‘forgets’ to acknowledge that this type of raisonnement, not an ‘original’ claim by Rushdie in 1997, was in fact theorised by Raja Rao 60 years earlier in his foreword to Kanthapura: 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. (Rao 1938: 5–6) It may appear as strategically dismissive then that Rushdie goes so far as to paraphrase the exact words Rao had used in Kanthapura with regard to the originality and distinctiveness of other ‘englishes’, such as the Irish and the American, employed thereafter by various communities in the world: Indian English, sometimes unattractively called ‘Hinglish’, is not ‘English’ English, to be sure, any more than Irish or American or Caribbean English is. And it is a part of the achievement of the writers of this volume to have found literary voices as distinctively Indian  .  .  . as those other Englishes forged in Ireland, Africa, the West Indies and the United States. (Rushdie 1997: xiii) It is unfortunate that Rushdie skilfully formulates his argument on the Indian writer’s strategic appropriation of English without acknowledging its copyright author. The only hint to Rushdie’s awareness of Rao’s impact 10

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on the issue of Indian English language in the 1930s is provided—very briefly—in a one-sentence proleptic accusation a few pages later. Rushdie turns Rao’s early ‘midnight parenting’ of a new tradition of good-‘quality’ English-language fiction into an outdated intervention, now relegated to the philological (hence ‘non-literary’?) field: ‘Raja Rao, a scholarly Sanskritist, wrote determinedly of the need to make an Indian English for himself, but even his much-praised portrait of village life, Kanthapura, seems dated, its approach at once grandiloquent and archaic’ (1997: xvii). The issue of English in India is as significant today as it was when Raja Rao wrote Kanthapura. The latest injunction comes from the National Education Policy (NEP) released in 2020. The document mandates that a threelanguage formula be followed in the country while leaving the decision of the precise languages to the individual states which are part of India’s federal structure (NEP 2020: 13). Whereas Rao spoke of the instinctive nature of bilingualism in India, leaving the reader as the final arbiter of the choice of native Indian language which will combine with English in this bilingual alliance, the current policy ambitiously invokes a trilingualism. Again, it is assumed that Indian citizens will have the prowess to be skilful in three languages. Significantly, the languages remain unnamed in the document except that English is mentioned as one of the languages in which science and mathematics would be taught (14). Although Rao had spoken of the use of English openly in the foreword, though in a hybridised form, the NEP tacitly follows the same dictum by stating that at least two of the three languages should be native to India, thereby tactically leaving a niche vacant for English. Such a directive appears to have a twofold purpose. It strategically balances the employment of the mother tongue with the use of the English language as much as it dispenses with the antagonism between public and private education in schools and institutes of higher learning (Mehta 2020). Elite private institutions will be allowed to carry on using the medium of English, thereby linguistically marginalising the majority of the people in the country who are not fluent in English. At the same time, by not mentioning any of the three languages, it remains unclear whether mother tongues would indeed be included in every case and whether the private exclusive English-medium schools will be at all checked for making the learning of English obligatory. As always in its historical chronology, the policy neither sanctions nor disapproves of English as one of the languages of currency in the country. But at the same time, the status of English becomes non-native or foreign even though it is regarded as one of India’s own languages in many quarters such as the Sahitya Akademi, India’s national academy of letters, which is committed to advancing literature in all the Indian languages. In the decades that followed India’s independence in 1947, English remained integral to the tradition of bilingualism (or even trilingualism in some cases) in the country, despite the insistent clamour for the imposition of Hindi as the national language. It appears that the same ambiguity is 11

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allowed to continue although the current NEP outlines other foreign languages such as Korean, Japanese, Thai, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian (NEP 2020: 15). While the inclusion of so many foreign languages will ostensibly strip away some of the elitist sheen of English, in real terms the edge that English enjoys over other languages is unlikely to get diminished because of its long-entrenched position. Interestingly, the decision that two of the languages must be native Indian ushers in Sanskrit (14), one of India’s classical but now antiquated languages. Critics of the NEP are anxious that Sanskrit will attempt to build a fairly large base of Sanskrit speakers and the creation of an inevitable ‘Sanskrit-based reconstructed past as the mainstream culture of India’ (Mathew 2020) leading to the saffronisation of the country, a political move to thrust a Hindu chauvinist ideology onto the Indian nation. This move will no doubt privilege a right-wing agenda and promote a bias towards indigeneity and ‘pseudonationalistic jingoism’ (Devy 2020). This volume, on its part, attempts to locate the position of Raja Rao in ‘mainstream’ postcolonial criticism in light of a number of 20th-century political and cultural developments while keeping in mind his significant investment in language and national identity, gender, and transnational politics. The chapters hope to demonstrate the necessity of acknowledging Rao’s work within postcoloniality on the one hand, while remembering the strong links he maintained with India on the other. Thus, we have taken care that alongside the interrogation of ideas of home and belonging, as well as nationality, history, culture, and identity that are constitutive of a plurally shared cultural experience which is not exclusively ‘Indian’, we do not completely distance ourselves from the philosophically minded readings which still largely define it comprehensively. This does not mean that we subscribe to stereotypical constructions or orthodox and over-simplified views of India, which unfortunately continue to be associated with Rao’s work.5 The logic behind this collection of chapters has been to gather valuable critical interventions that throw new light on the construction of Indian identity in terms of both current postcolonial theorisations and Raja Rao’s inward turn towards philosophy. The book, we hope, will be more than a sum of its parts. Harish Trivedi’s opening foreword paves the way for a selection of chapters on different facets of Rao’s writing characterised by cultural flows wrestling with cultural homogenisation at a variety of levels. We initiate the discussion on national identity and postcolonial politics with Alastair Niven’s view that Raja Rao’s version of nationalism is theological rather than democratic. Niven explores how Rao operates at the level of symbolism to paradoxically create a remarkably ‘pure’ and prophetic novel such as The Serpent and the Rope by relating Rao’s reverence for women with the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, thus linking one of Rao’s central themes of monarchism with 12

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the mystery of existence he chased in all his writings. Developing Raja Rao’s philosophy further, Rumina Sethi works out the affinities between Rao’s brahmanic vision of India and the more aggressive face of Hindu spiritualism in four of his novels, pointing towards the neglect of historical mutation in his world view. Taking examples of Upanishadic models employed by Rao, she investigates the manner in which he is traditional without making tradition repugnant, yet veering almost towards the possibility of transnationalism within his ever-expanding ideal of India. In ‘Resisting the British empire: Rao’s Two Political Anthologies’, Letizia Alterno examines Rao’s least known but extremely significant works—Changing India and Whither India?—published jointly with radical activist Iqbal Singh between 1939 and 1948, exposing Rao’s anti-colonial positioning together with his committed political engagement with Indian national ideology and post-national politics. Rahul K. Gairola, on his part, discovers the ‘national’ in the ‘transnational’ through the examination of conventions of prescribed clothing in Kanthapura, the appropriation of Indian dress codes on the levels of caste, gender, sexuality, and nation which enable a cultural homogenisation and prevent the inevitable possibility of a hybridising social space during active phases of the nationalist movement. John C. Hawley strikes at the heart of Raja Rao’s metaphysics by questioning the troubled legacy of his writing in The Cat and Shakespeare, which is considered a sequel to The Serpent and the Rope, and wonders why Rao turned his novels into philosophical treatises. Whereas he concludes that the technique is intentional, he also outlines Rao’s concerns as reaching far beyond the national. The next section on philosophy and aesthetics includes the contributions of several distinguished Rao scholars: Paul Sharrad wraps his argument around Raja Rao’s treatment of scales in Comrade Kirillov, Rao’s book on Marxism, moving from the personal to the national, and thence to the worldly. The writer’s treatment of cultural themes finally moves in concentric circles to the transnational, never once abandoning his motherland. Sakoon Singh constructs an informed critique of the representation of women in the context of national narratives, such as Rao’s 1947 collection of short stories, by claiming Rao’s proclivity towards a nation-based iconography deeply entrenched in femininity. In ‘Posthumanism in Raja Rao’s The Cat and Shakespeare: Redrawing the Boundaries’, Chitra Sankaran suggests the idea that Rao’s novella consciously departs from a western-based humanist philosophy and that it can be best addressed through a posthumanist approach that links with Vedantic philosophy. Janet M. Powers tries to make sense of one’s individual existence and the Divine and concludes that Raja Rao enacts life as a game. The ultimate belief system that Rao follows, she reasons, is that of Brahman, which may be attained only by the initiates. Poet and writer Neelum Saran Gour explores the ‘unknown quantity’ in The Chessmaster and His Moves to offer a perceptive close reading of Rao’s complex metaphorical use of mathematics. 13

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The following section on multicultural politics, habitat, and translation is intended to challenge existing and well-entrenched orthodoxies, including the allegorising of the Mahatma, as Ulka Anjaria shows by interrogating the very raison d’etre of classifying a novel like Kanthapura as Gandhian. She lays bare the multi-layered texture of the novel to probe non-hegemonic ways of reading by comparing Rao with Uday Prakash, a Hindi novelist, thereby highlighting the significance of unacknowledged possibility. Dieter Riemenschneider employs the perspective of evolutionary psychology to explore landscape and nature in Rao’s novels to arrive at a startling realisation that human beings evolve through adaptation with their environment through conscious choice of habitat. The ‘preferred environment’ then becomes part of their cultural heritage and a mode of survival. Waseem Anwar and Farrah Fatima also question the shibboleths that were fostered by two ideological nations-in-the-making, India and Pakistan, in securing their freedom. The authors express the poignancy at the loss of ‘civilisational’ friendship between the two countries as represented by the authorfriends, Raja Rao and Ahmed Ali in their individual novels, and explore whether that older ethos could be recuperated in the hybrid environment of a transnational era to recover a hoped-for happiness. Both Rao and Ali, interestingly, had been tutored at Aligarh Muslim University. For a devout Brahmin like Rao to be educated in a Muslim institution is itself a situation of liminality that underlies human relationships. This section concludes with a chapter on a unique translation, not in one of the Indian languages, but into Italian. Alessandro Monti investigates claims of colonial assimilation in language and abrogative autonomy through an approach that sees translation and interpretation as processes in constant evolution, and not one that involves only a language transaction. The final section titled ‘Reminiscences’ fittingly completes the volume: it contains the memoirs of Susan Raja Rao and Makarand R. Paranjape and includes a poetic tribute by Edwin Thumboo. Susan Raja Rao’s reflections about Rao’s writing style, at once personal and informative; Makarand R. Paranjape’s interaction with the author in 1993 when he travelled to India; and Edwin Thumboo’s poem written in honour of Raja Rao are a reminder that works of literature are necessarily products of a wider human existence, to which Rao offered a unique and distinctive contribution. We hope the memories of those who were in intimate contact with Raja Rao will resonate in us with a sense of poignancy seldom found in critical essays. We leave you with Vijay Mishra’s high praise for Raja Rao, a writer who wrote novels but with an acute resistance to the genre of fiction, who was even unwilling at one point to be published. We find ourselves agreeing with Mishra when he says that this ‘man of silence’ effectively tells us why this western form of composition ‘should not be written’ and thus articulate the impossibility of producing a ‘truly Indian novel’. 14

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In their editor’s introduction to the special issue of Critical Inquiry titled ‘Around 1948: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Global Transformation’, Gandhi and Nelson use a compelling phrase—‘damaged world’—to refer to the events of the late 1940s, particularly the year 1948 (2014: 292). Not just spanning the bitter-sweet crises of decolonisation following the Second World War, those were times which saw the bifurcation of China, Korea, and even Germany, the birth of Israel and the accompanying flight of the Palestinian Arabs, the Republic of Ireland Act, and the institutionalisation of apartheid in South Africa (287–88), perhaps best exemplified in Auerbach’s tragic vision that underlies the sensibilities of manifold writers and artists who drew inspiration from ‘the exigencies of displacement, expulsion, self-chosen exile, and bitter political choice’ (291). It is possible that Rao’s aesthetics of non-dualism, mono-cultural wholeness, and unification is predicated on negating just such a ‘bleakness of vision’ (291) which made it impossible to live in those fraught political times. For many of our contributors, Raja Rao’s self-conscious pursuit of a cultural homogenisation creates the only possibility of existence at a time when all principles of certainty, indeed civilisation itself, were challenged, similar to current times, which makes the analogy even more pertinent. For the others, an engagement with the dialogue played out between cultural exclusivism and intercultural pluralism is more productive.6

Notes 1 See, for instance, the work of the Warwick Research Collective (WREC) on world system theory. For another significant and very recent piece of writing on this subject, see Valassopoulos and Spencer (2020). 2 As shown in the narrative by the choice of not capitalising terms indicating national identity, such as ‘indian’ instead of ‘Indian’ (Rao 1988: 37). 3 Jalal al-‘Azm’s (1981) warning to the ‘orientals’ to avoid the temptation to employ the existing prejudices of Orientalism is pertinent here. In our context, both Rao and his protagonists Rama (The Serpent and the Rope) and Sivarama (The Chessmaster and His Moves) are expatriate and, to an extent, themselves the ‘other’. 4 The term ‘cultural blending’ is borrowed from Bill Ashcroft’s excellent essay on the ‘postcolonial city’ (2017: 53). 5 The introduction to the 2014 reprints of Rao’s novels by Penguin Modern Classics, for instance, still describes his fiction as ‘founded on the linguistic and metaphysical speculations of the Indians’ (Parthasarathy 2014: x). 6 For an interesting discussion of the mutuality between the totalising claims of ethnicity and national identification on the one hand and hybridity and transnationalism on the other, see Chrisman (2003: 73–88).

References Ahmad, Aijaz. 1993. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. ———. 1995. ‘The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality’, Race and Class, 36(3): 1–20.

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Alterno, Letizia. 2011. Raja Rao: An Introduction, New Delhi: Cambridge University Press. Amin, Shahid. 1996. Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura 1922–1992, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Ashcroft, Bill. 2017. ‘Transnation and the Postcolonial City’, Australian Humanities Review, 62: 46–64. Chatterjee, Partha. 1986. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World—A Derivative Discourse? London: Zed. ———. 1993. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chibber, Vivek. 2013. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, London and New York: Verso. Chrisman, Laura. 2003. Postcolonial Contraventions: Cultural Readings of Race, Imperialism and Transnationalism, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Devy, G. N. 2020. ‘National Education Policy seeks to Reinvent the Wheel and Ensure a Cultural Revolution’, National Herald, 30 August. www.nationalher aldindia.com/opinion/national-education-policy-seeks-to-reinvent-the-wheel-andensure-a-cultural-revolution (accessed on 2 November 2020). Gandhi, Leela, and Deborah L. Nelson. 2014. ‘Around 1948: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Global Transformation’, Critical Inquiry, 40(4): 285–97. Gilroy, Paul. 1999. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London and New York: Verso. Hall, Stuart. 1993. ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, pp. 392–403, New York: Columbia University Press. Jalal al-‘Azm, Sadik. 1981. ‘Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse’, Khamsin: Journal of Revolutionary Socialists of the Middle East, 8: 5–26. Mathew, Ashlin. 2020. ‘Modi Government’s New Education Policy Is Nothing but a National Exclusion Policy’, National Herald, 1 August. www.nationalheraldin dia.com/india/modi-govts-new-education-policy-is-nothing-but-a-national-­ exclusion-policy-say-experts (accessed on 12 November 2020). Mehta, Pratap Bhanu. 2020. ‘Text of Education Policy Artfully Navigates Several Thickets’, Indian Express, 1 August. https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/ columns/new-education-policy-nep-india-6533163/ (accessed on 1 August 2020). Morris, Anne. 1998. ‘A Raja Rao Retrospective’, in Robert L. Hardgrave (ed), Word as Mantra: The Art of Raja Rao, pp. 193–6, New Delhi: Katha. Mukherjee, S. N., and Maddern, Marian (trans). 1986. ‘Introduction’, in Sociological Essays: Utilitarianism and Positivism in Bengal, Calcutta: Rddhi. Munro, Gayle. 2015. ‘Transnationalism: A  Review of Literature’, Studies on National Movements, 3: 1–36. National Education Policy [NEP]. 2020. ‘Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India: 1–65’. https://ruralindiaonline.org/library/resource/ national-education-policy-2020 (accessed on 2 November 2020). Parthasarathy, R. 2014. ‘Introduction’, in Raja Rao: The Serpent and the Rope, Gurgaon: Penguin. Rao, Raja. 1938. Kanthapura, New Delhi: Orient. ———. 1960. The Serpent and the Rope, New Delhi: Orient.

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———. 1988. The Chessmaster and His Moves, New Delhi: Vision. ———. 1996. The Meaning of India, New Delhi: Vision. Rushdie, Salman. 1992. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991, London: Granta. Rushdie, Salman, and Elizabeth West. 1997. The Vintage Book of Indian Writing: 1947–1997, London: Vintage. Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism, London: Routledge. Sethi, Rumina. 1999. Myths of the Nation: National Identity and Literary Representation, Oxford: Clarendon. Valassopoulos, Anastasia, and Robert Spencer. 2020. Post-Colonial Locations: New Issues and Directions in Post-colonial Studies, London: Routledge. Vertovec, Steven. 1999. ‘Conceiving and Researching Transnationalism’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 22(2): 447–62.

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Part I RE-ROUTING RAJA RAO’S POLITICS, NATIONAL IDENTITY, AND POSTCOLONIAL CRITICISM

1 THE LURE OF MONARCHY IN THE PURSUIT OF TRUTH Raja Rao’s royalism in The Serpent and the Rope Alastair Niven

Since its publication in 1960, Raja Rao’s erudite novel, The Serpent and the Rope, has acquired a mystique which some mistake for pretentiousness and many find off-putting. Although Rao’s first novel, Kanthapura (1938), had suggested a career in which he would draw from traditionalist subject matter and stylistic conventions in the manner of Kannada-language writers Shivaram Karanth and Masti Venkatesh Iyengar, he was later to write mostly about cross-cultural connections. A  son of Mysore, he became a citizen of the world, as was recognised by the award of the Neustadt Prize in 1988, a prize which has honoured major writers from every continent for their ability to open up indigenous cultures to the rest of humanity. The Serpent and the Rope is also a highly personal novel. The relationships of the protagonist Rama are sometimes thinly disguised autobiography, but the novel works on many levels, being a bildungsroman only up to a point. I concentrate in this chapter on Rao’s deep interest in royalty. Amounting almost to an obsession—although an unfashionable one—­ royalty as a theme, in my view, merits a good deal of attention and examination. Although Raja Rao was out of tune with aspects of modern democratic models of government, he was not entirely antediluvian in his admiration of inherited heads of state. ‘I am the only Indian royalist’ (Rao 1960: 192), Rama claims, as though in defiance of modernity, but around the world there are still many millions of people who share his ideal. Indeed, in some lights, Rao may be seen as transnational in his purview. The best-known monarch today is Queen Elizabeth II, daughter of the last Emperor of India, George VI, who until the moment of India’s independence in 1947 signed himself George R. I.—Rex Imperator. When The Serpent and the Rope was published, Elizabeth had been on the British throne for only eight years. By 1960, the young attractive mother was 21

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already a photogenic presence in the world’s media and was clearly setting about her duties assiduously and tactfully; but Rao goes well beyond this, bestowing on her an almost sacerdotal status—‘in anointing her Queen [England] was anointing herself’ (1960: 202). As I  write this chapter, Queen Elizabeth is 94 years of age, still the head of state of 16 countries, and by far the longest serving monarch not only alive today but who has ever reigned in Britain. She is rarely the subject of press or popular criticism, not because of sycophancy but because she is universally regarded, even by republicans and those who oppose the hereditary principle, as having conducted her life and her role in governance with diligence and sensitivity. She is possibly the most photographed person in the world, her image reproduced on stamps, coinage, and banknotes in all her sovereignties. It is neither an exaggeration nor a paradox to suggest that, though she is usually referred to as ‘the Queen of England’, she personifies a form of transnationalism which did not exist when any of her predecessors were on the throne. Rao’s royalist admiration of her does not therefore seem inflated or oleaginous. What is this value, or ethic, or spiritual authority which Rao perceives as endemic to royalty and from whence does it arrive? The key may be inferred from the opening sentence of the novel: ‘I was born a Brahmin—that is, devoted to Truth and all that’ (1960: 7). Rama’s journey throughout the book is above all a spiritual quest. He asks how many of his ancestors have known the Truth, or seen ‘God face to face and built temples’ (7)—temples of the mind and spirit as much as physical buildings. He is always aware of the insuperable loss of those wise or pure people who have gone before him, starting with his mother: Whenever I stand in a river I remember how when young, on the day the monster ate the moon and the day fell into an eclipse, I used with til and kusha grass to offer the manes my filial devotion. For withal I was a good Brahmin. I even knew Grammar and the Brahma Sutras, read the Upanishads at the age of four, was given the holy thread at seven—because my mother was dead and I had to perform her funeral ceremonies, year after year—my father having married again. So with wet cloth and an empty stomach, with devotion, and sandal paste on my forehead, I fell before the rice-balls of my mother and I sobbed. I was born an orphan, and have remained one. I have wandered the world and have sobbed in hotel rooms and in trains, have looked at the cold mountains and sobbed, for I had no mother. One day, and that was when I was twenty-two, I sat in an hotel—it was in the Pyrenees—and I sobbed, for I knew I  would never see my mother again. (1960: 7)

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All that is set out here on the first page of The Serpent and the Rope motivates the action and discourse that ensues in the next 400 pages of this epic novel. Though the novel is not explicitly Freudian, Rama’s search for the perfect woman is partly a search for a mother substitute, someone to fill the aching gap of losing his mother at birth. Whether it be Saroja, Madeleine, or Savithri, the Princess of Avanti in Grandmother Lakshamma’s story (1960: 121–3) or Queen Elizabeth on the eve of her coronation, Marie de Medici or Catherine of Braganza, or any of the many queens and duchesses from history who people the novel, the women invoked by Rama are like beacons in his quest for knowledge and understanding of how the human heart works and our earthly life linked to the heavenly. These women, who are in Rao’s presentation of them repositories of purity, wisdom, and grace, are invariably royal or unattainably, platonically idealised: Savithri is a princess and Madeleine ‘altogether unreal . . . like the Palace of Amber seen in moonlight’ (15). The scholarly side of Rao/Rama is surely aware that in real history the actual personages he evokes are sometimes far from perfect—Marie de Medici, for example, was commonly believed to have been implicated in the assassination of her husband King Henri IV of France—but as he orchestrates the novel, Rao represents them like stars shining in the firmament, compass points for Rama’s pilgrimage through life. To read The Serpent and the Rope literally would be as misguided as trying to explain the significance of the constellations only in physical and astronomical terms without referring to their metaphysical and iconic potency down the ages in every culture of the world: ‘What a deep and reverential mystery womanhood is. I could bow before Saroja and call her Queen’ (1960: 52). Saroja is Rama’s halfsister and so not a potential spouse or sexual partner. She is, however, rooted in his place of birth and upbringing, as though from the start Rama seeks through his female siblings, his aunt, and ‘Little Mother’, his stepmother, approval and security. It is customary to see Rao’s novel as essentially philosophical, a disquisition on man’s relation with the divine and as a discourse upon the nature of truth. A short book that I wrote about the novel in 1987, Truth within Fiction: A Study of Raja Rao’s The Serpent and the Rope, explores the work in these terms. As I  wrote on the first page: Raja Rao writes in order to express the soul of India, its philosophy; his work is an exposition of tradition, showing the enduring relevance of Indian spiritual values (particularly Vedanticism) in a world that is given over to materialism, to republicanism and autocracy, to the abandonment of the Feminine Principle in favour either of vulgar sexuality or masculine domination. (9)

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I resile from none of that, but I also now believe more strongly than I did 30 years ago that the psychological self-analysis in the novel is very powerful. Rao was notably a quiet person, pleading on many occasions that silence was the most effective form of expression. Some people saw this as inverted egotism, a way of drawing attention to the mystique they accused him of cultivating. I believe it was genuine humility and that he found contemplation a more likely way of discovering what we are born for than grandstanding on platforms or hectic social interaction. The starting point of this spiritual journey was Rao’s relationship with the women in his family and his search for both female protection and sexual fulfilment. He ascribes his name, Raja, to his mother’s precipitate determination to launch him into the world immediately after she gave birth. The royal theme is there from the start of his life, as Rao rather inelegantly explains in the Preface to his short story collection, The Policeman and the Rose: I was born in a dharmashala, room number 1, in (the town) Beautiful, Hassana, whose goddess, the Lady Beautiful, Hassanakamma, saw her devotees only once a year.  .  .  . Some Kings of Mysore had given us privileges (for carrying the Royal Post, and collect the fee when a concubine first ‘tied on her bells’) and thus the lands we had, while the Maharaja of Mysore, when he came to Hassan had perforce to stop first in front of the Post Office House,  .  .  . and hence when my father was offering the prescribed ‘half-lemon on the knife’ to His Highness (and this was Krishna Raja Wodeyar, the Vedantin-king), my mother was so vitally shaken she threw me into the world, hence instead of being named Ramakrishna, like my grandfather was, I was simply called Raja. (1978: xi–xii) Like Ramaswamy in The Serpent and the Rope, Raja Rao lost his mother when he was young. Gauramma Rao died when her son was only four. He lived all his life therefore with an idealised notion of what she had been like. Rao in childhood was surrounded by aunts and cousins, and so one can reasonably conjecture that they are reconfigured in the women of Rama’s family in the novel. Though the Freudian side of The Serpent and the Rope has been hitherto underestimated, it must be seen alongside the metaphysical interpretation of the Feminine Principle, whereby women are part of men and men part of women. There is no absolute binary separation. There can hardly be a view less compatible with 21st-century feminism, wherein women are asserting their difference and distinctiveness, their right to stand alongside men and not be shackled by them. Rao goes beyond this, not only by saying that 24

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royalty often exemplifies the perfect possibility of balance between the sexes, but by asserting that in an ideal relationship between man and woman, each is sublimated within the other. There is no masculine superiority, but neither is there feminine separation: All the world is spread for woman to be, and in making us know the world woman shows that the world is oneself seen as the other. Union is proof that the Truth is non-dual. ‘As one embraced by a darling bride,’ says the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, ‘knows naught of “I” and “Thou,” so self embraced by the foreknowing (solar) self knows naught of “myself” within or “thyself” without.’ Not one is the Truth, yet not two is the Truth. Savithri proved that I could be I. One cannot possess the world, one can become it: I  could not possess Savithri—I became I. Hence the famous saying of Yagnyavalkya to his wife: ‘The husband does not love the wife for the wife’s sake, the husband loves the wife for the sake of the Self in her.’ (1960: 172–3) The notion of sublimation of one human being within another is not the same as supplication. It posits an absolute sharing, true equality, an acceptance of mutual partnership in which neither man nor woman is superior to the other. The passage continues, however, with a reminder of the real world, a world of action and decision-making, when Rao once again reaches for an example from royal behaviour: ‘Thus the King is masculine to his Kingdom, and feminine in relation to the Absolute, the Truth’ (173). Despite his constant allusions to ancient Sanskrit texts and to Vedantic principles, Rao was very conscious of writing in a century where women’s rights were being asserted as never before. Madeleine, for example, is studying the works of the New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield. ‘No man can understand a woman’, she says to Rama, adding in specific reference to Mansfield: ‘Only can a woman speak of a woman’ (1960: 166). There are moments in Mansfield’s work when the sentiments she expresses are almost indistinguishable from Rao’s. Compare his rhapsodising description of the eve of Elizabeth II’s coronation—‘England had now a lovely young Queen and she was going to be crowned. Even the trees and the earth seemed to have helped the English, so mild and kind the winter was . . .’ (1960: 350–1)— with Mansfield’s poem, ‘The Springtime’: ‘O, a Queen came to visit our country She was young, and was loved by us all How we hailed the glad signs of her coming When we first heard the merry thrush call.’ (Smith 1997: 26) 25

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Katherine Mansfield was, like her contemporary Virginia Woolf, the exponent of a woman’s right to be a free agent. Rao recognised that too in his portrayal of the principal women in his novel. Mansfield’s words, jotted down in her notebook on 22 May 1918, speak for her generation of intelligent women: [I]f there were going to be large freedoms she was determined to enjoy them too. She wasn’t going to be perched, swaying perilously in the changing jumble like a little monkey dropped from a tree on to an elephant’s head, & positively clinging to some large ear. (Smith 1997: 135) Madeleine, drawn though she is to Buddhism, yoga, and mysticism, is always an independent being, declining to be subservient to any male. As the headmistress of the school where she teaches puts it, Madeleine is the ‘sister-soul of Simone Weil’ (1960: 319), Weil being another iconic feminist of the 20th century and a Christian mystic. Mentions of Katherine Mansfield, Simone Weil, and Virginia Woolf, alongside many other giant intellects of the period such as Irène JoliotCurie, winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1936, the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, and the British scientist J. B. S. Haldane, to say nothing of brutal political leaders such as Franco and Stalin, help to anchor The Serpent and the Rope in the 20th century and make it a less esoteric novel than would have been the case if Rao had conducted his discourse only by reference to aristocratic figures of the modern age such as the Duchesse d’Uzes, heiress to the Veuve Cliquot Champagne fortune, who died in 1933. There is, however, no getting away from the fact that the book is steeped in references to grand figures from the past, some of them immensely celebrated such as Joan of Arc and Queen Elizabeth I, but others obscure even to the most educated reader. Who, for example, recognises the name of Henriette de Bruges, beside whose ‘stupid’ statue, erected by the princess to herself, Rama and Madeleine linger shortly before they are married (22)? Marie de France, Azalais des Baux, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Esclarmonde de Perelha, these beautiful courtly names are fleetingly conjured up, but then left behind like fallen petals. Although Rao peoples the drama of his novel with many such bit part players, each has a place in the great story of the Albigensian, or Cathar, heresy. This movement, which first arose in Languedoc (now incorporated into southern France) in the 11th century and which survived in various manifestations into the 13th, is the subject of Rama’s research and one of the binding threads of the book’s intricate narrative tapestry. The champions of Catharism, a doctrine which the official Roman Catholic church in the 12th century regarded as anathema, were often aristocratic or royal. Among its earliest and most powerful sympathisers was Queen 26

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Eleanor, who was married first to King Louis VII of France and then, after an annulment, to King Henry II of England. Another nobleman who declined to assist the Pope in his struggle with the Cathars was Raymond VI of Toulouse, and later his less effective son Raymond VII. Political and dynastic rivalries usually underlie religious proselytising by such rulers, but in Rama’s eyes they are spiritual advocates of a high order as well as impressive leaders. The dangers of Catharism, as the church saw them, included its tendency to see men and women as socially equal, its use of vernacular languages rather than Latin for the conduct of its business, its suspected roots outside Catholic domains—in India, Persia, and Byzantium, for example—but above all its Manichean insistence that the divine was both good and evil. The Cathars did not accept the monotheistic belief of Catholics. Instead they regarded human beings as fallen angels condemned to reincarnate until, in a likely future life, they would renounce all forms of materialism and selfinterest. It was a doctrine of perfectability, attainable without the disciplines and instruction of the Roman church. The Popes, of course, did not agree. Innocent III was determined to quell what he regarded not only as a theological heresy but as political secession. A  predecessor, Eugene III, had first pronounced against the Cathars over 50 years before. Pope Innocent now launched an assault on Cathar strongholds, with forces led by the charismatic Anglo-French nobleman, Simon de Montfort, 5th Earl of Leicester. The Pope’s firm intention, in what he termed a crusade, was to wipe out the Albigensian heretics. His tactics worked, though it would be another hundred years before Rome could comfortably feel that the Cathar danger to its supremacy was over. In the struggle of elected theocrats against inherited royalty, the former had won. Rama seems to admire both sides, but he commits himself to the victors: If I  had been a contemporary I  would have joined Simon de Montfort, not for the love of money or of glory, not even for an ­indulgence—I would rather have fought against indulgences than against the Cathars—but I would have fought for the clear stream of truth that runs through Roman Catholicism. (1960: 103) Throughout the novel Rama admires decisiveness, finding it displayed as often by anointed monarchs such as Pope Innocent and Napoleon as in inheriting kings and queens. In Rama’s view, the absolutism of such rulers brings us much closer to truth than do the equivocations of weaker sovereigns. Authority, in other words, must be exercised and not just assumed. Rama’s historical judgements can seem oddly out of tune with prevailing interpretations today, but it is difficult to dismiss them as rant. ‘Despite all the sins of Innocent III, or later of Pious XII with his pact with the Fascists, 27

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it is the papacy and not the British House of Commons, as people believe, that has saved Europe from destruction’ (103). Rao’s definitions of royalty and the lure of monarchy are never absolutely stated, but they are inferred throughout the novel. In his depiction of it, royalty manifests the highest merits in human achievement, so there is a practical side to it. An example is the marriage of the Portuguese princess, Catherine of Braganza, to the newly restored King Charles II after the civil wars in England, which brought with it the creation of a new trading hub and eventually a great international city (‘and so Bombay comes into being’, 233). Time and again, Rao attributes supreme political nous to kings and queens, princes, and popes. In avowing this royalist ideal, however, he often makes large sweeping historical claims of a kind which cannot survive any serious scholarly examination. One example: ‘India is free today not because of Jeremy Bentham but because of Napoleon’ (103). This outrageous statement might carry slightly more conviction if it was not followed a few pages later by an inaccurate statement that Napoleon ‘came back from St Helena before his Hundred Days of Glory’ (125), when the author confuses the Mediterranean island of Elba, from which indeed Bonaparte did escape, with the Atlantic island of St Helena, where he was later exiled and died. Royalty, by definition, must be inherent and inherited, but in Napoleon’s case it was self-styled and could not wholly disguise his obscure Corsican origins. Strange historical misjudgements proliferate in The Serpent and the Rope. Again, however, we must avoid reading the novel in too factually focused a way. As Rama asserts, ‘India has no history, for Truth cannot have history’ (1960: 104). Nevertheless, historical distortions matter. The eyebrows of any British reader of the novel will be raised by Rama’s panegyric to King Edward VIII, the monarch who abdicated the throne in 1936 in order to marry someone considered unsuitable at the time to become his queen consort, thus driving away ‘what might have been her best King, or at least the best-loved, since Henry the Fifth’ (206). With his leanings towards fascism and his evident self-indulgence, Edward’s decision to give up the crown is today believed to have saved Britain a disastrous reign and, furthermore, paved the way for his dutiful and uncompromised niece Elizabeth II to mount the throne while he was still living. Rao staunchly sticks to the view that royalty carries with it an innate talent to solve practical issues and to provide clarity to complex situations. This is not just a European phenomenon in medieval or in modern times, but is found in the old Sanskrit tales and teachings alluded to throughout all Rao’s work. Indeed, Rama’s academic supervisor at the Sorbonne, Professor Robin-Bessaignac, specifically contrasts the different kinds of practical action in Greek mythology and in the Ramayana, allowing the novel to oscillate between national loyalties and a transnational setting: ‘Nobody goes to fight for a Helen in India; rather does Rama send his devoted wife 28

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Sita to exile, to protect his impersonal Kingship from any shadow falling on it’ (1960: 222–3). As the professor avers, in European tradition, derived from the doctrine of Manichaeism or duality, the feminine dominates, but in the Sanskrit epics ‘[t]he masculine, the impersonal principle is affirmed’ (223). This is a central motif in the novel and must be grasped if we are to understand not only Rao’s discussion of royalty but his enquiry into the spiritual identity of India itself: ‘Kingship is an impersonal principle; it is like life and death, it knows no limitations. It is history made carnate, just as this Thames is the principle of water made real. And when a king apologizes for being a king he is no king; he establishes a duality in himself, so he can have no authority. “The King can do no wrong,” comes from the idea that the Principle can do no wrong, just as communists say, “the Party can do no wrong.” ’ (206) This appears to condone implacable absolute power and pave the way to fascism. But then Rama makes a peculiar distinction between Stalin, ‘the man of iron . . . the impersonal being’, and Hitler, ‘his plans personal, his whims astrological, his history Hitlerian’ (206). It is probably fruitless to untangle these generalisations about the two giants—wicked in most e­ stimations—of the 20th century. Rao/Rama seems to be saying, however, that a better way to rule is through impersonal authority, which he claims for Stalin (‘communism must succeed; happily for us, to be followed by Kingship’, 206), rather than by strutting egotism of the kind Hitler went in for. In the end the ideal ruler will humanise this impersonality by merging its masculinism with the feminine, realising the duality that is the highest state of earthly being. Such a person will be sovereign and is almost certainly likely to be royal: ‘Thus the King is masculine to his Kingdom, and feminine in relation to the Absolute, the Truth’ (173). Royalty is therefore not always an inherited caste but can be an acquired grace. In the same metaphysical way that the novel asserts on several occasions that India is less a country than a state of mind, so the claim is made for royalty being a level of aspiration and attainment, as much as a matter of blood lineage or inherited position: ‘The dualist must become saintly, must cultivate humility, because he knows he could be big, great, heroic and personal, an emperor with a statue and a pediment’ (206). Quite early in The Serpent and the Rope, Rama recounts how his grandmother Lakshamma used to tell the story of the virtuous Prince Satyakama, who is rejected and sent into exile by his wicked stepmother so that her own son can be placed on the throne; how penury and disaster befall the realm whilst the young prince is forced to wander the forests; how then a rolling vegetable, the budumékaye, changes into a beautiful princess and catches 29

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the prince’s eye; and after many magical encounters the couple return to the prince’s kingdom whereupon order is restored and prosperity ensues. It is a simple legend, told by grandparents to encourage children to sleep, but it mirrors so many of the themes of the novel: through endeavour, integrity, and spiritual grace, harmony can be achieved. Nature itself, the trees, animals, and insects of the forest, acknowledge the virtue of the prince and princess. It is of course a fairy tale, but in its simplicity it helps to explain the more complex metaphysics of the rest of the book and guides us into the theological nuances of Rama’s investigation of Catharism. The prince in Lakshamma’s tale would be nothing without his miraculous princess and bride. This brings us back to the veneration of women, a theme which runs through the novel. ‘What a deep and reverential mystery womanhood is’ (1960: 52)—and thus we return to the person of Queen Elizabeth II, who throughout the novel exemplifies and indeed personifies the highest state of feminine grace: woman, queen, chosen one of God through the ceremony of anointment that awaits her at her coronation. ‘I am a monarchist . . . and I honour the Queen’, says Rama (356). There is a long passage towards the end of the novel extolling the virtues of women and seeing them embodied in the young monarch: Woman is the earth, air, ether, sound; woman is the microcosm of the mind, the articulations of space, the knowing in knowledge; the woman is fire, movement clear and rapid as the mountain stream; the woman is that which seeks against that which is sought.  .  .  . Woman is kingdom, solitude, time; woman is growth, the gods, inherence; the woman is death, for it is through woman that one is born; woman rules, for it is she, the universe. . . . The world was made for celebration, for coronation, and indeed even when the king is crowned it is the Queen to whom the Kingdom comes . . . for even when it is a King that rules, she is the justice, the bender of man in compassion, the confusion of kindness, the sorrowing in the anguish of all. . . . The coronation is the adieu of man to the earth. Be gay, earth, be beautiful, for man must go. (357–8) I can think of no other English-language fictional prose quite like this written in the 20th century. Elevated, ecstatic, and spiritually aspirational, it seems almost disconnected from reality, a supra-human language which goes even further than the transnationalism evident in many parts of the novel. This kind of language reaches towards a means of expressing cosmic possibilities or utterances of the divine. It hearkens back to the language and prosody of the great Sanskrit epics and scriptures, as though Rao was trying to re-discover their extraordinary energy and commitment to the divine, and so bring these qualities back into contemporary usage. 30

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C. D. Narasimhaiah defends the floral quality of Rao’s language well, commenting on the parallel rootedness of the novel in ancient Sanskrit writings and its modern quest for philosophical understanding. As Narasimhaiah puts it, there is in the depiction of Rama persistent questioning by a gifted but distracted intellectual hero side by side with the endorsement of age-old popular beliefs. It is this double vision which makes a tradition vital but also keeps the novel going. What in another novelist would have ended in despair is here transmuted into a flow, a continuity—‘Charaiveti, Charaiveti march on, march on O ye traveller’ is a well-known verse of the Upanishads. The transmutation is the work of a well-grounded belief in the metaphysical view of life. It is this central operating principle which irradiates the entire material of the novel and without an informed appreciation of it much that happens in the novel must sound rhapsodical or sentimental. (1973: 8) Since it is impossible to read such passages in a crudely literal way, it follows that when Rao extols actual women who have lived in the past or who are living at the time of writing his novel, he configures them as idealisations rather than as credible historical beings. The Queen whose coronation in London took place on 2 June 1953 is not the queen whom the mass of the British people would have recognised at the time, even though Rao specifically alludes to her Commonwealth role: ‘the Queen will walk through the streets of Adelaide’ (1960: 358), a reference to the arduous tour of her Commonwealth realms which she undertook after the coronation. Rao’s Queen Elizabeth II is an idealised monarch, representative of the highest stage of womanhood, not the busy working head of state with whom Winston Churchill, as her prime minister, had weekly audiences. His Elizabeth is not the mother of two young children whom she had to leave behind on her global travels. Nor is she the attractive young woman who filled the gossip columns of the popular press and whose husband and sister were repeatedly and mischievously cited in scandals. She is closer to being a goddess or a Sita. Rama, on the eve of the crowning of this young woman (she was 27 at the time), speaks of ‘how England was recovering her spiritual destiny, how in anointing her Queen she would anoint herself’ (202). Even the landscape seems to respond to this royal mystique: What an imperial river the Thames is—her colour may be dark or brown, but she flows with a majesty, with a maturity of her own knowledge of herself.  .  .  . The mist on the Thames is pearly, as if Queen Elizabeth the First had squandered her riches and femininity on ships of gold, and Oberon had played on his pipe, so 31

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worlds, gardens, fairies and grottoes were created, empires were built and lost, men shouted heroic things to one another and died, but somewhere one woman, golden, round, imperial, always lay by her young man, his hand over her left breast, his lips touching hers in rich recompense. There’s holiness in happiness, and Shakespeare was holy because Elizabeth was happy. Would England not see an old holiness again? (201) Between the unexpected accession to the throne of Princess Elizabeth on 6 February 1952, whilst she was on an official tour of Kenya, and her coronation in Westminster Abbey 16 months later, there was much talk of a new Elizabethan age. This optimism was partly a reaction to the austere conditions that followed the Second World War, which had ended eight years before in victory but also in exhaustion. Rama’s evocation of the first Queen Elizabeth, of Oberon’s consort Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and elsewhere of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, is not therefore just fanciful. Responsible people, among them Churchill himself, looked to the prospect of a golden age. For a brief moment Rama’s exemplification of Elizabeth II as an embodiment of royal perfection is in alignment with the hopes of many people not just in Britain but around the English-speaking dominions and former colonies, even perhaps among many in the newly independent India, for Rama comments on how remarkable it is ‘[t]hat I, an Indian who disliked British rule, should feel this’ (202). Rao envisions the young Elizabeth as the emblem of an attainable and better future, not just in Britain but globally. In this respect she embodies transnationalism rather than narrow Englishness, the opposite of a colonial relic. Raja Rao was to re-visit some of the themes of The Serpent and the Rope in later works. In Comrade Kirillov (1976), for example, he writes again about the Albigensian heresy and examines aspects of political leadership in the modern world. Makarand R. Paranjape sees Rao’s last major work, The Chessmaster and His Moves (1988), voluminous though it is, as best approached through the prism of The Serpent and the Rope: ‘It is in the earlier novel that we can see the most convenient entry point to the central dialectic of The Chessmaster’ (1998: xviii–ix). Though we see echoes of Rao’s great interest in royalty in these later works, it is only in The Serpent and the Rope that it predominates as subject matter. As this novel is generally thought to be his masterpiece, it is fair to argue that Rama’s royalism is a supreme portal for getting to the heart of Rao’s quest for understanding the nature and purpose of existence. Stefano Mercanti puts it thus: ‘Historically, monarchies are seen through Ramaswamy’s consciousness as the visible expression of the will of humanity to be united under its highest representative, a communal dedication to the ideals of Purity and Truth’ (2009: 110). The story ranges across many types of kingship—mythic, classical, 32

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medieval, imperial, papal, absolute, constitutional. Rama and Sita, Krishna, Parvathi, Buddha, Semiramis, Tristan, Isolde, and Oberon conjoin with Henri IV of France, Akbar, Elizabeths I  and II, Victoria and Albert, and many others, in a novel clustered with aristocratic names and reminders from past eras. The writing of The Serpent and the Rope took Rao many years. The Europe in which it is partly set had only emerged from the internecine strife of the Second World War eight years before. It was undergoing ambitious reconstruction against a background of continuing division (Germany split in two), occupation (the imposition of Soviet-inclined regimes behind the ‘Iron Curtain’), and the rapid decline of its colonial systems around the world. More positively, Jean Monnet’s vision of a European economic union was gaining traction. In such a convulsively altering landscape, the surviving European monarchies offered an assurance of stability. Although the novel was published in 1960, Rao was working on it even as India achieved its independence in 1947, when the status of the princes, maharajahs, and nawabs was under the closest scrutiny. The reduction of their powers in the new Indian constitution was to be completed by the removal of their titles and privileges in 1972, but by 1960 their fate was already sealed. Rao’s exaltation of the monarchical principle, therefore, ran wholly counter to the prevailing political ethos; even though a few court cases were fought in protest at their abolition, the traditional Indian aristocracy knew that their glory was over. Their predicament became the subject of several novels, among them Manohar Malgonkar’s The Princes (1963a), published in 1963, and Mulk Raj Anand’s Private Life of an Indian Prince, which came out ten years earlier. In the 1930s, Malgonkar had worked briefly for Indian aristocrats, organising big game hunts; he would write later about princely dynasties in several works, including his history of the Puars of Dewas, also published in 1963 (Malgonkar 1963b). The Princes recognises the huge personal struggles that faced such potentates as the tides of democratisation swept them aside. Anand’s novel is the more psychologically profound and complicatedly sceptical of the two. Focusing on the mental decline of its royal protagonist, Vicky, it was an unexpected work to come from the pen of a writer noted for his Marxist sympathies and for his empathy with untouchables. It is, however, a mark of Anand’s humanity that no class lay outside his purview. Private Life of an Indian Prince (1953) is one of the best analyses in fiction of the personal consequences of losing authority. A comparison with King Lear will not be inappropriate. The point to be made is that Raja Rao was not alone in identifying royalty as a relevant issue to be diagnosed in a period when it was being disowned by many countries. His stance is very different from Anand’s, but these two great mid-20th-century English-language writers felt impelled to write about it. Rao’s career was devoted to establishing whether there is such an entity as Absolute Truth. Through the character of Rama, he shows how 33

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fascinated he was by the processes of research. The Serpent and the Rope is a book which revels in historical enquiry. It is a highly personal novel, for so much of it echoes Rao’s own scholarship, his travels, relationships, and spiritual questioning. It also, however, operates on an elevated plane of metaphysical abstraction. Rao is aspiring to write a novel which takes fiction away from ‘real life’, without losing contact with it, in order to define ideas more purely, almost allegorically, than can be possible if social and psychological details encumber them. Monarchy is thus the perfect metaphor for the potential perfection of the human endeavour, being anointed by God and placed at the apex of society and authority. The behaviour of individual kings and queens may sometimes have been reprehensible, but their symbolic role—which is largely all that is left to a modern sovereign such as Elizabeth II—can still be monumental. As we have noted, Rama comments that ‘I am the only Indian royalist’, to which Savithri replies, ‘Well when you are King, I shall be Queen.’ Rama remarks that her riposte does not seem to be a joke, but rather ‘a dedication, a prophecy’ (1960: 192). Rao’s novel is dedicated to discovering how humankind can attain the purest grace and know the ultimate truth. In hoping that we would reach these pinnacles, so close to the creator of all mysteries, Rao intended that his novel should also be prophetic.

References Anand, Mulk Raj. 1953. Private Life of an Indian Prince, London: Bodley Head. Malgonkar, Manohar. 1963a. The Princes, London: Hamish Hamilton. ———. 1963b. The Puars of Dewas Senior, New Delhi: Orient Longman. Mercanti, Stefano. 2009. The Rose and the Lotus: Partnership Studies in the Works of Raja Rao, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Narasimhaiah, C. D. 1973. Raja Rao, New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann. Niven, Alastair. 1987. Truth Within Fiction: A Study of Raja Rao’s ‘The Serpent and the Rope’, Calcutta: Writers Workshop. Paranjape, Makarand (ed). 1998. The Best of Raja Rao, New Delhi: Katha Classics. Rao, Raja. 1938. Kanthapura, London: George Allen and Unwin. ———. 1960. The Serpent and the Rope, London: John Murray. ———. 1976. Comrade Kirillov, New Delhi: Orient. ———. 1978. Preface, The Policeman and the Rose, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. ———. 1988. The Chessmaster and His Moves, New Delhi: Vision. Smith, Margaret (ed). 1997. The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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2 FROM NATIONAL TO METAPHYSICAL Raja Rao’s idea of India in a transnational era Rumina Sethi

Before turning to consider Raja Rao’s idea of India, it should be mentioned that his novel The Serpent and the Rope followed Kanthapura by a long hiatus of more than two decades.1 Rao described his lack of creativity to be a result of turning to metaphysics (Naik 1972: 23). By the time The Serpent and the Rope was published, the motives of the struggle for independence and the accompanying Gandhian ideology had become more or less diffused and decentred. This chapter is about the replacement of the politics of the nation-state with the metaphysics of India in four of Rao’s novels—The Serpent and the Rope, The Cat and Shakespeare, Comrade Kirillov, and The Chessmaster and His Moves. As stories, these novels have the usual features of postcolonial writing in which independent intuition and logic, and an emphasis on psychological problems, are the governing themes since the writer no longer bears the responsibility of maintaining national identity. Correspondingly, the communal consciousness and the quality of shared experience present in Rao’s first novel Kanthapura are missing in the later novels as we notice the detachment of the characters from all kinds of social responsibility. The post-independence period in India is one in which identities are redefined in a manner similar and yet different from the way they had been fashioned in periods of intense nationalism. The difference arises not simply as a result of the end of colonialism, but also as a resistance to what Nandy calls ‘the second colonization’ which survives nationalism (1983: xi). Postcolonialism, in many ways, witnesses a replay of the preoccupation with tradition in order to combat a rising neocolonialism. Despite the changed historical circumstances of the Indian nationalist project, the modernisation programmes which inevitably accompany the formation of the nation-state and the resultant clash with the ‘authentic’, pre-industrialised past provoke a new defence of tradition and might provide an explanation 35

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to Rao’s treatment of larger cultural themes. In Rao’s later novels, tradition is safeguarded by elevating high Hinduism. While Hindu revivalism was witnessed even in the early decades of the national movement, by the late 1920s there was a discernible interest in strengthening Hindu concerns, arising mainly as a reaction to a growing insecurity among Hindus resulting from Gandhi’s fair and equitable doctrines regarding minorities and the attempts of the British to win over Muslims politically (Fox 1989: 217). Gandhi had anti-intellectualised the dominant religious core of India by de-brahmanising Hindu culture (Nandy 1980: 49, 72). Although his spiritual interpretations of the Indian past and its sacred texts often came close of those of the Brahmin intellectuals, he was a prominent dissenter of brahmanism, believing that it had outlived its utility. In reinterpreting and mobilising Hinduism for the non-brahmanic periphery, Gandhi had largely substituted the absolute value of the Vedas and the Upanishads by the Bhagavadgita. Gandhi was also responsible for introducing politics into the Hindu dharma, thereby bringing together what had always existed separately at a ruthless, ‘amoral’ political level of arthashastra (the science of politics) with the quite traditionally separate religious cultural centre comprising the concepts of brahmanism (Nandy 1980: 48–9). Further, his belief that the meek would inherit the earth challenged brahmanical patriarchy, which while tolerant of ideological dissent, was vulnerable in the face of a public ethic that diminished its importance. I see Raja Rao as an intellectual caught within the insecurity resulting from a repudiation of metaphysics during the nationalist phase and the uncompromising desire to secure a system of Hindu ethics after independence. As a member of the postcolonial brahmanic elite, Rao can be situated within the wider historical context of post-Gandhianism as well as a more narrowly personal and psychological bind which relates to his expatriation.

Bridging the dichotomies Rao’s vision of India attains maturity with The Serpent and the Rope, which explores the opposition between the East and the West enacted through Rama, the hero, and his wife Madeleine. Rama works on his doctoral dissertation in France on the Albigensian heresy in the Middle Ages while Madeleine is engaged in research on the Holy Grail, a central myth in European thought. Believing India to be the genesis of European civilisation, they attempt to trace western myths and phenomena to Indian philosophy. Both, however, are engaged in a deeper quest—a spiritual definition of the self—which overwhelms even their academic pursuits. Though Madeleine’s quest to reach a state of Buddhism is quite definitely ‘Indian’, her desire for perfection contradicts Rama’s conviction in the paradoxical nature of the world and its beings: while the mind pursues Truth, the body yearns for all sorts of pleasures. In other words, Rama accepts the inevitable coexistence 36

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of a physical plane of living (illusion) with a quest for metaphysical idealism (reality), and the limits the former imposes on the latter. Madeleine’s Manichean mysticism tends to separate the two realms of existence: she believes that the world is the actual reality and that transcendentalism lies in dismissing the very real aspirations of the body. Unlike Rama, she cannot accept the simultaneous presence of the serpent and the rope, typifying the coexistence of the real and the unreal, which is the essence of advaita vedanta, a philosophy Rama is wedded to.2 For Rama, the denial of the flesh, in fact, affirms its existence. Madeleine lacks that inward sense of reality and stands outside the system of recognition that Rama has internalised. She is, from Rama’s standpoint, representative of a western intellectual tradition as opposed to an intuitive Indian one. For Rama, ‘the impossible is the reality’ (1960: 168) and that reality lies in ‘the formless form of Truth’ (403), in brahmanism, a complex synthesis of Hindu traditions modelled over thousands of generations. Correspondingly, he perceives Madeleine’s desire for perfection in Buddhist austerities to be a European’s understanding of an Indian system: ‘her attraction towards, and eventual commitment to, a great Eastern religion based on intangible mystery, is in fact the purest demonstration of her Catholicism and European classicism’ (Niven 1987: 16). While intuition is not the privilege of the East alone, Rama’s proud inheritance wills the reader to draw a line between a purely Indian experience, which does not permit foreign intrusion, and its supposed comprehension by a European. While Rama’s epistemological understanding of the East might claim superiority in the realisation of Truth, his separation from Madeleine cannot be seen entirely within essentialist dichotomies of East and West. Their divorce may also be perceived from the vantage point of orthodox brahmanism which diminished Buddhism as a living belief in India. Buddhism has been the cardinal deviation from Hinduism since it opposes the Brahmins’ sacrificial system and caste rules which few devout Hindus can accept (Carroll 1983: 89). Although Hindu chauvinists have repeatedly absorbed the separate existence and beliefs of the lower castes and the Muslims, not to speak of the Buddhists and the Jains, into an assimilative Hinduism in the interest of unity, the model no longer works for Rao since he ideologically appropriates a more aggressive Hindu ‘nationalism’ in a changed political situation in which ‘deviants’ must either be subordinated or removed. This in many ways overlaps with the sentiment expressed by the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), a Hindu right-wing nationalist organisation that advocates pluralism even as it seeks to stress the importance of ‘ethno-nationalism’ in the face of rising western cultural values: ‘One can practice any religion . . . as long as worship is done within the framework of cultural Hinduism and with respect for national traditions’ (Andersen and Damle 2018: xviii–xix).3 The symbolic opposition to Madeleine is represented through Savithri who alone recognises Rama’s Self in her being, and thereby responds to him in the same way as Maitreyi did to the sage Yagnavalkya, Rama’s 37

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Upanishadic ancestor. Rama is drawn to Savithri because she corresponds to the perfect Hindu wife who ‘wed[s] her [husband’s] God’ (1960: 84) as Rama had once tried to wed Madeleine’s and failed.4 It may be questioned why Rama’s own desire to embrace Madeleine’s god is not taken as a breach of his Hindu dharma. In fact, Rao’s hero alternatingly takes the positions of a universalist and a chauvinist, which is not surprising considering his physical placement outside his own country. The ceaseless transnational connections he seeks to establish between his station abroad and the landscape and myths of his country, dictated by the twin themes of illusion and reality, are an attempt to reduce the gap between the two as well as a retreat into roots. Myths, both indigenous and foreign—the Tristan and Isolde myth which corresponds with the love saga of Krishna and Radha, the myths relating to Satyavan and Savithri, and Abelard and Eloise—are evoked perhaps in nostalgia or to effect, in Bruce King’s terms, a linkage between the ‘national’ and the ‘international’ (1980: 44–5). While the novel records the story of the rift between Rama and Madeleine who represent the incompatible ‘culturalisms’ of the East and the West, the imagined connection between the sacred nature of the Ganges and the Rhône suggests a universal sisterhood as if to culminate in a mythic India. In Kanthapura, too, the expanding metaphor of India had been perfected through the symbolic convergence between Indian rivers. But the universalism effected here is far more difficult to realise since the author’s world view precludes outsiders. It is Savithri who draws Rama out of his confusion and guides him towards Knowledge, which culminates in the guru figures of Rao’s later novels.5 Correspondingly, the epigraph to the novel is quoted from Sri Atmananda Guru: ‘Waves are nothing but water. So is the sea.’ At a symbolic level, water relates to the past since the ancient Indian rivers have their origins in antiquity and myth, and the continuation of that past into the present. The river Ganges, in particular, becomes a potent symbol of continuity and permanence along with conveying the passing nature of Truth. The subsequent brahmanic belief in Antaranganga or ‘The Ganga/Ganges is within one’, strengthened by the conviction that all rivers are Ganges, asserts the common origin of all Indians, and even non-Indians, in brahmanism. The connection is strengthened by the metaphor of bridges, which, however, are not crossed. Like the rivers, the dialogue also moves from the unknown to the known. Indeed, it is the nature of the uplifting dialogue between Rama and Savithri in the novel—which corresponds to the Upanishads, the supreme texts of the Hindus—that leads to a recognition of Rama’s non-dual ‘Self’: ‘When seeing goes into the make of form and form goes into the make of seeing, as the Great Sage says, “what, pray, do you see?” ’

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‘You see nothing or, if you will, yourself,’ answered Savithri, and I wondered at her instant recognition of her own experience. (1960: 130–1) Rama’s forms and techniques of investigation, as we see, are in accordance with the Vedic idea of knowing oneself as a necessary prerequisite to knowing Truth. Rao makes it clear that the apprehension of the self-evident truth is enabled only through eastern ‘knowing’, not by western ‘intellectualising’. And yet, there is the circumstantial presence of the local and the historical upon the timelessness of traditional Hindu discourse, so that the reader is jerked back from the Upanishadic representation of Indian philosophy to a consideration of Rama’s physical presence in France. The reader’s perception must therefore be modified to accommodate the local and the timebound within the metaphysical and the timeless. This raises two interrelated questions: Is the metaphysical representation of India the only alternative for an expatriate? Or, is the French element in the narration of The Serpent and the Rope an indication of Rao’s universalism, of the regenerative power of India since ‘somewhere, the Rhône must know the mysteries of Mother Ganga’ (1960: 245)? The answer is concealed within Hindu solipsism and its aggressive champions for whom the departure from metaphysics is inconceivable, in terms of both a disintegration of national identity following independence and their personal isolation from their country. In the circumstances, Rao/Rama creates his own metaphysics from the knowledge of his illustrious ancestors, which consequently becomes increasingly personal. Paradoxically, it is the distance and neutrality afforded by expatriation that permits his ‘identity’ to flourish and continue unreservedly.

The Guru and the Shishya It is in The Cat and Shakespeare, Rao’s subsequent novel, that the resolution of Rama’s Upanishadic quest for Truth is attained. Rao uses Ramanuja’s rival philosophy of bhakti yoga or devotion to God to indicate the path of absolute surrender to Brahman, whereas The Serpent and the Rope is based on Sankara’s jnana yoga, which does not allow the infiltration of devotion in its intellectual apprehension of Brahman. It has been argued by many that the two great teachers expounded different philosophies and that Ramanuja vigorously opposed the doctrines of Sankara (Urquhart 1986: 58–9). Ramanuja did not believe in maya or illusion, and thereby respected human faculties more than Sankara could permit in his assertion of human susceptibility to illusion. Ramanuja also argued that Sankara was ‘not a reliable interpreter’ of the Upanishads (Urquhart 59). While it is true that Sankara later admitted grudgingly to the common inability to make a distinction between the real and its illusion, Rao’s defection to bhakti yoga

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marks a disregard of a widely accepted difference acknowledged among intellectuals. In this light, may we take Rao’s monolithic model as evidence of the strength of his desire to syncretise and unify in the name of Indianness actual Indian traditions which were quite opposed?6 If so, then Madeleine’s Buddhism should have been subsumed within Hinduism on the same principle. Like the earlier novel, the narrative in The Cat and Shakespeare is an exercise in uncovering reality through the multi-layered dialogue based on Sankara’s advaita vedanta. The essence of the Upanishadic discourse lies in an unquestioning acceptance of the sacred nature of the relationship between the guru and the shishya or disciple, which works on the assumption that the guru is the divine repository of knowledge, being thus invested by the gods themselves. It becomes part of the shishya’s religious duties therefore to make his guru his god. The narrative structures of both The Cat and Shakespeare (1971) and Comrade Kirillov accommodate the guru figures—Govindan Nair and Kirillov—who inspire their disciples, also the narrators, and admit them into new worlds. The Cat and Shakespeare concludes with an unambiguous celebration of an intense religious experience in which Ramakrishna Pai, the narrator hero, for the first time, recognises reality—tat tvam asi or ‘that art thou’ (Radhakrishnan 1953: 458). Kirillov is quite a different guru; he makes Marxism his metaphysics and is intellectually as convincing in his system as Nair is in Vedanta. Comrade Kirillov, however, makes a complete volte-face towards the end when the guru is discovered to be a Vedantin despite his loyalty to the Party, enabling the narrator, R, to hold back from politics despite his apparently ‘false’ guru. While the nature of the relationship between the author/guru and the reader/disciple underlines the monist systems of both Sankara and Ramanuja, the prospect of witnessing the disciple’s relation to a Marxist guru Kirillov within the implication of surrender to the Party is intriguing. Being a sadhak or devotee, the reader is expected to have a pre-existing knowledge that the Marxist is really a crypto-Vedantin and that his journey is mapped out in advance. Rao gives an insight into the misguided Marxist largely by juxtaposing Kirillov’s faith in the Party’s dogma against the contradictory run of history. Being a good Marxist, Kirillov respects Stalin’s injunction to Indian Marxists to suspend agitation until the victory of the allies. In retrospect, we know that India’s independence was, in fact, facilitated through the Quit India Movement of 1942 rather than through a Marxist ideology. To disprove Marxism by an appeal to history is inconsistent with the timeless philosophical principles Rao purports to be using, and amounts to harnessing an illegitimate form of irony at the expense of the character. If one persists with the argument that the metaphysical cannot coexist with the material, Rao’s fascination with Marxism becomes even more questionable. In Kanthapura, Rao records its hero Moorthy’s conversion to socialism even though the change is attributed to his confusion. But in 40

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Kirillov, the author’s choice of the hero as a kind of later Moorthy again questions his appreciation of Marxism within the quintessence of Indian spirituality. It is true that at a point Rao had joined the socialists in India. He had also edited Whither India? which includes an essay on socialism by Jayaprakash Narayan, a committed Marxist of the 1930s.7 Rao’s fascination with Marxism must necessarily have grappled with Indian spirituality if his novels are anything to go by as evidence. Yet the deviant heroes are either abandoned, like Moorthy who threatens the ideological unity of Kanthapura, or represented as misguided and confused like Kirillov. Rao has admitted: ‘I am interested in authenticity. One should be authentic. . . . It is to those who are not authentic that misery comes’ (Sharrad 1987: 125). Such ‘authenticity’ in Rao’s works is double-edged since the victory of Vedanta appears to be adulterated with a sincere appreciation of Marxism. The final triumph, needless to add, lies in the spiritual, identified with Brahman.

The Hindu way of life Spiritualism, it must now be evident, has been the largest denominator of the Hindu way of life, and its expediency in ideological formations is significant, both before and after independence. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Hindu traditionalists like Vivekananda, Aurobindo Ghose, and Annie Besant sought to stimulate national pride through the Ramakrishna mission school of Vedantism, the culturally assertive neo-Hinduism, and the Theosophical Society. The theosophists in particular endeavoured to revitalise the original caste system which had gradually become diffused and splintered. They emphasised the need for a change from the physical to the astral to attain a release from the mundane. The Theosophical Society gained currency among the intellectuals since its western guardianship legitimised traditional Hindu metaphysical values of the union of the self (atman) with Brahman (Bald 1982: 10–12). In recent years, the Vedantic union between atman and Brahman has been appropriated by the Hindu right wing in supporting the political issue of Ram Janmabhoomi or the birthplace of the Hindu god Ram in Ayodhya.8 The exclusivity of Ram as god is at the same time linked with the pluralistic character of Hinduism so that he both embodies common reverence and subsumes ideological difference, or in other words, ‘the notion of an inner desire that corresponds to and realizes itself in a universal feeling’ (Datta 1993: 49). The same principle is employed in Kanthapura where the pluralism of India is synthesised in the homogeneous worship of the goddess Kenchamma. In order to consolidate Hindu identity in postcolonial India, the RSS declares spiritual knowledge to be a divine trust given to Hindus by Destiny (Golwalkar 1966: 7). Its more militant wing, the revivalist Vishva 41

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Hindu Parishad (VHP), often calls for a reinterpretation of the Inner Spirit of Hinduism in a world going increasingly over to modernity and social change. Golwalkar, or ‘Guruji’ as he was popularly known, one of the founders of the RSS, considered material life and consumerism as crude western tools, having scarcely any solidity when compared with Hindu cultural essentials (1966: 5). The denunciation of socialism as ‘western’ had always been part of the rhetoric of those who advocated an ‘Indianisation’ of democracy: ‘The RSS is not opposed to socialism as an egalitarian philosophy, but to the materialistic aspect of it which does not accord with our culture or our ethos, or the essential values of life we believe in’ (Deshmukh 1979: 16).9 For RSS ideologues, it is evident that the national development towards a future Hindu utopia can be guaranteed only through a revolution of the individual spirit, which is of primary importance when compared to the redistribution of wealth and property. In effect, current-day ‘Hindutva’, or the idea of aggressive Hindu nationhood, disguised as cultural uniformity, conceals the desire of the Hindu upper-class elite to exclude the masses from enjoying the democratic benefits of the new political nation. In one stroke, the dictum—‘we are all Hindus’—discredits the ‘struggle for new political emergence of the lower caste, tribal and Muslim masses’ by its outwardly reasonable formulation (Aloysius 1994: 1451). The threat posed by the Muslim minority is insignificant compared to the ‘threat to the upper caste vested interests’ from the ‘egalitarian and pluralistic aspirations of the masses within formal democracy’ (Aloysius 1452). From this viewpoint, Rao’s message of spirituality in Kirillov is part of his intention to prevent class structures from splitting up traditional Hindu solidarity and the related upper-class interests but at the same time the expression of an expansive civilisational metaphor that includes everybody: India is too powerful and too deep in an Indian to allow him to lead an alien life. She loves her children too much—and as long as Lord Siva is in Kailash and the holy Ganges flows from His hair; Indians will not betray their land—for the mother is bigger than all politics, all economics, all castes, all philosophies. India is of every Indian—of which Comrade Kirillov is only one! (1976: 1) India, as Rao sees it, is greater than all creeds and histories yet the symbols employed in the quote above are all Hindu.10 Such a formulation has the all-too-familiar ring of the nationalist rhetoric, characterised on the one hand by evoking the sentiment of Mother India and the concept of a ‘civilizational nation state’ (Andersen and Damle 2018: 78), and on the other by a select interpretation of its very plurality.

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Sunya and the transnational In the journey towards knowledge, Rao’s latest novel, The Chessmaster and His Moves, identifies the guru as the chessmaster who sweeps away the disciple’s incomprehension and raises the individual from the temporal to the Absolute, the It. Correspondingly, the enlightened narrator speaks of the idealised linguistics of Indian primary sounds, particularly sunya or zero, in which all numbers have their origin and to which all numbers return: ‘There is a primary language . . . as there are formal numbers, some structure of our thinking that naturally understands ten instead of twenty, of root words instead of a word for every object that the chinese tried to paint and failed. Indeed there must be primary sounds, like particles in our nuclear universe, which act and react according to as yet unknown laws.’ (1988: 33) The ‘structure’ of thinking which the protagonist Sivarama speaks of has to be both intuitively comprehended and naturally communicated. This can be possible in the ‘language of the gods’ alone, for it is only when the language is eternal and unchanging that the comprehension of the word by the hearer/ reader will correspond precisely to the effect desired by the speaker/author (Rao 1965: 77). In other words, the solipsistic individualism of the speaker can be reproduced in the hearer, quite unlike the reader–writer relationship in western forms taken to its extreme in postmodernism. It is thus that Sivarama attempts to go back to the eternal and the unchanging to establish a true communication with his hearers, which he feels the Chinese failed to do. This poses the question why this learned Brahmin falls prey to a common western misconception of the notion of Chinese characters. However, the poetic compression of the English language succeeds in creating a tightly organised rhythm and structure suitable for Sivarama’s philosophical disquisitions. Again, Rao’s continued use of the English language is mystifying within his concepts of high Hinduism since English is considered to be a means of attenuating the spirit of Hindutva and its ‘fundamentalist nationalistic’ demands for Hindi or even Sanskrit (Sunder Rajan 1992: 28). As in The Serpent and the Rope, the idealistic metaphysical speculations of a philosophically organised dialogue often have a repetitive quality of the syntax—‘ten-twenty’, ‘words-word’, ‘act-react’—which enables Sivarama to create the impression of continuity and eternity as in the puranas. Yet there are profound silences in the book which break conversation and are in keeping with the profundity of the thought. The very moment Sivarama is interrupted, the continuity of his dialogue comes to a halt, and he finds it difficult to resume speech. Partly the result of a stammer, the silence may

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also arise from the inability to convey ‘pure sound’ or sunya, the inexpressible, through the puranic. The silence comes at a point when he is asked to recount the story of Nachiketas who holds a dialogue with the god of Death on the nature of the Absolute. It recurs when he is asked to explain Brahman. In other words, the absence of language conveys that Brahman, whose recognition is intuitive and internal, cannot be explained through words. It is also possible that the novel, at the puranic level, is simply not adequate to carry the burden of metaphysics. The pithy moralising of the Vedanta furnishes the novel with a significant and new theme concerning India—the quality of being universally ‘indian’ [sic] which comes from the realisation that India is ‘no country, it’s a metaphor’ (Rao 1988: 36). This is also the message of Kanthapura although the contextualisation of the novel within history gives it a geographically defined immediacy. The later metaphorical representation of India indicates the growing imperialism of the nation-state as it takes more and more people into its fold: There are no indians. . . . India is no country, I told you. . . . Wheresoever one dissolves is India—every thought when purely understood is India. When Camus knows he is Camus, that is, there is no Camus, Camus becomes an indian. (1988: 37) The quality of being ‘indian’ does not simply indicate a neo-nationalism to overcome a devitalised contemporaneity but the assertion of a larger cultural theme, sunya, which in its very namelessness, shapelessness, and timelessness is all-consuming (King 1980: 44, 50). That alone, for Rao, marks the final attainment for the initiates and shows the triumph of spirit over matter. Tracing the trajectory of Rao’s vision from the national to the transnational, we can see the evolution of a select Hindu India, which replaces Gandhi’s moral concerns in Rao’s first novel, Kanthapura, with the ideal representation of a universal, all-embracing ‘india’ in his latest. Gandhi’s concern for the little cultures and minorities of India was to become more and more insignificant by establishing links with the world since Truth and God, being Hindu cultural essences, are, at the same time, human universals. In effect, Rao comes very close to Rabindranath Tagore’s belief of abandoning national boundaries and political freedom as a cure to the world’s problems (1918: 97–130). His idea of universalism finds parallels with Tagore’s Gora where a juxtaposition of nationalist ideals and contemporary politics is shown to ‘violate’ the ‘fundamental principles of Indianness and Hinduism’ (Nandy 1994: 40). Yet Tagore was not a revivalist even though his concept of Hinduism before 1905 was predominantly brahmanic. Rao, in contrast, is willing to build upon the category 44

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of ‘India’ which is both timeless and universal, yet unashamedly static and narrow. Along with his sweeping assertions about the universalist principle contained in India (The Chessmaster and His Moves), we also receive a privileged and prejudiced account of that very India (The Serpent and the Rope): for Rama, ‘real’ India lies neither with the northerners who embrace ‘extreme modernism with unholy haste’ (1960: 31), nor in the ‘barbaric’ city of Bombay/Mumbai. Brahmanic purity instead seems to have been better preserved in the south which did not suffer the corruption of foreign invasions. Ironically, an allowance is made for the Ganges which flows through the north. Rama’s protection of a select and partial cultural category amounts almost to a racist imperialism which makes India and Europe into distinguishable and mutually insular concepts and yet assumes a transnational alliance between countries and races. The paradox helps to release him from the double bind of advocating both codes, while at the same time shielding his admiration for Europe from criticism by subsuming Europe within India. Or is it Rao’s intention to testify not to the necessity of unity but to the inescapability of hybridity? It should be understood that the metaphor of expanding India is not a liberalisation of his closed system but the assertion of a universal supremacy built on Truth which is available only to the select. The universal quality of India does not, in other words, embrace the world but rather perpetuates an imperialism for all those who submit to ‘Indianness’.

History and the Hindu Right If, within the philosophy of advaita vedanta, India or Truth can be possessed only by those who recognise the difference between the serpent and the rope, then Rama’s conception of Truth and its configuration within the governing leitmotif of illusion and reality presupposes an ahistorical world view. The enumeration of this cosmic theme together with the stories of the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and the Buddha, all filtered through a Brahmin’s senses, serves to create ‘a timeless backdrop’ (Sharrad 1984: 87) of a mythical land: ‘India is the kingdom of God, and it is within you. India is wheresoever you see, hear, touch, taste, smell. India is where you dip into yourself, and the eighteen aggregates are dissolved’ (Raine 1988: 603). Yet Rama purports to be an historian and a chronicler: I am not telling a story here, I am writing the sad and uneven chronicle of a life, my life, with no art or decoration, but with the ‘objectivity’, the discipline of the ‘historical sciences’, for by taste and tradition I am only a historian. (Rao 1960: 231) 45

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The history he narrates is an account of his life which corresponds to timeless metaphysics. The possession of India by his all-knowing Self can only be a very arrogant, personalised view: India was a continuity I felt, not in time but in space; as a cloud that stands over a plain might say, ‘Here I  am and I  pour’—and goes on pouring. The waters of that rain have fertilized our minds and hearts, and being without time they are ever present. It is perhaps in this sense that India is outside history. (Rao 1960: 246–7) Since history appears to be inadequate to narrate his timeless ‘India’, Rama chooses to universalise a narrative that history is unable to control. In his desire to effect an intellectual renaissance issuing from an elite cultural revival, Rama as an historian can only be a persuasive but not a credible narrator. It is finally in the acknowledgement and coalescence of a personal Brahmin identity with the larger Brahman identity of a collective ideal called India that Rama/Rao finds satisfaction: ‘Where . . . does . . . history stop, and where do you begin?’ (1960: 196). This ideal holds within itself ‘the historian’s attempt to invest the events of the world with meaning, the individual’s quest for continuity and integrated being, and the yogin/saint’s exercise to exhaust the authority of temporal reality’ (Sharrad 1987: 76). For a western reader, his history would be dubious and can be credible only from a mythical, and by his definition, ‘Indian’ perspective which would be more romantic than real. While Rama’s India can only be located outside history, the Hindu right wing in India tend to situate their monolithic India well within its compass. It appears that the metaphysical and even mythical nature of the history of Ayodhya can be completely refashioned by majoritarian politics. By giving a historical account of events, right-wing historians, since the 1970s, have been producing evidence of the ‘truth’ to indicate the exact geographical coordinates of the location of the Hindu god Ram’s birthplace.11 In his work on the ‘construction’ of the history of Ayodhya, Vinay Lal recounts the large body of historical ‘evidence’ collected by historians from the so-called ‘cow belt’.12 In contrast, he cites from Sanskrit texts and the Skanda Purana, the very sources used by right-wing historians, to expose that Ayodhya was turned into a Hindu place of worship from the 16th century onwards as a backlash against the growing power of the Mughals (Lal 2003: 143). Other historians have also insisted that on no account should the birthplace of Ram be associated with the site where the disputed mosque once stood since even archaeological excavations give contrary support (Gopal et al. 1990: 77). The kind of history-writing where myth and historiography are inseparable is an interesting case of fiction conforming to fact. But in its very claims to historicity, which it paradoxically dehistoricises by allowing for ‘no change 46

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or development in the character, position, interests, behaviour  .  .  . of its several protagonists’, it is removed from the ‘factual’ (Pandey 1994: 1523). As Ashis Nandy remarks: ‘the politically powerful now live in and with history’ so that the power of myth over history is absolute (1995: 46). What once was termed ‘ahistorical’ is currently developing a system of asserting its ethics through a principle of moralising or ‘the principle of principled forgetfulness’ (47). While the appropriation of myth and morality by realpolitik forms one part of the writing of history, as in the Ram Janmabhoomi issue, its other facet lies in its very institutionalisation so that the construction of the past becomes admissible. For an expatriate like Rao, the objectivity bestowed upon history can successfully conceal the morality of his remembered past. He has striven to nourish his vision of India and keep it alive all through his existence outside his country, and it is perhaps the expatriate soul that prescribes the construction of a particular ideological model. History, in his case, comprised as it is of poetry, mythology, cosmology, and the puranas, not only lends credibility to the representation of political events but also allows a respectable interchange between past and present in the interpretation of current politics. To summon Nandy, not only does the past shape the present and the future, but ‘the present and the future also shape the past’ (66).

Notes 1 This chapter is a revised version of a chapter entitled ‘The Future of a Vision’, which appears in my book Myths of the Nation: National Identity and Literary Representation, Oxford: Clarendon, 1999, pp. 153–77. 2 Rao’s own lineage has been traced to Sankara’s advaita vedanta (ad 8). 3 Founded in pre-independence India (1925), the RSS was instituted ostensibly to inculcate a brotherhood of Hindus that would help thwart British domination. By the 1990s, however, it acquired a massive following. Affiliated currently with the ruling party BJP, the RSS openly proclaims its ideology of recovering the core Hindu and Hindi-speaking heartland of India. 4 For Rao, the devotion of the wife alone fulfils her husband. He wants his woman to be Parvati, Shiva’s spouse, whose absorption into the male can recover for the man a state of primordial formlessness. At a metaphorical level, Rama (and later, Sivarama in The Chessmaster) aspires for such a union that can banish the world and its chaos and bring him to the discovery of Shivoham or the realisation of oneness with God (Parmeshwaran 1988). 5 In Hindu philosophy, salvation can only be attained through one’s guru who alone can show the path of light. 6 The philosophies of dualism and non-dualism, though opposed, take their origins from the philosophy of the Upanishads. 7 See Jayaprakash Narayan, ‘Socialism: A  System of Social Organisation’ (Rao and Singh 1948: 71–95). 8 The conflict over the Ram Janmabhoomi and Babri Masjid issue in the ancient city of Ayodhya situated in the state of Uttar Pradesh in India had been festering since the late 1800s. The Hindus insisted that a 16th-century mosque built by Babur, the first Mughal emperor, on the site of a Hindu temple had desecrated

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the birthplace of their god Ram. The subsequent demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 by Hindu volunteers led to widespread clashes between Hindu fundamentalists and the Muslim minority for decades. In November  2019, the Supreme Court of India resolved the issue amid much controversy by granting the contested land to the Hindu community for the construction of the Ram temple. 9 See also Seshadri who laments the havoc caused by the ‘Missionary-MuslimMarxist combine’ to Hindu identity and national cultural integration (1984). 10 Rao’s attack on communism as alien to the very soil of India could have sprung from his alarm at the 1958 election of a communist government in Kerala state. 11 See Lal 2003: 142–3. Some of the ‘histories’ Lal mentions are authored by Mishra (1985), Nandan (n.d.), Sri Ramjanmabhumi Mukti Yagya Samiti (1989), and Pandey (1976). 12 The ‘cow belt’ comprises of parts of northern and central India, especially Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, where cows are considered sacred and the consumption of beef forbidden. Cow slaughter for any purpose whatsoever is considered illegal and carries legislative punishment.

References Aloysius, G. 1994. ‘Trajectory of Hindutva’, Economic and Political Weekly, 29(24): 1450–2. Andersen, Walter K., and Shridhar D. Damle. 2018. The RSS: A View to the Inside, Gurgaon: Penguin Random House. Bald, Suresht Renjen. 1982. Novelists and Political Consciousness: Literary Expressions of Indian Nationalism 1919–1947, New Delhi: Chanakya. Carroll, Theodora Foster. 1983. Women, Religion, and Development in the Third World, New York: Praeger. Datta, Pradip Kumar. 1993. ‘VHP’s Ram: The Hindutva Movement in Ayodhya’, in Gyanendra Pandey (ed), Hindus and Others: The Question of Identity in India Today, pp. 46–73, New Delhi: Viking. Deshmukh, Nana. 1979. RSS, Victim of Slander, New Delhi: Vision. Fox, Richard G. 1989. Gandhian Utopia: Experiments with Culture, Boston: Beacon. Golwalkar, M. S. 1966. Bunch of Thoughts, Bangalore: Vikrama Prakashan. Gopal, Sarvepalli, Romila Thapar, Bipin Chandra et al. 1990. ‘The Political Abuse of History: Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhumi Dispute’, Social Scientist, 18(1–2): 76–81. King, Bruce. 1980. The New English Literatures: Cultural Nationalism in a Changing World, London and Basingstoke: Macmillan. Lal, Vinay. 2003. The History of History: Politics and Scholarship in Modern India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Mishra, Pratap Narain. 1985. Kya Kahati Hai Sarayu Dhara? Sri Ramjanmabhumi ki Kahani [What Says the River Sarayu? The Story of Ramjanmabhumi], Lucknow: Lokhit Prakashan. Naik, M. K. 1972. Raja Rao, New York: Twayne. Nandan, Justice Deoki. n.d. Sri Ramjanmabhumi: Itihasik evam Vidik Simiksha [Ramjanmabhumi: Historical and Legal Review], Allahabad: Suruchi.

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Nandy, Ashis. 1980. At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics and Culture, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. ———. 1983. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. ———. 1994. The Illegitimacy of Nationalism: Rabindranath Tagore and the Politics of Self, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. ———. 1995. ‘History’s Forgotten Doubles’, History and Theory, 32(4): 44–66. Niven, Alastair. 1987. Truth Within Fiction: A Study of Raja Rao’s ‘The Serpent and The Rope’, Calcutta: Writers Workshop. Pandey, Gyanendra. 1994. ‘Modes of History Writing: New Hindu History of Ayodhya’, Economic and Political Weekly, 29(25): 1523–8. Pandey, Ram Gopal ‘Sarad’. 1976. Sri Ram Janmabhumi ka Romanckari Itihas [The Wonder-Filled History of Sri Ramjanmabhumi], Ayodhya: Pandit Dvarikaprasad Sivgovind Pustakalay. Parmeshwaran, Uma. 1988. ‘Siva and Shakti in Raja Rao’s Novels’, World Literature Today, 62: 574–7. Radhakrishnan, S. (trans and ed). 1953. ‘Chandogya Upanisad’, in The Principal Upanisads, vol. 8.7, London: Allen and Unwin. Raine, Kathleen. 1988. ‘On the Serpent and the Rope’, World Literature Today, 62: 603–5. Rao, Raja. 1960. The Serpent and the Rope, New Delhi: Orient. ———. 1965. ‘The Writer and the Word’, The Literary Criterion, 7(1): 76–8. ———. 1971. The Cat and Shakespeare: A Tale of Modern India, New Delhi: Orient. ———. 1976. Comrade Kirillov, New Delhi: Orient. ———. 1988. The Chessmaster and His Moves, New Delhi: Vision. Rao, Raja, and Iqbal Singh (eds). 1948. Whither India? Baroda: Padmaja. Seshadri, H. V. 1984. Hindu Renaissance Under Way, Bangalore: Jagarana Prakashana. Sharrad, Paul. 1984. ‘Aspects of Mythic Form and Style in Raja Rao’s The Serpent and the Rope’, Journal of Indian Writing in English, 12(2): 82–95. ———. 1987. Raja Rao and Cultural Tradition, New Delhi: Sterling. Sri Ramjanmabhumi Mukti Yagya Samiti [Ramjanmabhumi Liberation Committee]. 1989. Sri Ramjanmabhumi ke Bare me Tathya, Ham Mandir Wahin Banayenge [The Truth about Ramjanmabhumi: We shall Build the Temple There], New Delhi: Suruchi. Sunder Rajan, Rajeswari. 1992. ‘Fixing English: Nation, Language, Subject’, in Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (ed), The Lie of the Land: English Literary Studies in India, pp. 7–28, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Tagore, Rabindranath. 1918. Nationalism, London: Macmillan. Urquhart, W. S. 1986. Vedanta and Modern Thought, New Delhi: Gyan.

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3 RESISTING THE BRITISH EMPIRE Raja Rao’s two political anthologies Changing India and Whither India? Letizia Alterno

Rao’s political anthologies, published both ahead and immediately after Indian independence, represent his first steps in attempting to define India in terms of its political modernity. They are radically different from Rao’s later critical engagement with the idea of India, which often sees it narrativised as a momentous, hypostatic ‘absent presence’ under the ongoing influence of space, with no geography (‘this India, a nameless, a shapeless, a timeless nothingness’—Rao 1988: 37)1 or else as a literary image which strategically moves away from modernity by a return to the ancient Indian systematic philosophy of advaita vedānta. The consequence of such a political re-imagining of India during the 1930s and 1940s will be a social re-alignment of global structures challenging predominant standards of language and culture (Bassnett and Trivedi 1999: 34–5). In this context, Homi Bhabha’s idea of the nation (1990), expressed in an interview, as a sliding concept caught in a process of continuous transformation (the nation’s ‘translationality’ so to say) can be useful to recognise how significantly authors like Rao have contributed towards a re-definition of the Indian nation primarily through their appropriation of the English language: The nation survives today in a complex, compromised situation. The trace of the nation survives in all kind of ways. So whether we talk about transnationalism, post-nationalism, de-nationalization, what you have to be aware of is what part of nationness is being recycled and reiterated, transformed, reapproximated, and retranslated. The important thing to understand is that we are living in translational times. And maybe all times are translational times. But I think it is our intellectual responsibility to understand that the ground beneath our feet is a shifting, sliding ground, and to try to actually take account of that. (Chance 2001) 50

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In line with Benedict Anderson’s view on the point that ‘nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are cultural artefacts of a particular kind’ (1983: 4), Bhabha envisages the nation as a narrativised entity undergoing a continuous verbal as well as cultural re-definition.2 I want to suggest here that it was indeed a cultural re-definition of the Indian nation that facilitated an emerging strand of fervent nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s, which eventually came into contact and clashed with British colonial ideologies. This is emphasised by Rao in the prefatory note to the volume Changing India, an anthology of writings which retraces Indian political, social, and philosophical thought through several personalities from pre-independent India. Changing India was edited with political writer and activist Iqbal Singh in 1939, a very significant year in the Indian struggle towards independence which accounts for the pioneering spirit inspiring the two editors to collect a number of political essays vibrant with intellectual fervour and passionate involvement in the national cause. Around this time, the Indian National Congress had already declared Hindi as the national language and Devanagari as the official script. More­ over, to stress the connection between politics and intellectual thought in 20th-century India, the national song, Vande Mataram, was chosen from the novel Anandamath by Bankimchandra Chatterjee.3 In this period, the Congress flag was given the status of national flag, slaughtering of cows was prosecutable, and the picture of Gandhi worshipped in schools, all elements on which Rao would later lay emphasis in Kanthapura, together with the rise of the more pragmatic socialism of Jawaharlal Nehru.4 During the same year, the anti-British Subhas Chandra Bose, founder of the Indian National Army, defeated Gandhi’s nominee and was elected president of the Congress. Openly opposing the British, and convinced that the people were ready for a revolution towards the liberation of India, Bose proposed the Congress a programme which gave the British Government a six-month ultimatum to grant India independence, preparing for a massive civil disobedience movement in case of refutation. Eventually, Gandhi and the opposition did not back the resolution and Bose preferred to resign from his post just a few months before the outbreak of the Second World War. Such was then the socio-historical context which saw the production of Rao’s earliest work and the idea of an Indian nation establishing its ideological–political premises. Published eight years ahead of independence, the title choice for Rao’s collection—Changing India—comes as no surprise as it evokes the idea of a collective willpower on the move towards a liberal socio-political transformation for the benefit of India and its people. Raja Rao and Iqbal Singh express their idea of change with a selection of writings meant to retrace, as they state, ‘the evolution of Indian thought in social, political and philosophical spheres during the past hundred years’ (1939: 16).5 From the ideas of committed reformist Raja Rammohan Roy, ‘the first of our moderns’ according to the editors 51

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(1939: 16), to the political thought of Jawaharlal Nehru, the anthology provides a socio-political cadre of almost 100 years. Its evolutionary curve is represented by the diverse approaches to politics, society, and religion nurtured by various authors who had personally contributed to a change in Indian history and culture. Together with Gandhi’s ideas on National Education, Rao and Singh also include the resolute standpoint on Indian nationalism of Chittaranjan Das, politician and minor poet who, as they observe, died in 1925, ‘just at the time when his help would have been of incalculable importance due to the appointment of the Simon Commission strongly opposed to India’ (Rao and Singh 1939: 150).6 With a somewhat apologetic tone, the authors praise the governing dynamics of the nationalist movement in India claiming that if Das had lived ‘he might have made the nationalist movement more supple in its activity and yet more forceful’ (Rao and Singh 1939: 150).7 With Changing India Rao intervenes in the political–sociological debate in the Indian context from circa 1839 to 1939. Its authors emphasise that ‘its general trend and logic seems to have been determined by a historical event of overwhelming significance—namely, the contact with the Western World’ (Rao and Singh 1939: 9). In retracing a ‘change’ in Indian thought, Rao and Iqbal Singh identify three different phases of the cultural encounter between India and the British, and by extension between India and the western world: The first phase was one of bewildered admiration of the Western civilization and a tendency towards imitation of all its elements, regardless of their intrinsic worth. This was naturally followed by a period of hostility and resistance to everything connected with the European culture. The contemporary phase will be seen to have brought a more corrective perspective and understanding. (1939: 9) The transition between the three different cultural phases Rao and Singh illustrate here was undoubtedly not as rigid. Nevertheless, histories of Indian Writing in English have by and large described the impact of western thought on Indian writers in terms of an initial phase of imitation of western modes of culture (Frantz Fanon’s discussion of ‘mimicry’ in Black Skin, White Masks (1986) or Homi Bhabha’s related intervention in The Location of Culture (1994) seem pertinent here), followed by a period of analysis and refusal, and a resulting, more problematic, negotiation of these two intellectual reactions.8 Rao’s ‘corrective perspective and understanding’ belongs to the ‘contemporary phase’ of his contextual present tense, that is, the end of the 1930s, but we have to go back to the end of the 19th century to retrace ‘the first phase’ Rao refers to, which relates to the causes behind such ‘imitation’ of western literary models. 52

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In his History of Indian Literature in English, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra argues that during the colonial period it was the urban elite of Calcutta that, under the promise of office jobs in British administration (for which English proficiency constituted a prerequisite), moved to the city, starting a process of ‘colonization of the mind’ (2003: 2).9 Colonialism, as Ashis Nandy has famously argued in his study of the psychology of the Indian response to colonial repression, is ‘first of all a matter of consciousness and needs to be defeated ultimately in the minds of men’ (1983: 63).10 The deep-rooted influence that British colonialism has exerted on the colonised mind, which in some ways is still carrying on, has expressed itself in various forms other than the mere political and economic control over a territory, as Edward Said showed in Orientalism (preceded only by Frantz Fanon). Rao and Singh’s Changing India had drawn attention to the idea of cultural re-definition and the Indian response to the influence of the West, arising out of a need to overcome a phase of ‘acute disorientation’, ‘a general intellectual mendicancy, an inanition of political thought’ (1948: vii–viii). Due to the long-lasting period of political struggle India had to confront when negotiating for her independence, the two editors decided to compile a second critical anthology. Published in 1948, hence matured over a span of almost ten years after the first, it addressed the issue of national freedom in the ‘tentative attempt to apprehend the various ideological trends operative in India at points of their most crystallised articulation’ (1948: vii). The anthology bore the title Whither India? (derived from Jawaharlal Nehru’s homonymous article figuring in it)11 so as to rhetorically evoke the idea of an India having to choose amongst a plurality of prospective directions offered by the multifarious political articulations of the 1940s. Published one year after the official date of independence, the anthology propounds an outline of the political trends of the time. Nehru’s views on the British capitalist hold over India, also part of the collection, constitute an exception as they date back to the 1930s. Yet the editors’ choice of including Nehru’s piece of writing seems to have been dictated by the comprehensive and lucid character of his analysis of global capitalism which he judged unsuitable for the Indian condition because it ‘led to ever-increasing conflicts with the rising nationalism of colonial countries and to social conflicts with powerful movements of the exploited working class’ (Rao and Singh 1948: 13). Anticipating Said’s discourse on Orientalism by almost half a century, Nehru explains that the difference between the East and the West is just an elaboration of the mind justifying imperialist objectives: ‘there is no such thing as East and West except in the minds of those who wish to make this an excuse for imperialist domination, or those who have inherited such myths and fictions from a confused metaphysical past’ (7).12 Acknowledging the need for a political change in India, Nehru looks at independence as a necessary step towards freedom: ‘Independence therefore cannot mean for us isolation but freedom from all imperialist control, and because Britain 53

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to-day represents imperialism, our freedom can only come after the British connection is severed’ (17).13 Therefore, according to Nehru, it was only by severing her connection with Britain that India would be released from her colonial burden. However, his suggestion of a direction towards which India should set off remains rather utopian since it offers no clear solution to India’s socio-economic impasse: ‘Whither India? Surely to the great and economic equality, to the ending of all exploitation of to-day and the near future’ (Rao and Singh 1948: 19). A more pragmatic approach is proposed by Jayaprakash Narayan, also included in the anthology, who translates Nehru’s thought into practical socialism, wishing ‘to abolish private ownership of the means of production [no longer in the hands of the Indian people] and to establish over them the ownership of the whole community’ (82). In the following brief account of the plurality of standpoints which are given voice in Whither India? I  wish to highlight a recurring attempt at inclusiveness detectable in Rao’s fictional work. Among these political utterances is, for instance, the revolutionary approach of Marxist K. S. Shelvankar, suggesting a subversion of the authoritarian State which would help India overcome its political impasse. Rejecting the idea of a ruling State altogether, the anarchist standpoint of M. P. T. Acharya refuses the violence of a government of the minority (which he associates with any idea of the State) along with the existence of any conception of territorial frontiers to be defended in the name of nationalism. In order to present the full range of the Indian political scene preceding independence, the anthology also includes two diverging viewpoints on the issues of separatism/anti-separatism of the Muslim community from the Hindu sections. The first viewpoint is introduced by Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s article ‘The Basis of Pakistan’ on the impossibility for Hindus and Muslims, two completely different cultures as he argues, to be united under a single political entity: Notwithstanding thousand years of close contact, nationalities which are divergent today as ever, cannot at any time be expected to transform themselves into one nation merely by means of subjecting them to democratic constitution and holding them forcibly together by unnatural and artificial methods of British Parliamentary Statuses.14 (144) The second stance on the issue of anti-separatism, advocated by N. Gangulee, supports the idea of a Constituent Assembly and speaks in favour of a sociopolitical integration. Such progressive strategy aims ‘to integrate the diverse and even conflicting aspect of civilization and culture that have sprung up within [India’s] borders’ and ‘to show that racial diversity can never be a handicap to political independence’ (Rao and Singh 1948: 193–4). In line 54

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with the effort towards inclusiveness and diversity of political perspectives expressed by the editors of Whither India?, Gangulee concludes that ‘it is to the interest of the nation that every possible fissiparous tendency be rectified if we are to become the arbiters of our own destinies’ (193). It is within this context of political, and more precisely anti-colonial, engagement that Rao started a literary career, which in its different phases bears the influence of Gandhi’s ideals and Nehru’s Marxism, discernible in his novels Kanthapura and Comrade Kirillov, and which at some later point would also address the problem of the coexistence of a Hindu India and a Muslim India within national borders, through representative characters of those two cultures in The Serpent and the Rope and The Chessmaster and His Moves. To conclude, the political and critical relevance of the two anthologies is justified not only by the editors’ strong political engagement with the Indian historical–political contexts of the 1930s and 1940s, but also by the variety of ideological and thematic concerns indicating a deep interest in the respect and endorsement of plural and heterogeneous perspectives, both in cultural and in political terms. Though the anthologies themselves proved to be a unique and short-lived political contribution by the author Rao, they were certainly a prologue to his later fictional and non-fictional production’s strive towards prioritising heterogeneity over homogeneity. Despite the inconsistencies that characterise Rao’s fiction, such as the allegiance to the ‘royalist’ position of some of his characters, the intermingling in this writer’s creative output of hybrid identities, thematic concerns, intertextual references, terms and quotations from different languages and literatures,15 the recurring presence in his novels of digressions within the main narrative line is an indication of Rao’s representation of diversity, which, however complex and problematic, also testifies to crucial contextual changes concerning the Indian nation.

Notes Dedication: This chapter and my efforts to birth this volume—my sādhanā—are dedicated to the memory of Raja Rao and two outstanding scholars, all dearly missed in the world of letters, language and the academia: Meenakshi Mukherjee and Wilfred P. Lehman. 1 Among other numerous references to India’s timelessness and geography-lessness in Rao’s novel The Chessmaster and His Moves, one reference in connection with Israel indicates explicitly that ‘Israel has a history and a geography, India has none’ (Rao 1988: 608). 2 For a critique of Bhabha’s postmodern debunking of modernity, see Ahmad (1992: 68–9). 3 In addition, as Joshna E. Rege points out, the anthem ‘was sung at the opening of the annual Indian National Congress sessions, despite the objections of Muslim Congress members to its clear references to the nation as the Goddess Durga’ (2004: 39).

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4 During this period Nehru represented, according to Rao, a concrete hope for a political change in India. This is evidenced in the writer’s own dissatisfaction and his acknowledgement in Kanthapura of Moorthy’s deviation from Gandhi’s ahimsa towards a more socialist-pragmatic politics. Rao’s views are summed up in an interview with Shiva Niranjan, in which no distinction is made by Rao between himself and his fictional characters: ‘SN: You have just said that in Kanthapura you were a Gandhian, but then towards the end of the novel we find Moorthy dissatisfied with Gandhi.   RR: Moorthy was a young man who felt dissatisfied after he suffered a defeat. . . . At one time, Nehru was also dissatisfied with Gandhi’s way of struggle. But if Nehru had not been a true Gandhian, India would not have been in the state we are today. At best you can say that Moorthy was a deviating Gandhian. Nehru too was a deviating Gandhian’ (Niranjan 1979: 23). 5 The anthology provides the reader with a selection of rare writings, amongst which letters, autobiographical sketches, and essays, from Raja Rammohan Roy to Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Rabindranath Tagore, Swami Vivekananda, M. K. Gandhi, Ananda Coomaraswamy, and Jawaharlal Nehru are included. 6 The Indian Statutory Commission, known as the Simon Commission after its chairman, was appointed in 1927 by the Conservative Government of Britain which, fearing an electoral defeat by the Labour Party, was concerned about the future of the empire. The Indian response to the Simon Commission—consisting exclusively of members of the British Parliament—was allegedly unanimous and resulted in the Simon Commission boycott in December 1927.     Significantly, Chittaranjan Das is mentioned by Rao in Kanthapura, along with Tilak and Gandhi, two major political figures of the struggle towards swaraj or Home Rule. See Rao (1938: 101). 7 Some major historical events and political turns following the publication of the anthology in 1939, such as the Quit India Movement proposed by Gandhi’s homonymous resolution in 1942, the following 1946 cabinet session held in order to frame a constitution for a self-governing, independent India, and Lord Mountbatten’s Plan for Partition in June 1947 (almost three months before independence), were yet to happen when the anthology was completed. 8 I identify this ‘period of analysis and refusal’ in Rao’s anti-colonial approach in Kanthapura, while seeing a ‘more problematic negotiation of these two intellectual reactions’ at work in Rao’s later writing. 9 ‘And yet’, Amit Chaudhuri argues, ‘rather than a simple conflict between native and foreign cultures, this phase of self-enquiry and self-redefinition is, substantially, what colonialism meant in India, so that, importantly, even categories such as “native” and “foreign” were confounded or realigned’ (Chaudhuri 2001). 10 I would add, agreeing with the views of Nandy, that such influence is also bilateral, in the sense that it has an effect on the mind on the coloniser as well as that of the colonised. This idea was re-formulated in the powerful anti-colonial critique authored by Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1986). 11 Significantly, Nehru also figures in the previous anthology, which presents three excerpts taken from his An Autobiography (2004). For their second anthology, Rao and Singh selected his article ‘Whither India?’ dated 1933, hence 15 years before 1948, as the opening article, as if to give it a semblance of continuity in thought and argument with their previous one. In the introduction to Whither India? they commented that Nehru ‘is represented here by an essay he wrote some fourteen years ago rather than by some of his recent pronouncements because it seems to be more lucid and coherent in argument’ (1948: xi).

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12 In 1978, Said would express a similar idea when formulating his understanding of western cultural hegemony over the Orient in terms of Orientalism, dealing with ‘not a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient (the East as career) despite or beyond any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a “real” Orient’ (Said 1978: 5). 13 Nehru’s disarming analysis of British imperialism is also an indication of the underlying rhetoric disguising the British imperialistic mission: ‘Under cover of fine and radical words and phrases they seek to hide the ugly and brutal face of imperialism and try to keep us in its embrace of death.’ Nehru is referring in particular to formulations such as ‘British Commonwealth of Nations’ that was meant to replace the previous formula ‘The British Empire’ (Rao and Singh 1948: 18). 14 It is clear from Jinnah’s words that only the separation of Pakistan from India will guarantee peace and harmony to the All-India Muslim League, which swore to never agree with the Federal Scheme according to the Government of India Act of 1935. 15 A further and coterminous example of Rao’s conscious efforts towards cultural inclusiveness and diversity is the short-lived but ‘first truly international publication to come out of India’, edited with fellow writer Ahmed Ali and published in Bombay in 1943; Tomorrow, as the editors’ blurb states, ‘will publish stories, poems, essays, translated from the major European and Asiatic languages, and help in the interpretation of TOMORROW.’ See Rao and Ali (1943).

References Ahmad, Aijaz. 1992. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, London and New York: Verso. Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso. Bassnett, Susan, and Harish Trivedi (eds). 1999. Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice, London: Routledge. Bhabha, Homi. 1990. Nation and Narration, London and New York: Routledge. ———. 1994. The Location of Culture, London and New York: Routledge. Chance, Kerry. 2001. ‘The Right to Narrate: Interview with Homi Bhabha’, 19 March. http://hrp.bard.edu/resource_pdfs/chance.hbhabha.pdf (accessed on 15 October 2020). Chaudhuri, Amit (ed). 2001. Modern Indian Literature, London: Picador. Fanon, Frantz. 1986. Black Skin, White Masks, London: Pluto. Mehrotra, Arvind Krishna (ed). 2003. A History of Indian Literature in English, London: C. Hurst. Nandy, Ashis. 1983. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Nehru, Jawaharlal. 2004. An Autobiography [1936]. New Delhi: Penguin. Niranjan, Shiva. 1979. ‘Interview with Raja Rao’, in K. N. Sinha (ed), Indian Writing in English, pp. 19–28, New Delhi: Heritage. Rao, Raja. 1938. Kanthapura, London: George Allen and Unwin. ———. 1988. The Chessmaster and His Moves, New Delhi: Vision. Rao, Raja, and Ahmed Ali (eds). 1943. Tomorrow, Bombay: Padma. Rao, Raja, and Iqbal Singh (eds). 1939. Changing India, London: George Allen and Unwin.

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———. 1948. Whither India? Socio-Politico Analyses, Bombay: Padma. Rege, Joshna E. 2004. Colonial Karma: Self, Action and Nation in the Indian English Novel, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Wa Thiong’o, Ngugi. 1986. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, London: Currey.

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4 THREADS OF IDENTITY Caste, clothing, and community in Raja Rao’s Kanthapura Rahul K. Gairola

Raja Rao’s narrative weavings Raja Rao’s novel Kanthapura fictionally depicts socio-political life in a south Indian village, as narrated by Achakka, a grandmother of the village, in the oral tradition of a purana. The elderly woman reveals that dominant castes like the Brahmins reside in the best sector of the village, while lower castes like Dalits and the pariahs are territorially marginalised through the spatial dynamics of prime agrarian real estate. Achakka affiliates with the incipient anti-colonial movement against British occupation in colonised India, thus signifying the socio-political leanings of both the narrator and Rao himself. Achakka in one instance describes a moment during which the villagers communally resolve, in the style of a Greek tragedy, to ‘organize a foreign-cloth boycott like at Sholapur’ (Rao 2013: 146). This chorus-like speech throughout the novel blends the purana style with legend (Mani 2001: 90) that amplifies the dissident voice of the people. Through its narrative style, the novel recounts the rise of swadesi and the more general Gandhian nationalist movement, both of which were mired in transnational politics of the British Raj’s textile trade in the modern era. The plot thus centres on the daily lives of everyday Indians as they interact among themselves and with the representatives of the British colonial government (Subramony 2017: 845). Moorthy, or Morthappa, is the novel’s principle male protagonist, which is likely due to his support of Gandhi’s non-violent resistance and humble lifestyle, both marked by politically signifying apparel. Throughout the novel, Moorthy receives help and support from allies including his mother Narsamma, the priest Temple Rangappa, Dorè, Patel Rangè Gowda, Rangamma the widow, and Rachananna the coolie. In contrast, Waterfall Venkamma emanates a bitterness against the protagonist and virulently rejects his inclinations towards the Non-Cooperation Movement, which is 59

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contextualised in the novel. As Moorthy spreads Gandhian ideology, he faces opposition from some villagers including Bhatta the moneylender, the Swami of Mysore, and the police inspector, among others. The novel as such historically unearths the relationship between adherents of Gandhi’s teachings on non-violent resistance to imperialist oppression on the one hand, and those in favour of the colonial government on the other (Chatterjee 2000). Rao weaves additional major themes throughout the plot including those related to economic independence and the erosion of the caste system, nationalism, and colonialism, as well as the expression of communal identities (Subha 2018). My analysis interweaves gender, sexual, caste, religious and national identities beneath the umbrella theme of ‘threads of identity’ that link the fictional narrative to the material reality of its author. Indeed, as Mulk Raj Anand articulates in an interview with Kamal D. Verma, Kanthapura is informed by Rao’s experiences of village life despite the author’s middleclass, upper caste origin (2017: 118–19). To Verma’s observation that the plot revolves around the influence of Gandhi on a rural village, I would add that clothing potently marks the interface between Rao’s written fiction and the historical moment in which he composed the novel. For example, male characters display their ideologies through garments that demonstrate the masculinist impact of both traditional and western cultures as these men compete for recognition in the eyes of the British in the hope of currying favour with them (Iqbal and Hiloidari 2015). The intertwined themes of gender and sexuality incisively cut through Rao’s narrative like a sewing needle that sutures together the social fabric of the villagers’ lives. While I would acquiesce that often a conflation of gender with sexuality in conventional sociological literature can reduce a robust analysis, Rao expresses each of them differently (Choudhury 2001).

Kanthapura’s costumes of caste and ritual I will detail here briefly that the caste system has been part of Hindu culture for many centuries and is linked to specific forms of ritual and dress although during colonisation, the young generation, being westernised, threatened to erode this system (Mishra 2015). As a result, adherence to caste is often viewed as a means for recuperating both indigenous culture and nationalist masculinity, and for representing Dalits or the untouchables as being constitutively exterior to the caste system like the dirt beneath the supreme deity Brahma’s feet (Bhat 2017). Rao’s novel dramatises this system of social stratification and chauvinism that comprises Hindu culture while signalling why it has endured to date. For instance, since every member of each respective caste must stay within their caste and adhere to codified manners, gestures, marriage, and clothing, the Swami excommunicates Moorthy for mixing with other castes (Raval 2016). This stages a damning 60

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impact on community and belonging of caste ideology linked to the ideologies interwoven into garments throughout Rao’s fictive landscape. This narrative kernel of the novel can be contextualised through a reading of Emma Tarlo’s Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India, in which she details the significance of caste in relation to Gandhian clothing. For example, Tarlo writes: In Gandhi’s own perception, the loincloth was a sign of India’s dire poverty and of the need to improve its wealth through swadeshi and through a wholesale rejection of European civilisation. It was a rejection not only of the material products of Europe, but also of the European value system with its criteria of decency. . . . Gandhi hoped visually to expose Indian poverty while simultaneously suggesting its resolution through hand-spinning, weaving, and freedom from British rule. (1996: 75) Tarlo thus brands Gandhi as ‘clothing manager of the nation’ whose ‘primary motive was to invent a form of pan-Indian headwear which anyone could afford and wear. . . . a man’s headwear was important for revealing his social and religious identity’ (83). She observes, for example, that Gandhi’s promotion of the khadi cap, made of homespun cotton, aimed ‘to attain a level of visual uniformity which had never existed in Indian headwear. Such uniformity was very important to Gandhi’ (83). To robustly underscore the historical and epistemological significance of gendered clothing in Kanthapura and the ways in which it narratively articulates anti-colonial ideology, one can begin by citing the opening pages of the novel as they foreshadow the pervasive significance of clothing in relation to caste, religion, and ritual. This commences with the narrator’s salute to Kenchamma, the village’s patron goddess: O Kenchamma! Protect us always like this through famine and disease, death and despair. . . . We shall offer you our first rice and our first fruit, and we shall offer you saris and bodice-cloth for every birth and marriage. (Rao 2013: 3‒4) This opening passage reveals the inextricable cultural link of clothing and ritual, both punctuated by religion, that Rao instils throughout his novel while also foregrounding the ways in which gendered apparel surfaces in Hindu rituals and customs. This is a significant narrative strategy from the inception of the novel that mediates against Thomas Babington Macaulay’s preference for ‘a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect’ (Macaulay 2003: 237). 61

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Rao’s novel reflects Macaulay’s rigid intolerance of indigenous languages and cultures in Indian colonialist society as manifested in gendered social networks early in his narrative. For example, readers witness white supremacy and labour extraction as perpetrated by the white ‘Hunter Sahib’ who wields a whip at the Skeffington Coffee Estate (Rao 2013: 61). The author likewise foregrounds gender through sartorial identity politics that are punctuated by ideologies of proper femininity and sexuality. Achhaka narrates Waterfall Venkamma’s harsh stigmatisation of the widow Rangamma for sporting ‘her gold belt and her Dharmawar [elegant, silk-woven] sari’ which, in Venkamma’s assessment, visually marks the widow as a ‘whore’ (Rao 2013: 5). Rao’s foregrounding echoes Rathi Vinay Jha’s contention that silk saris with emblazoned gold borders constitute a ‘vocabulary of Indian womanhood’ (Jha 1995: 78). Here, the gendered Indian woman’s dress operates as the socially transgressive stigma of sexual proclivity. In the next breath, Venkamma curses her widowed sister-in-law’s parents, further grumbling that ‘[i]f her [Rangamma’s] parents are poor, let them set fire to their dhoti and sari and die. Oh, if only I could have had the courage to put lizard-poison into their food!’ (5).

Fashioning masculine space in Kanthapura Rao depicts the villagers of Kanthapura as a traditional agrarian community that observes ancient cultural rituals constellated around the allocation of gender through responsibilities, clothing, and mannerisms. In most traditionally heteronormative societies, gender assignment is accomplished through clothing and chores expected of children in situated, domestic spaces (Haque 2011). Villagers raise their boys with the gendered expectations to behave and dress like ‘men’, thus galvanising them to articulate masculine gender identities as they transition from adolescence to manhood. I would here suggest that Moorthy is indoctrinated into learned society through the uniform typical of school children that outfits them as both objects of discipline for the school and subjects of the British Crown. This trend in attire reflects the fact that Hindu men signify patriarchal masculinity with signifying vestments including the bandhgala, lungi, kurta, angarkha, and sherwani. These clothes are worn strictly by men and are distinct from those worn by women (Kumar 2015). We may herein understand assertions of gender privilege in the context of essentialised differences between rural men and women that are further complicated by communal relations parsed out in social spaces carved out by the British Raj. For example, Parthasarathy writes that in Rao’s novel, ‘[s]pace within an Indian village is cut up and allocated to the different castes. Social relationships are interpersonal but hierarchical, with the Brahmin and the pariah at the opposite ends of the spectrum’ (2014: xiv). ‘Into this world’, continues Parthasarathy, ‘steps a young Brahmin, Moorthy, 62

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who is educated in the town and is therefore considered modern. He is a figure of authority because he combines in himself upper-caste status and a college education’ (xiv). Parthasarathy’s observation is key to my reading, expressly with respect to Moorthy: while the village territorialises tradition and religious classes, Moorthy moves from the urban, educated enclaves of the town into the rural countryside. Indeed, his domestic migration threatens to destabilise colonial rule as well as class oppression based on gender, caste, creed, and skin colour. The traditional Hindu/Brahmin clothing that Moorthy wears in the novel socially articulates an under-interpreted valence that drives Rao’s narrative even as it punctuates the intersection of religion, patriarchal privilege, political ideology, and the idealism of independence while simultaneously marking social transgression from commune and/or empire. Moorthy encourages both men and women to adhere to traditional clothing as a show of respect for Gandhianism that is arguably linked to the socialised gender roles of the village; this is to say that Moorthy’s garments articulate and assert his gender identity as a man (Dikheel 2019). One prominent marker of masculine leadership qualities is the white-coloured Gandhi cap made of  khadi that was popularised by him during the early part of the independence movement, and which Indian nationalists wore to socially signify ‘the duties’ of patriarchal leadership. As a result, the cap has transformed into a traditional, sartorial symbol for politicians and social activists (Meegaswatta 2013), of masculine command of socio-political issues in colonial Hindu society. In Kanthapura, several male characters wear the Gandhi cap at different points in time to assert their leadership qualities and thereby showcase their manhood within nationalist discourse. The fact that Rao depicts only men wearing the Gandhi cap suggests, as often the case with head wear, that it is a symbol of socio-political gender power unavailable to women. Moorthy wears the Gandhi cap when he is on his campaign trips to amass support for Gandhi’s anti-colonial movement. Temple Rangappa is another male character who visually signifies patriarchal leadership by wearing a Gandhi cap in solidarity with the movement as distinct from the women characters in the novel (Ramanathan 2012). This is especially significant as Lisa Trivedi pointedly argues: If the British first used clothing as a means to master their subjects, they used it later as a way of introducing modes of dress that they deemed morally superior to native attire. The new styles marked a break from the symbolic rhetoric of cloth and clothing in precolonial India. Western clothing was increasingly associated with the Crown and the promise of Western progress, which supplanted traditional native authority. (2007: xviii–xix) 63

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As observed by Trivedi, the significations of western clothing and its linked ideology of modernity were defined against the ‘unsophisticated native’ and/or ‘anti-colonial radical’ signified by the Gandhi cap. Indeed, in Kanthapura, we can critically read the cap as a socio-political signifier of indigenous, agrarian virility. The wearing of clothing exclusively by these male characters communicates the message that leadership capability is exclusively a masculine agenda (Agrawal 2018). Social and political power is thus linked to patriarchy and caste for both of which clothing is the veritable signifier in the rural sphere of mundane, domestic discourse. Dorè, a young  Brahmin  lad from the village who has attended the city university (Devi 2014) and is the most privileged of the villagers (Raj and Elmo 2013), visually signifies elitist masculinity and articulates his ideologies on gender identity through his clothing. He initially prefers western clothes and the transnational clout they socially signify but, after converting to Gandhian ideals and declaring support for Moorthy, reverts to traditional Hindu habiliment. In both instances, Dorè deploys dress to assert nationalist masculinity on a daily basis that reflects Gandhian ideology in the rural public sphere. We can also read the Swami as a character foil whom Rao sketches into the narrative in contradistinction to Dorè. The Swami, whose clothing articulates patriarchal sway in and through the appearance of religious righteousness, is the regional Hindu leader based in the city of Mysore who supports the Brahmins’ campaign against Moorthy’s Gandhian movement. Swamis act as figureheads of Hinduism, and therefore their clothing manifests the presence of god on earth. Accordingly, the Swami wears the traditional headgear, also known as the pagri or the dastar. The headgear represents values including valour, honour, and spirituality, among others, and symbolises male power and privilege (Mani 2001). His headgear signifies both loyalist and anti-colonial authority and affiliation, as well as the influence that he wields having been awarded 1,200 acres of wetland from the British Raj while deploring ‘all this Gandhi and Gindhi who cannot pronounce even a gayathri [poem]’ (Rao 2013: 123). The Swami is moreover clad in colourful religious clothing with ornaments and bright beads that polychromatically highlight his social status and the favour he curries with the British. The clothing that the Swami wears is thus a potent, naturalised symbol of the religious power associated with male identity that underscores the link between the clothes swamis wear and gender identity through the lens of Hinduism, which was regarded as a pantheistic form of spirituality and thus idolatrous by the British and Muslims. In ‘Clothing the Borders: Dress as a Signifier in Colonial and Post-Colonial Space’, Gareth Griffiths carefully surveys the ways in which dress and dress codes enforced disciplinary regimes in the visual register of daily, public

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life. In the context of anti-colonial movements against the British Raj, Griffiths details that [t]he use of traditional dress (dhoti and shawl) by Gandhi became a dress code specifically and deliberately adopted to indicate the decision that he and his followers would not support the economic and political normative codes of the Raj. However what evolved as a dress code adopted by most of Gandhi’s supporters (the use of khadi or homespun cotton) was an adaptation of a form of dress largely discarded until then among the European-educated classes that formed the Indian National Congress before Gandhi’s rise. Even after its adoption, khadi continued to be combined with additional identifying dress signifiers that marked sub-groups within the movement: e.g., Sikh turbans, Kashmiri tunics, or Pashtun headgear. (2017: 8) This passage demonstrates the profound way in which clothing signifies revolutionary bodies as much as it also identifies the targets of colonialist violence in the novels’ historical context. Before India gained independence, people from all walks of life actively recognised the significance of wearing indigenous cloth and apparel, which not only portrays villagers’ bodies as a unified social corpus but also visually signifies their religion. National identity undoubtedly influenced the manner of dress across Indian society. In the novel, a distinction surfaces in the manner of dressing among political nationalists and supporters of the colonial government (Das 2018). While supporters and sympathisers of the government, like the police inspector Badè Khan, wear uniforms assigned by the government, the nationalist politicians and Gandhi’s followers spin and wear khadi. Here, Rao completely skirts the burden of transnationalism, witnessed in sporting western-style clothing by several characters, in favour of a focused intent on the sociopolitical mandate of independence for India. That is, the wilful absence of transnational clothing arguably buttresses the theme of national independence that is symbolised by the indigenous clothing of Indian characters as underscored by the historical account rendered above by Griffiths.

Women’s garb in Kanthapura In the context of women’s dress, Rao’s novel invokes social spaces that underwrite the traditional gender roles for women, or what Judith Butler describes as a phantasmic, ‘proper’ gender (1993: 312). For Butler, gender is not ‘the rightful property of sex’; ‘[t]here is no “proper” gender’, she maintains, that is ‘in some sense that sex’s cultural property’ (1993: 312). However, in Rao’s novel, the notion of ‘proper’ gender as it is represented

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through Indian women’s apparel seems to invigorate yet challenge the independence movement. In other words, the ideologies of Hindu masculinity appear to shape the material spaces of family and domesticity that we associate with gendered femininity that Butler brands ‘proper’. For example, there are several references in the novel to the clothing worn by women on special occasions (Rao 2013: 109‒10). This is evinced in three different categories of women in Kanthapura: wealthy women engaged in celebrating matrimonial rituals of young maidens who are about to wed, village widows who have lost their husbands, and the supposed asexual witches of the swamps. In the first category, we witness Bhatta’s sisters wearing Dharmawar saris with ‘half-seer gold belts and diamond ear-rings’ (2013: 110) during marriages, festivals, and feasts as if their social bodies in the public sphere reflect the bounty and good fortune of these events. Moorthy insists that these saris are not to be worn by the women of his family, yet upon his return from prison they excitedly discuss donning elegant Dharmawar saris with a ‘diamond hair-flower’ in their hair (145). Dresses and jewellery reflect not only economic status, but also the cultural and religious practices of the village in contrast to women characters who transgress ‘proper’ femininity. This vision of femininity is moreover linked to wealth and prosperity: if a rich woman wears diamond jewellery, a poor woman will wear only an old sari: ‘And I shall wear the sari I wore at Nanjamma’s daughter’s marriage’ (145). Here and in South Asian culture, heterosexual union is socially and ideologically linked to material wealth such that heteronormative femininity as inflected by Hindu clothing and culture accrues cultural capital in the social sphere of the village. In contrast to these women, the novel represents three widows—­Achakka, Rangamma, and Ratna—who actively participate in the revolutionary ­movement. In reading the roles of widows in the novel, Ranmuthugala claims that ‘Rao’s ideas of women are conditioned by Mahatma Gandhi [so that] the widows play the role of the Indian woman who lacks the freedom to enjoy her sexuality but must take up arms to fight in the nationalist struggle’ (2019: 56–7). In the context of Ranmuthugala’s contention that widows are essentially denied erotic expression at the expense of the nationalist struggle, this appears to be true even in the context of accessories. Conservative Hindu society, for example, does not allow a widow to wear certain pieces of jewellery, a fact that is admitted ruefully: ‘now that I cannot wear the bangles’ (145). This reflects Rumina Sethi’s observation that Rao shapes these three widows into ‘nation mothers’ (1999: 136) whose asexuality reifies their anti-colonial nationalism. For such widows, serving in the role of ‘nation mother’ entails visceral anxiety and trauma around loss of the nation and its imagined communities. For example, Moorthy’s mother Narsamma is acutely distressed by such threats, inconsolably rolling on the floor while lamenting, ‘Oh, they’ll 66

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excommunicate us—they’ll excommunicate us, the Swami will excommunicate us’ (Rao 2013: 53). Narsamma’s emotional trauma is a function of her being old and widowed—both of which Rao reflects in the attire she wears. Narsamma, characterised as a pious old widow, nearing 65, wears broad ash-marks as a symbol of her ascetic austerity and is initially proud of her son’s ‘Gandhi affair’ (48‒49). She soon changes her opinion when the uppercaste community begins to perceive Moorthy as a ‘pariah-mixer’ (50). An old woman, Narsamma is set in her ways, ignorant of the exploitative burden of the pariahs: ‘when she was by the Aloe Lane she grew so violent with Pariah Bedayya, because he would not stand aside to let her pass by, that she spat on him and shouted at him and said it was all her son’s fault’ (56). Apart from socially segregated widows, I  would further observe the existence of a third group of native women lurking beyond the normative, gendered ideal, exterior to Butler’s ‘proper’ femininity as well as the realm of humanity. Rao flags this in the narrative when villagers juxtapose the ‘Mahatma’ as ‘a man of God’ against ‘wandering witches of the marshes’ who consume toddy (2013: 196). Here, a ‘witch’ wearing a turban and wielding a ‘lathi’ [stick] is viewed as socially transgressive rather than upwardly mobile in the arena of gendered apparel. Apart from the image of the witches of the marshes wearing turbans, there is no other description of women’s headgear in the novel. It is interesting how the novel depicts the gendered transition of a caste-riddled society into a class-less, nationalist entity influenced by the Non-Cooperation Movement through headgear. Such facets of the novel narratively manifest the notion that the 1930s’ Indian society depicted in the novel is historically and culturally moulded by several ideological inequalities on the levels of gender and caste, which in turn control power hierarchies in social interactions. It also marks the threat of ostracisation from community if conventions of clothing are breached. Under the leadership of Moorthy, the villagers forego strict obeisance to caste preferences and feel a cohesive unity taking shape, ‘people came— men, women, children—and the pariahs and the weavers and the potters all seemed to feel they were of one caste, one breath’ (2013: 173). If the Gandhian movement had used religious practices and cultural habits to unite people against the caste system, it also effectively used peoples’ skills to challenge the economic exploitation of the colonial rule and link it, along gender roles, with the freedom struggle. We note that gender, like caste, overdetermines the spatial relations between the housing arrangements of the members of the village. This reflects Rumina Sethi’s close reading of Kanthapura as a microcosm of national identity. She writes, The Indian village, nevertheless, continued to be regarded as the idealized antithesis of western civilization in terms of its spirituality and religious norms which were eternal. . . . [T]he assumption 67

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of the spiritual potential of India embodied in its villages became a fundamental feature in representations of Indian identity. (Sethi 1999: 25) Sethi’s observation that the village underscores a synergy between spirituality and religious norms in relation to the linear timeline of hegemonic western civilisation further amplifies the narrative’s disavowal of transnationalism as a theme that shapes the text (1999: 81–2). Rather, the focus remains fixed on the injustices of British colonialism throughout the subcontinent counterposed against the virtues of democracy enshrined in discourses of anti-colonial nationalism. As such, the theme of time mediates against readers’ identifying with the British imperium (since India is ancient and indigenous) or its commodified fashions (since indigenous clothing is preferred to foreign-manufactured apparel). In this anti-transnational, pro-nationalist context, socially transgressive women characters like the widows and the witches serve as catalysts of revolution and social change for poor people, women, children, and other marginalised groups. As such, these women cross the threshold of normative femininity precisely through engagement with revolutionary nationalism that rejects the British Crown’s exploitative consumerism—and Hinduism’s default to high caste patriarchy.

Khadi as the fabric of nationalism In conventional societal structures, caste validates the actions of people, imparting a sanctity even to mundane engagements and daily chores while culturally ingrained attitudes about caste hierarchy are repeatedly reflected in casual conversations in the novel. Kanthapura contains diametrically opposed castes with a few upwardly mobile male characters: the Swami asserts pride in Hindu culture whereas Moorthy, Dorè, and other male characters sport indigenous cloth to signify routine, anti-colonial sentiment. Moorthy moves through the village convincing the men and women to abandon western clothes and to begin spinning wool and weaving khadi cloth, which symbolises Hindu traditions and political ideologies (Singh 1973). Indeed, the political ideology of wearing traditional clothing forcefully articulates a quest for independence from the British colonisers (Jacob and Cerny 2004). Yet, pariah men in the novel are clad in loincloth and bereft of expensive ornaments (Runmuthugala 2019). Rao’s social pariahs are among the lowest castes with no meaningful privilege or power, and are thereby compelled to appeal to the mercy of the more privileged castes for nationalist participation. Even pariah children silently acquiesce to caste hierarchy: ‘[children] gaze silently at Moorthy, as though the sacred eagle had suddenly appeared in the heavens’ (Rao 2013: 99). But when Moorthy is about to enter Rangamma’s upper-caste house upon leaving a pariah household, he is advised to change his holy thread. Here, even a single thread cloaks 68

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Moorthy in an invisible armour of privilege whose sanctity is under threat owing to his intermixing with the lower castes. Finally, Rangamma and Moorthy reach a compromise whereby Moorthy takes a spoonful of holy Ganges water to ‘cleanse’ himself. The narrator simply comments: ‘After all a Brahmin is a Brahmin, sister!’ (101). Coolie workers at the Skeffington Estate, such as Rachanna, are clad in torn clothes and are ‘half-naked, starving’ (61) in a socially discernible manner that cogently signifies their low rank in the caste superstructure supported by Hinduism. There is also a constellated manifestation of traditional cultural identities linked to Hinduism that surface through various characters’ styles of dress. With the threat of westernisation disrupting Hindu traditions, most Indians, especially the older generation, impress upon their communities a need to abandon western clothing and return to wearing the traditional Hindu attire. Rao’s infusion of this socio-political identity and ideology that circulates throughout the public sphere of the community thus preserves villagers’ culture and methods of practicing non-violent Gandhian resistance (Acharya 2002). This is key to the theme of clothing since India has always had a rich tradition of weaving cloth—muslin, brocade, chanderi, maheshwari, and various other rich variations to name a few. The Indian textile industry was brutally curtailed by British mercantile interests in favour of the British textile industry based in Manchester. Providing an alternative to British cloth, khadi and the spinning wheel became the epicentre of the Gandhian movement that both nourished the vulnerable indigenous economy and allowed the struggle to reach rural and remote places. Indeed, khadi virtually became ‘the look’ of Gandhian non-violence. The national movement deployed the charkha or the spinning wheel not only as a physical embodiment of Gandhi’s social reconstruction programme, but also as a symbolic suggestion of India’s confidence in challenging British manipulation. The villagers in Rao’s novel take up spinning seriously, and soon it establishes a viable economic chain between the villagers and the city leaders: [A]nd from then onwards we all began to spin more and more, and more and more, and Moorthy sent bundles and bundles of yarn, and we got saris and bodice cloths and dhotis, and Moorthy said the Mahatma was very pleased. Maybe he would remember us! (2013: 105) Rao underscores khadi as a symbol of resistance against British colonialism through khadi dhotis (133) and khadi apparel worn especially by Sankar the advocate (134). In one instance, Sankar refuses to attend a wedding if his family did not wear khadi. Rather, he insists that not a single cloth of foreign yarn should be either worn by or gifted to people: ‘when they pleaded, “[j]ust one Dharmawar sari?” he would say “I am not the head of the family, but if you wear anything but khadi I will not go!” ’ (137‒8). Such 69

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sentiments reassure and encourage the villagers, particularly the women, to move ahead with the struggle; they plan to begin a sevika sangha, a volunteer corps, and to organise a foreign-cloth boycott ‘like at Sholapur’ in the village (146). Khadi narratively functions as a badge of being a nationalist, of caring for one’s country, of fighting for the cause of the people, and an identification mark even: ‘we would see the tall khadi-clad Volunteers coming by the afternoon bus’ (166). Spinning khadi had rendered employment and purpose to many, transcending into an embodiment of the sacred ideal of freedom. Gandhi had urged that khadi was a reaction against expropriated Indian wealth, and insisted on its adoption as a sacred duty. For example, the narrator of Kanthapura reveals: And he says too, spin every day. Spin and weave every day, for our mother is in tattered weeds and a poor mother needs clothes to cover her sores. If you spin, he says, the money that goes to the Red-man will stay within your country and the Mother can feed the foodless and the milkless and the clothless. (16‒17) Here, spinning can provide nutrition and clothing to ‘Mother India’ against the exploitative ventures of the British redcoats. In the summative words of Tarlo: ‘Historians have emphasised the fact that khadi acted as a fabric of unity, visually uniting Indian politicians and wealthy peasants with the rural poor’ (1996: 101). We again see Rao fashion khadi into the costume/ outfit/uniform of an independent India rooted in the subcontinent, resistant to transnationalism while rejecting economic and migratory policies that perpetuate the exploitation of indigenous South Asians.

Conclusion: spinning tales, costuming the nation This story of a small south Indian village caught in ‘the maelstrom of the Gandhian movement successfully probes the depths to which the nationalistic urge penetrated and . . . fused with traditional religious faith’ to ‘rediscover the Indian soul’ (Naik 1984: 105–6). Gender identity and sexuality are manifested via the clothing manners through the characters including Moorthy, Dorè, and the Swami who are often clad in traditional Hindu regalia to express their identities. The socio-political import of apparel surfaces front and centre after the death of Narsamma when Moorthy starts living with the educated widow, Rangamma, who is active in India’s independence movement. When he is shortly invited by Brahmin clerks to the Skeffington Coffee Estate to create an awareness of Gandhian teachings among the pariah coolies, the policeman Badè Khan beats him. In response, scantily clad coolies stand up for Moorthy and in reprisal beat Badè Khan—an 70

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action for which they are then thrown out of the estate. Moorthy continues his fight against social inequality while the women continue resistance under the leadership of Rangamma. The novel also records the impact of citizens’ boycott on the Indian markets: ‘from Kailas to Kanyakumari and from Karachi to Kachar, and shops are closed and bonfires lit, and khadi is the only thing that is sold’ (Rao 2013: 222). It can also be noted that the Gandhian ideology was neither hegemonic nor prescriptive as its modalities could be interpreted by the masses in their open ways. Tarlo makes the point that khadi itself could be viewed as an ambivalent marker of Indian nationalism that functioned as a ‘fabric of unity or fabric of difference’ (1996: 101). Thus interpreted, khadi as a material marker of indigenous ideologies of subjectivity and belonging may well become a symbol of transnational Gandhian politics by making available the freedom of choice. This is a vital observation to make for in its very absence we can discuss the traces of transnationality and the corresponding shape of Rao’s novel had such a theme been woven throughout the narrative. In addition to the use of khadi as a ‘symbol of the Congress’s national fabric’ (Naik 1984: 373), it is pertinent to add that a coolie throws an inflamed dhoti at the Skeffington Coffee Estate guards (Rao 2013: 236‒7). This act of setting a piece of clothing on fire literally becomes the spark that ignites an anti-colonial resistance which galvanises an indigenous movement led by women leaders. In sum, then, Kanthapura is an historical fiction of the events that took place in an Indian village before independence from Britain. By wearing traditional clothing, many of Rao’s characters demonstrate adherence to the local Hindu culture. In a way, this acts as a boost for the unification much needed in the fight against the British imperialists— but a unification movement characterised by the exclusion of Muslims. As I have demonstrated throughout this chapter, these anti-colonial and anti-­ transnational narrative cross-currents occur not just under the banner of the Indian Congress flag which symbolises the fabric of the nation, but the sartorial fabric in which Raja Rao dresses his characters.

References Acharya, Indranil. 2002. ‘ “Indianization” Through Vernacularization: The Art of Raja Rao in Kanthapura’, in Amar Nath Prasad (ed), The Indian Writing in English: Critical Explorations, pp. 46–53, New Delhi: Sarup. Agrawal, Shuchi. 2018. ‘Gandhian Philosophy and Vision in Raja Rao’s Kanthapura’, Journal of English Language and Literature (JOELL), 5(2): 12–15. Bhat, Ishfaq. 2017. ‘Kanthapura as a Postcolonial Text: Treatment of Indian Sensibility in Kanthapura’, International Journal of Trend in Scientific Research and Development, 2(1): 374–6. www.ijtsrd.com/humanities-and-the-arts/english/ 6981/kanthapura-as-a-postcolonial-text-treatment-of-indian-sensibility-inkanthapura/ishfaq-hussain-bhat (accessed on 24 April 2020).

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Butler, Judith. 1993. ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’, in Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (eds), The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, pp. 307–20, New York and London: Routledge. Chatterjee, M. 2000. ‘Khadi: The Fabric of the Nation in Raja Rao’s Kanthapura’, New Literatures Review, 36: 105–13. Choudhury, R. 2001. ‘Rumina Sethi’s Myths of the Nation: National Identity and Literary Representation’, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 32(2): 179–83. Das, Sonali. 2018. National Identity and Cultural Representation in the Novels of Arundhati Roy and Kiran Desai, New Castle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Devi, Seema. 2014. ‘Analysis of Kanthapura the Village: Novel of Raja Rao as a Fictional but Realistic Work in English’, Asian Journal of Multidimensional Research, 3(5): 60–6. Dikheel, H. K. H. 2019. ‘Plot Structure of Rao’s Kanthapura’, Journal of Al-Frahedis Arts, 2(37): 437–45. Griffiths, Gareth. 2017. ‘Clothing the Borders: Dress as a Signifier in Colonial and Post-Colonial Space’, in Daria Tunca and Janet Wilson (eds), Postcolonial Gateways and Walls: Under Construction, pp. 3–20, Leiden: Brill. Haque, Mohammed Rezaul. 2011. ‘The Nation and One of Its Fragments in Kanthapura’, Transnational Literature, 4(1): 1–19. http://hdl.handle.net/2328/25483 (accessed on 8 June 2020). Iqbal, Tasrina, and Pori Hiloidari. 2015. ‘Crossing the Cultural Frontiers in the Narrative of Kanthapura’, The Clarion-International Multidisciplinary Journal, 4(2): 108–11. Jacob, John, and Catherine Cerny. 2004. ‘Radical Drag Appearances and Identity: The Embodiment of Male Femininity and Social Critique’, Clothing and Textiles Research Journal, 2(3): 122–34. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/ 0887302X0402200303 (accessed on 17 June 2020). Jha, Rathi Vinay. 1995. ‘Kanchivani: The Saris of Kachipuram’, Marg: Woven Splendours: Indian Silk, 46(3): 75–88. Kumar, Ashok. 2015. ‘Narrative Techniques in Raja Rao’s Kanthapura’, International Journal of Literary Studies, 5(1): 50–2. Macaulay, Thomas Babington. 2003. ‘Minute on Indian Education’, in Barbara Harlow and Mia Carter (eds), Archives of Empire: From the East India Company to the Suez Canal, vol. 1, pp. 227–38, Durham: Duke University Press. Mani, K. R. Shiela. 2001. ‘Mythic Narrative in Raja Rao’s Kanthapura’, in Rajeshwar Mittapalli and Pier Paolo Piciucco (eds), The Fiction of Raja Rao: Critical Studies, pp. 87–95, New Delhi: Atlantic. Meegaswatta, Thilini. 2013. ‘New Regimes and Old Structures: An analysis of Ideological Shifts and Strategies of Change in Raja Rao’s Kanthapura’, in Anura Manatunga and C. D. S. Wettewe (eds), Asian Art, Culture and Heritage, pp. 179–90, Colombo, Sri Lanka: Centre for Asian Studies, University of Kelaniya and International Association for Asian Heritage. Mishra, R. K. 2015. ‘Under Men’s Eyes: Women in Kanthapura’, in Sanjeev Kumar Vishwakarma (ed), Feminism and Literature, pp. 258–69, Allahabad: Takhtotaaz. Naik, M. K. 1984. Dimensions of Indian English Literature, New Delhi: Sterling.

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Parthasarathy, R. 2014. ‘Introduction’, in Raja Rao, Kanthapura, pp. vii–xxix, Gurgaon: Penguin Modern Classics. Raj, P., and Prayer Elmo. 2013. ‘Gandhian Ideals in Raja Rao’s Kanthapura’, Galaxy: International Multidisciplinary Research Journal, 2(5): 1–9. Ramanathan, Geetha. 2012. Locating Gender in Modernism: The Outsider Female, New York: Routledge. Rao, Raja. 2013. Kanthapura, Bombay: Oxford University Press. Raval, Manish R. 2016. ‘Kanthapura: A Study’, International Journal of Research in Humanities and Social Sciences, 4(1): 30–3. Runmuthugala, M. E. P. 2019. ‘Widows and Concubines: Tradition and Deviance in the Women of Raja Rao’s Kanthapura’, Journal of International Women’s Studies, 20(3): 51–61. Sethi, Rumina. 1999. Myths of the Nation: National Identity and Literary Representations, Oxford: Clarendon. Singh, R. S. 1973. Raja Rao’s Kanthapura: An Analysis, New Delhi: Doaba House. Subha, V. 2018. ‘Nationalism and Spirituality in Raja Rao’s Kanthapura’, Research Journal of English Language and Literature, 6(4): 234–7. Subramony, R. 2017. ‘The Narrative Techniques in Raja Rao’s Kanthapura’, International Journal of Scientific Research in Science and Technology, 3(7): 844–6. Tarlo, Emma. 1996. Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India, London: Hurst. Trivedi, Lisa M. 2007. Clothing Gandhi’s Nation: Homespun and Modern India, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Verma, Kamal D. 2017. Understanding Mulk Raj Anand: His Mind and Art, New Delhi: Vision.

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5 THE CAT AND SHAKESPEARE, THE PROBLEM OF THE EGOSELF, AND THE VAGARIES OF LITERARY REPUTATION John C. Hawley

V. M. Madge describes The Cat and Shakespeare: A Tale of India as ‘not only the philosophical but also the aesthetic culmination of Raja Rao’s artistic endeavour’ (Madge 2013: 36). In this slim sequel to the heftier and more celebrated The Serpent and the Rope, Rao builds on the eponymous imagery of the earlier book, which had suggested that the reader is hardpressed to distinguish between a serpent and a rope to discern what is true, and argues in its sequel that it is far more difficult to see clearly what the apparent solidity of the world around one might suggest: something unseen but perhaps impending or subtending what our senses mistakenly conclude is real. These two Rao novels dance around the same campfire, leaving readers perplexed: do the flames and the shadows moving across the cave wall suggest a necessary distinction between the cat and Shakespeare, the serpent and the rope, or instead imply an optical trick reconciled by the brain as the cat and Shakespeare, the serpent and the rope, as principally a question of perspective? In an epistemological conundrum of this sort the concept of ‘truth’ is often encased in quotes to announce some suspicion that we cannot ever have sufficient access to the data necessary to pin down such a protean notion: reality, as these two Rao books prompt us to consider, is often unrecognised, if not unrecognisable—perhaps it is always a sometime thing, a subjective leap. In an unlikely, if not serendipitous, assemblage of images, this shorter of the two books speaks repeatedly about a cat and kittens, occasionally referencing Shakespeare and his various characters and, in particular, the ever-confused Hamlet. As in Shakespeare’s tragedy, a paralysing uncertainty stalks The Cat and Shakespeare on cushioned paws. Indeed, how many levels of uncertainty are there in the Shakespearean anti-hero’s infamous questioning of our unexpected consciousness of both our being and our 74

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impending non-being—what Heidegger would later term our ‘thrownness’ (Geworfenheit) into this visible world. Rao’s novella makes explicit reference to Hamlet’s famous question—‘To be or not to be,’ in all its peregrinations: Are we to act? Are we to end another’s being? Does our own being have any substantiality? And the reader is left wondering: Why set up this rather odd and disorienting configuration—a cat and the immortal bard, much as Rao’s earlier book had chosen a striking comparison (serpent/rope) to destabilise the reader’s reliance on any perceived identity. The Serpent and the Rope begs reference to the concept of qualia: even if we can agree that one is seeing a rope rather than a serpent, is one’s own experience of ‘rope’ the same as another’s? In that bemused spirit, this chapter will suggest that a similar heuristic dilemma presents itself when we look at the great literary figure we imagine when we pronounce the name ‘Raja Rao’, as when we look at the less fully delineated historical character known as ‘Shakespeare’. More than a decade after his death, Raja Rao’s reputation would seem to be settled. He is consistently listed as coequal, along with R. K. Narayan and Mulk Raj Anand, as a founder of the Indian novel in the English language. He is generally described as the most religious and philosophical of the three, Anand being the reformer and Narayan the artist (Khair 1988: 75; Narasimhaiah 1999: 148; Trivedi 2006: 9; Walsh 1983: 6). Indeed, some have described him as the greatest Indian novelist of the 20th century and as the most ‘Indian’ of the triumvirate (Assisi 2019: 1; Naik 1972: 7). But what does that mean? Mulk Raj Anand, for example, complained as follows about Rao: It’s not enough to go on and on about Atman and Brahman, about the reality of Brahman and the illusion of the world; it won’t do to cling blindly to Sankara’s Advaita of the ninth century. Our problems are different. How do we solve them? Can Sankara’s answers serve us today? (Paranjape 1998: 129)1 With friends like these, one wonders how Rao weathered the storm of criticism even in his own day, let alone in our own. But this question of national identification is doubly ironic in Rao’s case, since the Truth at the heart of his protagonists’ various quests cannot in any apodictic or even proleptic sense be categorised as ‘Indian’—it is universal, and thus his writing could be described as most trans-national of the three. Naik observes that Rao’s output is less than Narayan’s and Anand’s (1972: 7), and a naïve reader might understandably go farther and ask why it was that Rao left behind such a comparatively large number of unpublished works—did he consider them unfinished, did publishing houses find them unacceptable, or did the author perhaps not ‘identify’ with them? 75

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Despite the ongoing Raja Rao Publication Project at the University of Texas, sceptical contemporary publishing houses might reasonably doubt that he would draw enough readers throughout the English-speaking world, and even in India itself, to make a publication project financially viable. Indeed, the erstwhile editor-in-chief of that Publication Project, Letizia Alterno, in a 2010 article in the Times of India (ambiguously titled ‘A Forgotten Raja’), compared Rao to the wildly popular Salman Rushdie and ominously complained that, whereas Rushdie’s papers were acquired by Emory University and will be made available to the public, the fate of Rao’s archive remained uncertain. Given her devotion to Rao’s work, Alterno decried the ‘public desertion’ of ‘these precious manuscripts’ and reasonably laments ‘the relative ease with which our society’s owners of capital, both cultural and material, can dispose of other’s lives and careers’—and perhaps one might add, dispose of their reputations, as well. Her protest and perhaps others like it apparently bore fruit, since in 2016 Rao’s estate donated his archive to the Ransom Center at the University of Texas, where he had taught philosophy from 1966 to 1980, and thus can expect preservation. Without denying the value of Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, and others representing the ‘emerging trendy multicultural literary approaches of the 1980–90s’ (though ‘trendy’ is a dubious compliment, at best), Alterno in her 2010 article had protested that ‘Rao’s writing remains a conveniently unacknowledged, yet almost palpable presence in some of their works.’ She characterises him as ‘one of the leading anti-colonial literary voices coming from India’, sharing with the founders of the Négritude movement— Léopold Senghor, Aimé Cesaire, and Léon-Gontran Damas (who were his contemporaries)—‘an eagerness to evoke a sense of distinctiveness of their language and culture together with an attempt to evoke a pannational social and cultural identity’ (2010). But since Rao was difficult to read even when he was first published, that difficulty has become more obvious in our own day as readers become less tolerant of writing that challenges generic expectations. In trying his best to make The Chessmaster and His Moves intelligible to readers in 1997, for example, Makarand R. Paranjape began by protesting that ‘the book demands to be judged by its own standards, which most of the reviewers have failed to do’ (1998: 119). But can any book ‘for the ages’ make such a demand? In a word: yes. If one considers the history of works that were overlooked during their authors’ lives, but which were later disinterred from their premature graves, many reveal themselves in subsequent years as just what the doctor ordered for a later age. Perhaps Rao is another such writer, one that makes more demands on readers than would a popular novelist who sets out to entertain. Rao is a different sort of writer—one for whom the spaces between words are more important than what is on the page. Alistair Niven wrote 76

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that ‘he valued silence almost as a moral condition’ (2006), and Rao himself said that what you don’t say in life is as important as what you say. . . . The universe is vibrant silence. . . . I was married in France, and when I brought my first wife to India, she was very shocked at the silence. When we went into the houses of friends, they just sat and said nothing. In India, behind the chatter, there is silence. (Jussawalla and Dasenbrock 1992: 153–4) After he had retired from teaching, Rao’s third wife Susan would fondly describe his early mornings and portray her husband as slipping easily into the role of guru: He would talk about Indian philosophy and just enjoy nature. . . . And he would talk to trees and he would actually hear answers back. (Once) he told a tree that he was a Brahmin . . . and the tree told him back, ‘Yes, we’ve known about them for 4,000 years.’ (Ealy 2016) No surprise, therefore, that this follower of Gandhi agrees with the master’s observation in the introduction to My Experiments with Truth (1927) that one needs a guru to see the truth (Rao 2007: 62), but may spend most of one’s life seeking a suitable spiritual guide. The Cat and Shakespeare is an account of one clerk’s (Ramakrishna Pai) happy encounter with a neighbour (Govindan Nair) who turns out to be an excellent guru for Pai’s steps towards enlightenment. But since a guru does not give easy, pellucid answers to life’s meaning, Nair’s illogical leaps and roundabout locutions structure this novel as an atypical narrative, certainly not a linear plot that western readers would recognise as fitting a genre called ‘novel’: the narrative form of The Cat and Shakespeare and much of Rao’s works, in fact, is atypical of fiction written for Americans or the English. The style seems to be that of one’s peregrinating guru who might say: ‘here, I will say something; now, you think about it.’ In fact, one critic summarises the mixed reception Rao receives in the West as follows: The strengths of Rao’s novels are  .  .  . balanced by weaknesses acknowledged even by those who praise Rao most enthusiastically: frequent obscurity, occasional sententiousness, and unconvincing characterizations of ostensibly dramatically engaged figures who are, in fact, too often mouthpieces assigned to voice their author’s ideas. (Allen 2008: 389–90) 77

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With regard to The Cat and Shakespeare in particular, this critic seems to have lost patience altogether with Rao’s techniques, asking readers: ‘Is there more here than meets the reader’s suspicious critical eye? Perhaps only the Mother Cat knows’ (391). Janet M. Powers takes the opposite approach. Rather than implying an emperors’ clothing game of pretence covering vacuity, she describes the book’s structure as tight-rope walking between four states of consciousness (Powers 1988: 614). Under her tutelage, we are not surprised that the plot of the slim novel is very hard to follow, so difficult, in fact, that one would understandably conclude that telling a story is not the point of what Rao is trying to achieve. As Alterno puts it, ‘From beginning to end, Pai’s telling is indeed nothing but a question mark’ (2011: 45). Importantly, the character’s ongoing confusion (shared with the reader more frequently than many readers will find comfortable) is central to the apparent purpose of the book—which, again, is not to tell a story, but to pose metaphysical questions of great importance to the protagonist. Thus, the book poses a dilemma and stands as something of a koan: by presenting a protagonist with a relentlessly indeterminate, rather sluggish ego, Rao frustrates many (especially contemporary) readers’ expectations, driving them away from the book—or, conversely, driving them more deeply into it if they share the protagonist’s interest in metaphysics. The technique is fully intentional on Rao’s part. In the introduction to The Meaning of India, he emphasises the nature of process in his writing, noting that the essays were written over several years; some are repetitious, he acknowledges, and some contain mistaken interpretations of myths. Instead of correcting those mistakes, he asks to be forgiven and notes that this is all part of ‘the game’. ‘Come, let us play, you and I’, he concludes, having emphasised that the end . . . is not a question of success or defeat, but the abolition of contradiction, of duality—and of the peace it should bring to one. I play the game knowing I am the game. That, is the meaning of India. (2007: 7) This statement is interesting on a number of levels. If we are to take seriously the subtitle of The Cat and Shakespeare—‘a tale of modern India’— we may have to read the word ‘India’ symbolically, rather than literally. Rao suggests that writing itself is a game; he then identifies the game as himself; further, he extrapolates from himself to something he calls ‘India’ which, perhaps, we would be wrong to equate with the nation founded in 1947. He told an interviewer once, ‘I am always in India’ (Jussawalla and Dasenbrock 1992: 151), which says more about Rao than about India: as Stefano Mercanti writes, he follows Gandhi’s notion of a geographyless 78

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homeland which is Truth (2015: 228). This invites the criticism that Rao was not materially in touch with the Indian subcontinent, but in fact lived his life within a projected ‘idea’ of ‘India—thus, if his novels have come to be seen by many as the most ‘Indian’ of the triumvirate (in the narrow sense of most Hindu-philosophy-laden), this may have less to do with where he is than with how he is, so to speak. The same might be said about the settings of his novels, which rely less heavily than those of other authors on the specificities of place and more profoundly on the overlapping levels of consciousness among his characters: consciousness of what is, rather than what is to be. ‘India’, in such a context, is the internal urge to move ever closer to a recognition of one’s reality. It has less to do with the Taj Mahal than it has with clarity of ‘inner’ vision and self-consciousness. In the conclusion to her monograph on Rao, in an attempt to demonstrate that the expatriate author was nonetheless supremely ‘Indian’ with a ‘unique connection with Gauri Mata’, Alterno quotes from Rao’s 1963 essay, ‘Books Which Have Influenced Me’, to the effect that Whether it is through Dante or Shakespeare, through St. Thomas Aquinas or Nietzsche, you come back to the Upanishads and the Vedanta, realizing that wheresoever you go, you always return to the Himalayas, and whatever the rivers that flow, the waters are of the Gangotri. (Rao 1979: 45) This, Alterno observes, is a demonstration of both ‘a “transculturally Indian” mind’ (2011: 149) and that of Ashis Nandy’s analysis of India itself, swerving and bobbing as it adjusts to one or another assault or conquest over time. Nandy writes: Probably the uniqueness of Indian culture lies not so much in a unique ideology as in the society’s traditional ability to live with cultural ambiguities and to use them to build psychological and even metaphysical defences against cultural invasions. (Nandy 1983: 107) Alterno makes this assertion of the ‘Indian’ character of Rao’s writing even while admitting that as notable an Indian critic as Tabish Khair finds the ‘India’ that Rao remembers or embodies is long gone (2011: 149). Alterno lumps Khair together with ‘a conspicuous number’ of critics who note Rao’s ‘deliberate exile in foreign countries’ and ‘aloofness from “genuine” Indian culture’ (149). Regardless of the merits of the argument between Alterno and Khair, at heart it would seem that Rao is projecting an ‘India’, but one that is his own. In other words, he is describing himself. Perhaps this is true for any novelist who seeks in his or her writing to ‘recreate’ a particular 79

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geography that, per force, must always be made up of subjective memories. One might express this dynamic as an extension of the humility, so to speak, with which readers might seek to discern the ‘truth’ of a novel’s setting: where, for example, does Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul exactly duplicate the Istanbul that any tourist might access, and where is it an imagined place of the author’s outright creation? One thinks, for example, of Lawrence Thornton’s 1987 novel, Imagining Argentina, which is set in that South American country even though its author had never visited it. In those negotiations between the facticity of a place and its ‘re’-creation in a novel, the author consciously or unconsciously edits the truth and thereby reveals aspects of his or her desires, fears, obfuscations, obsessions. And so it is with Rao: his ‘India’ is not that of Alterno or Khair. The Cat and Shakespeare provides an opportunity for Rao to offer up a conversation between two characters who describe approaches to the contemporary moment in which his novel resides. One is Ramakrishna Pai, the narrator, who is an ordinary man with typical goals; he gradually comes to recognise these goals as illusions. The other is his neighbour, Govindan Nair, who works as a clerk in the local Rations Office. Nair is the more enlightened, and in his garrulous and semi-bumbling interactions with Pai he serves as the protagonist’s casual guru. The ‘events’ in the plot are not prepared for by the narrator (or the author, one could say); they simply happen to the characters, and are not emphasised as having particular significance. They are variously serendipitous or calamitous, but ultimately offer occasions to choose either greater consciousness, or deeper avoidance of Truth. Thus, Nair, the guru, suddenly loses his son, Shridhar, to pneumonia; a co-worker, Boothalinga Iyer, suddenly dies from an attack of asthma brought on at work by a joke Nair had some ‘responsibility’ for, though the fault seems irrelevant to Rao; and Nair is brought to trial on a charge of bribery, which one might argue he is guilty of, but for which he is acquitted. Similarly, Pai ‘endures’ life’s happenstance: his mistress becomes pregnant—and far from condemning this relationship, the novel boosts the symbolic importance of the mistress, Shantha, over the wife, Saroja; he develops ‘British’ boils on his body; his daughter’s arranged marriage does not come to be; he does not see his way clear to build the impressive three-storey house that preoccupies his dreams before Nair helps him move into an attitude of greater acceptance of things as they are. These plot details are not the author’s central focus; that is, in themselves they are not obviously symbolic and they are almost accidental pieces of furniture that provide moments of repose and reflection: read a few pages, then sit, and think. This relative indifference to specifics is suggested by the book’s scriptural characteristics: pick it up, open to any page, read a few pages, and one will have the entire book in a nutshell, since Rao writes it as a meditation. Everything in the book seems to revert back to the narrator, and then by extension to Rao. Pai writes, 80

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for example, of his mistress: ‘For a woman love is not development. Love is recognition’ (1992: 23). And Rao admits in an interview that: ‘When you love, you become deeply yourself. All objects are known only inside yourself. Even the one you love. Love is a way of knowing yourself. Loving is pure self-realization’ (Jussawalla and Dasenbrock 153). So Shantha ‘recognises’ the truth that is her love for Pai; and Pai, in loving her, apparently better knows himself. Whether or not he knows her, seems irrelevant to Rao, or is at least not a question with a satisfying answer that the protagonist can access. A lesson recurs throughout the book: the parable of a kitten, and the happiness attendant upon surrendering to being carried through one’s life by the Mother Cat (which some would call Fate). Thus, the narrator is fond of mashing together one arbitrary thing with another and proposing that they are dependent upon each other, that there is a connectivity between the least apparently related events and things. For example, after Pai is cured of his ‘British boils’, his mind meanders through time in this rather extraordinary passage (representative of many such passages throughout the book) that follows the course of a worm through an Indian soldier into a cow and thence into the milk that Pai drinks and who thereupon develops his ‘beautiful British bubo’ (Rao 1992: 25). In his bribery trial, Govindan Nair confuses the judge by speaking in riddles, prompting the judge to remark, ‘I cannot follow your argument, sir. Will you repeat?’ (88). Nair’s apparently illogical argument stresses the importance of recognising balance as ever present: all events are opportunities to accept the notion that one event necessitates its ‘opposite’. Thus, ‘Your Lordship, could I say Your Lordship without the idea of an Accused? Could I say respectable without the ideas of unrespectable coming into it? Without saying, I am not a woman, what does the word man mean?’ (1992: 89). The Government Advocate ‘had never had to argue against so strange a man’ (90), but the irrational approach wins the day. The frustrated judge admonishes Nair to speak the truth and gets the response: ‘The judge can give a judgment. The Government Advocate can accuse. . . . But the accused alone knows the truth.’ To the question from the judge how he would know the truth, Nair replies: ‘By being it . . . as if it were such a simple matter’ (91). After all that, though, the resolution of the case is not of great significance for Nair: ‘Govindan Nair was not set free. He was free’ (94). It is all a matter of recognition: ‘When you see the stone of the wall, and stone alone remains, you have no prison’ (101). This is as close as we might come to a blueprint for the approach Rao himself takes towards writing. It is not, for him, a question of getting from point A to point B. Alterno’s analysis is this: ‘He writes to achieve spiritual balance through self-analysis. To him, the figure of the writer is synonymous with the seeking devotee (sadhaka), the wise man (rishi), and the poet (kavi)’ (Alterno 2002). So the autobiographical overlay onto his characters 81

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and their search for Truth is apparent. He writes less for an audience, and more as a means of self-exploration. As he told an interviewer Writers do not communicate; that is a very misleading word. Writers have nothing to say; they experience.  .  .  . Writers are not so much interested in their audiences as you suggest. . . . How does a human being mature? By going deeper into himself. That is the Indian tradition. (Jussawalla and Dasenbrock 143) If this were the complete picture, one might wonder why Rao bothered to publish his material in the first place (though, as noted early in this chapter, there is a lot of material that he did not publish); why would it not be sufficient for his purposes to simply undertake the writing, and then destroy it once he had reached enlightenment? Rao did, at any rate, make an odd admission to a different interviewer: ‘I wanted to publish my books anonymously  .  .  . because I  think they don’t belong to me, but the publishers wouldn’t agree’ (Parthasarathy 1977: 30). ‘They don’t belong to me’—he perhaps envisions them as a series of workbooks or exercises that show the way through thickets that otherwise obscure the walking path towards Truth. One thinks of examples in the west like the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, which provide a daily regimen for self-centring, imagining a particular place from a Biblical story, and then encouraging a personal engagement with characters from that story—all for the purpose of coming to a greater realisation of what is real, what ‘counts’ in life, and then providing an incentive for personal commitment to changing the world for the better. Ignatius makes no reference throughout his exercises to the years in which they are written (1522–24), and thus the exercises themselves step outside time and remain forceful for spiritual seekers in any age. Similarly, while The Cat and Shakespeare includes clear markers of its particular historical moment (e.g., quite a few references to Hitler and the British colonisers) and makes snide remarks about the effects of colonialism and the pursuit of the ego by the colonisers (64), one would not immediately think of The Cat and Shakespeare as a classic anti-colonial tract. In fact, Rao is quite explicit on this point when contrasting himself with his two famous contemporaries, Narayan and Anand. Regarding Narayan he suggests that ‘[h]e writes of the social world; I do not. I am only interested in the Vedantist search for Truth, in metaphysics’; and of Anand he writes that he ‘is interested in changing the social world. I am not’ (Jussawalla and Dasenbrock 150; 151). Janet M. Powers demonstrates how this plays out in Rao’s novels: for her, the metaphysics of The Cat and Shakespeare that holds ‘the philosophical possibility of human enlightenment’ trumps the Marxism of Comrade Kirillov, which

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offers only ‘a set of objective solutions for economic well-being grounded in idealism’ (1988: 614). Clearly, then, The Cat and Shakespeare is not a western novel,2 not even a didactic western one, and western readers will most likely be put off by the whole endeavour: Does Rao endorse [guru] Nair’s complacent fatalism? We cannot be sure, because the character’s energetic interest in life seems clearly preferable to the static nature of [narrator] Pai’s reluctance to do more than dream of a fuller, more satisfactory life. . . . Rao’s novel seems content with the simple contrast between its thinly drawn protagonists. Is there more here than meets the reader’s suspicious critical eye? Perhaps only the Mother Cat knows. (Allen 2008: 391) Perhaps that is true, and perhaps Rao is perfectly content to leave it up to the ‘Mother Cat’ and to his readers who may or may not take the occasion to leap over the wall to the guru’s compound and have a metaphysical moment of meditation. After all, he admits that he is ‘not interested in communicating across cultures’: ‘I am what I  am. I  am an arrogant Indian— some people have called me an Indian imperialist. India’s greatness is its capacity to absorb’ (Jussawalla and Dasenbrock 143). So perhaps ‘India’, as Rao defines it, is just not for everyone; not everyone needs be absorbed. When asked about the inaccessibility of his literature to the common reader, Rao reiterates that [he is] not in the least interested in that. The people who wrote the Vedas didn’t say, “Would the common man understand?” . . . Greatness is that which helps you to be yourself, whosoever you may be, from your depth, not from your egocentric self. (Jussawalla and Dasenbrock 154–5) His task as a writer is to provide an occasion for his readers to break through the membrane that divides their demanding egocentric self from their ‘depth’. In the context of the novel’s apparent theme, everything in one’s life is there as a moment of potential encounter with Truth. Western ethics can be a distraction from such encounters. And if, in The Cat and Shakespeare, the judge and Government Advocate had never before encountered so idiosyncratic an accused individual as guru Govindan Nair, perhaps many readers also stumble through a good many pages of the book wondering what it is they are meant to think of Pai and Nair. Discomfort, from Rao’s point of view, is a good start.

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Rao has argued that England and America ‘have a very superficial culture’, a ‘horizontal culture’ (Jussawalla and Dasenbrock, 148). Looking at the popular literature now being written by Indians both in India and in the diaspora by writers like Chetan Bhagat or Arvind Adiga, perhaps Rao would say the same thing about his contemporary homeland. Interestingly, Makarand R. Paranjape characterises The Chessmaster and His Moves as ‘the most powerful attempt in contemporary English literature to temporize and legitimize an ideology that denies the ultimate reality of the phenomenal world’, but also as ‘an embarrassing book to have been written in the present world’ (1998: 129). Such a bifurcated and seemingly self-destructive critique fits very easily as a description of that most complicated of Rao’s books, but I would argue that it is likewise true of the comparatively simpler (and certainly shorter) The Cat and Shakespeare. As Paranjape puts it, ‘Raja Rao is going against the dominant culture not only of the West where he has spent most of his life, but of today’s India’ (129). But one’s country and even one’s age are part of the illusion, as for Rao: ‘There is no transformation. There is only rediscovery. One had never gone anywhere. One had always been where one is’ (2007: 61). As Stefano Mercanti wrote of The Cat and Shakespeare, ‘By going beyond both the gross back-ground perceived by the sense-organs and the subtle forms of the mind, the protagonist, Ramakrishna, at the end of the story intuits the substratum which underlies the duality of existence’ (232). I would suggest that Rao would likely not have minded if his works were not read by anyone ever again. In ‘The Writer and the Word’, he advised that one should ‘not heed expressions like “the reading public”, “communication”, etc.’ (2007: 156); and in accepting the Neustadt Prize in 1988 he said: the effort of the writer, if he’s sincere, is to forget himself in the process and go back to the light from which words come. . . . But I want to say to you in utter honesty: I would like to be completely nameless, and just be that reality which is beyond all of us who hear me . . . because I alone know I am incapable of writing what people say I have written. (2007: 158–9) And yet, there it is.

Notes 1 Anand’s criticism of Rao is echoed by Komalesha: ‘Raja Rao’s real genius lies definitely not in the places he discusses Vedantic stuff; but in the areas/corners untouched by or beyond the influence of Sankara, Vedas, Madhava and Aurobindo. It happens because whenever Rao discusses Vedantic stuff, he interferes in

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his own discourse to such an extent that the writer in him at once disappears. . . . Raja Rao’s greatness lies in the world outside his Hindu vision and it is high time the critical world focused on this aspect of Raja Rao’ (2009: 214–15). 2 On this point, see Niranjan’s interview with Rao (1979: 20).

References Allen, Bruce. 2008. ‘Wholeness is All: East and West, Flesh and Spirit, Illusion and Reality in the Fiction of Raja Rao’, in Jeffrey W. Hunter (ed), Contemporary Literary Criticism, pp. 286–392, Detroit: Gale. Alterno, Letizia. 2002. ‘The Mystic Cat: Reality and Maya in Raja Rao’s The Cat and Shakespeare’, Kakatiya Journal of English Studies (KJES), 22: 1–20. http:// rajarao.free.fr/Essay%20on%20The%20Cat%20and%20Shakespeare.pdf (accessed on 23 August 2018). ———. 2010. ‘A Forgotten Raja’, The Times of India, 8 May. https://timesofindia. indiatimes.com/india/A-forgotten-Raja/articleshow/5906330.cms (accessed on 19 November 2019). ———. 2011. Raja Rao: An Introduction, New Delhi: Cambridge University Press. Assisi, Francis C. 2019. ‘Breathing India in America: A Tribute to Raja Rao’. www. beilharz.com/autores/rao/ (accessed on 19 November 2019). Ealy, Charles. 2016. ‘UT’s Ransom Center Gets Archive of Noted Indian Writer Raja Rao’, American Statesman, 14 June. www.mystatesman.com/news/local/ ransom-center-gets-archive-noted-indian-writer-raja-rao/cUmpdP6z8Aw1IbMG gmqmxI/ (accessed on 22 August 2018). Jussawalla, Feroza, and Reed Way Dasenbrock (eds). 1992. Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World, Jackson and London: University Press of Mississippi. Khair, Tabish. 1988. ‘Raja Rao and Alien Universality’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 33(1): 75–84. Komalesha, H. S. 2009. ‘Desi Kanthapura, Marga The Serpent and the Rope: Reassessing the Literary Lineage and Value of Raja Rao’, Indian Literature, 53(6): 202–17. Madge, V. M. 2013. ‘A Centennial Tribute to Raja Rao’, The Literary Criterion, 48(3–4): 33–8. Mercanti, Stefano. 2015. ‘From Indianness to Humanness: Raja Rao and the Politics of Truth’, Lingue e Linguaggi, 13: 227–34. Naik, M. K. 1972. Raja Rao, New York: Twayne. Nandy, Ashis. 1983. The Intimate Enemy, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Narasimhaiah, C. D. 1999. ‘Raja Rao: The Metaphysical Novel (The Serpent and the Rope) and its Significance for Our Age’, in The Swan and the Eagle, pp. 200– 41, New Delhi: Vision. Niranjan, Shiva. 1979. ‘An Interview with Raja Rao’, in Krishna Nandan Sinha (ed), Indian Writing in English, pp. 19–28, New Delhi: Heritage. Niven, Alistair. 2006. ‘Raja Rao: Master of Indo-Anglian fiction’, The Independent, 19 July. www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/raja-rao-6094956.html (accessed on 29 November 2018). Paranjape, Makarand. 1998. ‘The Difficult Pilgrimage: The Chessmaster and His Moves and Its Readers’, in Robert L. Hardgrave, Jr. (ed), Word as Mantra: The Art of Raja Rao, pp. 108–32, New Delhi: Katha.

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Parthasarathy, R. 1977. ‘The Future World is Being Made in America: An Interview with Raja Rao’, Span: 29–30. Powers, Janet M. 1988. ‘Initiate Meets Guru: The Cat and Shakespeare and Comrade Kirillov’, World Literature Today, 62(4): 611–16. Rao, Raja. 1979. ‘Books Which Have Influenced Me’, in M. K. Naik (ed), Aspects of Indian Writing in English: Essays in Honour of K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar, pp. 45–9, New Delhi: Macmillan. ———. 1992. The Cat and Shakespeare, London: Asia Publishing House. ———. 2007. The Meaning of India, New Delhi: Vision. Trivedi, Harish. 2006. ‘Raja Rao: The Twice-Born Novelist’, Indian Literature, 50(5): 8–12. Walsh, W. 1983. R. K. Narayan: A Critical Appreciation, New Delhi: Allied.

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Part II PHILOSOPHY, AESTHETICS, GENDER, AND THE NOVEL

6 COMRADE KIRILLOV ‘A New Novel’ newly understood Paul Sharrad

It has been a long time since I wrote anything about Raja Rao’s work, and since then I have detoured from Indian writing to Pacific Islands writing and back to my roots in Australian literature. Rao’s style and his commentary on creating a written English that gives a sense of Indian speech has been useful in helping me think about the much newer literatures of Oceania, building as they do on a cultural tradition of performance and orality in languages other than English. Revisiting Australian literature has, by contrast, allowed me think about literary careers as they are shaped by critical reception and also about the relationship between abstract thought and art. A revival now of critical attention to Rao may be compared to the widespread discussion of Patrick White’s novels following his Nobel Prize and later ‘experimental’ fiction, a slump in critical attention afterwards, and the revival prompted in part by the centenary of his birth in 2012 and also by a turn in critical studies from a solidly secular attitude towards consideration of matters spiritual (Ashcroft et al. 2009; Vanden Driesen and Ashcroft 2014). Earlier critiques of Rao’s play across fiction, Vedanta, history, and epic find an interesting echo as well in evaluations of Australian writing across the same years as Rao’s literary output. H. M. Green, in his 1961 A History of Australian Literature, praised the country’s best poets as adding to ballad tales and lyric description a weight of intellectual exploration. One of his favoured few, Judith Wright, nonetheless, turned a critical eye on a fellow ‘intellectual’ poet, R. D. FitzGerald, and (echoed by subsequent critics) accused him of writing philosophy rather than poetry, as though the two were mutually exclusive (Green 1961: 883; Kramer 1965–66). Like White’s revival, it is a good time to revisit Rao’s writing; and like FitzGerald’s poetry, it is still pertinent to consider the balance of philosophy and literary craft in his fiction. The turn in literary studies towards models of World Literature (Cooppan 2009), transnational dynamics (Ashcroft 2010, 2011), and reapplication of geographers’ methodologies relating to scale (Dixon 2015), suggests new ways of reading or positioning Rao’s fiction. 89

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By all sorts of measures, The Serpent and the Rope deserves to be considered not only in terms of the ‘East–West encounter’ theme favoured in older analyses, but as a study of the problematics of the transnational psyche and as a world-literary engagement with texts and cultures (Rao 1960). Clearly, Comrade Kirillov also demands a world-literary reading context, primarily because of its overt intertextual riff on Dostoevsky’s The Possessed. Like that novel, which operates on a national–international scale as characters debate the nature of Russian society in contrast to France and Germany, Rao’s book contrasts the intellectual world and nation scales, and the even more reduced personal scale of two interlocutors and their two companions, mostly confined to one room in a London apartment. Looking back over the critical questioning of Rao’s literary form (locating the looseness of narrative and lengthy verbal essays in puranic models, for instance), we can see the largely nation-based scale of debate. However, the turn to world and transnational frames allows us to connect with critiques such as the Australian questioning of FitzGerald’s poetry, to assess that it is still pertinent to consider the balance of philosophy and literary craft in Rao’s fiction, but not necessary to tie that down to any essentialist cultural base. This is particularly the case with Comrade Kirillov, a book that has suffered from the same response as Judith Wright’s to FitzGerald: too much abstract debate; not enough literary form and finesse. As Shyamala Narayan and Dieter Riemenschneider outline, critics have consistently declared the work to be Rao’s least successful (Narayan 1988: 111; Riemenschneider 2005: 324). They may be right, but the judgement usually rests upon a misapprehension of the nature of the text and thereby overlooks interesting aspects of its struggles with content and form. Comrade Kirillov is something of an anomaly in Raja Rao’s literary corpus. The edition most people now see is labelled ‘A New Novel’ and appeared in India in 1976. As such, it would appear to be a culmination of a writer’s evolution from the stories to Kanthapura (1938), to The Serpent and the Rope (1960), and finally to The Cat and Shakespeare (1965). It has been read accordingly—scathingly by D. S. Maini (1980: 19)—as a decline in achievement. Esha Dey, for example, cannot see why Rao resuscitates the Buddha in Comrade Kirillov when his ideas have been dismissed in The Serpent and the Rope (1992: 197). Riemenschneider’s excellent 2005 survey of critical responses to Rao still shows everyone reading the book as a late work that falls short of previous successes. Narayan acknowledges a possible earlier provenance but concurs with the general opinion that ‘[i]t is not in the same class as Raja Rao’s other works’ (1988: 99, 111). Certainly, coming back to the novel ‘cold’ after several decades, one is struck by the clumsy opening—like a bad translation in need of a good editor: I first met communism in Kirillov. Kirillov (as I shall explain later) was an Indian, his pants too dissimilar for his limbs, his coat 90

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flapping a little too fatherly on his small, rounded muscles of seating. . . . In Adyar they spoke, did they not, that some magnificent feminine presence had twisted his young heart. (Rao 1976: 7–8) The reader might well ask what needs explaining—either he is Indian or he isn’t. Why not just say the pants were a bad fit, and what is ‘fatherly’ about a flapping coat? And even allowing for the archaic construction of unwarranted familiarity with Adyar’s gossip, surely the narrator/writer, despite using a second or third language, would know how to correct the egregious ‘spoke that’. On style alone, Comrade Kirillov seems to be more an apprentice work than a summa literaria. This incongruity is explained partly by the actual history of the book. Rao included a ‘postface’ in the 1976 edition explaining that it had been written originally in English but first published (with The Cat and Shakespeare) in French translation in 1965. The pairing suggests that Comrade Kirillov should be another development from The Serpent and the Rope, since its companion was specifically described by Rao as being written after the larger book was completed (1955–56), when its author had discovered his guru in Travancore (Niranjan 1979; Kaushik 1983). However, Perry Westbrook records sighting a manuscript intended to introduce Comrade Kirillov in which Rao says he wrote the story in 1949 once he had returned to France after the wartime years in which he supported the Independence movement in India (1988: 617). Similarly, ‘on the basis of a critical examination of a number of published and unpublished sources’, Letizia Alterno argues in her monograph on Raja Rao that ‘the novel was conceived some time before 1950, during a period when Rao’s existential wavering was not yet over’ (2011: 125). What we have, then, is a text that carries vestiges of the voice in Kanthapura, with its oral folkloric idiom and penchant for myth and ritual, mixed with an over-reaching attempt to develop the highliterary philosophical register of The Serpent and the Rope. Narayan notes the residue of Kanthapura in Kannada names creeping in despite their referent being an Iyer family from further south, and she detects a hint of The Serpent and the Rope in a passing mention of the narrator as ‘Rama’ despite a footnote identifying the narrator R with Rao himself (Rao 1976: 41, 116; Narayan 1988: 107). With the war and the Quit India Movement still fresh in his memory, the politics of Gandhism versus a more militant resistance from the Left had to be worked through. Whereas in The Serpent and the Rope, we can see historical figures such as Hitler and Stalin being smoothed into more philosophical reflections on history and culture, in Kirillov they are still directly embodied and debated. Janet M. Powers claims that Rao’s Kirillov is based on a real Indian Communist who influenced Stalin’s decision not to support India’s independence struggle during the war so that Britain would be better 91

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able to fight Hitler (1988: 612). We know that Kirillov is also partly based on Rao’s cousin, who was one of Annie Besant’s nominated ‘adepts’ sent to Europe to prepare the way for the Messiah of theosophy (Rao 1988: 537). Rao’s overt recourse to Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed seems to indicate the writer’s realisation that he needed some literary apparatus to take his material away from the immediacy of the 1940s’ political debate and historical reportage. The somewhat excessive attention to Kirillov’s tie (derived from Dostoyevsky) can be seen in this regard as a modernist touch of atmospheric symbolism intended to invest him with the aura of a literary character. Criticised by Narayan as a stylistic defect (1988: 108), we may detect in the clearly overblown prose—for example, the memorable excess of describing the curvature of the tie as ‘praterplusparenthetical’ (Rao 1976: 25, 30–1)—a conscious, perhaps even self-mocking artifice on Rao’s part. Self-mockery is not usually a trait evident in the solemn pronouncements about writing and Vedanta that Rao produces in essays. However, several commentators have identified irony as the characteristic tone of Comrade Kirillov (Narayan 1988: 106–8; Badve 1979). That is partly manifest in deliberate passages of parodic ventriloquism throughout the book. The text recreates the self-congratulatory sentiments of liberal-left English folk running faddish vegetarian eateries: we do not say so, but you know we are the only people who treat black and white alike. We have no nationality either—we work according to Bircher-Benner. He is Swiss, as you know—but here remember we are in England! (Rao 1976: 17) The narrator wryly comments that according to one dietary theory, ‘[y]ou grew more agile, intellectual or kindly, according to your beetroot c­ ontent’ (16) and goes on to show the false idealism of a well-meaning minority in discussing his actual experience: ‘This colour problem in England is ­terrible—you always know what you are through others’ eyes.  .  .  . You seemed small in comparison with the sturdy English’ (19). He goes on to expose the hypocrisy in Indians who, despite sympathy with ‘negroes’, adopt a superior attitude on the basis of their own lighter skin. At other times, we are presented with the morbid thoughts of Kirillov anticipating death. The text slides from reporting the lack of food in Kirillov’s apartment to the rise of the new Communist state: Kirillov will die—but India shall be free. Kirillov will kill himself— but the new Communist State will rise. Man is a biological equation, and Marxism has no traffickings with individuals. All men in Marxism have anonymous names, and death—this last biological act—is an act of sheer surgery against betrayal. I  will not betray 92

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my ideas—I am hungry. I die. The messiah will rise of my blood, and the colours of the Communist land are the blue of meditations. Come, comrade death, I am yours . . . (26–7) It is only in retrospect, when the narrator says, ‘If such were his night meditations . . .’ (32), that we realise the passage is not a transcription of Kirillov’s words but merely the narrator’s imaginings of his thoughts. Only then do we perceive the implied critical distance. The effect of this slippery shift in voice is twofold: we have both a sense of the writer working too spontaneously to make things clear and a growing intuition that something complex is being worked through that itself resists simplification. Slyness lurks in the bushes of confusion. At times the reader struggles to work out quickly the shift in focalisation and attitude. It is as though Rao is trying on a number of voices, almost in playscript, suggesting not only the critical regard of the narrator but also a general lack of control on any consistent position from which to view the world. As Esha Dey says, ‘unlike Rao’s other novels which emphasize a continuous flow, Comrade Kirillov is perceptibly marked into different blocks, separated from each other’ (1992: 189). In a book coming from the peak of a writer’s career, this might well be a significant flaw; in a novel that is really trying out a number of positions in preparation for the magnum opus, it is more understandable. It may even be possible to see such uncertainty as essential to the vision of the text. Rao says that he was psychologically unstable in the 1940s such that he was ready to give up writing altogether and retire into metaphysical pursuits in Benares, and it was not until his guru guided him to write it all out in The Serpent and the Rope that he found stability (Sharrad 1987: 10). We might recall that Rao’s marriage to Camille Mouly ended in 1949 (a distressing event, only confronted later in Ramaswamy’s separation from Madeleine, and distanced in Comrade Kirillov by being displaced onto the death of Kirillov’s wife). If Comrade Kirillov reflects that early period of instability, then form matches content and style, and the achievement is not as slight as previously envisaged. We may still surmise that the resultant novella is not a major success, perhaps because the writer’s personal uncertainty comes through in a decided lack of control over his material; however, as an experiment bridging two different literary modes, the book appears to be more appealing. The critical distances that the ventriloquised passages set up can be connected to the narrator’s exposé of Kirillov’s contradictions; they also tend to feed back onto the enigmatic figure of the narrator himself, named ‘R’, who is in some respects the author’s alter ego. In this we may detect a rehearsal of the complexities of The Serpent and the Rope. As we get more information about the narrator, so the figure of Kirillov comes into sharper focus. R is younger, a ‘heathen’ by contrast to Kirillov’s ‘religion’, and unlike him, 93

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‘a Gandhian and a Vedantin and an Indian’ (Rao 1976: 8, 26). R signs petitions against Stalin’s show trials, whereas Kirillov is prepared to sacrifice individual rights to the orthodoxy of state policy (30; 42–45). But the two are interconnected: R is not only a distant cousin of Kirillov’s but also aspires to be a writer as does Kirillov. It is also revealed that both men have ‘lost their threads’ (28)—meaning, presumably, that they have lost caste status by travelling across the seas to Europe—even though they have not relinquished their cultural roots. Regardless of their differences, the inner contradictions in one person flow into the ambivalent attitudes of the other, keeping them engaged with each other until the younger man becomes ‘uncle’ to the older man’s son. R is not spared some of the ironic critique in the text: he declares his admiration for Hemingway’s writing (1976: 28), but we can tell easily that his prose is anything but brusque. In fact, irony is allowed to work only in favour of the narrator. R presents himself as ‘innocent’ (26) by comparison with the better educated, more politically informed Kirillov, but the positioning of his voice at a critical distance from Kirillov’s ‘statistics’ and logic shows up a certain ruthless innocence in the willed dedication to Marxist doctrine, as it also reveals the underlying tensions of deep-seated emotional ties to Hindu poetry and ritual. Unlike the ironic ‘feedback loops’ in The Serpent and the Rope, the young narrator, as Kirillov’s foil, escapes his own ambiguities. If his protest that all the millennial social reforms will not erase inner despair and metaphysical yearning (40) sounds a bit feeble against Kirillov’s energetic dogmatism, he nonetheless comes out of the whole story as the wiser being for not succumbing to the secular levelling politics of the West. If Kirillov is sent to Europe and America as a harbinger of the ‘wisdom of the East’ on the one hand, he is seduced by its opposite on the other, even if only at the level of the intellect, whereas R returns to his homeland, taking the young Kamal Das (who embodies a meeting of East and West) to Kanyakumari, the Hindu-approved confluence of oceans presided over by the missionising spirit of Swami Vivekananda. Possibly Rao was not yet ready to confront his own contradictions, and let his narrator affirm an identity and cultural ideal that was comforting to the freshly re-expatriated, newly divorced writer. The tidy resolution of the book by contrast with its untidy internal workings is consistent with the dichotomous outcome of Kanthapura and the theme of idealism versus pragmatic reality. The early novel ends in political defeat and Moorthy’s defection from Gandhi to Nehru, but salvages a moral victory vested in sentimental ties to cultural ideals that survive regardless. Comrade Kirillov rehearses the paradox that extreme idealisms look the same, even though they are in direct opposition (‘And how like a Sadhu Kirillov was too—clean in his habits, almost ascetic in his spare ways’ [72]), but opts for a cultural ideal of India as purer than the ethically dubious realpolitik of subscribing to Communist doctrine. The book admits to 94

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shortcomings in Indian society and Gandhian ideals (via Kirillov’s diatribe, thereby fencing them off [33–37]) but resolves its story not in favour of historical determinism, but in terms of the Kanthapura-like folkloric numerology running through the book at an idealised mythic site. Most critics draw attention to the sudden break in narrative when R returns from America to find that Kirillov’s wife, Irene, and second child have died. The logic of the writer’s debt to Dostoyevsky demands that one of the key characters die, but we expect it to be Kirillov, who has labelled himself ‘an old moralist’ and therefore ‘a man fit for liquidation’ (1976: 39). When he departs for Russia, he may well be liquidated under Stalin’s rule, presumably content to sacrifice himself to the cause. However, the writer also needs something to break the narrative’s impasse of ideologically opposed males unable to separate because they are joined by family, cultural background, and personal affection. The woman—here, Kirillov’s wife— becomes the fictive solution. Irene has also sacrificed herself to the political cause by serving her husband and his project of exposing the evils of colonialist capitalism (54–60). She learns Hindustani and cooks vegetarian curries but her personal love for her husband is rebuffed with a long disquisition about western romantic love emanating from the ‘Buddhist’ asceticism of the Cathars—a speech worthy of Ramaswamy in The Serpent and the Rope. Kirillov upholds mutual ‘reverence’ as the Indian mode of married affection (78–80), and notwithstanding his allegiance to universal equality of all, keeps his wife at bay if only because family contentment threatens to pull him back into a lyrical reconnection with ‘the vast and wondersome land of Hindustan, working the Law of non-becoming’ (93). Abruptly, we are also told that while R has been away in America, and Kirillov in Moscow, Kamal, their older son, has been sent to his grandfather in India with the ashes of his mother and younger brother. Then, with no explanation, we are plunged into Irene’s diaries. R later says he obtained them when visiting P’s (Kirillov’s Indian name is Padmanabha) parents and polished up the prose. The diaries provide a new viewpoint on Kirillov, bringing out his child-like qualities and quietly mocking his logic of statistics by recording a British military award to a butcher who slaughtered a record number of pigs for the army: ‘London and Moscow believe in figures. So, it would seem, even the ancient Indians’ (1976: 98). Irene comments that P talks illogical nonsense and bolsters his arguments by being ‘racially arrogant’ (101–3). Her regular mention of S, a cheerful Sikh friend who marries an Irish woman, throws a contrastive light on the often peptic P and puts R into context (with some self-mockery on Rao’s part) as a romantic metaphysician who ‘thinks Indian in Gothic English’ and parades a stagey Indianness (108; 117). The effect is to bolster R’s structurally implied but overtly weak critique of Kirillov’s determined Marxism. Irene records the death of her mother and P’s lack of understanding. She begins to fear India despite her initial attraction to its romantic aspects, partly because she is 95

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anxious it will take her husband away from her (112–3). In fact, and in yet another ironic reversal, Kirillov leaves India for Moscow and perhaps Peking [Beijing], but the ashes of Irene and her son move to the subcontinent, and regardless of R’s attempt to Indianise Kamal, the boy challenges his self-possession, demanding a European goodnight kiss ‘in his enchanting cockney’ (127). The diaries lend a human touch to the otherwise rather programmatic philosophical debate. They are not integrated into the fabric of the book although they do suggest a way forward into the relationships of The Serpent and the Rope and seem to force the narrator against his own inclinations to admit to the intrication of East and West at a level more essential than intellectual debates and emotional cultural attachments. A reading of Comrade Kirillov as a preparatory exercise is not totally discredited, but nonetheless has to be modified when we consider Rao’s ‘postface’ to the 1976 edition. Rao declares, ‘I have worked again and again on the novel, and so this is the definitive version of the text’ (132). We have to ask: if he did rework the text, having produced both The Serpent and the Rope and The Cat and Shakespeare, and having moved in time beyond the machinations of the Cold War, what changes did he make textually, and why do so many jarring phrases and structural jumps survive? Dey notes that Rao added the footnote identifying himself with R (1992: 204), but this seems to be a superficial retrofitting. If we accept critical descriptions of Rao’s much later work The Chessmaster and His Moves (1988) as an endless round of people expounding abstract ideas to each other, it is unlikely that Rao would think of moderating the briefer philosophical exchanges in his earlier work; and in any case, he may well have been merely polishing up a final version of the original text rather than attempting to rewrite it as a successor to his three other novels. As one who had since consolidated his persona as Hindu philosopher-sage, Rao had little motive in 1976 to revisit Ramaswamy’s tortured self, and so ‘Rama’/Rao in Comrade Kirillov was allowed to stay relatively untouched by the tensions surrounding him in his youthful expatriation, and as a result, the text’s inherent struggles have been left intact. There is a research project here for someone with access to Rao’s papers and the first publication in French. Was he working back into English from the French translation at all? If so, the leaps into second-person ‘you’ would make sense as a conversion of the common impersonal French ‘on’. How might critical response to Rao’s other works (academic recognition for the achievement of The Serpent and the Rope but more sustained critical acclaim for Kanthapura) have affected his decisions in subsequent edits of Comrade Kirillov? Was there perhaps a reluctance to dispense with the ground-breaking folkloric voice, so that some of the infelicitous English phrasing was allowed to remain? These questions may not lead to firm answers, but they do suggest that we must read on a wider scale than that of the single text in order to arrive at a better understanding of it. This notion of scale takes us back to the idea 96

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of transnational movements with which I began my return to reading Rao’s work. Drawing on the work of geographers who have worked with the idea of space as socially produced (stemming from Lefebvre’s 1974 study), literary theorists have applied the concept of scale to literary texts and our reading of them (Tanoukhi 2008). If we think of any web-based map, we know that the ‘zoom in’ and ‘zoom out’ buttons will selectively reveal and hide information that is meaningful only in relation to the scale of the map. At the scale of the nation, we might see mountains and rivers that determine regional political and cultural formations; at the regional scale, we will see major highways and byways that link towns and cities; at town level, smaller streets and major buildings will appear. As Robert Dixon has pointed out in relation to Australian literature, the scale of most of our reading has been that of the nation (2015). This is true also for much of the writing produced under the broad label ‘postcolonial’. It is certainly the national—both as the formation of the modern nation-state and as the ideal of a unifying Indian cultural tradition—that has framed and shaped our reading of Raja Rao’s fiction. To this idea of scale, and to the scale of the nation, we can usefully add the concept of the transnation. Again, I come to this partly through work in relation to Australian literature, notably as set forth by Bill Ashcroft (2010, 2011). In the context of postcolonial literary studies too, the concept emerges in a post-national phase influenced by globalisation studies. In the case of Indian literary studies particularly, this has meant a scaling from nation to diaspora, to a network of more complex relations that operate internationally within nations, and without attention to any national frameworks. Potentially the transnational could become as unwieldy a concept as the postcolonial has sometimes turned out to be; but if we add to it specific levels of scale, we may then have a critical toolkit that is both manageable and useful. At the scale of the personal, Rao appears not to be transnational at all in that he adopts a singular cultural identity tied to his motherland. However, his Vedantic sage persona is built out of intra-national and international materials. Rao was educated in Muslim institutions in Hyderabad and Aligarh before entering French universities, and his alignment of Hindu identity with the Indian nation-state declared itself as a regional phenomenon, specifically located in the historical–cultural space of Travancore. At the same time, this micro-national selfhood has been informed by Rao’s diasporic life, making him a representative of his nation in the United States. After an initial period of searching, Rao moves to and fro at an international scale, while remaining essentially fixed at the scale of the individual. Readers also operate in relation to scales, and most have read Rao, and particularly Kanthapura, on the scale of the national. Despite its evident reliance on European modernism, The Serpent and the Rope has also been read in relation to India, the two works prompting national literary awards. 97

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Nonetheless, the first book came into being following a struggle between sub-national and international languages (Kannada, French, and English) and with the endorsement of E. M. Forster. It went on to appear in the United States. The Serpent and the Rope may have been read mainly in relation to its puranic structure and internal philosophising by a troubled Brahmin, but it has moved internationally amongst critics from Russia, America, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Singapore, and Australia, and looking at its reception on that scale, we can see that it has generated a range of interpretations. Rao’s novels set up their own different scales that function across transnational space. Kanthapura is very like a Google map. It sets up spatial scales by zooming us in and out. Little dramas between individuals occur within and across the four divisions of the village. Rooms and thresholds structure action. The village as a whole functions in relation to surrounding regional spaces such as the forest and the plantation. Regional space is penetrated by national movements: plantation labour, newspapers, boys from the city, Gandhi’s campaigns for caste reform and independence. Framing this are the Western Ghats and the oceans beyond which the ‘red men’ live and consume spices and coffee grown in Kanthapura. The action of the novel is national history in microcosm, but also a regional version of it, told by one individual steeped in the provincial outlook of a village. We begin with the old lady’s voice, and move progressively with Moorthy’s story to a wider collective tale. This brings in forces from across the country, and the world, but the tale ends not with the ‘big screen’ drama of violent confrontation, but the individual voice of emotional recollection by someone returning to the destroyed village. Without going into detail, we can similarly read The Serpent and the Rope for its management of scaled spaces of action. To some extent, all the text comes to us, like Kanthapura, as a monologue: sometimes Ramaswamy’s unspoken flow of emotions, sometimes his thoughts seemingly ‘spoken’ to us, and his accounts of dialogues with others. Mostly, the book is set in the national space of France, and within that the regional spaces of southern France, but the mental space is international: London, Russia, Germany, and India. India is not a uniform national space, being broken up into Varanasi, Travancore, and Mysore, into Hinduism and Buddhism. However, if the mental/cultural scale is international, the physical action is quite restricted: occasional strolls in the fresh air, but usually conversations in rooms. Like Kanthapura, the psycho-philosophical drama resolves into one person, this time sitting quietly drinking coffee. A larger frame of ongoing quest and return to the guru in Travancore is suggested, as is the larger national drama of independence struggle in Kanthapura, but transnational movements are for the moment reduced to stillness and individual feeling. The world appears as a virtual reality of abstracted cultural debate or political action; the text settles around home as felt reality. 98

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Comrade Kirillov is interesting when compared to the two novels framing it. It too moves between abstract ideas and personal realities. It also operates on an international scale, setting up the same France–India contrast as in The Serpent and the Rope, and like the two other novels, depicts the Indian nation at a regional scale: mostly as Tamil Nadu, with a visit to Varanasi. Its focus on Communism (and initially on the spread of theosophy to the West) sets up a genuinely transnational scale, in that these flows of thought—particularly Communism’s attention to class, capital, and global revolution—pay no heed to nation-state structures. Unlike the external social upheavals of Kanthapura, Comrade Kirillov is more of a character study in which the drama is psycho-cultural, placing it closer to The Serpent and the Rope, but at the same time, there is more external action than village movements or Ramaswamy’s cogitations. For one thing, the narration is broken up into R’s report of his encounter with K, and Irene’s diary commenting on them both. Within that mix, characters move from India and Czechoslovakia, and to America, England, Russia, and perhaps China. At this level, the scalar structure of Comrade Kirillov seems to be a reversal of Kanthapura’s nested frames: it starts at the international scale and gradually narrows down to a flat in London and then to one person’s diary, before simultaneously widening out (with R’s return to India after his American trip) and closing down to the specific place of Kanyakumari. The national frame of originating and ending in India, blended with a final scene at the personal scale, echoes the resolutions of both of the other novels. But the conclusion is an uneasy one: R’s ‘felt’ sense of home reality is disturbed by Kamal’s western acculturation evoking a western response in the self-appointed representation of Indianness. The Serpent and the Rope may encompass all the cultural histories of France and India, but its actual movements happen on a restricted scale, always framed by the construction of a Vedantic identity. Its forerunner is set mostly at the same scale of rooms as both of the other novels, but is also a more uncertain play across larger and smaller scales. This disruption of both ‘felt’ home and intellectual world challenges the tendency of critics to read Rao at the scale of the national. This resistance is underpinned by the book’s unusual publishing circuit, with its belated appearances, first in French, then in English in India and the United States. Its work is spread uncomfortably across several scales that cannot be resolved easily into either an experiment with Vedantic truth or a sentimental tribute to an idealised Indian cultural identity. In its uneasy range of scales, Comrade Kirillov may be Rao’s most fully transnational work, and that may have something to do with its relegation to minor rank by critics who for a long time have been looking for binary empire-colony dynamics and postcolonial national champions. Whatever the details of this story may be, it should be clear that, while not altering the general outline of Raja Rao’s literary career, repositioning Comrade Kirillov more firmly as an early experiment makes it a more 99

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interesting work than the failure critics have previously declared it to be. Bringing the transnational turn in literary criticism to bear on reading Rao also lets us see his work in fresh light. Without a digression into turns in Australian literary criticism towards the transnational and book history, or in the absence of thinking about the vicissitudes of literary careers, it may not have been possible to re-examine this aspect of Rao’s complex evolution as a writer. It is perhaps an indication of the ongoing need for networks of literary thought that extend beyond national boundaries, even beyond the kinds of comparative study of ‘great works’ that conventional models of World Literature seem to involve.

References Alterno, Letizia. 2011. Raja Rao: An Introduction, New Delhi: Cambridge University Press. Ashcroft, Bill. 2010. ‘Globalization, Transnation and Utopia’, in Walter Goebel and Saskia Schabio (eds), Locating Transnational Ideals, pp. 19–27, New York: Routledge. ———. 2011. ‘Australian Transnation’, Southerly, 71(1): 18–40. Ashcroft, Bill, Lyn McCredden, and Frances Devlin-Glass. 2009. Intimate Horizons: The Post-colonial Sacred in Australian Literature, Adelaide: ATF Press. Badve, V. V. 1979. ‘Comrade Kirillov’, New Quest, 14: 121–8. Cooppan, Vilashini. 2009. Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing, Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press. Dey, Esha. 1992. The Novels of Raja Rao: The Theme of Quest, New Delhi: Prestige. Dixon, Robert. 2015. ‘National Literatures, Scale and the Problem of the World’, JASAL, 15(3). https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/arti cle/view/10577/10455 (accessed on 2 October 2018). Green, H. M. 1961. A History of Australian Literature, Pure and Applied, Sydney: Angus and Robertson. Kaushik, Asha. 1983. ‘Meeting Raja Rao’, The Literary Criterion, 18(3): 33–8. Kramer, Leonie. 1965–66. ‘R. D. FitzGerald—Philosopher or Poet?’ Overland, 33: 15–18. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space [1974], trans. Donald NicholsonSmith, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Maini, D. S. 1980. ‘Raja Rao’s Vision, Values and Aesthetic’, in K. K. Sharma (ed), Perspectives on Raja Rao, pp. 1–19, Ghaziabad: Vimal Prakashan. Narayan, Shyamala A. 1988. Raja Rao: Man and His Works, New Delhi: Sterling. Niranjan, Shiva. 1979. ‘An Interview with Raja Rao’, in K. N. Sinha (ed), Indian Writing in English, pp. 19–28, New Delhi: Heritage. Powers, Janet. 1988. ‘Initiate Meets Guru: The Cat and Shakespeare and Comrade Kirillov’, World Literature Today, 62(4): 611–16. Rao, Raja. 1938. Kanthapura, New Delhi: Orient. ———. 1960. The Serpent and the Rope, London: John Murray. ———. 1976. Comrade Kirillov: A New Novel, New Delhi: Orient. ———. 1988. ‘Entering the Literary World’, World Literature Today, 62(4): 536–8.

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Riemenschneider, Dieter. 2005. The Indian Novel in English: Its Critical Discourse 1934–2004, Jaipur: Rawat. Sharrad, Paul. 1987. Raja Rao and Cultural Tradition, New Delhi: Sterling. Tanoukhi, Nirvana. 2008. ‘The Scale of World Literature’, New Literary History, 39(3): 599–617. Vanden Driesen, Cynthia, and Bill Ashcroft (eds). 2014. Patrick White Centenary: The Legacy of a Prodigal Son, Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press. Westbrook, Perry D. 1988. ‘Raja Rao’s “Comrade Kirillov”: Marxism and Vedanta’, World Literature Today, 62(4): 617–20.

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7 WOMEN AND THE NARRATIVE OF NATIONALISM IN RAJA RAO’S THE COW OF THE BARRICADES Sakoon Singh

Narsa always sang it closing his eyes and figuring the Master’s wife . . . as a huge, big goddess, sitting on a swan . . . a huge light behind her head, a conch in one hand, a wheel in another, and a tamed lion at her feet. . . . And when it came to the end, ‘Mataram, Mataram, Vandé Mataram’, Narsa’s eyes suddenly grew full of tears and the whole earth seemed to grow soft and radiant, and he felt his head resting on the lap of a great, big mother. . . . ‘Who is this big Mother, Sir? He asked one day of his teacher . . . It is our country, our Motherland.’ ‘What is our country, Sir?’ ‘Country! Country is the one we live in. This is our country.’ (Rao 1947e: 111–12) I know my country as Mother. I offer her my devotions, my worship. If a monster sits upon her breast and prepares to suck her blood, what does her child do? Does he quietly sit down to his meal . . . or rush to her rescue? (Ghose 1954: 48)

The metaphor of orphaning and loss of mother/country The orphan Narsa, or Narsiga, vividly ‘imagines’ the bountiful mother figure evoked in the patriotic songs they sing at school. Devoid of a real mother, he has learnt to substitute the idea of mother with the ‘available’ mother figures like the master’s wife. His intense emotional reaction to the plight of the mother described in the anthem is compounded by the memory of his own dead mother. He imagines the Mother in the manner of classic 102

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Hindu iconography whereby she transcends her mortality and appears as a Goddess. She straddles a swan, her private vehicle, and showers a bounty of rice from one hand while holding the wheel, the chakra of life, in the other. The boy’s vision is a personal one but triggered by the vivid imagery of the song. However, the ironic streak in Rao’s fiction becomes poignant when the child is perplexed about the true identity of the mother. He is unable to understand the rampant mother-as-nation symbolism tacitly accepted by other children. It is a tenuous connection inadvertently exposed by the boy’s naïve question: ‘But who is this big Mother, Sir?’ The question, asked by the boy who represents the lowest denominator in an obscure village, soon dissolves into the story, yet in a fundamental way interrogates the narrative of nationalism. It is a question asked by a character for whom the constructs of village, caste, and family are tangible because these are the sites where important, everyday events in his life are transacted. Nation, however, is an abstraction he will gradually learn to imagine. The fact that Narsiga is an orphan only adds to the intensity of emotion he experiences for the Mother, for not only does he feel aggrieved at the mistreatment meted out to the country, but he also battles with the primeval loss of a biological mother. This chapter deals with the presentation of narratives of nationalism in Rao’s writings, especially the selected short stories from the collection The Cow of the Barricades and Other Stories (1947b), wherein women-as-nation is an oft-repeated trope set in the larger context of the freedom struggle. There is an attempt to understand the politics of mythologising the freedom struggle, by which I  mean the presentation of the political as the mythological through a new language of iconography such as that used in the creation of Bharat Mata. Further, the chapter highlights Rao’s attempts in exposing this inherent irony by juxtaposing the grandeur of mythological imaginings with real-life struggles of marginalised Indian women. In this regard, the chapter also includes a close reading of the short stories ‘Javni’ and ‘Akkayya’ that bring out unique problems of low-caste women and young widows. An attempt is made to analyse broader attempts to harness the language of myth and deification of women in the Gandhian context and the manner in which this strain is represented in Rao’s fiction.

Politics and the ‘Poetry of Primordiality’ In the essay ‘The Imaginary Institution of India’, Sudipta Kaviraj outlines the efficacy of narratives as ‘interpretations of the world and its history which issue in a call to change it’ (1993: 32). He goes on to argue that the narrative of Indian nationalism built around elements such as the song Vande Mataram1 is explicit about some matters and mute about others. Whereas some narratives are ‘explicit and detailed about the lofty ideals of freedom, sacrifice and glory, they are vague about the more concrete and contestable 103

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questions of distribution, equality, power and the actual unequal ordering’ (Kaviraj 1993: 32). According to Kaviraj, these narratives tend to steal the poetry of ‘primordiality’ . . . to try to argue about and justify the nation. Nationalist movements usually try to project the nation, actually a product of a conjecture of modernity, in terms of regaining a timeless community which was lost. So although a modern phenomenon, nationalism must speak a traditional language of communities. (21–2) To understand the argument, one can investigate how the connection is engineered between ancient epics, which continue to hold sway on popular imagination, and the modern ideas of nation and nationalism, thus creating new models of allegiance. In the Indian context, the nationalists endeavoured to appeal to tradition in rallying sentiment against colonialism. The attempt to deify the nation as mother goddess/Bharat Mata builds on the centuries-old piety towards scores of Hindu gods and goddesses presiding over their respective domains. Therefore, the modern idea of nation transforms into a traditional–devotional phenomenon that makes an instant connection with the people. In her exhaustive study, Rumina Sethi shows how, during the period of the Indian freedom struggle, Hinduism was homogenised in an attempt to appeal to people divided by class and caste differences. She explores the origins of the word ‘Hindu’ which has, for its root, not the name of a God but a river. ‘Hindu’ was a collective referent used to indicate the people who stayed along the river Indus (1999: 29). During the nationalist phase, a ground had to be created for people to unite against a common enemy, and Hindu mythology offered a strong basis to do that. It is in a similar context that Kaviraj invokes the proposition put forward by the German sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies who describes communities (gemeinschaften) as a unit that ‘fostered a feeling of intense solidarity and belonging but . . . is not based on convergence of interest, which distinguished gesellschaften [societies]’ (1993: 20–1). Kaviraj further argues that modern nationalism arises from the aspiration to control political and economic interests and is therefore allied to gesellschaften (22). However, in its attempt towards self-validation, modern nationalism links itself to ‘immemorial aspirations and indissoluble community’ (22) that have been characteristics of primitive communities. It justifies itself through an appeal to antiquity by producing a rhetoric of ‘blood, passion, sacrifice and remembrance’ (22). It is in this light that one can fruitfully analyse the use of myth and nascent nationhood in Rao’s fiction where he employs references from the epic Ramayana in the portrayal of the freedom struggle. The struggle for the nation’s freedom is compared to the struggle 104

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Rama wages to rescue his wife Sita from the clutches of Ravana. This fight, which is understood as the primordial one between forces of evil and goodness, suras and asuras, devas and danavas, is also the blueprint of the ‘new’ battle between the British and the Indians. Owing to this comparison, in one stroke, the freedom struggle gains legitimacy and evokes an intense feeling of solidarity with a ‘righteous’ cause. As an illustration, in the aforementioned story ‘Narsiga’, the orphan boy imagines Gandhi as Rama. Upon hearing the news of his release from jail, he ecstatically compares Gandhi’s return from a prolonged jail term as Rama’s momentous return to Ayodhya after 14 years in exile.2 So complete is the identification with Rama that Gandhi is imagined in the company of Sita rather than his wife Kasturba, with the Master of the story lodged at Gandhi’s feet—a mirror image of Hanuman, Rama’s faithful devotee. The image, in the mould of Hindu iconography, is a recurrent theme in popular art like calendars and posters, where, in all likelihood, a character like Narsiga is likely to have seen it.3 In the second excerpt quoted above by Aurobindo Ghose (1872–1950), the nationalist leader and poet-philosopher picks on the image of violence-asrape inflicted on Bharat Mata. Interestingly, Ghose translated Vande Mataram into English—the same text that brings tears to Narsiga’s eyes. The imagery of rape used by Ghose is by no means an original trope. While the image strongly states the case against the coloniser for having forcibly and unjustly entered the country, it also makes the struggle gendered from the very beginning. It is a call to the countrymen to save the honour of the woman (mother/sister/wife) subjected to rape. It forces them to act by calling into question their machismo, for ‘real’ men will not rest in peace when their mothers are being raped. The use of the image of woman to indicate the act of rape of the country stigmatises the woman as a sexual object and also highlights her helplessness. Putting her on the pedestal with gods and goddesses is not helpful either because she still relies on men to save her honour. Ania Loomba sums up the conundrum effectively in her work Colonialism/Postcolonialism: Colonising and anti-colonial men, while being otherwise opposed, have often shared certain attitudes to women. In colonialist as well as nationalist writings, racial and sexual violence are yoked together by images of rape, which in different forms, becomes an abiding and recurrent metaphor for colonial relations. (1998: 164) Therefore, the iconography of the Indian freedom struggle, drawing hugely from Hindu mythology, operates between the twin poles of glorification of women on the one hand and real socio-political disempowerment on the other. 105

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Gandhi, mythmaking, and Rao’s fictional women Now, one morning, Narsa took Rami with him, and having gathered a pocket full of gravel stones, he stood by the bridge, and as the train slowed down, he took up stone after stone . . . and flung them against the train. (Rao 1947e: 115) Come indoors and take charge of the house. Let us go out to work. Slaves for seven hundred years and still you pride yourselves on your masculinity! Aren’t you ashamed? (Chatterjee 2008: 310)

The Cow of the Barricades anthologises short stories written between 1936 and 1944. This decade was a time of heightened nationalistic fervour and marked a highpoint of dissent against the presence of the British in India, a clear avowal of swadesi rule. Published in the momentous year of Indian independence, this book marks the culmination of a protracted struggle. Rao was also closely associated with the Civil Disobedience Movement, which was a call by Gandhi to wilfully disregard the British authority as a form of protest. Gandhi was a unique figure because his politics ostensibly emanated from a moral position, and while challenging the ‘immoral’ British rule in India, his sense of natural justice could not simultaneously condone the injustices of Indian society. Gandhi’s influence on authors writing in the decade of the 1930s is more than tacit, and he figures in these works, overtly or covertly, as a social reformer and a political visionary (Khilnani 2003). Gandhi extensively used examples and parallels from Hindu mythology to sensitise the Indian masses about the ills of colonial rule. Apart from describing the ideal state of swaraj being akin to Ramraj, he extensively employed mythological characters from religious texts to illustrate his point. Addressing a women’s social reform group very early in his career, he impressed upon his audience the need for women leaders who were ‘pure, firm and self-controlled’ like the mythological heroines Sita, Damayanti, and Draupadi (Forbes 1996: 124). Sita, in the epic Ramayana, followed her husband into exile and was abducted by the asura Ravana. Following a prolonged battle, she was recovered but had to prove her ‘purity’. Draupadi, in a polyandrous marriage, was the wife of five Pandava brothers and was put on stake in a game of dice. Her husbands lost the game and she was about to be disrobed when the god Krishna intervened and her sari became an unending fabric on a spool. Damayanti, faithful and self-sacrificing wife of Nala, could recognise her husband in any guise. These were the heroines Gandhi recalled to motivate women

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to join in the struggle. In Women in Modern India, Geraldine Forbes elaborates: Gandhi evoked India’s sacred legends, especially the Ramayana when he asked Hindu women to join the political movement. . . . He compared the British rulers to the demon Ravana who abducted Sita, wife of righteous king Ram. Under colonialism the enslaved people were losing all sense of Dharma (righteousness), restoration of the rule of Rama would only come when women, emulating the faithful and brave Sita, united with men against this immoral ruler. (1996: 125) In other words, Gandhi exhorted women to be ready to make sacrifices as that would deal a powerful blow to the British. Addressing his women readers in Young India, he wrote: The female sex is the nobler of the two, for it is even today the embodiment of sacrifice, silent suffering, humility, faith and knowledge. A woman’s intuition has often proved truer than man’s arrogant assumption of superior knowledge. (1922: 752) The significance of a woman’s sacrifice, whether it was in tearing herself away from her family to join the protests on the streets or in losing her sons and husbands, is emphasised by evoking Indian mythological characters. Gandhi, however, was astute enough to tweak his version when addressing Muslim women, by substituting the example from Ramayana with references to Satan. In this context Forbes comments: ‘Gone were the references to Ramayana and Mahabharata. . . . Gandhi told Muslim women that British rule was rule of Satan and exhorted them to renounce foreign cloth to save Islam’ (1996: 125). Similarly, Sucheta Kriplani argues that since Gandhi’s moral stature was perceived to be high, he could convince families to let their household women join the national movement. He assured women that it was possible to assist the movement without leaving their homes or neglecting the family. At the same time, he assured the families that their women would not sacrifice family honour or prestige (Forbes 1996: 125). Gandhi’s perception of women’s participation was one of conservative implicit collaboration with men where the household would not be neglected. On many an occasion he emphasised the importance of women’s sacrifice to the nationalist movement, which implied their willing acceptance of social censure coupled with the looming risk of death/imprisonment of their husbands and/or sons. The call and participation of women in the Indian freedom struggle acquired unparalleled importance and was a display

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of moral righteousness. As Tharu and Niranjana comment in a different but relevant context: ‘Women are seen as morally pure and ­uncorrupted— hence the significance of their protest, which becomes a “disinterested” one since they have no place in the organised political process’ (1996: 240). Similarly, according to Loomba: ‘Anti-colonial or nationalist movements have used the image of nation-as-mother to create their own lineage and also to limit and control the activity of women within the imagined community’ (1998: 180).

The sacred cow and the Hindu worldview The opening excerpt from the short story ‘Narsiga’ describes the orphan boy throwing stones at the ‘red man’s’ train. Here, the boy comes close to what can be described as an anti-imperial act. Accompanying him in the act is his ‘girlfriend’ Rami, scavenger Sankanna’s daughter. However, it can equally be interpreted as a sardonic commentary on the role of women in political acts, as they have primarily been perceived to be playing the role of benign assistants or helping hands to the all-important male leaders in the freedom movement. ‘The Cow of the Barricades’, the eponymous story of the collection, takes this symbol of nation-as-mother a step further by strategically using the image of a cow, an animal accorded the status of the sacred feminine in the Hindu worldview. The story lays bare the ideological differences between Gandhi and his close associates, like the ‘Master’ on the one hand, and the bands of disgruntled Gandhian followers impatient with non-violence on the other. Much venerated as a sacred creature, the cow is a darling of the Master—its sacred and mystical nature is accentuated by the fact that no one seems to understand where it goes once it ‘disappears among the bushes’ and then mysteriously re-emerges every Tuesday (Rao 1947c: 175). That for the Hindus, both the cow and Tuesdays are held sacred is a tacit understanding between the readers and the author and therefore, the story is charged with a signification from the very beginning. Every time the followers claim that some kind of violence is needed to expel the British from the country, the master reiterates his stance that non-violence is the only way forward. Later, Gauri ambles into the heavily barricaded area where a gun battle between the nationalists and the British is set to begin. The British army takes its position and plants a bullet through Gauri’s head and she dies instantaneously. The cow as a sacred creature, as a mother figure and the milk-giver, transforms into a symbol of the ultimate sacrifice which will liberate the Indian nation from the yoke of imperialism. Eventually a rich man buys off the two prime properties on the site and erects Gauri’s statue in the middle, a memorial that is subsequently used as a community space for children to hang out and play. Through her supreme sacrifice, Gauri becomes integrated with tradition, representing the means 108

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of livelihood for the toymakers of that area who make little wooden toy Gauris that sell like hot cakes at railway platforms: And to this day hawkers cry them about at the railway station, chanting, ‘Gauris of Gorakhpur! Polished, varnished and on four wheels!’ and many a child from the far Himalayas to the seas of the South pulls them through the dusty streets of Hindusthan (1947c: 181–2) Even in her death, Gauri, the ideal mother figure, is shown to ensure the wellbeing of the poor and the happiness of her children. By emphasising the geographical limits and locales of the still nascent nation-state India—its mighty Himalayan head and its southernmost tip where the waters glide into the seas—Rao too is building upon the idea of India as a distinct geographical entity. Through the use of literary imagination and by injecting mythological references in political discourse, Rao imagines India as a nation at this point in time. Rao has the last word in this story about the efficacy of Gandhian politics when he upholds him more as a moral than a political force: ‘Therefore it is said: The Mahatma may be all wrong about politics, but he is right about the fullness of love in all creatures—the speechful and the mute’ (1947c: 182).

Rao’s women characters in the shadows The use of the imagery of woman-as-nation in the freedom movement, playing out in a political space that was still struggling with the conceptualisaton of an imaginary nation, situates Rao’s representation of both the nation and contemporary Indian women (given their myriad problems) in an ironic light. The attempts to infuse a still nascent nation with the qualities of divine agency mediated through women, and thus impart stability and sovereignty, were clearly aimed at gaining legitimacy for the political idea of a nation. Within this context, the quality of women’s participation in the nation’s freedom struggle is worth exploring. According to Forbes, while addressing women, Gandhi would not only inspire them to become active participants in the freedom movement but also urge their male companions to lend them active support in the cause by exhorting them to respect women and put an end to the centuries-old traditions of child marriage and mistreatment of widows (1996: 125). As discussed above, even though he was pressing for change in a contained and conservative way, he was able to influence the public to reevaluate their attitude towards women. It is this ‘new consciousness’ aroused by Gandhi that the young, suave, educated male narrative voice in ‘The Cow of the Barricades’ seems to embody. There is a parallel evinced in the character of Moorthy in Rao’s first novel, Kanthapura, who inspires the young widow Ratna to take up the fight on his behalf. In The 109

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Cow of the Barricades, the narrator constantly looks in the dark crannies and nooks of the ossified Indian village households to salvage women, widows, orphans, and pariahs languishing in the unjust social order. The presence of Gandhi in these stories becomes more than inferred when, at one point, he becomes a deified presence. And as with Kanthapura, a dominant concern with these stories is the filtering influence of Gandhi as a political and ideological force in the basic Indian unit of social life, which is the village. The short-story ‘Javni’ centres around the life of a low-caste, low-class servant woman. In highlighting the case of a marginalised woman, the story enables a more holistic understanding of the real condition of women as opposed to their mythologised versions in political discourse. Javni’s situation is made even more deplorable since she is a widow. A  young modern narrator is shown visiting the house of his married sister where Javni lives as a servant. At one point in the story, the young narrator senses a presence on the threshold of the house as he waits for his sister to make him a cup of coffee. It is revealed to him that the elusive figure is Javni, the ‘monkey’ (Rao 1947d: 2). His sister patronisingly and repeatedly addresses Javni either as her ‘monkey’ or as ‘child’, thus shrouding Javni’s identity in mystery. Rao highlights just how invisible the existence of a low-caste, widowed, servant woman could be in an upper-caste household. To begin with, Javni never fully appears in sight of the narrator, so that he is left puzzled whether she is a beast, a monkey, or a prankster child. She is infantile in her behaviour and repeatedly hides her face when asked a question. Later at dinner time, she departs into the byre, located at the far end of the house, where she devours mouthfuls of rice and pickles, almost like an animal. Again, the frugality of her existence is underscored through the description of her bedding which comprises of a wattle mat alone, because ‘she seemed never to suffer from cold’ (2). Apart from the fact that she is a pariah in an upper-caste household, she is expected to lead an austere existence as a widow. For centuries, Hindu widows have had to shave their heads and wear austere white clothes indicative of an abhorrence to beauty, ornamentation, and temptation. Even their food is supposed to be bland because spicy food is considered an aphrodisiac. The poet Sarojini Naidu (1879–1949) writes about the plight of Hindu widows in this milieu: Shatter her shining bracelets, break the string Threading the mystic marriage beads that cling Loth to desert a sobbing throat so sweet, Unbind the golden anklets on her feet, Divest her of her azure wails and cloud Her living beauty in a living shroud. (1912: 14)

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Widows in pre-independence India, especially the figure of the sati, have become the subject of a vast variety of critical discourse after Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak presented the woman made sati as an exemplary subaltern who, since she acquires her identity only after her death, cannot speak up, leading to complete silence on the matter (1994: 102). Others like Loomba and Lata Mani have exhorted academics to look instead at the figure of the transgressive widow, who endured unspeakable cruelties yet survived to tell her tale (Loomba 1998: 185; Mani 1989: 118). It is this figure of a Hindu widow with the ability to articulate whose life is highlighted in some of these stories. When the narrator asks Javni what she plans to do with her earnings, she replies with disarming simplicity that she intends to buy a sari, an ostensible sign of vanity and indulgence that survives despite the near-animal existence she is forced to lead. There is also a measure of pride she exhibits in her work when she proclaims to the narrator that ‘there is nobody who can work for a Revenue Inspector’s family as [she does]’ (Rao 1947d: 7). She understands that her employer, Sita, depends on her support. Sita, we discover, is extremely scared of being left alone, and on such nights when her revenue inspector husband is away, Javni gives her support. Sita’s dependence on Javni hints at something akin to sisterhood. However, paradoxically, it is Sita who is most resistant to bringing about a change in Javni’s social stature. When the narrator, repulsed by Javni’s existence in the animal byre, prompts Sita that they allow her to eat inside the house, Sita vehemently opposes the proposal. On being reminded of her affection for Javni, Sita replies that ‘affection does not ask you to be irreligious’ (9). Significantly, Rao here radically questions the rigidity of a religion that fosters such inequality. He interrogates the religious structures that accord such unimpeachable authority to Sita over Javni. Javni’s ‘own’ family comprises of her brother’s wife and child, with whom she has a special bond. As discussed, this trope of a widow’s love for another’s child is often repeated in these short stories, and the ideas of a childless woman and a motherless child resonate in Raja Rao’s stories all too often. In Sita’s house, she has to contend with her low-class, low-caste status whereas in her brother’s house, she is the unwanted widow, who is always looming as a burden and an ‘inauspicious’ presence. She is eventually thrown out of her brother’s house, which is also the case with Akkayya in the eponymous story. Through the narrator of the story ‘Javni’, Raja Rao highlights the ills of casteism and widow remarriage in orthodox Hindu society. Additionally, by choosing to make a marginalised, low-caste, low-class woman the major protagonist of the story, he reveals a deeply evolved social consciousness. Akkayya, in contrast, belongs to an upper-caste, affluent household. She is the young narrator’s grandmother’s sister. As an eight-year-old, she is married off to a much older man. Such is the age difference between the two that the husband already has a married son. The marriage festivities last for a

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few days, after which she is left at her parents’ house till she ‘comes of age’. This was a common practice in pre-independence India as child marriage was rampant.4 However, before the marriage is consummated, Akkayya’s father gets the news of her husband’s death (Rao 1947a: 78). She is thus prevented from putting vermillion in her hair ‘which she did not mind . . . in the very least’ (78) and becomes a virgin-widow. Oblivious of the consequences of this peculiar situation, she innocently carries on and is eventually sent off to her husband’s house. She is happy to be in a ‘full house’ bustling with people (79) and leads a contended life, cooking for the family, visiting the temple, and playing with the children. Gradually, however, she becomes irritable and begins to question why she cannot have children of her own (80). The beginning of the story highlights the bond between the narrator and Akkayya and how, when he was a child, he would spend time with her. She would press him to her chest and he, in turn, would fondle her breasts. The consequences of her unfulfilled sexual needs is another dimension of this story; in highlighting this aspect, Rao is radical enough to bring up the issue of a woman’s need for sexual gratification, especially vis-à-vis young virginwidows like Akkayya. The patriarchal slotting of a woman primarily as a wife or mother leaves very few alternatives for characters like Akkayya who can be neither. She is constantly accused of being promiscuous—her dead husband’s son uses this excuse as a pretext for throwing her out. Later, when she is ill and her body lets out a stink, the narrator’s cousin Ramu speaks in hushed tones about her ‘bad disease’: ‘She stinks like a manure-pit. I could not sit by her’ (1947a: 86). The implication is clear: that she suffers from a sexually transmitted disease and by extension, is morally depraved—a ‘legitimate’ basis for her expulsion. The portrayal of woman-as-nation by the Indian nationalists highlights interesting cross connections between discursive, cultural, and political aspects of Indian society. While at one level, the image is connected with Hindu iconography which was the dominant visual idiom through which India was imagining its freedom struggle, at another level, it forces one to come face-to-face with the real condition of women in India at the time. In the short stories from The Cow of the Barricades, one finds an exploration of Hindu iconography as a design in which the narrative of the freedom struggle is cast, as well as the reformatory spirit of the women’s question palpable in the narrative voice. The influence of Gandhi is overarching, beginning from his own employment of religious tropes in arousing the masses towards action in the freedom struggle, to his projection as a divine character in the epic that was the Indian freedom movement.

Notes 1 Composed by Bankimchandra Chatterjee, Vande Mataram was first published in Banga Darshan in 1875. In 1882, Bankim included it in his novel, Anandamath,

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but attained iconic status when it became a war cry in the protests against the Bengal Partition in 1905. It has a peculiar structure as the first two stanzas are in Sanskrit whereas the other two are in Bengali. It was adopted as a national song by the Indian government post-independence but has been a contentious choice. Every now and then, it is claimed to be anti-Islamic because it forces non-Hindus to bow before an icon (Bharat Mata) rather than a country. 2 In the Ramayana, Rama’s return from exile to Ayodhya is a celebratory event. It is accompanied by large-scale celebrations and lighting of candles by the people of the kingdom. For Indians, the annual festival of Diwali is reminiscent of this event. 3 Eminent sociologist and an avid calendar collector, Patricia Uberoi has worked extensively on Indian calendar art, which she considers to be a genre by itself. In her book, Freedom and Destiny: Gender, Family and Popular Culture in India (2006), she studies calendars as visual narratives for representing the nation. Also see her essay ‘Unity in Diversity’? (2002) for an incisive discussion on the depiction of India as Bharat Mata. 4 In 1927, American journalist Katherine Mayo published Mother India, a scathing attack on certain Indian customs, including child marriage, the tantalising details of which shocked western readers. The title was meant to be a sardonic reminder of the inequalities in Indian society and a reiteration of the imperial logic that Indians were not ready for self-governance. ‘Akkayya’, dealing with the same theme, was first published in December 1933 in the French magazine Cahiers du Sud.

References Chatterjee, Partha. 2008. ‘Women and the Nation: The Trouble with Their Voices’, in Mary E. John (ed), Women’s Studies in India: A Reader, pp. 309–16, London: Penguin. Forbes, Geraldine. 1996. Women in Modern India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gandhi, M. K. 1922. Young India 1919–22, Madras: S. Ganesan. Ghose, Aurobindo. 1954. The Liberator: Sri Aurobindo, India and the World, trans. Sisirkumar Mitra, New Delhi: Jaico. Kaviraj, Sudipta. 1993. ‘The Imaginary Institution of India’, in Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey (eds), Subaltern Studies VII, pp. 1–39, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Khilnani, Sunil. 2003. ‘Gandhi and Nehru: The Uses of English’, in Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (ed), A History of Indian Literature in English, pp. 135–56, New York: Columbia University Press. Loomba, Ania. 1998. Colonialism/Postcolonialism, London: Routledge. Mani, Lata. 1989. ‘Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India’, in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (eds), Recasting Women, pp. 88–126, New Delhi: Kali for Women. Mayo, Katherine. 1927. Mother India, New York: Blue Ribbon. Naidu, Sarojini. 1912. The Bird of Time: Songs of Life, Death and the Spring, London: Heinemann. Rao, Raja. 1947a. ‘Akkayya’, in The Cow of the Barricades and Other Stories, pp. 70–96, Bombay: Oxford University Press.

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———. 1947b. The Cow of the Barricades and Other Stories. Bombay: Oxford University Press. ———. 1947c. ‘The Cow of the Barricades’, in The Cow of the Barricades and Other Stories, pp. 174–82, Bombay: Oxford University Press. ———. 1947d. ‘Javni’, in The Cow of the Barricades and Other Stories, pp. 1–22, Bombay: Oxford University Press. ———. 1947e. ‘Narsiga’, in The Cow of the Barricades and Other Stories, pp. 97–118, Bombay: Oxford University Press. Sethi, Rumina. 1999. Myths of the Nation: National Identity and Literary Representation, Oxford: Clarendon. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1994. ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory, pp. 66–111, New York: Columbia University Press. Tharu, Susie, and Tejaswani Niranjana. 1996. ‘Problems for a Contemporary Theory of Gender’, in Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakarbarty (eds), Subaltern Studies IX, pp. 232–60, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Uberoi, Patricia. 2006. Freedom and Destiny: Gender, Family and Popular Culture in India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. ———. 2002. ‘ “Unity in diversity?” Dilemmas of Nationhood in Indian Calendar Art’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 36(1–2): 191–232.

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8 POSTHUMANISM IN RAJA RAO’S THE CAT AND SHAKESPEARE Redrawing the boundaries Chitra Sankaran

Introduction The Cat and Shakespeare, a novella set in erstwhile Travancore, has been seen as forming a theological sequence to Raja Rao’s second book, The Serpent and the Rope. That Rama, the protagonist of The Serpent and The Rope, announces his intention of going to Travancore at the end of his novel seems to underline this continuity. This view held by critics such as Ayyappa Paniker (1980) is further substantiated by Raja Rao’s own comments: ‘In Kanthapura, I  was Gandhian. In The Serpent and The Rope, I was searching. The Cat and Shakespeare is the conclusion to The Serpent and The Rope’ (Niranjan 1979: 22). This has led critics like K. R. Rao to discuss a movement from karma yoga [salvation through deeds] in Kanthapura to jnana yoga [intuitive intellectual understanding of Brahman] in The Serpent and The Rope to bhakthiprapatti [salvation through devotion] in The Cat and Shakespeare (1980: 108). K. R. Rao argues convincingly that these novels propound three widely acclaimed paths in Hinduism to attain Godhead. Moorthy, the protagonist of Kanthapura, advocates devotion to duty; Rama, in The Serpent and the Rope, the intellectual comprehension of Brahman or Universal Godhood; and Govindan Nair in The Cat and Shakespeare a complete self-surrender through devotion. Persuasive though his argument is, it still leaves unexplained several baffling enigmas in the novel that lead critics like Eliot Fremont-Smith, writing for the New York Times, to remark: ‘Precisely what the point of it is, is hard to say . . . [E]ven Eastern paradox can have diminishing returns. Here they seem inscrutable’ (1965: 196). Yet, the start of the narrative gives very little hint of the spiritual enigmas that are to occur later. On the contrary, the tone appears matter of fact and

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the concerns rather pragmatic, even worldly, taken up entirely with human, in effect, material concerns. This is how the novel begins: I have a small white house here, with a courtyard. From the back I  look over coconut trees, and huts, and somewhere there’s the sound of the sea. I was appointed divisional clerk, Trivandrum, some two years ago. I left my wife and two children at Pattanur. My eldest was five years of age, my youngest three. It’s not so easy to change schools, you know; and then it was monsoon time. When I thought of the bad new road (which leads to Kamla Bhavan, the noble name my fat landlord inflicted on this blue and ochre-banded building), I suffered to think of Usha coming back from school in this mess. (7) The narrative at this point appears to be entirely centred on human concerns and seems to accord with a humanist manifesto which foregrounds all things human. Broadly speaking, the belief that every individual can make the best of life by creating meaning and purpose for himself can be said to lie at the heart of the humanist philosophy. This credo certainly seems reflected in the narrator Ramakrishna Pai’s unfolding sequence of events. Furthermore, even his enigmatic neighbour, Govindan Nair, whose expansive personality is often bewildering, is described in very human terms. Thus, to discuss the novel as humanist in flavour would not be entirely inappropriate.

Humanism Broadly, the three constituents of humanism are secularism, rationalism, and individualism. The Humanists UK (formerly, British Humanist Association) defines humanism as the view that ‘we can make sense of the world using reason, experience and shared human values and  that we can live good lives without religious or superstitious beliefs’ (Humanists UK). As such, humanists do not place any premium on a god or gods, or any other supernatural or divine entities. Humanists do not think that the universe needs a divine power outside of itself in order to have value. Instead, they are of the view that it is humans, inside the universe, who determine its value. The intrinsic worth of humans, according to humanists, therefore, lies in themselves and not in anything outside of them. In the West, from the post-enlightenment era onwards, when humanist thought held sway, science was identified with progress, as superstition began to lose its hold. It became possible to think of humans, with intelligence and skills, as coming to dominate a fickle and violent nature. As such, a certain natural division between the natural world and the human 116

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world emerged in humanistic thought. It is noteworthy that this concept of a fundamental dichotomy between the humans as self and the natural world as other is one that recurs in Raja Rao’s text, The Cat and Shakespeare, and aligns it to a humanist perspective. There is no getting away from the fact that the affairs of both Ramakrishna Pai and his neighbour, Govindan Nair (in both the literal and the metaphorical sense), are central to the novel. Pai’s wife Saroja, his mistress Shantha and her pregnancy, Nair’s job at the ration shop, his visit to a brothel, the prank played on him by a co-worker, their preoccupation with building Pai a house are all events that take centre stage. These are also played out against the backdrop of a natural world which, ironically, appears meaningful only when connected to the human, as demonstrated for instance in the passage below: Five o’clock on any watch (including the clock on the secretariat) is the same moment all over the world. But not the same hour, for the world is regulated by the watch. Pray, what is a watch? A thing that turns on itself and shows the moon. What is the moon? A thing that turns on itself and (elliptically) goes around the sun. And what is the sun? The sun is a luminary that made the earth—the grasses rise green on the sward, the clouds form, the dawn comes; the cattle go home; man puts manhood into woman and the child is born; the tree shoots into the air, and birds sit on it; houses rise, houses, and our children, when they are born, are well looked after. . . . Eagles circle. That is all due to the sun. And the moon. And the clock on the secretariat. (Rao 1992: 41) It is ironic that the passage begins and ends with human creations whereas the natural world is sandwiched in-between. The predisposition to believe that the human world holds sway over the natural world is apparent at various points. Pai’s observation seems to underline this course of thought that runs through the text: Ernakulam must have many ruins and the Dutch must have left a few guns there. In Kartikura House they still show you Dutch cannon balls. When you plow for the tapioca sowings, the cannon balls come out just like the tapioca. Usha used to say, ‘The cannon is hard tapioca but this tapioca is man’s.’ (9–10) This seems in tandem with the ‘anthropic’ thinkers among the humanists who went so far as to believe that the universe is precisely orchestrated for the production of human existence—a theory latterly known as the ‘Strong 117

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Anthropic Principle’. The evolutionary biologist Alfred Russel Wallace (1904) anticipated the anthropic principle as long ago as 1904: Such a vast and complex universe as that which we know exists around us, may have been absolutely required . . . in order to produce a world that should be precisely adapted in every detail for the orderly development of life culminating in man. (256–7) Gradually, however, the notion of anthropocentrism met with scepticism. Despite this, the idea of humans as the only point of meaningful and reliable referencing refused to go away. That ideology has formed the crux of humanistic thought. It began in the 17th century under the influence of writers like Francis Bacon and René Descartes, who saw a paradigm shift from the earlier era of the centrality of the divine into an era of humanism, a move towards the supremacy of the individual, scientific method, and human concerns. In the novel, the compelling concerns of Pai, the narrator, reflect this solipsism. A pressing pragmatism and a self-centred perspective rule the narrator’s life, his ultimate goal being that of building a big house. Pai repeatedly registers this wish: I was thirty-three. . . . I wanted to become a rich man, for then my wife would be so happy that I could do what I liked. If my plans went well . . . I would build a big house, like contractor Srinivasa Pai. He is some distant cousin of mine, and I no more like his house than I like his face. But people usually introduce me in the office saying, ‘This is Mr  Ramakrishna Pai, cousin of Srinivasa Pai of Chalai Bazaar.’ (9) Thoughts of acquiring a house, and thereafter those of its ownership, dominate Pai’s mind: ‘I have a house now, my own. Usha is lying inside’ (57). But paradoxically, Pai’s neighbour Nair, despite his lack of worldly ambition, seems equally pragmatic and concerned with affairs of the world, at least for Pai’s sake. In fact, Pai underlines Nair’s practical and scientific turn of mind, which appears alien to a traditionalist like himself. He declares at one point: As I told you, Govindan Nair had passed his first year in law. . . . He could never see anything except in definition of its situation. If I said, for example, the bilva tree, his mind would not think of Shiva and the hunter [a Hindu myth], as it would occur to you and to me, but he would think of the manure the tree must have had

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(rotten banana leaves, of course), and of man who planted it and was it morning or evening when it was planted. (85) Nair is the instigator who makes it possible through his machinations to bargain with Pai’s landlord, Murugan Mudali, for Pai to acquire his house. But Nair also evinces an unfathomable logic that mystifies those around him. One way of comprehending Nair is as the ‘holy fool’ or even as Lord Shiva of Saiva Siddhantha.1 This takes the concerns of Nair as well as the text’s into the realm of the spirit and the soul. However, this preoccupation too, despite its apparent incongruence with humanist thought, can be accommodated within this speculative system. Descartes, in Discourse on Method, made the disembodied soul central to his conception of truth and knowledge. His well-known adage cogito ergo sum made the split between mind and body complete. For Descartes, however, the senses are suspect because they ‘sometimes deceive us’ (1912: 24). Descartes could only be sure that he was thinking—‘I think therefore I am.’ The body and its senses were not central to his notion of being or our experience of place. For Descartes ‘Reason’ was the ultimate arbiter of truth. He specifically rejected the role of the senses and the imagination in determining ‘truth’ (29). In Rao’s text, Nair’s entire philosophy seems ruled by scepticism of the senses and the imagination. During his court trial, the idea he elucidates overtly seems in fact closely aligned to Descartes’s line of reasoning: Is there seeing first, or the object first? If I have drunk a glass of coffee with milk and in actual fact I have not, but believe I have, which is more real, my exhilaration or the coffee that was drunk? Proof is only oneself. Proof simply means I know. (1992: 86) One might contend that Nair’s philosophy, however, also seems to advocate a certain fatality or passivism when he describes himself as a kitten held by the scruff of his neck by the cat. Nevertheless, this argument can be contested at two levels. First, Nair’s notion of faith is far from passive. On the contrary, it seems to be a very positive assertion of mind that centres the human and requires a great deal of contemplative and physical action. Nair emphasises repeatedly to Pai how important it is to achieve the state of mind akin to a kitten held by the cat, and Pai on his part demonstrates how difficult it is to achieve this state of mind. Indeed, all the events played out in the plot can be shown to demonstrate precisely this point about the need to and the impossibility of achieving this state of equanimity, one which is described in the text as an active not a passive state.

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Interestingly, within the humanist tradition, thinkers such as Hegel and Ludwig Feuerbach do not conceive of the human without taking into account the notion of divinity. Feuerbach’s humanism is based on the idea that ‘Love is the true unity of God and man, of spirit and nature’ (1957: 48). Here again, man’s role in attaining this unity with the divine is conceived as a dynamic human activity that requires effort and resource. This idea seems, in effect, closely parallel to Nair’s who sings ‘I am empty as a tamarind seed, The lord plays the square and four with me’ (1992: 87). To achieve this state of ‘emptiness’ that Nair can boast of is perceived as uncommon. However, again, Jean-Jacques Rousseau at the turn of the 18th century stands out as an ardent proponent of humanism. He first expresses the idea that man by nature is pure and good, and that in order to achieve happiness, he needs to leave all that is unnatural and return to nature, to himself, to become human again (Walther). Here, Rousseau seems to be going against post-Enlightenment ideology that placed Man at the centre of the created world as the active puppeteer who through knowledge and wisdom could conquer and control it, vide Prospero of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. This strong move towards an anthropocentric, humanist view marks a profound ascendancy of the individual, or the centrality of human thought and experience rather than that of the divine. This allows a movement from sacred and social duty to the importance of individual self-fulfilment. Raja Rao’s The Cat and Shakespeare is intriguing precisely because this precarious balance that is held between the human and the divine in humanist thought right from Descartes onwards seems reflected in its pages. Despite Nair’s metaphysical bent, at times Pai’s cryptic descriptions of his neighbour remind us of Prospero: Like a pirate on the high seas (at the time of the Dutch, so to say) is Govindan Nair. He can command a crew of ten Mophlas and in any language you like. He could put a bark onto the sea and say: Sea, take it, and the sea would heave and bear you to where the isles are. (1992: 50) However, these various points of congruence glimpsed between humanist strands of thought and the text are not a means of claiming that the text could be clarified as holding a humanist position. Indeed, my intention is far removed from this. This exercise is merely a preliminary examination to clear the ground to show some similarities with the humanist speculative tradition, but also reveal aspects of its narrative that will permit us to approach it from another more recent speculative tradition, namely posthumanism. Critics, both in India and the West, describe Raja Rao’s third novel The Cat and Shakespeare as being, despite its slenderness, one of the most abstruse and difficult of Rao’s novels. M. K. Naik finds the book ‘as enigmatic as both the “Cat” and “Shakespeare” have traditionally been’ (1980: 93) and 120

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Robert J. Ray speaks of ‘the illusory non-plot held together only by . . . mystifying points of extreme intensity’ (1966: 414). This general confusion can once again, as in The Serpent and the Rope, be attributed to the fact that the novelist, consistently describing himself as an advaitin should, in the conception of a major character in The Cat and Shakespeare, subtly incorporate features which seem remarkably similar to those in another Hindu tradition, Saiva Siddhantha from south India, with its concept of bhakti. Bhakti, a Sanskrit term meaning devotion, was also a theological movement which sprang up in the Upanishadic times as a reaction to the overintellectualisation and over-subtlety of some of the Upanishads,2 as a form of theistic protest. In some Upanishads like the Svetasvatara, the principle of devotion is made explicit: To the great-souled man who loyally and greatly loves his God, who loves his spiritual master even as his God, the matter of this discourse will shine with clearest light. (Tyagisananda 1949: 23) Bhakti is conceived as the devotion shown not only to God, but also to a spiritual teacher or Guru, as the personal and immediate manifestation of the deity. To follow the Bhakti Marga or the path of devotion is to relegate works and even knowledge to a secondary place and to accept salvation or moksha from God as an act of free and underserved grace. In Saiva Siddhantha, many of the traits of the bhakti marga have been absorbed, but within the system itself, these traits are altered and qualified according to the faith. It is interesting to note that this notion of bhakti is a central theme in The Cat and Shakespeare. Both Nair and Ramakrishna Pai underline this concept using the analogy of the cat and the kitten. Nair says ‘Let the mother cat hold you by the neck’ (13); or again, Have you ever seen a kitten fall? You could fall. I could fall. But the kittens walk on the wall. They are so deft . . . The mother cat watches them. And when they are about to fall, there she is, her head in the air, and she picks you up by the scruff of your neck. (61) Here, divine care is equated to the care of the cat. Raja Rao has always claimed that his central concern has been similar to that of seers and saints of Hinduism since time immemorial, namely, to merge with Parabrahman, the cosmic absolute. As Joseph Campbell points out, the ultimate realisation, which the sages have celebrated within Hinduism, is that God worshipped as the ‘Without’ is in reality a reflex of the same mystery as oneself (1962: 12). As long as an illusion of ego remains, the commensurate illusion of a separate deity will also be there and vice 121

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versa. But, precisely that illusion or duality is the trick of maya or illusion. Tat tvam asi3 [That thou art] has been considered as the crux of many influential Hindu philosophies and as the proper thought for the first step of wisdom. One cannot contradict the fact that these bhakti aspects of the text appear frankly anathematic to humanist thought. But what is of greater significance is what emerges when the notion of bhakti and the notion of maya are brought together. Then the notion of devotion to God or a Guru that is central to bhakti gets extended to the idea of reaching out to all of the universe since the very idea of God is revealed as an illusion of the mind, a trick of maya. As such, the act of bhakti becomes an act of reaching out to what is conceived of as the significant other, which within advaita, a non-dualistic system expounded by the philosopher Adi Sankara, is none other than the essence of oneself. There seems to be little or no reconciliation between a humanist viewpoint that is concerned with a rationalist, solipsistic self and the bhakti view that teaches a dedication to the other as self. Here is where posthumanist philosophy becomes a useful vantage point from which to unravel the text.

Posthumanism Posthumanism is a relatively recent speculative and conceptual school, which, among other things, challenges the perception of the ‘human’ in humanist philosophy and also foregrounds the constitutive function of the other in our meditations on, and constructions of, ourselves, our identity, and individuality. Central to it is a reconsideration of the process by which power is negotiated. Posthumanist thought pushes for the formerly objectified ‘other’ to take on the signifying power that was previously denied to it/ her, and to question the status enjoyed by the self as a ‘mono-signifier.’ As Lidan Lin points out: Beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, a number of Western thinkers working in different academic disciplines have notably contributed to the fostering, shaping, and developing of the concept of posthumanism among whom are . . . M. Bakhtin, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva and others. One of the themes uniting the works of these thinkers is the argument that the individual is an incomplete and insufficient constitution, who will always depend on the participation of the Other for enriching and invigorating his selfhood. . . . Thus in the hands of these . . . posthumanists the argument for the necessity of the Other in the constitution of the subject is supported by a set of new ideas that redefines the ontological and epistemological status of the Other. Bakhtin’s ‘excess of seeing’ of the Other, Sartre’s approving ‘look’ of 122

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the Other, Lacan’s ‘lack’ of the Other, and Kristeva’s ‘unnameableness’ of the Other. (1998: 1–3) In theorising posthumanism, it would be profitable to juxtapose it with advaita, a philosophical school within Hinduism. The purpose of this rather unusual juxtapositioning is both theoretical and ethical. Ethically, despite the fact that no direct influence exists between the two strands of thought, we could take Ann Weinstone’s challenge on board. In her book, Avatar Bodies: A Tantra for Posthumanism, Weinstone declares that posthumanism, despite its efforts to protect the other, refuses to expose itself to the other. Instead posthumanism has turned towards technology as a way of avoiding contact with the other(s). The result has been that posthuman ethics has bifurcated into being either an ‘ethics of responsibility’ or an ‘ethics of self-capacitation’ (Weinstone 2004: 8). According to Weinstone, nowhere do these two strands come together to create a posthumanism that sees responsibility for the other taking the form of contact between the subject and another, or even multiple others, for the purpose of extending the subject’s own capacities. Instead, posthuman ethics of responsibility force the other to remain other, creating an asceticism that prohibits contact. The first step would thus be to ‘allow the other to become familiar’ and not reduced to an object or implement along the way to the subject’s greater self-realisation (8–12). Ann Weinstone herself tries to forge a link between posthumanism and Kashmir Shaivism, with the latter as the significant other. However, it seems to me to be even more appropriate, in the context of The Cat and Shakespeare, to propose advaita as the other since the gesture seems singularly befitting at several levels: at the textual and interpretative level, at the level of theory, and as an ethical move towards the other. First, at the textual and interpretive level, the engagement with the other occurs at various levels. The first such encounter occurs when Ramakrishna Pai, the narrator, gets the British Bubo. It started one morning as I  began to scratch my feet. The red of my scratch began to swell up. It became round and then yellow. . . . [T]he bubo grew and grew . . . [and] burst under my feet. The fluid just spilled over the floor. . . . It almost grew big under my eyes. It was like a guava in a few minutes. . . . In a few hours my whole body except my face had nothing but boils. They rose, grew red and then yellow, and burst like country eggs. (16) Pai’s diseased and putrid body is described graphically. This becomes significant to our argument. Disease has long been established as the site of contagion and carries with it heavy stigmatisation. As early as 1966, Mary 123

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Douglas in Purity and Danger discusses how ritual pollution, uncleanliness, and contagion are demarcated in various societies. The diseased body is ‘othered’ systematically and outcast from the social and symbolic order. Invariably, the diseased body constitutes a threat to the social order, and as Quayson, discussing the aesthetic nervousness evident in Wole Soyinka’s works observes, the diseased body ‘institutes significant disjunctures to the established protocols of the social domains in which they appear’ (2008: 117). Therefore, it is all the more noteworthy that there is a conspicuous absence of stigma and contagion in dealing with the disease on the part of Pai’s neighbour, the exceptional Govindan Nair. Pai observes clinically about his bubo: ‘When I woke toward morning ants and lizards were both at it. They were having a feast’ (17). His body has become an ‘abject’ in Kristeva’s sense of the term. According to Julia Kristeva in The Powers of Horror (1984), ‘abject’ refers to the human reaction (horror, vomit) to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of distinction between subject and object or between self and other. It is therefore remarkable that Nair approaches it without disgust: ‘ “Ah you big British boil” he said and laughed’ (Rao 1992: 18). Pai has already struggled to ineffectually explain Nair’s perspective: ‘For him the whole world was one living organism’ (17–18). What Pai appears to be expressing here is precisely the fact that this breakdown between subject and object, caused by the sight of the abject, which would generally result in an intense reaction by the self since it is witnessing the breakdown of carefully erected barriers—in this case barriers constructed by civilisational and cultural demarcators between the self and other—does not appear to affect Nair. Here, the observation by Pai that ‘the whole world was one living organism’ for Nair is particularly relevant in the context of posthumanism since it seems to point to a seamless world where boundaries between self and other become irrelevant, even non-existent. Again, this is also an idea central to advaita. Robert Pepperell, another influential posthumanist philosopher, in his book The Posthuman Condition, spells out the central tenets of his creed. He states: ‘It is now clear that Humans are no longer the most important things in the Universe. This is something the Humanists have yet to accept’ (1997: 180). In removing the boundaries of the human, Pepperell’s philosophy comes very close to that of Nair’s. Furthermore, at the end of the book Pepperell lists ‘The Posthuman Manifesto’, the foremost of which are the following: a) Human bodies have no boundaries. b) No finite division can be drawn between the environment, the body and the brain. The human is identifiable, but not definable. c) Consciousness (Mind) and the environment (Reality) cannot be separated. They are integrally linked. 124

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d) There is nothing external to a human, because the extent of a human cannot be fixed. e) If we accept that the mind and body cannot be absolutely separated, and that the body and the environment cannot be absolutely separated then we are left with the apparently absurd, yet logically consistent, conclusion that consciousness and the environment cannot be absolutely separated. (179–99) The central philosophy expounded in The Cat and Shakespeare which Nair once enunciates to Pai, enigmatically and pithily as ‘You is one. I is one, Where is the two?’ (1992: 84), describes the core of advaita’s monism. This essentially expounds the view that all creation is a projection of and hence part of Brahman. We can easily notice the congruence of this perspective with Pepperell’s posthumanistic thought, which emphasises a boundary-less world. The points of similitude between advaita and posthumanism can be traced further. The notion of reaching out and engaging with the other, another central tenet of posthumanism, such that the self is incomplete except when it engages with the other and gets completed only when it is in a dialectical relationship with the other,4 is an idea that is very strongly expounded in Rao’s text. Nair goes to a brothel to engage in an enigmatic Upanishadic dialogue with a ‘prostitute’, culturally marked as social outcaste and other. The girl initiates the dialogue and hence is positioned in the place of a spiritual seeker or sadhaka. Yet again, social demarcations that exist between a ‘sage’ and a ‘prostitute’ are rendered meaningless: ‘Are you happy’ asked Govindan Nair. The girl threw a bit of her sari over her body. ‘Are you? she asked. ‘Can’t you see I am happy?’ ‘Where does it come from?’ ‘Where does water come from?’ ‘From the tap?’ ‘And the water in the tap?’ ‘From the lake?’ (45–6) Thus, at the textual and interpretive level, the move towards reaching out for the other is instated at several points in the text and at several levels. The text concords with posthumanist thought at the level of theory as well since the fundamental idea central to the text is based on advaita. According to this school of thought, the foundation of the universe is Brahman, often translated as Universal Consciousness. This Brahman is above all duality, both metaphysical and epistemological. Consciousness, thought, 125

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or knowledge is the substance, not an attribute of Brahman. It is consciousness without any object or subject, and therefore differs so entirely from the very nature of consciousness as not to deserve the name at all. The only attribute response to any attempt to invest it with attributes would be ‘neti, neti’ (‘not this’).5 There is no doubt that advaita within Hinduism on the one hand and western philosophy (in general) and posthumanism (in particular) on the other suggest a very different cosmology and anthropology from each other. Yet at the level of theory, the comparison between the two will not and should not appear discordant because as Weinstone points out: Posthumanism, thus far, has been too respectable, too reasonable, too committed to the coherent, especially to the coherency of difference. If we want to fundamentally alter our experience and conception of self, we must break the law of the other, the law of the alien, the irremediably unfamiliar, of exteriority (or interiority) as such. We need to get drunk with each other so we can become posthumanS. (2004: 107) Hence it seems that both posthumanism and advaita advocate a world where the boundaries between the self and other are dissolved. At the ethical level, the dissolution of binaries becomes the appropriate move, reaching Weinstone’s goal of enabling the development of a vocabulary of contact and intimacy leading to ‘an altered syntax of self-other relations that is more faithful to the critiques of elitism and exemption that both posthumanism and deconstruction enact’ (7). This would also be the ultimate ethical act since in comparing two such distant conceptual systems, we are performing what Janus Head, when reviewing Weinstone’s act of comparing posthumanism and Tantrism, labels as an act of assuming responsibility. He declares: The very argument of the book is contained in these moments in which Tantrism and posthuman make contact. How should we respond when something so foreign and alien touches the familiar? Should we back away lest we do violence against that other? Should we embrace it and risk effacing difference? To connect Tantrism and posthumanism, Weinstone assumes responsibility for both: aware of posthumanism, she must be responsible for Tantrism; aware of Tantrism, she knows that growth occurs at moments of contact. (2005: 367) Similarly, in our attempt to compare advaita and posthumanism, though conscious that such simplistic comparisons can be reductive of both systems, we nevertheless actively initiate these steps as a necessary stage in the 126

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realising of the inner esoteric truth of the former and in establishing the ultimate goal of the latter speculative system.

Conclusion We now arrive at the culmination of our argument which began with the attempt to show that the text has humanistic features, but also deep discrepancies. We traced the path of devotion or bhakti marga within Hinduism as central to Rao’s The Cat and Shakespeare. From there it was a short step to establish that once the concept of maya, or illusion of an ‘ego’, was taken into account, it was possible to interpret bhakti as a move towards the other, thus making a logical progression to posthumanist thought. In enacting the comparison between posthumanism and several aspects of the text, such as advaita and bhakti marga, I have undertaken an exercise that has proven useful as an interpretative tool for examining an abstruse and elusive text. It has also been an ethical activity in forging a link between two systems that are otherwise contrapuntal, alien to each other, emerging from two completely different cultural and speculative traditions.

Notes 1 Saiva Siddhanta is a dualistic philosophy that originated in Tamil Nadu in south India where the foundational goal of all beings is to seek enlightenment through Lord Shiva’s grace. For a more detailed discussion of Nair from this perspective, see Sankaran (2007: 196–231). 2 The Upanishads are Hindu scriptures that constitute the core teachings of Vedanta [the end of the Vedas]. They do not belong to any particular period of Sanskrit literature. The oldest date to around the middle of the first millennium, while the latest were composed in the medieval and early modern periods. 3 This famous phrase uttered by Aruni, an Upanishadic character in the Chhandogya Upanishad, to his son is said to contain the essence of Vedantic teachings (Swami Krishnananda vi 8: 7). 4 For more detail on the ‘Incomplete Self’ in posthumanism, see Lin (1998: 12–15). 5 For a concise summary of the philosophy of advaita, see Sankaran (2007).

References Campbell, Joseph. 1962. The Masks of Gods: Oriental Mythology 2, London: Secker and Warburg. Descartes, René. 1912. A Discourse on Method, London: J. M. Dent. Douglas, Mary. 1966. 2004. Purity and Danger, London: Routledge. Feuerbach, Ludwig. 1957. Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot, New York: Harper. Fremont-Smith, Eliot. 1965. ‘Proverb-Hunting in Paradox-land’, The New York Times, 20 January: 196. Head, Janus. 2005. ‘A Review of Avatar Bodies: A Tantra for Poshumanism by Ann Weinstone’, Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature, 8(1): 367–72.

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Humanists UK (formerly, British Humanist Association). ‘Humanism’. www. humanism.org.uk/humanism (accessed on 27 July 2010). Krishnananda, Swami. ‘The Chhandogya Upanishad’. www.swami-krishnananda. org/chhand/Chhandogya_Upanishad.pdf (accessed on 10 October 2010). Kristeva, Julia. 1984. Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection, New York: Columbia University Press. Lin, Lidan. 1998. ‘The Rhetoric of Posthumanism in Four Twentieth-Century International Novels’, Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Texas, Denton. Naik, M. K. 1980. ‘Feline Felicity: On the Meaning of The Cat and Shakespeare’, in K. K. Sharma (ed), Perspectives on Raja Rao, pp. 93–108, Ghaziabad: Vimal Prakashan. Niranjan, Shiva. 1979. ‘An Interview with Raja Rao’, in K. N. Sinha (ed), Indian Writing in English, pp. 19–28, New Delhi: Heritage. Paniker, Ayyappa. 1980. ‘The Frontiers of Fiction: A Study of Raja Rao’s The Cat and Shakespeare’, Literary Criterion, 16(1): 60–72. Pepperell, Robert. 1997. The Post Human Condition, Exeter: Intellect Books. Quayson, Ato. 2008. Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis in Representation, New York: Columbia University Press. Rao, K. R. 1980. The Fiction of Raja Rao, Aurangabad: Parimal Prakashan. Rao, Raja. 1992. The Cat and Shakespeare, New Delhi: Orient. Ray, Robert, J. 1966. ‘The Novels of Raja Rao’, Books Abroad, 40(4): 411–14. Sankaran, Chitra. 2007. Myth Connections: The Use of Hindu Myths and Philosophies in R. K. Narayan and Raja Rao, Berne: Peter Lang. Tyagisananda, Swami. 1949. Svetasvetara Upanishad, Mylapore, Madras: Sri Ramakrishna Math. Wallace, Alfred Russel. 1904. Man’s Place in the Universe: A Study of the Results of Scientific Research in Relation to the Unity or Plurality of Worlds. 4th ed., London: George Bell. Walther, C. F. W. ‘Slavery, Humanism,  & the Bible’, Selections from Lehre und Wehre, trans. Erika Bullmann Flores. www.reclaimingwalther.org/articles/ cfw00002.htm#S3 (accessed on 11 July 2010). Weinstone, Ann. 2004. Avatar Bodies: A Tantra for Posthumanism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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9 THE CAT AND THE CHESSMASTER Deconstructing ‘Play’ in two novels by Raja Rao Janet M. Powers

This chapter had its genesis in a remark made to me by Raja Rao at the time that he was writing The Chessmaster and His Moves. He insisted that he was creating a scene that was a literary expiation of the Holocaust. I was stunned by his statement, believing that such a thing was not possible, and indeed I am not sure that he succeeded even if that was his intent. Yet Rao’s remark continues to reverberate in my mind, along with another scene in The Cat and Shakespeare, in which the narrative suddenly breaks into dialogue as if it were a dramatic play. Although these scenes may not seem to be related, they in fact are; both have in common the element of ritual, commonly understood to be a form of play, in alluding to the Divine. In addition to discussing these two scenes, I will address the larger concept of ‘play’ as it figures in the above-mentioned novels and as it is understood in both Indian and western cultural milieux. That Rao was preoccupied by play, we know from numerous statements in his novels. In The Cat and Shakespeare, he refers to the Vedantic realisation that the world is maya or play: ‘where play begins, reality begins’ (1965: 96). In The Chessmaster and His Moves, Rao states repeatedly, ‘What is existence but pure play?’ (1988: 221). These statements stem directly from the absolutist philosophy of Vedanta. As explained by G. R. Malkani, Pure consciousness is the Absolute: pure consciousness we have seen is intolerant of any difference, the moment it is distinguished it is distorted, and it ceases to be itself. It is the reality behind the world of matter and of individual selves. It is the ground of these. We know the world, and we know other selves, as long as we do not know pure consciousness, which is the universal self. (1951: 256) 129

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Both Ramakrishna Pai, the 33-year-old Saraswath Brahmin narrator in The Cat and Shakespeare, and Sivarama Sastri, the 31-year-old south Indian Brahmin mathematician in The Chessmaster and His Moves, continually speak from the position of pure Vedanta or non-dualism. Their respective antagonist mentors, however, contest this view by insisting on the tengalai school of theist Vedanta, qualified non-dualism or Viśişţādvaita, in which devotees place absolute trust in God. Thus, Govindan Nair tries to persuade Ramakrishna Pai to behave as a kitten-devotee and trust the Mother Cat, whereas Michel, the Jewish Holocaust survivor, makes a persuasive case for the Chessmaster that saved his life, but whom he calls Providence. The Cat and the Chessmaster, respectively, are metaphors for controlling deities, separate from their devotees. For Raja Rao, an advocate of Viśişţādvaita, realising Brahman means erasing the separation sensed by the individual who only then experiences the Absolute. Both of these novels are in fact chess games, with each side having a variety of ‘pieces’ or characters who enliven the narrative by bringing variations of these two philosophical positions to the fore. Pai’s wife Saroja, for instance, is contrasted with this mistress, Shantha, a Nair, who does not need to be married to Pai to be ‘wife’ or mother to Usha. Boothalinga Iyer, who does not know how to play, is ostensibly killed (perhaps by a heart attack) when a female cat jumps on his head. But also inhabiting the ration shop are Syrian Christians and a half Brahmin, Nair, whose religions involve a controlling God. The Chessmaster and His Moves introduces a host of characters with varying philosophical positions: a Marxist, a former resistance fighter/doctor, a Rajput princess, a maharaja playboy, a Jain ascetic, an actress, a devout Brahmin sister, each of whom brings a particular angle of vision to the ongoing dialogue between pure Vedanta and Viśişţādvaita Vedanta. Although not all of those characters ‘play’ with such awareness as Sivarama and Jaya, they sometimes experience moments of pure consciousness and at other times resist such experience. Before going any further, it will be useful to define what is meant by ‘play’ in both Indian and western cultures. In The Chessmaster and his Moves, Sivarama’s letter to André Malraux tells the story of Ramanujan, the great mathematician, who played with numbers: ‘And play, lila, remember is the most serious expression of indian wisdom: Siva dancing in the crematorium etc’ (1988: 612). According to Roger Caillois, ‘a civilization and its content may be characterized by its games. They necessarily reflect its culture pattern and provide useful indications as to the preferences, weakness, and strength of a given society at a particular stage of its evolution’ (2001: 83). The dice games played in the Mahābhārata illuminate very clearly both the ethic of cleverness and the ethic of dharma, as represented, respectively, by the Kauravas and the Pandavas. Both concepts are central to Indian identity, even today.

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Sanskrit has four different verbal roots for play—an indication, perhaps, of how important the concept is to Indian culture. The most commonplace— denoting play of children, animals, and adults—is ‘kridati’, a word that also describes the movement of wind or ocean waves. Gambling or dice games are referred to by the term ‘dīvyati’, which also refers to joking or jesting. The root ‘las’ combines several meanings: shining, blazing up, sudden appearance, sudden noise, moving to and fro, and pursuing an occupation. Finally ‘līlā’ (‘līlayati’) suggests swinging, frivolity, effortlessness (Huizinga 1950: 31–2). The lila (play) of the gods is popularly understood to keep the Hindu universe in motion. Krishna, an avatar of Vishnu, is considered the epitome of playfulness as he sports on the banks of a river even while accomplishing his designated task of destroying demons. Rao writes of the divine lila of Krishna and the gopis in The Chessmaster and His Moves, not only as play in the usual sense but as ‘isness turning on its self-pivot, singing’, as it is ‘this transcendence from duality that makes life possible, and meaning self-evident’ (1988: 505). In that novel, he also links the narrator’s playful relationship with Jaya to that of Siva and Parvati. Jaya’s husband, Surrendar, teases the narrator about both Jaya and Sivarama being in tapas (as both are ill) and not easily awakened (255). At another point in the narrative, he claims that ‘Siva invented chess to keep Parvati in fine fettle’ (429). Certainly, the invention of chaturanga (chess), whatever its origin, is one of India’s great gifts to the world, although the Indian game was originally played with four kings. Indeed, mathematics itself is seen as a form of play. For instance, Rao tells us that Bhaskara wrote his Lilavati to amuse his widowed daughter and that Siva invented puzzles that Parvati could never solve, ‘and thus mankind was saved because the Absolute was not defeated’ (378). By making the narrator of Chessmaster a mathematician, Rao is able to create a character who is constantly playing with numbers as well as continually trying to resolve the disparity between zero and infinity, between the horizontal and the vertical axes, between pure Vedanta and Viśişţādvaita. The narrator refers frequently to the great Indian mathematician Ramanujan, who played with numbers as children play with toys and discovered solutions to complicated mathematical problems; he inexplicably received his numbers from the Goddess of Namakkal. Sivarama hopes that he too will come up with a brilliant mathematical solution, rooted in his attempt to assign numbers to ideas and work out his philosophical problem through equations. Mathematical puzzles, unlike logic or logical positivism, seldom come to a dead end, but rather continue to fascinate, as long as human intelligence is willing to engage itself. Mathematical recreations involve the calculus of numbers in which chance has no part. When such analysis ends in certainty, the game loses interest. But one does not play to win as a sure thing, for ‘the pleasure of the game is inseparable from the risk of losing’ (Caillois 2001: 173).

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Perhaps the first westerner to write about the play element in culture was Johan Huizinga, a Swiss scholar who in 1944 published Homo Ludens, a work translated into English from the German in 1950, which remains in print as a provocative analysis of human experience. Huizinga wrote that to acknowledge play is to acknowledge mind: Play only becomes possible, thinkable and understandable when an influx of mind breaks down the absolute determinism of the cosmos. The very existence of play continually confirms the supralogical nature of the human situation. . . . We play and know that we play, so we must be more than merely rational beings. (1950: 3–4) Huizinga saw play as a civilising force and insisted that ‘holiness and play always tend to overlap. So do poetic imagination and faith’ (140). Anthropologists are particularly interested in Huizinga’s ideas because of his insistence that religious rituals, which seem utterly serious, are actually a type of play, as are war, philosophy, legal contests, and creative art. For Huizinga, play of all types in every culture has certain characteristics: (1) play is voluntary; (2) it involves stepping out of ‘real’ life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition of its own; (3) it is ‘played’ out within certain limits of time and place; (4) it creates order by bringing about ‘a temporary, a limited perfection’; (5) play contains an element of tension, of chance, of striving to succeed; (6) all play has its rules; (7) it promotes formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise or other means (7–13). Huizinga also offers examples of knowing as a form of play in the riddles of the Vedas and the Mahābhārata, as well as in the dialogues of the Upanishads. Certainly Raja Rao, who employs so much philosophical dialogue of the Upanishadic sort in The Serpent and the Rope, as well as The Cat and Shakespeare and Chessmaster and His Moves, was aware of the play element in knowing. Huizinga also has much to say about ritual, a point of great interest for this chapter, because of Michel’s ritual attempt to expiate the Holocaust towards the end of Chessmaster. Archaic ritual, for Huizinga, is ‘sacred play, indispensable for the community, fecund of cosmic insight and social development’ (25). Roger Caillois, a French scholar who wrote in response to Huizinga in 1946, pointed out that the earlier scholar minimised diversified forms of play, particularly games of chance, and ignored various needs served by play activity in contemporary cultural contexts. Caillois developed his own definition of play and later created a typology of play on the basis of which games characteristic of a culture can be classified. Arguing that play tends to remove the very nature of the mysterious, Caillois’s definition of play is much less spiritually oriented than Huizinga’s, yet it also sheds light on the 132

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game of chess, as well as the Mahabharata dice games. Play is to be understood as (1) free, not obligatory; (2) separate, that is, ‘circumscribed within limits of space and time, defined and fixed in advance’; (3) uncertain, ‘the course of which cannot be determined, nor the result attained beforehand’; (4) unproductive, ‘creating neither goods, nor wealth, nor new elements of any kind, and, except for the exchange of property among the players, ending in a situation identical to that prevailing at the beginning of the game’; (5) governed by rules, which suspend ordinary laws and establish new legislation which alone counts; and 6) make-believe, ‘accompanied by a special awareness of a second reality or of a free unreality, as against real life’ (Caillois 2001: 9–10). Caillois distinguishes four different types of games: (1) agon or contest, including chess, in which ‘each player has his superiority in a given area recognized’; (2) alea, the Latin word for dice games, including ‘all games based on a decision independent of the player, an outcome over which he has no control, and in which winning is the result of fate rather than triumphing over an adversary’; (3) mimicry, involving an imaginary universe in which one becomes an illusory character and behaves accordingly—‘he forgets, disguises, or temporarily sheds his personality in order to feign another’; and (4) illinx, ‘an attempt to momentarily destroy the stability of perception and inflict a kind of voluptuous panic on an otherwise lucid mind’ (Caillois 2001: 14–23). For our purposes, alea may be most useful in understanding Govindan Nair’s court victory in The Cat and Shakespeare, while agon certainly describes the game of chess, which serves as the central metaphor in The Chessmaster and His Moves. Suzanne’s job as actress at La Comédie Française and that of Govindan Nair in the ration-shop scene and court trial surely fit the category of mimicry. The expiatory ritual which Michel creates, while not as mind-disrupting as a roller-coaster ride, certainly has the effect of illinx, destroying the stability of onlookers and pulling them into his emotional vortex. My point is that Raja Rao constantly invoked the concept of play in its various types as he wove narratives, created dialogue, and plotted the larger contest between pure Vedanta and Viśişţādvaita Vedanta. Anthropologist Victor Turner takes Huizinga’s ideas about sacred play further in From Ritual to Theatre: the Human Seriousness of Play (1982). Turner sees both archaic ritual and post-Industrial Revolution western drama as instrumental in helping groups adjust to change; both are transformative performances which accomplish poesis or the making of cultural sense (21, 87). Most anthropologists agree with Turner over the issue of liminality, the outstanding feature of ritual. Liminality refers to the temporary relaxing of social structure and obligations to it, which makes possible transformation and creates community. ‘Traditionally religious rituals build on liminality’s transcendental dimensions, linking them to a supernatural context. And emerging forms of ritual become religious when they take account of a cosmic or ultimate context’ (Alexander 1991: 25). For 133

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Turner, as Alexander writes, the relationship of everyday social structure to ritual is dialectical: ‘by introducing the values of directness and equality, ritual alters social structure, putting it in the service of communitarian ideal’ (39). Ritual, a liminal activity, and improvisational drama, a liminoid or incomparable activity, thus function as anti-structure in relation to social ideals. We see a good example of improvisational drama as anti-structure in the ration-shop scene from The Cat and Shakespeare where the employees launch into Shakespearean language as, at their boss’s request, they investigate the case of 17 missing sacks of rice. Although Turner distinguishes between ritual as social drama and theatre as stage drama, he notes that both are concerned with resolving crises and ‘assigning meaning to the apparently arbitrary and often cruel-seeming sequence of events following personal or social conflicts’ (1982: 114). In The Cat and Shakespeare, an exploration of meaning is what occurs in the ration-shop scene, which appears in the narrative as stage dialogue. Appropriately, bits of Hamlet are woven into the scene, which touches on madness, murder, and dreams. Shakespeare, we are told by Govindan Nair, knew every mystery of the ration-shop. Here however we haven’t to murder a brother to marry his wife. Here we marry whom we like. The ration card marries. You are married even when there is no wife. You are married without looking at horoscopes. The dead are not buried in ration shops. There will be no grave scene. Ophelia will die but she will have no skull left for Hamlet, a future Hamlet, to see. We slip, sir, from sleep to wake from wake to sleep. (1965: 81) It becomes clear from this little playlet that one should not delve too deeply into the missing sacks of rice. Ration-shop sleight of hand is understood by all who work there: ‘In ration offices, as we all know, the dead have numbers. Killing be no murder’ (82). Ration cards are created and taken away; wagons of rice are sent to the wrong city; people come into existence and disappear, as if in dreams. The reason why Raja Rao decided to cast this interchange in terms of drama is best explained by Sutton-Smith in The Ambiguity of Play: Play is not just play but is also a message about itself (a metamessage), being both of the world and not of the world (paradox) . . . . Thus one can enact something real in play while denying that one is saying anything about the world, and thus be both innocent and guilty at the same time; only the shared knowledge of secrets allows others to know which truth, if either, is most intended. (1997: 139)

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It is precisely the shared secret of the ration shop that allows everyone who works there to enjoy the play which Govindan Nair improvises for their benefit. The employees are in collusion regarding the mysteries of the ration shop. They are innocent and guilty at the same time; regarding the missing sacks of rice, it is no longer clear what is illusion and what is not. Despite the fact that a great deal of play goes on throughout the novel, this bit of narrative ritual is clearly transformative: even the reader is persuaded by Govindan Nair in the spirit of play to abandon standards of honesty and condone ration-shop mysteries. It is a brilliant scene, calling upon the reader’s acquaintance with Hamlet and awareness of ration-shop fraud, to present Govindan Nair in a leading role, a dress rehearsal, as it were, for his trial in court and acquittal by chance or the Divine. The connection between law and play grows out of an agonistic understanding of the universe. In his discussion of play and knowing, Huizinga alludes to Anaximander’s stated understanding of the processes in life and the cosmos as a legal process, of the cosmos having to seek expiation for some primordial wrong: ‘For they have to render expiation to one another and atone for the wrong that they did according to the ordinance of time’ (1950: 117). In this same spirit, Rao seeks to atone for the horrors of the Holocaust in The Chessmaster and His Moves. The character of Michel offers a moving story of his own experience and a surprising story of Isae who escaped to India, but he insists that ‘ “the jews love God—love God, you know, and with passion” ’ (1988: 666). Sivarama and Michel argue heatedly about duality and non-duality, as the novel comes to a climax: SIVARAMA:  ‘Your God is an I-Thou, is not that so?’ MICHEL:  ‘—And yours?’ SIVARAMA:  ‘A Thou-so I. The I, and only therefore,

Thou. Thus only the “I” remains.’ MICHEL:  ‘Some german theologian has called it, I  think, the God beyond God. Is that what you seek?’ SIVARAMA:  ‘No, the God beyond God, minus the beyond. I want it here and now.’ MICHEL:  ‘So, what?’ SIVARAMA:  ‘There is no what, Just the hum of “I”, “I”, “I”—’ (669) At this point, Sivarama notes the similarity of the Viśişţādvaita deity to Jehovah of the Jews: ‘you can reach His feet they say, but never become Him. It is sweet, so sweet, to lie in rapture at His feet’ (670). When Michel asks whether Sivarama knows Brahman, he answers, ‘No. Not yet! For to know Brahman really, one has to become Brahman, to become It’ (670–1). The success of this exchange is measured by Michel’s embrace of Sivarama as his brother.

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Michel’s ritual expiation of Jewish history which follows is a strange piece of social drama. Clearly compelling to the bystanders who are pulled into the performance, Michel’s ‘thaumaturgical spell’ (1988: 677) grows out of Sivarama’s chanting in Sanskrit and rises to a crescendo of dancing, speaking in tongues, and showering of rose petals. Lines in Latin from Revelation 21 speak of a new heaven and a new earth, a new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven like a bride adorned for her husband. It is a coming together of opposites: of Absolute Vedanta and Advaita Vedanta, of the Rabbi and the Brahmin, of murdering Christians and murdered Jews. At its conclusion, Sivarama observes, We tread now, knowing there are no dead in the world. . . . And on either side of the Champs Elysée, see, see, the ancient dead are awake, their heads raised, the families reunited, handing the unleavened bread of the Passover, one to the other. Everyone, as anybody can see, is saved. (682) Rao apparently intends that the symbolic healing accomplished by this expiation ritual should in some way transform the excesses of the Holocaust and erase them from history. Although Rao intended for this scene to be celebratory and impressive, it unfortunately does not come off that way to the reader. One problem is that of the language of Michel’s ritual. With so many significant quotations throughout the book in Sanskrit and even Latin, one would expect that Rao might have bothered to find significant passages in Hebrew from the Old Testament. Or perhaps he might have sought passages from Martin Buber or the Kabbalah or some Hasidic scholar. Instead, he creates a ‘hallucinating dichtung’ (1988: 678), a sort of sing-song gobbledy-gook, a mantra confabulated out of nonsense words, which robs the litany of intensity and meaning. In addition, although we are told that Michel moves about the landscape and into the centre of a mandala, carrying a rose and a hoopla, it is unclear what he means by hoopla. Is he referring to a hupa, the Jewish wedding canopy, to a hula hoop introduced by one of the boys, or perhaps just a hulabaloo? However, neither the objects he carries nor his actions have symbolic significance. He lays the objects down and a bystander offers rose petals to each kneeling hierophant as if giving communion, upon which everyone throws the petals into the air, ‘clapping hands in ceremonial conclusion’ (681). It is impossible to say what has happened, except that an improvised ritual has occurred. Rao intended the ritual to be transformative, changing the way the world thinks about the Holocaust. Within the world of the novel, some sort of undefinable change has taken place in Michel, but the transformation does not go beyond him, despite bystander recognition that 136

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something important has transpired. We are offered a ritual which seems hollow and diminished, one that fails to measure up to the expectations which Rao has created, both in the novel with his suggestion of hierophany and in his announced intention as a writer. Rao goes so far as to suggest that Michel is a zadik, in Hasidic terms ‘a just man’, ‘the miracle maker, who loved all of man’ (681). Michel himself seems surprised at what he has done: ‘I am a hasid, remember. . . . I hadn’t known how deep all this is in one’ (682). But Sivarama presses him further: ‘To whom, Michel, did you pay homage?’ Michel’s response, ‘Certainly to Him. Maybe to It’, springs from dualism but admits the possibility of a single Absolute. If anything has happened, it is not an expiation of the Holocaust, but instead Michel’s understanding that the Divine may not be dual but rather unitary. Another western writer who has much to say about play is a contemporary American theologian, James P. Carse, who, in his book Finite and Infinite Games (1986), distinguishes between finite games which can be won and infinite games which continue indefinitely. Finite play, states Carse, is theatrical while infinite play is dramatic (1986: 16). Using these terms, we might observe that the ration-shop scene is dramatic in content, form, and function, whereas the expiation ritual is theatrical in every way. It comes to an end with a mock celebration of communion generated by a member of the audience. According to Carse, it is always surprise that causes finite play to end, while infinite players continue in a state of vulnerability, always expecting to be surprised (18). Finite players play to bring play to an end for themselves, whereas infinite players desire to continue the play in others. ‘The joyfulness of infinite play, its laughter, lies in learning to start something we cannot finish’ (1986: 26). In contrast with the finite player, who seeks to be powerful, the infinite player plays out of strength, that is, he allows the other players to do what they wish in the course of his play with them (31). This description of the infinite player sounds very much like Sivarama in The Chessmaster and His Moves, who is constantly being surprised by the actions of the other players (Suzanne, Mireille, Jaya), but who persists in playing nevertheless, even when the others cause play to stop or when the Chessmaster lays a hand on his shoulder. By the end of the novel, he has not given up on his puzzle, even though he finds no solution. His problem is not being able to find the Absolute while he is being maneuvered by the Chessmaster. And although he is grounded in awareness of the Absolute, he has a strong sense of being manipulated by an unseen hand. Towards the end of the novel, his Jewish friend Michel sets aside his belief in Providence to momentarily acknowledge absolute non-dualism. Similarly, Ramakrishna Pai, narrator in The Cat and Shakespeare, claims briefly to have crossed the wall and seen the Mother Cat, finally acknowledging qualified non-dualism. Both ‘games’ come to an end when a winner is declared. One has the sense, however, that Sivarama’s game will continue because he has not solved his 137

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puzzle. When the other books in the trilogy are published, we may follow his game to an eventual solution. The state of vulnerability that characterises infinite play is strikingly apparent in both novels as sickness. In The Cat and Shakespeare, the narrator becomes inexplicably ill with ‘British bubos’ at the same time that Govindan Nair’s son, Shridhar, falls mortally ill of an unexplained fever. In The Chessmaster and His Moves, Siva develops a sympathetic illness, which he persists in referring to as C² (Cortisone squared), even though his debility is inspired by Jaya’s surgery to remove a brain tumour. Curiously, Jaya’s tumour is called ‘a bubo’, evoking the language of The Cat and Shakespeare. Surely sickness in both contexts has not only a narrative purpose but a philosophical one also. Sickness allows both narrators time for reflection upon the events of their lives, as well as opportunities to think about their conversations with those who come to visit the sickroom. More important, the semi-comatose state of the sick individual also allows for sleep, dreams, fantasies—even hallucinations, which are a form of illinx, the type of play in which the stability of perception is momentarily disrupted and new sorts of urgent experience imposed on an otherwise stable mind. Siva, on his sickbed, muses: ‘Was not madness itself after all, a superior condition, the faculty of alogical insights into the laws of this bewildering universe?’ (1988: 221). Such play is perhaps the only freedom possible for the Vedantin who, suffering sickness (both his own and others’), is otherwise at the mercy of the Chessmaster. While confined to bed, and conscious of having no control over their bodies, both narrators traverse four states of the Māndūkya Upanishad: waking, dreaming, deep sleep, and contemplation about the non-duality of atman-Brahman (Hume 1921: 391–2). Historical events similarly create other immovable facts which smack strongly of the Chessmaster’s hand. The Cat and Shakespeare is located in Trivandrum in 1941, a summer of drought during the Second World War, when scarcity was beginning to show itself in the face of war. Although famine would not become alarming until 1943, and rice was still being shipped from one town to another, a ration card was nevertheless a priceless possession, and men who worked in ration shops were players in a bigger game of survival. Limitations on their lives, imposed by the West, are expressed in terms of cause and effect: ‘Hitler and the British brought about the drought’ (1965: 13). Pai’s boils come suddenly, without warning, and occupy his body: ‘They’re of British make, and like everything British, it works without your knowing’ (14). The Chessmaster and His Moves narrates the history of both Paris in 1963 as De Gaulle tries to stabilise the French government, and India that Nehru struggles to develop while remaining non-aligned. This political backdrop offers ample opportunity for comparison and criticism of the two leaders, as well as an added concern when the Chinese invade India in 1962 but then retreat without seizing territory—a puzzling, almost playful canard. In the face of these events, Sivarama and his friends 138

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continue their philosophical dialogue, each participating according to his or her distinct belief system. While others curse and complain, Sivarama tries to maintain his freedom from historical pressures, aware that existence is sat or Truth and therefore pure play, or lila. There are, however, moments when play stops abruptly, when surprise disrupts the voluntary make-believe world and the rules change. One such moment is the death of Shridhar in The Cat and Shakespeare. This event severely tests Govindan Nair’s belief in his role as a kitten being carried by the Mother Cat. Four weeks later, he is arrested on a charge of bribery, a situation which again seems insurmountable. Govindan Nair, however, responds by playing, turning the courtroom into a theatre and improvising an improbable story. In the course of his playful mimicry, a miraculous thing happens: Boothalinga Iyer’s signature is found beneath another signature, allowing Govindan Nair to go free. Yet, as the Vedantin narrator observes, Govindan Nair is not ‘set free; he was free’ (1965: 105; emphasis mine). Even in the face of surprise, he continues to play as if a kitten, and is in turn delivered by the Mother Cat. One might think that Boothalinga Iyer’s sudden death would also be a moment that stops play, but it is not. Because he does not know how to play and indeed resists it, Iyer’s presence represents structure in two ways, both as codified Brahmin behaviour and as the boss of the ration shop. His death, therefore, is welcomed because it allows the anti-structure, the playful sleight of hand in the ration shop, to continue without restraint. Several moments of play-disrupting surprise occur in Sivarama’s playful relationships with the three women in The Chessmaster and His Moves. His relationship with Suzanne comes to an abrupt end when her diaphragm case falls to the floor, which makes him realise that she is trying to push him into the act of procreation, so as to restore her dead son. Siva, however, is angry and has no intention of fathering a child with Suzanne. He wants, rather, to enjoy the sexual play of their relationship, reminiscent of the Kama Sutra, than assume the onerous responsibilities of husband and father. Sivarama’s relationship with Mireille begins with a moment of surprise in which she offers him her breasts, ‘the goblets of Shiraz’, while he lies in his sickbed. He revels in the ritual of lovemaking: Time that is made is ever made for its non-making, the depth reveals your pneuma, the coiled serpent arising has reached the nimbus and become the lotus with a thousand petals—thus you float, as Brahma did, on the waters of creation. (1988: 351) Afterwards, she tells him that she played a trick on him. And he replies that in playing he forgot himself: ‘I became I, . . . not me, but maybe the principle, the inner-arising Siva, the self-manifesting birth of form’ (352). Yet after 139

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this afternoon of ecstasy, Mireille reverts to her former friendly relationship with Sivarama, surprising him again by telling a story of her Diotima, who told her that once she has known Light she should never return to it (369). Siva’s response is to go on playing: ‘Holy, holy universe . . . Parvati’s game, and Siva’s amusement. So, life, I said to myself, why not go and play now. Nothing is ever lost, nothing ever gained, as Newton well knew’ (370). Jaya and Sivarama have a remarkable relationship, one that cannot be consummated physically because they both accept their dharmic responsibility. Jaya is already married to Surrendar; moreover, Sivarama is Brahmin and Jaya a Rajput (Kshatriya). But their relationship transcends the merely physical. Although they have shared moments of physicality, such as when he touches her navel in Calcutta or when he lies beside her on the bed, their mutual awareness of the Absolute and their understanding of non-duality is a spiritual consummation rather than a sexual one. They are the only characters in the novel who fully understand the Oneness of the Absolute, although others—Jaya’s mother and Uma—sense their understanding and wish to partake of it. Even non-Hindus sense something different about Sivarama; they appreciate his spiritual quality of mind and enjoy being in his company. But Sivarama is also human and enjoys his sexual relationships with Suzanne and Mireille, even regretting that his relationship with Jaya cannot be a human marriage. Thumboo notes how Sivarama misunderstands Jaya’s request that were she to die, he should incarnate as the Siva in the temple so that their marriage may be consummated (1988: 570). Only later does Sivarama understand that for Jaya the physical is not part of the route to the Absolute (Thumboo 1988: 571). The Chessmaster has his own mathematic, which Sivarama acknowledges, and even dialogues with him, much in the way that Job argues with God in the Hebrew bible. Remembering an encounter in a Swiss chapel when a child lays her head on the mathematician’s shoulder, he acknowledges the ‘yet, unrecognized presence of the Chessmaster’ (1988: 508). Sivarama recollects a watch lost because a cat plays with it and asks, ‘What relation had the cat to the Chesspiece-mover?’ (509). Thinking of Jaya and her family, he asks, ‘Would Jaya still have a child, you think, Chessmaster?’ The Chessmaster replies, laughing, ‘She too, yes, she too, is a part of the game.’ Sivarama goes on to say: His compassion alone made us play a game to show that we were free, and bound only by the laws we ourselves had legislated. Whoever said the laws of chess were definitive, immutable? He who thinks so, goes down the well, I tell you. You are free. (509) Several pages later, Sivarama imagines that the Chessmaster himself stops the game when he is winning: ‘That is why, son, I  stop. The game is for 140

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the game’s sake.’—‘How so?’—‘How so? You made the rule. You can also change it. Play the game now, as you go on inventing your rules. Go’ (511). Accordingly, Sivarama goes and soon imagines himself drawn to the banks of Niranjana by the Chessmaster himself: There, in the thick darkness of my mind, rising tier after tier in myself, I  see, at last, the Light that can see this light, and in the midst of that great effulgence, I see a form, almost a formless form, it’s at last the Chessmaster himself. I am bewildered. How can form have no-form and yet have form, such the game of sheer intelligence. I bow to Him and say: Lord, give me back my truth. And he says: Tell me when you left it? And I say unto Him: Lord, I do not know. I must have left it in some past life, aeons and aeons ago. Then, says the Lord: How did you see?—I saw, that is all.—And he who saw, pray tell me, where is he? (511) Like Arjuna viewing Krishna’s Divine Form in the Bhagavadgita, or Job arguing with Jehovah out of the whirlwind, Sivarama is dazzled by the Chessmaster’s physical and philosophical brilliance. He realises that ‘in discrimination is wisdom, wisdom and knowledge, the Light that can see this light. There all doubts and all the jungles of the mind end.’ He acknowledges that the journey has ended and he can play whatever game he cares to play. But in his freedom, where there is ‘no one to go and no one to do anything’, he realises that he cannot stop Jaya’s death and is ‘irremediably— lost’ (511–12). The Chessmaster continues to manipulate and does not ­concede the victory. The question of gambling should be raised at this point, as Sivarama tells Uma, ‘I can change anything to mean anything, and all meaning seems to me now utter nonsense. I am really a gambler’ (1988: 515). Like Huizinga, Sivarama refuses to acknowledge the game of chance as play, at least within the metaphor of life as a game: ‘to win by chance is prostitution. To play and let the Chessmaster win, that is the truth’ (516). It is the truth of the Advaita Vedantin, not the truth of the Absolutist, and so there is no capital T. Unlike the Chessmaster, the Vedantin’s Absolute does not act on its own, separately from the actions of those who are part of it. Relating the sad story of how his wife died, Sivarama’s father tells the boy, ‘What a game life is. You can never win. Truth alone is victorious. And that, as the Maharishi says, is beyond birth and death’ (581). Struggling years later with the two philosophies, Sivarama writes on his blackboard, ‘Where is, he? Who is, He? What is, It?’ (639). We see him poised between the dictates of the Chessmaster, a separate deity, and awareness of the Absolute, It, ‘isness’ or pure being. Constantly aware that ‘the chesspiece does not move by itself’, Sivarama acknowledges that ‘he who is behind me, moves me to my next place. And 141

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I also know that I, and this me, are not two me-s, but somewhere one and only one “I” ’ (644). Although he speaks of atman-Brahman, the puzzle of being remains unsolved. Yet when Jaya departs on an Air India flight, a solution of sorts seems to occur. After telling Sivarama, ‘I wish you could be king,’ she weeps. Sivarama experiences unity of being: ‘You could add nothing to it. Take away nothing from it. Who could add what to whom?’ (706). As the plane takes off, however, the airport party begins intoning celebratory verses from the Tulasi Rāmāyana telling how Rama and Sita returned to Ayodhya together in the pushpak vimana. The epic, however, once again evokes the god of the Advaitin. Sivarama recites further lines from the Uttaramacarita speaking of his ‘shattered heart’ and ‘utter sorrow’, further reinforcing our sense that the Chessmaster has had his way once again. The very last page of the novel, in which brother and sister acknowledge their bond, suggests that the narrator is ‘home’, although the question of Absolute non-duality as opposed to duality of god and devotee has not yet been resolved. This ambiguity in regard to Sivarama’s life is the same ambiguity that all of us face in trying to make sense of existence and the Divine. Throughout his novels, Rao continued to put Sankara’s teachings into the mouths of his characters. But in all of his novels there is also the implication that some external force is at work manipulating their lives, and that life is an infinite game, to be resolved only by the sudden surprise of death or the moment of ananda experienced by the jivanmukta. Thus, Raja Rao, in each of his brilliant narratives, insists that the real existential challenge—realising Brahman in the face of perceived manipulation by the Chessmaster—is the most difficult philosophical problem faced by human beings.

References Alexander, Bobby C. 1991. Victor Turner Revisited: Ritual as Social Change, Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press. Caillois, Roger. 2001. Man, Play and Games [1961], trans. Meyer Barash, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Carse, James P. 1986. Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility, New York: Free Press. Huizinga, Johan. 1950. Homo Ludens: A  Study of the Play Element in Culture, Boston: Beacon. Hume, Robert E. 1921. The Thirteen Principal Upanishads Translated from the Sanskrit, London: Oxford University Press. Malkani, G. R. 1951. ‘Comparative Study of Consciousness’, in W. R. Inge et al. (eds), Radhakrishnan: Comparative Studies in Philosophy Presented in Honour of His Sixtieth Birthday, pp. 231‒57, London: Allen and Unwin. Rao, Raja. 1965. The Cat and Shakespeare, New York: Macmillan. ———. 1988. The Chessmaster and His Moves, New Delhi: Vision.

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Sutton-Smith, Brian. 1997. The Ambiguity of Play, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thumboo, Edwin. 1988. ‘Raja Rao: The Chessmaster and His Moves’, World Literature Today, 62(4): 567–73. Turner, Victor. 1982. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, New York: PAJ Publications.

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10 THE UNKNOWN QUANTITY Mathematics and metaphysics in Raja Rao’s The Chessmaster and His Moves Neelum Saran Gour

The Chessmaster and His Moves appears to mark an advance on Raja Rao’s earlier novels by its creative inclusion of mathematics within the parameters of his literary metaphysics. In The Serpent and the Rope the protagonist was a historian, but in The Chessmaster and His Moves Rao has made his hero a mathematician, a Ramanujan-like figure. Rao’s authorial experiments with Truth have led him into two parallel searches, first into history and subsequently into mathematics. In The Serpent and the Rope, Rao had devoted some thought to what he then called ‘the tyranny of two and two’ (1960: 99) and the significance of the zero; and what was summed up in a few paragraphs in the earlier novel forms the primary concern of the latter. In the earlier novel, Rao had seemed to argue with categorical emphasis against analytical thinking as a means to understanding reality: ‘if Dostoevsky had studied the theory of numbers he would have known how all numbers merge into zero, from which they arose’ (1960: 99). Mathematically, such a statement is meaningless and can only be understood as a literary metaphor. By zero, Rao implies something akin to the Buddhist sunya, the undifferentiated state, void of quality and quantity but from which all concrete characteristics emerge. It is possible to find technical support for Rao’s remark by reference to the ‘singularities’ of mathematics when its seemingly absolute laws break down. For, as quantum physics has demonstrated, the laws of mathematics and classical physics refer only to what might be called ‘the zone of middle dimensions’ (Capra 1975: 23); at the sub-atomic and at the macrocosmic levels, mathematics, which the Greeks believed dealt with eternal and absolute laws of reality, breaks down. We may recall Bertrand Russell’s piquant opening remark in The Principles of Mathematics: ‘Mathematics is a science in which we do not know what we are talking about nor whether what we say is true’ (1903: 1); and Albert Einstein’s equally paradoxical statement: ‘As far as the laws of mathematics 144

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refer to reality they are not certain; and as far as they are certain they do not refer to reality’ (qtd. in Capra 1975: 13). To the extent that, along with such eminent positions, Raja Rao’s phrase ‘the tyranny of two and two making four’ (1960: 99) implies the arbitrary and inaccurate rule of the discursive intellect, we may go along with his remarks in The Serpent and the Rope. Indeed, when Rao makes his protagonist Ramaswamy cite the anecdote of Euler at the court of Catherine the Great—the proof of God’s existence is ‘a+b/n’ is equal to ‘X’ (1960: 130), he makes this ‘X’ a metaphor for the Absolute. When ‘X’ is the ‘All’, one can quibble about the Absolute’s components in any way one chooses. The grand total of all metaphysical constituents remains the same, and it matters little what the variables are. But in The Chessmaster and His Moves, published over 20 years later, Rao has evolved creatively in his use of the metaphor of mathematics. In this later novel, the main character Sivarama Sastri calls mathematics ‘the ultimate metaphysique’ (Rao 1988: 499) and as ‘being nothing else but philosophy construed in numbers’ (523). The 20th century converted philosophic terms into mathematical symbols: language, metaphysics, and mathematics combined in a more concentrated search for essential meanings: Symbolic logic is a notation aimed at identifying the axioms and procedures at the base of each [thought]  .  .  . and of reducing all possible proofs to the barest skeletons. By this plan the results should be absolutely abstract and clear-cut statements. . . . Several monumental efforts have been made to translate all mathematical reasoning into such revealing shorthand—most notably in the three symbol-heavy tomes of the Principia Mathematica, published by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell. (Bergamini 1963: 174–5) The Formalist School in Mathematics held the view that the laws of mathematics were absolute. A contrary view was proposed by Kurt Gödel of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton who put forward what is called an ‘existence proof’—an argument ‘which shows that something exists without necessarily producing the “something” for inspection’ (Bergamini 1963: 175). Gödel’s theorem is regarded with both ‘antipathy and exhilaration’ as Bergamini pointedly remarks: Those most hurt are the ‘formalist mathematicians’ who had hoped to establish each branch of mathematics once and for all on a single consistent set of axioms. Those most gladdened are the freewheeling spirits who cannot endure the thought that mathematics will ever be cut and dried. (1963: 174–5) 145

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In terms of Rao’s own creative use of mathematics, it is interesting to reflect that it was Wittgenstein who employed the chess-game image, and Einstein who, while objecting to Heisenberg’s ‘uncertainty principle’ and Niels Bohr’s theories about the randomness of quantum reality, famously declared that he would never believe that God plays dice with the universe (Pais 1982: 440). Quantum reality is governed by its own laws. In Einstein’s view not chance but an as-yet-uncomprehended determinism programmes the workings of the universe. Significantly, Lewis Carroll, another mathematician, likewise employed the motif of the chess-game. Rao has worked in one of the trail-blazing conceptions of modern mathematics, the Game Theory, proposed by mathematicians like Von Neumann (Bergamini 1963: 175). Today, cutting-edge physicists talk of the ‘God-particle’—the Higgs boson, found in 2012 during data analysis in Geneva’s Large Hadron C ­ ollider— postulated to be the innate agency present in each particle of matter. All these ontological and epistemological concerns have been intimate preoccupations with Rao; and in The Chessmaster and His Moves, he makes a heroic attempt to incorporate them within the body of a novel, running the serious risk of making the product intolerably ponderous for lengthy stretches, but memorably inspiring in its core issues and their treatment. Raja Rao is preoccupied with the metaphysics of chance and necessity and their underpinnings of freedom and determinism, but his enquiry has a poetic rather than a scientific foundation. Sivarama Sastri meditates profoundly on ‘number’ and ‘zero’, but for Rao this is a private and entirely metaphorical equation between symbol and the sunya, that is the zero as the ontological void. Throughout the novel, Rao employs words like ‘mathematique’ and ‘zero’ in a metaphoric sense, and it is more than possible that if rendered into rigorous symbolic logic, his statements might not be able to stand up to the mathematical test. In order to appreciate the fruitful sense in which Rao uses these terms we must keep in mind his perennial ontological binary of Brahman and maya, the undifferentiated, unquantifiable, ultimate reality and its accessible, knowable, quantifiable representations. Rao constantly discusses the relation between language and number. In his discourses on number, he appears to adopt what may be called a formalist position, but when he turns his attention to zero his approach is entirely transcendental-mystical. The zero for Rao is the noumenal reality, the sunya,1 the nirakar-anirvacaniya,2 the ‘such’.3 In The Serpent and the Rope, Ramaswamy had frequently used the image of nothingness, replicating Heidegger and Nagarjuna. Both Heidegger and Nagarjuna attached primacy to the metaphysical necessity of negation, a fundamental position for initiating subsequent discourse (Heidegger 1972; Nagarjuna, qtd. in La Vallée Poussin 1988). Ramaswamy’s contemplations in The Serpent and the Rope also frequently resort to this principle. The concept of negation is one of the ideas that finds symbolic representation as the zero in The Chessmaster and His Moves. In The Serpent and the Rope, Rao had explored that 146

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there is a substantive difference between Truth per se and its multiple and varying interpretations. In The Chessmaster and His Moves, he employs the poetic idea of mathematics to refer to the abstractions and necessary symbolisms whereby we strive to apprehend the essential Truth. Sastri’s prolonged contemplations on the subject are among Rao’s most lyrically inspired. The novelist in Rao thus explores the game of human existence as an equation playing with equations. We now use terms like evolutionary programmings, genetic codings, and behavioural conditionings. The self itself and its constitution are Rao’s subjects, and the laws and processes of their inter-connectivity with non-dual reality his constant themes. Thus, numbers become abstract symbols, their configurations take the form of hexagrams or cosmic patterns of the Tao, obeying what the Chinese ‘li’ or law mandates. The flow, the dance, the game are all universal metaphors of this philosophically cognised phenomenon as the following passages will illustrate. Vedanta, especially its advaita4 version, underscores all of Rao’s speculations on the subject. Mahayana5 Buddhism’s influence is in places manifest, in others implicit: [M]y mind jumped, it seemed from depth to distance, . . . there was a feeling altogether of sudden apperceptions, of quick equivalences, of seeing axioms, laws, connections between fact and fact, human, philosophical, mathematical, which implied  .  .  . that knowledge belonged to oneself, that everything was spread out . . . an inner space  .  .  . and as one rediscovered those connections, the mathematician, the philosopher, saw them in varied symbols, yet exactly of the same meaning. . . . Henri Poincare had spoken [of sudden illuminations] . . . willing to name it but the signature of an inexplicable series of forces . . . rather than spurts from the well of knowledge, the jnana-kund, the secret hidden Ganga in which each one of us behold . . . the wisdom that was already there. (Rao 1988: 328–9) And again: [T]ruth has to be stated in terms of a language suited to it. That is why I like mathematics. The square root of minus one . . . has no human language equivalent. (529) There is in this abstract code an in-built aesthetics too. Mireille, a character in the novel, says: ‘I can see its aesthetics. All symbols are made to yield pure meaning’ (349). As stated above, Rao’s preoccupation with the concept of the zero is not a hard-core mathematical involvement but only an extension of his mystical 147

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empiricism. His repeated references to emptiness or sunyata will bear this out: But to be nameless is to be so true. Zero should really be one’s name. The Buddha, had he not said? . . . There is nothing behind one. So Sunya is my name. . . . And be not Siva’s name Sunyadhipati, Lord of Emptiness? From zero arise all numbers. (1988: 8) To Rao, the sunya or zero signifies the opposite of Being, the state of nirvana, the substratum Brahman from which all appearances issue, as well as the dissolution of the individual ego when the sense of being and nonbeing are transcended. Zero is a blanket metaphor, and its symbolism can be stretched to signify many metaphysical things. Zero can be inferred to mean the state of silence, the refusal to commit to verbal categories or the unknowable noumenon. Frequently the concept involves the idea of negation or denial which leads to inverse discovery, a sense used by both Heidegger and Nagarjuna (Heidegger 1972; Nagarjuna, qtd. in La Vallée Poussin 1988). Zero in Rao’s shifting symbolism assumes a range of meanings, but there is a recognisable predictability in his authorial ecstasies: ‘What was the world anyway? And where was I? Who was I? A man walking in London emptiness.’ And expectedly, Sastri quotes Sankara’s nirvana-astakam6: ‘na ca vyoma bhumirna tejo na vayur’ [I am neither ether nor earth, neither fire nor air] (166). Often Rao uses the metaphor of the zero to signify death or dissolution, or even a Zen-like extinction of the thought process: ‘Yoga is after all the undoing of thought. So is Zen. Not to be . . . was truly to be’ (1988: 43). But this profound zero-ness is not a negative state, as the novelist continually asserts in a convincingly Mahayana Buddhist posture. The zero zone is just the area beyond thought, beyond becomings in a Buddhist sense. What the reader grasps very early in The Chessmaster and His Moves is that Rao has not evolved into new terrain despite the effort to convert literature into mathematics, but rather utilised the terms of mathematics in a literary way. ‘Zero is not nothingness’ (283) is still an appealing literary statement although it may be construed by the sympathetic reader to be a poetic counterpart of Kurt Gödel’s ‘existence theorem’ referred to earlier. Indeed, Rao constantly yokes words and numbers together in his private version of modern linguistic philosophy. The incommunicable essence of experience can only be approximately conveyed through words, just as Rao appears to suggest the ultimate reality can only be apprehended through patterns, programmes, and laws whereas the epistemology of these mappings is done through the abstraction of numbers: ‘mathematics and linguistics seemed in many ways so close—symbols to express the mysteries, subterfuges and images of a human function, called the mind’ (1988: 215). 148

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If number and language are both symbols approximately apprehending reality, poetry is a ‘mathematique’ of the intuition, and each poet has his own integers or conceptual units of meaning. Rao takes up Mallarmé’s poem ‘Herodiade’7 for discussion and considers its symbols: ‘The Absolute in fact can only be indicated by symbols and silences—the frozen lake, the dip, the untouched wings of the Cygne—gave meaning to life, death and immortality’ (25). And since reality is ultimately unknowable, it can only be accessed circuitously through trails of images which speak to the subliminal, rising out of the unconscious and pointing towards intimations of states beyond utterance. The death of the swan as it submerges itself in the ice-bound lake in Mallarmé’s poem is conveyed through a sequence of visuals charged with suggestion. Symbols are the algorithms of poetry as much as they are the alphabets of mathematics. And Rao similarly believes ‘that forces, the gods, had not only names but numbers, colours, geometrical shapes as the Tantrics believed, why even Pythagoras’ (34). The mind relies on symbols, words, numbers, musical notes, visual images, or movements to render a reality otherwise elusive. Yet our mental cartography cannot reproduce the exact contours of the territory. Rao uses mathematics as a system of symbolism to indicate relations or patterns in the process of life. In places he even uses initials to mean characters: ‘J’ for Jaya or ‘S’ for Suzanne in the private algebra of his narrative. The essential configurations in the life process seem to be constant as though part of some absolute mathematical algorithm. In the novel, relationships are strangely ordered. Jayalakshmi is married to Surrender Singh. Sivarama Sastri loves Jaya nobly and platonically. Raja Ashok also loves Jaya but she loves Sastri. Sastri lives with Suzanne but has a transitory love affair with Mireille, her friend. Mireille, on her part, is married to Jean-Pierre who is guilty of his own misdemeanours with his female patients. As Sastri moves from Suzanne to Mireille, so Suzanne moves from Sastri to Michelle, a minor character in the novel. These are the ‘becomings’, the unfurling of the process of relational flux in a strange algebra of perennial designs. Rao also refers to his sister Uma’s mental derangement in this connection, suggesting that the mind too has its programmes and codes, something all too familiar to us in the 21st century, exposed as we are to theories of artificial intelligence and computer programming. In each case we skim the surface of some master-reality, superlatively intelligent, creative, and sentient. We deal in unknown quantities and establish our tentative laws, abstractions, equations. As in mathematics, there are substitutes. But the substitute, holds Rao, is absurd when Truth exists: ‘You know, Jaya. There is only you for me.’ ‘What about Suzanne then?’ . . . ‘A substitute,’ . . . ‘Why a substitute when the real is here.’ (1988: 126) 149

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Rao states epigrammatically in The Chessmaster and His Moves: ‘Everything in life seems a substitute for something else’ (126). And again: ‘We live . . . in abstractions, with layer behind layer of reflections and connections, an infinity of equations linking one reality with the other’ (48). A consideration of mathematics leads Rao into one of the key ideas of modern physics, the dynamic universe, the dance of the molecules which Fritjof Capra, long before Rao, described as ‘the dance of Shiva’ (1975: 9). The ever-changing world of apparently stable matter in relation to the thing-initself in the Kantian sense leads the exploration naturally towards an enquiry into the nature of time and transformation. None of these ideas are original to Rao, being mere theories enjoying cutting-edge intellectual currency at the time The Chessmaster and His Moves was written. Rao has made poetic use of them, however, and incorporated them into a work of literature, combining metaphysics and natural science in a plurality of sweeping discourses. To Jaya’s question ‘Why does a rose fade?’, for instance, Sastri answers: A certain conglomeration of molecules in one case is formed in one way, and the next second they change their pattern. . . . For, change is the very law of nature, which simply means [that] patterns, shapes in the objective world change, thus creating time. . . . As the buddhists say: ‘Things come, appear and disappear, leaving absolutely nothing behind.’ (Rao 1988: 139–40) To Jaya’s ‘What is the rose then?’, he replies, ‘An appearance of molecular shapings’ (140). Walking the razor’s edge between physics and metaphysics, Sastri poses the next question: ‘What then . . . is change?’ And replies: ‘Change is the quantum of time’ (141). Then, with a swing of discourse characteristic of Rao, Sastri reduces all to his favourite advaita vedanta when he piquantly poses the next question: ‘But then who sees it? Does change see change?’ and gives us once more a Vedanta-tilted axiom: ‘Only what is stable can see the unstable’ (141). And, like The Serpent and the Rope, the question ‘What is the rose then?’ involves us yet again in the theological issue of the problem of Universals that preoccupied the medieval schoolmen for several centuries in the monasteries of Europe. The Chessmaster and His Moves is reminiscent of the philosophical joust between Ramaswamy and George as Sastri asks: ‘Is not man an abstraction, as your Plato somewhere said? Tell me, Suzanne, one thing that is not an abstraction. . . . A million qualities make an object. And yet as our scientists know, the object escapes us. . . . You too are an abstraction.’ (1988: 77) 150

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The key symbol in the novel—the game of chess—imaginatively extends the creative application of mathematics to literature. The relation between mathematics and chess is replete with exciting metaphysical possibilities. Rao states the parity: ‘The indians . . . gave zero, a pure abstraction, and chess, another pure abstraction, to the world’ (69). The universe is the great chessboard, with the Absolute as the Chessmaster, and all the world his play with himself and with his creatures. The rta or tao is the grand cosmic lila or play of the universe containing change and time and ever-dancing molecules of gross and subtle matter, ever forming and dissolving shapes of transience described poetically by Capra as the ‘dance of Shiva’. In the novel the characters are related to one another in an incomprehensible set of relations. These are the pawns, following rules which are beyond their own apprehension but perfectly meaningful to the Chessmaster. Our intuition does inform us of invisible forces intervening or controlling, or as Rao puts it, ‘a sure instinct in us . . . informs us of our next move, if only we could listen to it’ (185). In this stupendous game there are ‘not four orders of pawns, but a million’ (195). In a series of choice sequences, Rao outlines the riddle of the game which is the universe at play, a game which involves both necessity and chance, freedom and determinism, action and choice. Each pawn follows its own codes, and there is an ordered hierarchy of pawns on the chessboard. Moves and counter-moves have their own internecine dialectic and the variables of probability, the permutations of chance, and the combinations of karmic predestination that run into millions of possible positions. To the inept player who plays against a superior opponent like the Chessmaster, his own moves appear free, but the Chessmaster carefully controls even his opponent’s choices so that ultimate determinism operates as the Chessmaster’s will: The Chessmaster’s moves are, so to say, subtle, magnanimous, sure. His hand is on your shoulder, not to tell you where to move, but to show the nature of essensic movement. And movement itself is the play. Ramanujan called it the Goddess of Namakkal. . . . Ramanujan had only been given the light by which the riddles could be solved. . . . [I]t’s not the Chessmaster who moves, but you move, in the light of his presence. (506) It is against this passage that the insight of Raja Rao’s own chosen master, Atmananda Guru, ‘I am the light in the perception of the world’, which is the epigraph to the novel, becomes clear. Still, the game is not a serious one, as the spiritually evolved player comes to realise. One plays the game with a helpful, compassionate opponent and the adversarial stances of the relative positions are only appearances, not ontological facts. The game is not between combative partners, but rather 151

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a ‘make-believe’ one between two vastly unequal players, one of whom is amusingly using the other without any thought of victory or defeat. There is a touching element of mystical devotionality in Rao’s rendering of this relationship between the two, since the idea is rooted firmly in the advaita concept of Brahman and maya: ‘[O]ne wondered who the master-player was, moving his chesspieces with total precision, with dastardly quickness, rubbing his noble head in silence, in secret joy’ (501). The urgency of the game is an illusion. ‘The game is for the game’s sake’ (511). At the same time, the relationship between the inept player and the master-player is distinctly a personal one, rehearsing that of the kitten and the Mother Cat well exemplified in Rao’s novella The Cat and Shakespeare. ‘Who, Lord, who is this master chessplayer, who makes us jump and move, twist and double up and run forward, never allowing us rest but always giving us a surprise which showed his tender care, his laughter, his mischief, and yet his protection?’ (1988: 458) The recalled kitten and Mother Cat analogy may be carried a little further to say that the game is primarily playful like that between the Mother Cat and her small, awkward kitten. While there is fun in the play, or even a gentle mock-competitive posture, there is above all a tender solicitude and sympathy for the weak and blundering lesser player. In The Chessmaster and His Moves, Rao turns his transcendental yet personal divinity into the master player, and his clumsy and bungling player into an individual mortal, playing the complicated cosmic game by the incomprehensible but uncannily consistent rules of karma, destiny, will, or chance. The metaphor grows in richness as the authorial inspiration progresses. The game is a tissue of the illusion of being and it lasts only so long as the maya does. To one who has learnt to play effectively with God there is no further game: His compassion alone made us play a game, to show that we were free, and bound only by the laws we ourselves had legislated. Whoever said the laws of chess were definitive, immutable? . . . I tell you. You are free. The Chessmaster will now and again, however, say: You are winning now. Get up and go. (509) In the last section of the novel, the interior dialogue with the self changes effortlessly into a dialogue with one’s Master-opponent: ‘Tell me, Chessmaster, where are you taking me?’ (515). Or: ‘But, Master, you are winning’ (511). To realise in one’s spirit that one is always and ever an ineffectual player matched against, and manipulated by, an infinitely superior hand

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is to evolve in spiritual perception. ‘To play and let the Chessmaster win, that is the truth’ (516). The equivalence between chess and mathematics now becomes obvious. The position of the pawns corresponds to the placing of integers. The relations correspond to the endless patterns of equations with which the inept mathematician engages and that the Master Mathematician alone can comprehend and solve. Too well does the inept mathematician realise that ‘something is missing’ in all his explanations (505): ‘There is only one answer to every question, but maybe there are myriad ways to come to it. Each mathematician had his own freedom to go the way he liked. Remember, one approaches Brahman, each one his own way’ (490). The equation that contains all equations, the master key to the riddle, is never found. Rao describes ‘the mind’s mythic game with itself’ (1988: 100) and its ultimate singularities, to be quite like those of mathematics itself. In The Serpent and the Rope, Rao had drawn upon Euler’s answer to Diderot when he prepared the ultimate equation to prove the existence of God: ‘a+b/n  =  X. Hence God exists’ (1960: 130). By postulating an inclusive transcendental quantity as X which enfolds all the minor combinations and variations of relations between lesser quantities, Rao resoundingly upholds his signature advaita vedanta. In every field of experience, it is the game of chess that manifests itself. Suzanne, who is an accomplished actress, muses: ‘The playwright knew the play. The players did not.’ And Mireille asks: ‘Who is our Molière, Suzanne?’ (1988: 75–6). The first and second books of The Chessmaster and His Moves are named The Turk and the Tiger Hunt and The Goblets of Shiraz, respectively. The former symbolically refers to the enigmatic equation between the different species of the living world through the metaphor of the tiger hunt. The tiger kills the native and is in turn killed by the shikari or the hunter. On the great chessboard there are different orders of pawns in an evolutionary and psychic hierarchy where each lives by its own laws of movement on the board. But everything is interconnected in a maze of karmic equations. This is the ‘mathematique’ of God, implying the way in which the universe is programmed. The second book, The Goblets of Shiraz, is a slow, sensuous sequence devoted to the lila of sex, the mysticism of eros. The game of sex is regarded as yet another aspect of this chess game in which ‘eros’ represents the formula of the senses and ultimately of aesthetics. Rao also fills many pages of the book with political discourses. It may be easily inferred that the novel itself is the chess game of diplomacy, power, war, and peace on the chessboard of history. The game of chess and the conception of the transcendental Grandmaster is thus visualised as a complex metaphor that Raja Rao develops in its many dimensions of meaning as the symbol par excellence that refers to the world process, and the intelligence and design that drives it.

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Notes 1 Sunya is the void of reality. It is a term used in Buddhist metaphysics, especially in the thought of Nagarjuna. 2 Nirakar-anirvacaniya is a term used to describe the Formless Absolute, of whom no description is possible. The term has been used by Sankara with reference to Brahman. 3 ‘Suchness’ is a metaphysical term used by Buddhist philosophers to denote a pure state that transcends qualities, names, or forms that just is. Reality is conceived as just being and beyond the scope of qualifications or descriptions. 4 Advaita is one of the branches of Vedanta philosophy, initiated by Sankara, which holds that Reality is non-dual and that the self and the Absolute are co-extensive. 5 Out of the two major schools of Buddhism, Hinayana and Mahayana, the latter is the form practiced in most South-East Asian countries. It has a philosophy akin to Vedanta. Mahayana Buddhism places emphasis on achieving enlightenment (bodhisattva), on freedom from suffering and consequent rebirth (bodhicitta), and the desire to attain spiritual fulfilment (upaya) through the worship of deities rather than obeisance to any philosophical position. 6 One of the compositions of Adi Sankaracharya, the 9th-century Vedanta philosopher. 7 Tout son col secouera cette blanche agonie Par l’espace infligée à l’oiseau qui le nie, Mais non l’horreur du sol où le plumage est pris. Fantome qu’a ce lieu son pur eclat assigne, Il s’immobilise au songe froid de mépris Que vêt parmi l’exil inutile le Cygne. (qtd. in Rao 1988: 25)

References Bergamini, David. 1963. Mathematics, New York: Life-Time. Capra, Fritjof. 1975. The Tao Of Physics, Boulder, Colorado: Shambhala. Heidegger, Martin. 1972. Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, New York: Harper and Row. La Vallée Poussin, Louis de. 1988. Abhidharmakosabhasyam (including Nagarjuna’s commentaries of Madhyamika-vada), trans. Leo M. Pruden, Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press. Pais, Abraham. 1982. ‘Subtle Is The Lord . . .’: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rao, Raja. 1960. The Serpent and the Rope, New Delhi: Orient. ———. 1988. The Chessmaster and His Moves, New Delhi: Vision. Russell, Bertrand. 1903. The Principles of Mathematics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Part III MULTICULTURAL POLITICS, HABITAT, AND TRANSLATION

11 ‘I AM NOT GANDHI’ Kanthapura and the problem of allegory Ulka Anjaria

The legacy of Raja Rao’s 1938 novel Kanthapura is far-reaching. Still taught on syllabi today, it is considered a major early text in the tradition of Indian writing in English, as well as an emblematic example of how the novel participated in the consolidation of nationalist thought. Reading the novel in relation to nationalism—a practice inspired by Benedict Anderson’s analysis of the Filipino novel Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not) in his book Imagined Communities (1983), and more controversially theorised by Fredric Jameson1—has become central to theories of the Indian novel in English. Kanthapura is thus often read as a Gandhian allegory for its rich and lyrical description of how Gandhian thought and practice were disseminated to India’s villages before independence. Rao’s own thoughts on the creative use of Indian English in his preface to Kanthapura only further demonstrates his attention to the politics of literature. Through this novel and others like it, reading fiction in relation to the nation has become standard practice within postcolonial literary criticism—so much so, I would venture, that it is almost impossible to read fiction in any other way. Owing to this naturalised association between the novel and nationalism, it has become quite hard to identify and lay bare the critical assumptions that underlie such an approach or to suggest alternative interpretive methodologies. Indeed, the interdisciplinary scope of postcolonial theory has meant that scholars of literature constantly find themselves justifying to their colleagues why literature matters and what its larger significance might be. While this is a worthy endeavour, it has resulted in reductive political readings of complex literary works. For instance, calling a novel ‘Gandhian’ is a common shorthand used by literary critics (Shingavi 2013: 3), but in fact, the label raises questions that are usually left unasked: what exactly about the novel is Gandhian? Is Gandhianism the ideology of the author, the protagonist, the narrator, or a minor character? What does it mean for a novel to have a unitary politics? What about moments in the novel that are clearly not Gandhian—how do we read and interpret those? 157

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In this chapter, it is argued that while Kanthapura can certainly be read as a national allegory, and specifically as allegorical for the transmission of Gandhian ideology to India’s rural peripheries, there are also moments throughout the novel when this Gandhian allegory is called into question, offering a more complex relationship of the novel to political thought than is usually assumed in postcolonial criticism (S. Sharma 1997; Trivedi 2000; A. Sharma 2004). These moments of doubt constitute not so much a questioning of nationalism as a suggestion that human lives do not unfold as a function of external processes: this is as much true for nationalism as for allegory itself. This allows the possibility for local readings on the one hand, and transnational ones on the other. Attention to the moments where the Gandhian message fails or is unconvincing becomes, I  argue, equally important as reading for a dominant ideology. These moments allow us to offer alternatives to the dominant way in which not only Kanthapura, but much Indian fiction, is read and taught: as a version of a national allegory. Comparing the novel to a more recent work, Uday Prakash’s 2005 Hindi novella Mohandas, I suggest that both texts might open up new possibilities for reading postcolonial fiction beyond allegory.

Kanthapura and the national allegory Kanthapura is so commonly read as a Gandhian novel that this designation has become almost self-evident.2 Critic Saroj Sharma, for instance, argues that ‘the impact of Gandhian philosophy is the essence of the novel’ (1997: 103); Ambuj Sharma similarly argues that ‘Kanthapura is a true account of Gandhiji’s ideals and principles and their impact on an Indian village’ (2004: 104). Harish Trivedi writes that ‘Kanthapura . . . remains the most comprehensively and intimately Gandhian of all the Indian novels written in English’ (2000: 108). Through its story of the dissemination of Gandhian ideals to the village of Kanthapura, whose residents seem to resist them at first but then gradually embrace them, the novel is seen to capture the exhilaration and sense of radical change that was spreading around India in the 1920s. Although Kanthapura is just one place, the story of this village stands in for the story of the tens of thousands of similar villages across the nation. Unifying villagers across gender, caste, and personal grievances and grudges, the novel conveys the possibility of nationalism unifying the country in a similar way. From illiterate farmers clinging to their rituals and prejudices, Kanthapura’s characters gradually transform their lifestyles, take leadership positions, and put aside their differences for a cause larger than themselves. Just as Gandhian ideology was disseminated through various intermediaries, in Kanthapura it is Moorthy who stands in for Gandhi, seamlessly transmitting Gandhian ideas to the village using the local idiom. Moorthy is the centre of the novel’s political allegory, representing the many leaders 158

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who travelled around India to spread Gandhian ideology using the language and semiotics of the local communities (Brass 1994: 69‒70). These leaders translated or adapted Gandhian ideals into terms that India’s largely nonliterate population could understand and relate to. Yet they were not merely intermediaries, but were seen to carry some of Gandhi’s divine power themselves. Rao’s protagonist, Moorthy, like these real figures, acts as not only Gandhi’s representative but, at times, his avatar. As part of its allegorical register, the novel’s faith in the transformative power of charismatic influence offers a logic not reducible to the secular rationality of the modern novel. Throughout Kanthapura, characters’ actions are not explained by their psychology or their individual motivation, but are more often effects of external influence and charismatic power. For instance, the novel describes Moorthy’s transformation into a Gandhian as the result of Gandhi’s overwhelming, and never explained, narrative force: And suddenly there was a clapping of hands and shoutings of ‘Vandè Mataram, Gandhi Mahatma ki jai!’ . . . . And as there was fever and confusion about the Mahatma, [Moorthy] jumped on to the platform, slipped between this person and that and fell at the feet of the Mahatma, saying, ‘I am your slave’. The Mahatma lifted him up and, before them all, he said, ‘What can I do for you, my son?’ and Moorthy said, like Hanuman to Rama, ‘Any command,’ and the Mahatma said, ‘I give no commands save to seek Truth,’ and Moorthy said, ‘I am ignorant, how can I seek Truth?’ and the people around him were trying to hush him and to take him away, but the Mahatma said, ‘You wear foreign cloth, my son’.—‘It will go, Mahatmaji.’—‘You perhaps go to foreign Universities.’—‘It will go, Mahatmaji.’—‘You can help your country by going and working among the dumb millions of the villages.’—‘So be it, Mahatmaji.’ (Rao 1963: 33‒4) In this passage, Moorthy is less a character in the traditional sense than a conduit of an ideology that pre-exists him. At this point, he is not represented as encountering Gandhi’s ideas in a rational sense nor does he actively decide to renounce his modern life to join the nationalist movement. His purpose in the story is to represent the transmission of Gandhian thought, and therefore his motivation or psychology is unimportant. The reference to Hanuman is telling, who, as Leonard Wolcott writes: as a devoted servant of Rama, [is] motivated and empowered by the fixity of his love for Rama. Tulsi Das is at great pains to refer every action of Hanuman’s to the latter’s adoration of Rama; he assiduously—almost excessively—makes the point that Hanuman’s 159

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importance lies only in his relationship to Rama, and that whatever exploits he accomplished were possible by Rama’s power. (1978: 654) Like Hanuman, Moorthy matters as a function of Gandhi: no more, and no less. We see this logic of charismatic influence at other levels in the dissemination of Gandhian ideology as well. Just as Moorthy is completely transformed by Gandhi’s touch, so too are other characters converted in a similar way: Our Moorthy performed the camphor ceremony and from that day onwards Moorthy looked sorrowful and calm. He went to Dorè and Sastri’s son Puttu, and Dorè and Sastri’s son Puttu went to Postmaster Suryanarayana’s sons Chandru and Ramu, and then came Pandit Venkateshia and Front-House Sami’s sons Srinivas and Kittu, and so Kittu and Srinivas and Puttu and Ramu and Chandru and Seenu, threw away their foreign clothes and became Gandhi’s men. (Rao 1963: 12) Here, the almost magical effect of Gandhi’s touch is replaced by the even more elusive ‘went to’, suggesting a visit perhaps, or maybe a conversation. However, in not specifying the means by which the conversions took place, the passage suggests not the importance of how Puttu, Chandru, Ramu, Srinivas, and Kittu ‘became Gandhi’s men’, but simply the fact that they did. This is confirmed by the length and rhythm of the extended sentence, which reflects the ‘immense, rambling and seemingly shapeless’ (Khair 2001: 309) structure of the Hindu epics, and offers an aesthetic supplement to this idea of magical conversion. Gandhi’s influence on Moorthy is thus not exceptional but becomes the pattern by which all action and transformation occur in the novel, in which individual motivation is subsumed to a larger mythic or divine force. This allows Rao to depict the nationalist movement primarily affectively rather than as sound or reasoned political logic, reflecting the excitement and spirit of the age.

Gaps and doubts Yet, despite having seen how the novel works as a Gandhian allegory, there are also moments when this magical transmission wavers. It is as if despite Rao’s own vision, the characters cannot completely be contained by a mode that demands their complete compliance to external forces and the suppression of their psychologies, interiorities, and motivations. Even though these moments are generally glossed over, they are notable for how they challenge a purely allegorical reading of the novel. 160

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Most of the wavering occurs around moments of doubt expressed by one or more of the characters about the viability or pragmatism of Gandhi’s politics. For instance, during the hunger strike Moorthy undertakes on behalf of the movement, he meets some resistance from Seenu, who believes that the hunger strike could kill him: ‘No, Moorthy, this is all very well for the Mahatma, but not for us poor creatures’ (Rao 1963: 61). This statement refuses the logic that assumes Moorthy’s semi-divinity as ‘a Gandhi’s man’ by suggesting that even if Gandhi were able to withstand a hunger strike, Moorthy, as an ordinary man, will not. In saying this, Seenu momentarily refuses the allegorical logic of the novel. However, he is quickly overruled by Moorthy: ‘Never mind—let me try. I will not die of it, will I?’ And Rangamma says this and Seenu says that, and there is no end to the song. Then Ramakrishnayya himself comes to take Rangamma away and he says, ‘Let the boy do what he likes, Ranga. If he wants to rise lovingly to God and burn the dross of the flesh through vows, it is not for us sinners to say “Nay, nay”,’ and after a hurried circumambulation of the temple, they go down the Promontory and hurry back home. (61‒2) Seenu’s tentative doubt about Moorthy’s divinity is quickly overwhelmed by the firmness of Moorthy’s resolve and the aesthetics of the narrative voice, which privileges rhythm over specificity, so that a phrase like ‘and Rangamma says this and Seenu says that’ is suggestive of some debate among them but does not tell us precisely what the debate is about. Ramakrishnayya’s distinction between regular people, whom he calls ‘sinners’, and a man like Moorthy, who ‘wants to rise lovingly to God’, reinforces the view that Moorthy, like Gandhi, is a great soul. Yet despite this ultimate victory of the allegorical reading, Seenu’s resistance does stand as a small obstacle to the absolutely fluid and unproblematic transmission of ideology from centre to periphery. The ‘hurried’ circuit of the temple also suggests an active attempt to quickly brush aside any resistance. Another fleeting appearance of doubt appears towards the end of Kanthapura, when Moorthy is arrested and the women left alone in the village to take on the colonial police. Although significantly empowered by their successful agitation, the women are momentarily unmoored by Moorthy’s absence and are able to think independently for once about the purpose of all this bloodshed. Their first response is dissatisfaction: ‘No, no—this will not do, this will not do’ (Rao 1963: 161). Articulated, as it is, by a collective speaker, this declaration, buried within an extended paragraph typical of the novel’s style, indexes a generalised chaos just beneath the surface, ready to emerge whenever Moorthy’s charismatic presence is missing. Finally, the 161

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chaos crystallises into an articulated objection to the toll the movement is taking on the women’s lives: Of what use [was] all this Satyanarayana Puja—and all these Moorthy’s prayers—and that widowed Ratna’s commands? Prayers never paid Revenue dues. Nor would the rice creep back to the granaries. Nor fire consume Bhatta’s promissory notes. Mad we were, daughters, mad to follow Moorthy. When did Kenchamma ever refuse our three morsels of rice—or the Himavathy the ten handfuls of water? . . . (161, ellipsis in original) Here, the women’s reasonable questions about the movement’s viability in finding solutions to their practical requirements—taxes, crops, interest, food—again break the charismatic logic of the novel, in which characters are made to believe what they are asked to by their leader. Once again, this doubt disrupts the allegorical register of the rest of the novel and offers, for a moment, an unformed articulation of personal motivation as a rejoinder to the passive acceptance of Gandhian ideology. Yet once again, despite the possibility, the ellipsis that ends the passage is immediately followed, in the same paragraph, by a flood of retroactive capitulation: But some strange fever rushed up from the feet, it rushed up and with it our hair stood on end and our ears grew hot and something powerful shook us from head to foot, . . . such a terror took hold of us, that we put the water-jugs on our hips, and we rushed back home, trembling and gasping with the anger of the gods . . . Moorthy forgive us! Mahatma forgive us! Kenchamma forgive us! We shall go. Oh, we shall go to the end of the pilgrimage like the two hundred and fifty thousand women of Bombay. We will go like them, we will go . . . ! (Rao 1963: 161‒2) This subsumption of the relatively mild irruption of dissent to the overwhelming force of Kanthapura’s narrative supports the outward politics of the novel and its description of the successful incorporation of Kanthapura into the Gandhian fold, here again described as an irrational force—‘some strange fever’—that makes the women immediately change their minds. In the end, therefore, allegory seems to have prevailed. Yet at the same time, the passage suggests that this model of charismatic power does not convince everyone consistently. Reading for allegory inevitably privileges the success of the movement, but reading for moments of doubt necessarily calls that movement into question. 162

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Should these passages be read not as M. K. Naik does, as ‘passing moments of backsliding and cowardice’ (2000: 51), but as meaningful breaks in the otherwise all-encompassing allegorical register of the novel? The latter perspective is especially justified given the novel’s ending, which takes a surprising turn with Moorthy’s announcement in a letter to Ratna that he is no longer a Gandhian: Since I  am out of prison, I  met this Satyagrahi and that, and we discussed many a problem, and they all say the Mahatma is a noble person, a saint, but the English will know how to cheat him, and he will let himself be cheated. . . . I have come to realize . . . when I was in prison, that as long as there will be iron gates and barbed wires round the Skeffington Coffee Estate  .  .  . there will always be pariahs and poverty. Ratna, things must change. The youths here say they will change it. Jawaharlal will change it. You know Jawaharlal is like a Bharatha to the Mahatma, and he, too, is for non-violence and he, too, is a Satyagrahi, but he says in Swaraj there shall be neither the rich nor the poor. And he calls himself an ‘equal-­distributionist’, and I am with him and his men. (Rao 1963: 180‒1) Compared with the earlier passage on Moorthy’s transformation, this one presents Moorthy as an individual, not merely a transmitter of Gandhian ideology. Indeed, choosing to affiliate with Nehru rather than Gandhi is an instance of active resistance to the logic of charisma, and the reason Moorthy gives—equal distributionism—reflects a specific historical criticism of Gandhian ideology. For a novel that is considered an exemplary Gandhian allegory, this ending is surprising; it does not weaken the Gandhian enthusiasm of the rest of the villagers—‘we are [still] all for the Mahatma’ (181)—but it does undercut the seamlessness of the allegory, the idea that the novel should best be read as a pure and unmediated expression of Gandhian thought. These gaps and doubts suggest that rather than trying to paper over moments of hesitation, as the novel does to the women’s protestations, we might need a reading practice that attends to ambivalence rather than trying to extract a novel’s politics from what appears to be its dominant ideology. For instance, we could interpret the women’s misgivings as representative of the novel’s engagement with the problem of individualism and individuality in this transitional moment in village life. ‘Gandhianism’ then is less a fixed ideology than another form of collective thought which demands complete devotion from its practitioners. Far from being a Gandhian novel, these moments of doubt might be marshalled into a different trajectory of thinking: that is, of how the novel is critical of the way in which India’s villagers are summoned to submit themselves to ideologies that come from 163

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afar, whether they be religious, colonial, or nationalist. Such an approach would offer a reading of the novel that does not conform to any ideology named in the political sphere, but rather reflects a particular problem of modernity to which the novel form is well suited because of its own history in modernity. Reading outside of, rather than in deference to, allegory offers new modes of reading the postcolonial novel well beyond that of the national allegory.

‘I Am Not Gandhi’ The interrogation of allegory as the primary way of reading Indian fiction has been more deliberately questioned by recent literary texts which, as I  have argued elsewhere, are much less attached to the modes of ­meaning-making associated with the postcolonial novel (Anjaria 2019: 159). This is nowhere more apparent than in Uday Prakash’s Hindi novella, Mohandas (2006), which seems, from its title, to be another Gandhian tale, but which in fact raises the possibility that allegory is not a neutral form of reading but one with negative ethical consequences.3 The novella is the story of Mohandas, a man who struggles to find work, despite holding a college degree, because he lacks the ‘criminal, illegal connections and back-door deals, nepotism and nefariousness, bribes and rewards’ [sors-sifarish, jod-tod, rishwat-sampark, jaalsaaji vagaira] necessary to obtain a government position (Prakash 2012: 51).4 He becomes increasingly frustrated: ‘a dark pessimism began to grow inside’ [ek gehre avsaad aur niraasha ne uske bheetar dera daalna shuru kar diya] (52). Finally he is offered an office job at a coal mine, but never receives the promised contract in the mail. Four years later, he discovers that the job had been ‘stolen’ by Bisnath, a high-caste villager who had claimed to be Mohandas and was now living under Mohandas’s identity. Disturbed by this revelation, Mohandas goes to the mining town to prove that he is the real Mohandas, but he becomes more and more frustrated when people disbelieve him. Meanwhile, Bisnath convinces everyone that he is the real Mohandas, and through bribery and manipulation, manages to refute an official inquiry and later a court case. The loss of his name and identity raises doubts in Mohandas’s mind about the reality of the world: ‘The names people went by, was that who they really were? Or had they committed fraud and assumed the identity of others?’ [Ve kya vaastav mein wahi log hain, jis naam aur pehchaan se ve jaane jaate hain, ya ve asal mein koi aur hain aur unhonein jaalsaaji kar ke kisi aur ka mukhauta laga rakha hai?] (93). There is a glimmer of hope when a judge invokes special judicial powers to have Bisnath arrested, but that judge soon dies, whereafter Bisnath begins to act with impunity, committing petty crimes for which the real Mohandas is arrested and beaten. The novella ends when

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Mohandas finally gives up his fight for his identity: ‘I take your hands and beg’, he tells the narrator, please find a way to get me out of this. I  am ready to go to any court and swear that I am not Mohandas. . . . Whoever wants to be Mohandas, let him be Mohandas. I am not Mohandas. [Jise banna ho ban jaye Mohandas. Main nahin hoon Mohandas] (127‒8) The novella’s description of the trials of Mohandas, the obstacles faced by good people trying to advance professionally, and the critique of nepotism, casteism, and corruption, all constitute a social critique of the problems that afflict contemporary Indian society. From this perspective, Mohandas might be read allegorically, representing, through his first name, the figure of Gandhi, or more specifically the loss of Gandhian values in the present day and a disillusionment with the legacy of nationalism (Brueck 2017: 87). In this reading, Mohandas represents the futility of Gandhian ideals, but also possibly the lost hope Gandhi represents. Yet, the novella is in various ways resistant to this reading. For one, the Gandhian allegory is overwritten; not only is the novella’s protagonist named Mohandas, but his wife is Kasturibai, his mother Putlibai, and his son Devdas (the names of Gandhi’s wife, mother, and son). They live in a village called Purbanra, after Gandhi’s birthplace Porbandar. The associations with the real Gandhi are so copious that the text invites an allegorical reading while simultaneously satirising it. At one point, the narrator actually breaks from the story in a parenthetical aside to address the issue: (Please stop for a moment and tell the truth: did you begin to get the feeling that I’d gone and started telling you some kind of encoded, symbol-laden tale [koi prateekvadi kutkatha]? The main character of the story is called Mohandas, the wife is Kasturibai, the mother is Putlibai and the son’s name is Devdas. . . . I’d also like to stop the story right here and now to solemnly affirm that the similarity of names is honestly and truly just a coincidence. When I sat down to write this, I had no idea these sorts of echoes could possibly be hidden in the story of Mohandas and his family from the village [mujhe khud pata nahin tha ki hamare gaaon ke Mohandas aur uske parivar ke sadasyon ke byauron mein itihas ki koi aisi anugunj bhi chhipa ho sakti hai]. You’ll have to take my word, and don’t read too much into it [aisa kuch bhi nahin hai]. It isn’t some symbolic story or allegory or coded fable [Yeh koi prateek katha, rupak ya kutakhyaan

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nahin hai]. It’s totally on the level [Yeh to ek bilkul sapaat sa kissa hai]). (Prakash 2012: 48) The narrator anticipates here that the reader will understand the story of Mohandas as the story of Gandhi, allegorically linking text and nation. However, he says that this is the story of the present, ‘on the level’ [sapaat sa], not a nationalist allegory and not a story whose meaning lies under its surface. Yet, the narrator acknowledges, even against his own warnings, that the reader is inclined to ‘read too much into it’ (48). He thus recognises and simultaneously disavows the allegorical potential of this story, disrupting the reader’s assumptions about what constitutes Hindi literature, rural literature, and Indian literature as a whole, as defined by Jameson (‘All third-world texts are necessarily . . . allegorical’ [1986: 69]) and as repeatedly asserted by postcolonial critics. When combined with Mohandas’s own disavowal of his identity—‘Main nahin hoon Mohandas’ (Prakash 2006: 85)—we are left to ask: what are the limitations of an allegorical reading of Mohandas as a Gandhi figure? What might be lost in this allegorical reading, and what alternatives are possible? How might refusing to read Mohandas as a coded version of Gandhi compel a reading that is free of the ever-present shadow of history or the nation, a reading with more local, or alternatively more transnational, interpretive possibilities? In defamiliarising the allegorical reading, Mohandas reminds us that allegory is not built into texts but is actually a practice of reading. The narrator insists that the story of Mohandas is nothing more than the story of Mohandas, that it has no greater significance than the coincidence of the characters’ names. This claim seems, at first, tongue-in-cheek because the allegory is so overwritten. But at the same time, the theft of Mohandas’s identity is central to the story’s plot. So while the reader watches Bisnath make his wretched moves, stealing Mohandas’s identity and driving him to insanity, we also, in looking for a greater significance in Mohandas’s story, participate in a kind of identity theft. Thus, Mohandas’s frustrating journey to reclaim his identity causes him to reflect on the problem of allegory at large: ‘How can one man become another?’ (Prakash 2012: 70). The radical transportability of identity that allegory enables makes Mohandas feel insecure, as if his identity can, at any moment, be taken from him: he ‘began to feel as if the officers and the hakims and the wealthy and the party members’—and, we might add, the literary critics—‘were so powerful, they could turn anything into anything: a dog into an ox, a pig into a lion, a ditch into a mountain, a thief into a gentleman’ (70). This power of transformation, of ‘turning anything into anything’, suggests that allegory is not innocent but potentially an act of violence, changing meaning willy-nilly, at times in flagrant disregard of

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context or specificity—and potentially immoral as well, to be able to turn ‘a thief into a gentleman’. Mohandas indeed suffers for this as his own identity is taken from him in the story by Bisnath and, as the narrator suggests, by the reader as well, who tries to read him as allegorical for something else. In the story, the situation starts becoming more and more absurd, for instance, in Mohandas’s observation ‘how totally ludicrous [it was] that in order to find out where Bisnath’s flat was, he’d have to ask for his own name’ [apna hi naam lena pad raha tha] (76). These thoughts compel Mohandas to question the very reality he sees before him: ‘Then Mohandas began to ask himself who, after all, he himself was? . . . Did it happen like this to everyone?’ [Mohandas ko swayam apne upar sandeh hone lagta ki aakhir woh khud kaun hai? . . . Kya sabhi ke saath aisa hi hota hai?] (93). This absurdity is in part a consequence of making too many connections, of too eagerly linking the part and the whole, so that the past, the nation, and the authentic take over everyday reality. These visions are so powerful that Mohandas has to give up his own identity to free himself from them, and thus he finally admits, ‘I am not Mohandas’ (128). Yet even at this stage, the reader cannot help herself, as the narrator writes: I looked up; Mohandas was approaching, limping heavily. He was not wearing the washed-out, patched up pants and torn checked shirt, but only a loin-cloth. His hair had fallen out, and he wore cheap round eyeglasses. He walked slowly, using a walking stick, shuffling along like an old man [kisi bimar budhe ki tarah chal raha tha]. (127) Even after actively delinking Mohandas from Gandhi, here again the reader cannot help but see the former as an incarnation of the latter. A corrupt system and Mohandas’s repeated beatings at the hands of the police have left him a poor and wounded man, so he wears nothing more than a loin cloth, has a shaved head, and carries a walking stick. Even while the narrator describes these attributes, the reader cannot help, once again, cohering these observations into an image of the Mahatma, even after concluding a story that is clearly not about Gandhi. Once again, our interpretive habits compel us to look for this story’s significance elsewhere, as we ask: What is its larger meaning? The allegory here is revealed as a trick of the eye rather than something actually there. We believe the trick because we want—perhaps even need—the story to have a larger meaning, to be allegorical, to have significance beyond itself. But in its refusal to cohere around an allegorical reading, the text asks us to put aside the larger meaning for the physical reality it presents to us: the broken body and soul of this Mohandas.

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Conclusion Uday Prakash’s provocative novella raises the question of the cost of allegory, an interpretive practice that has become so tied to postcolonial criticism— with its incessant reading of literature in relation to nationalism5— that it is rarely discussed as an interpretive practice at all. Reading for national allegory imparts a text with meaning in relation to a larger political and historical context; it justifies reading fiction and it shows why fiction matters. However, its drawback is its potential to compromise the fictionality of fiction: its aesthetics, its lack of unified ideology, its experimental rather than fixed relationship to the world. It has the potential to obscure specificity by turning every individual story into a moral for something else. This is especially the case for charismatic figures like Gandhi who tend to alter the representational economy of fiction by their very presence. As seen with Kanthapura, once we understand the novel as the story of the dissemination of Gandhian ideas to the far reaches of India, Moorthy becomes the protagonist and everything is read—as in the hunger strike scene discussed earlier—in relation to him. It is this fear perhaps that motivates Mohandas to try to reclaim his own identity, even as it is constantly effaced by the reader, whom the novella situates within the same group as the powerful, high-caste village elite. Re-reading Kanthapura in this light suggests that rather than simply being a Gandhian allegory through which we can learn something about the nationalist movement taking place at the time, we might also read the novel for its subtle, meta-fictional consideration of the limits of allegorical reading. Allegorical reading is thus revealed to be a critical practice rather than a quality of texts themselves. A simplistic reading for allegory would seem to portend the end of reading, or at least reading for detail, nuance, and complexity. We do not perhaps have to give up on allegory altogether, but at least we can employ it as a starting point from which a more nuanced analysis can proceed.

Notes 1 Jameson’s comments are criticised for what is seen as his reduction of all ‘thirdworld texts’ to national allegories: ‘All third-world texts are necessarily, I want to argue, allegorical, and in a very specific way: they are to be read as what I will call national allegories’ (1986: 69). Despite these critiques, perhaps best articulated by Aijaz Ahmad (1992), allegorical readings have become a dominant methodology in postcolonial literary analysis. 2 This section has been adapted from Chapter 3 of Anjaria (2012). Reprinted with permission of Cambridge University Press. 3 The following discussion is republished with modifications from Chapter  5 of Anjaria (2019). 4 I am using the English translation of Mohandas for the English quotations and the original Hindi edition for the Hindi quotations.

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5 Reading postcolonial literature in relation to nationalism is so widespread that it has almost become an assumed methodology in the field. Examples include Chandra (1982), Jha (1983), Kortenaar (1995), S. Sharma (1997), Khair (2001), Rajagopal (2001), Cleary (2002), Joshi (2002), A. Sharma (2004), Kabir (2005), Gopal (2005), Agarwalla (2006), Mufti (2007), Ahmed (2009), and Daiya (2011).

References Agarwalla, Shyam S. 2006. ‘Third World Literature as National Allegory: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children’, in Reena Mitra (ed), Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, pp. 60‒81, New Delhi: Atlantic. Ahmad, Aijaz. 1992. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, London: Verso. Ahmed, Talat. 2009. Literature and Politics in the Age of Nationalism: The Progressive Episode in South Asia 1932‒1956, London: Routledge. Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso. Anjaria, Ulka. 2012. Realism in the Twentieth-Century Indian Novel: Colonial Difference and Literary Form, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2019. Reading India Now: Contemporary Formations in Literature and Popular Culture, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Brass, Paul R. 1994. The Politics of India since Independence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brueck, Laura R. 2017. ‘Bending Biography: The Creative Intrusions of “Real Lives” in Dalit Fiction’, Biography, 40(1): 77‒92. Chandra, Sudhir. 1982. ‘Premchand and Indian Nationalism’, Modern Asian Studies, 16(4): 601‒21. Cleary, Joe. 2002. Literature, Partition, and the Nation-State: Culture and Conflict in Ireland, Israel, and Palestine, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Daiya, Kavita. 2011. Violent Belongings: Partition, Gender, and National Culture in Postcolonial India, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Gopal, Priyamvada. 2005. Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation, and the Transition to Independence, London: Routledge. Jameson, Fredric. 1986. ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’, Social Text, 15: 65‒88. Jha, Rama. 1983. Gandhian Thought and Indo-Anglian Novelists, New Delhi: Chanakya. Joshi, Priya. 2002. In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. 2005. ‘Gender, Memory, Trauma: Women’s Novels on the Partition of India’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 25(1): 177‒90. Khair, Tabish. 2001. Babu Fictions: Alienation in Contemporary Indian English Novels, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Kortenaar, Neil Ten. 1995. ‘ “Midnight’s Children” and the Allegory of History’, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 26(2): 41‒62. Mufti, Aamir R. 2007. Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Naik, M. K. 2000. ‘The Village that was Wiped out of Man and Mosquito’, in Ragini Ramachandra (ed), Raja Rao: An Anthology of Recent Criticism, pp. 48‒65, New Delhi: Pencraft International. Prakash, Uday. 2006. Mohandas [2005], New Delhi: Vani Prakashan. ———. 2012. ‘Mohandas’, in Jason Brunebaum (trans), The Walls of Delhi: Three Stories, pp. 41‒129, New Delhi: Penguin. Rajagopal, Aravind. 2001. Politics after Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rao, Raja. 1963. Kanthapura, New York: New Directions. Sharma, Ambuj. 2004. Gandhian Strain in the Indian English Novel, New Delhi: Sarup. Sharma, Saroj. 1997. Indian Elite and Nationalism: A Study of Indo-English Fiction, Jaipur: Rawat. Shingavi, Snehal. 2013. The Mahatma Misunderstood: The Politics and Forms of Literary Nationalism in India, London: Anthem. Trivedi, Harish. 2000. ‘Gandhian Nationalism: Kanthapura’, in Richard Allen and Harish Trivedi (eds), Literature and Nation: Britain and India, 1800–1900, pp. 107‒120, London: Routledge. Wolcott, Leonard T. 1978. ‘Hanuman: The Power-Dispensing Monkey in North Indian Folk Religion’, Journal of Asian Studies, 37(4): 653‒61.

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12 NATURE AND LANDSCAPE An evolutionary psychological analysis of Raja Rao’s writing Dieter Riemenschneider

Since S. Menon Marath’s (1948–49) brief reference to Kanthapura in 1948, more than 500 critical studies—book reviews, essays, and books—have been published on Raja Rao’s literary oeuvre manifesting the writer’s important contribution to Indian English writing during the second half of the 20th century (Riemenschneider 2005a).1 As I have shown elsewhere, critical studies have been overwhelmingly concerned with the Indian writer’s engagement with the Hindu philosophical school of advaita vedanta and possibilities of its literary-narrative representation both through the genre of the novel and an adopted language, English (Riemenschneider 2005b). Yet, the question of which role nature and landscape play in Rao’s writing has never been asked seriously although the foregrounding of localities in titles like Kanthapura or On the Ganga Ghat suggests connotations beyond mere naming. No doubt, critical silence has been so because the modern Indian English novel in general has not been particularly attentive to the representation of nature or landscape, and only a few examples come to mind: an important scene in G. V. Desani’s All about H. Hatterr (1949: 100‒1, 104‒6), Saleem Sinai’s experience of the Sundarbans in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1982: 360‒6), or Amitav Ghosh’s respect for and engagement with ecological concerns in The Hungry Tide (2004). But these are exceptions and Raja Rao’s work confirms the rare occurrence of passages focusing on nature and landscape. However, the ones we encounter are sufficiently significant to deserve being studied more closely; the more so since to my knowledge only Gerhard Stilz’s ‘Return to the Jungle? Colonial and Post-colonial Landscapes in Indian English Literature’ has focused on this topic from a cultural perspective which I  would like to question for this very reason. Judging the function of nature in Kanthapura (and in Mulk Raj Anand’s Two Leaves and a Bud), he says: ‘Indian writers do carry on presenting Indian nature in the colonialist tradition with its culturalist

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concerns’ (Stilz 1995: 330)—a judgement echoing his earlier conclusion that ‘the colonizers were both physically and mentally threatened by the colonized and his, her or its dark nature. Landscape, climate, flora and fauna have come to play a dominant role in the impersonal variants of this conflict’ (334). I shall not address the culturalist concerns in Kanthapura, The Serpent and the Rope, The Cat and Shakespeare, and On the Ganga Ghat but would like to pursue my thesis that the perception and creative representation of landscape in literature—as in the arts generally—is also grounded in genetically evolved adaptations of human beings facing their environment. Studies in social biology and evolutionary psychology have proposed that homo sapiens, for ever on the move and in search of an environment that grants them survival and procreation, have learned to discern landscape features that promise safety and nourishment from those that do not. For example, discussing habitat selection theory and ‘environmental aesthetics from an evolutionary and ecological perspective’, Gordon H. Orians and Judith H. Heerwagen, as well as Jay Appleton, have pursued the question of why certain stretches of nature or landscape strike the observer as beautiful or ugly or even evoke mixed feelings (Barkow 1992: 551). They propose the thesis substantiated by research that savanna-like habitats evoked positive responses in homo sapiens by offering unimpeded views, easy orientation and movement, as well as trees to protect them and granting them a lookout (Kaplan 1992: 586). Accordingly, habitat selection theory postulates that such a preferred environment affected human responses and became part of our genetic make-up, a condition that has survived over millennia till the present and in spite of the transformation from nomadic to sedentary life during the ‘Neolithic Revolution’ around 10,000 years ago (Simmons 2007). To these critics, then, the study of human responses to nature and landscape went along with studying the evolution of aesthetic tastes as well. Landscapes, seascapes, even urban scapes and architecture, they say, evoke emotional and subsequently cognitive responses due to our genetic heritage. As Orians and Heerwagen maintain, ‘evidence of aesthetic responses attuned to the savanna environment can be found in our manipulations of landscapes for aesthetic purposes’, and they point at landscape features such as hills and mountains, rivers, valleys and open spaces, the sea and the horizon, as having been used by painters, photographers, landscape gardeners, architects, and writers to evoke and/or manipulate our sensation and our perceptions (1992: 570). However, both authors qualify their thesis by warning us that the evaluation of the artistic achievement of landscape representations merely from ‘an evolutionary-adaptive approach to environmental aesthetics’ must not be considered self-sufficient, let alone inclusive, yet it will invigorate our interpretation (575). Besides, it will make us aware of a cross-cultural universal in spite of the fact that ‘ecological signals have been transformed, over time’ into culture-specific events and artefacts (571). 172

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Similarly, in his study The Symbolism of Habitat: An Interpretation of Landscape in the Arts, the British geographer Jay Appleton has also argued—and illustrated his thesis with examples taken from literature—that human beings experience landscape in ways that are based on our environmental adaptations, an ‘environment visually perceived’ and composed of single features such as hills, mountains, and rivers (1990: 22). Singly or as a ‘composition’, these ecological signals evoke emotional as well as cognitive responses, sensations, and perceptions that Appleton relates to three aspects closely connected with human survival, which he calls prospect, refuge, and hazard. ‘Prospect’ allows us to survey the environment from an elevated place; ‘refuge’ enables us to find protection and hide; and ‘hazard’ ‘stirs a feeling of being threatened and of wanting to escape’ (cover blurb). How would Rao have responded to the concept of environmental aesthetics? I imagine having discussed it with him during one of our early morning constitutionals at C. D. Narasimhaiah’s Dhvanyaloka in Mysore—visualising him raising a polite eyebrow and remarking quietly that man’s realisation of the world quite generally was to be understood less along the hypothesised evidence of a doubtful scientific discipline such as evolutionary psychology than along those lines of thinking put forward by his narrator Rama in The Serpent and the Rope. In answer to his wife Madeleine’s question, ‘what is it separated us, Rama?’ (1995: 331), he responds: ‘India believes that to prove the world as being real or unreal is being really objective’ (333). And that is the actual meaning of hav[ing] a scientific outlook. . . . The world is either unreal or real— the serpent or the rope. There is no in-between-the-two—and all that’s in-between is poetry, is sainthood. (335) Our cognition of the real world is achieved when we come to know that the ‘actual, the real has no name’ because ‘[t]he rope is no rope to itself’ (335). Rama’s, and by implication, Rao’s, understanding of nature and landscape then could be defined as arriving at a point of unnaming what has been named/is being named, and thereby of having been made actual; in other words: to recognise the world from a metaphysical instead of a natural scientific angle. If so, does Rao’s creative literary handling of nature and landscape bear this out, in terms of both national and transnational experiences? Kanthapura is an old woman’s story about the fate of her village and its inhabitants in the political turmoil of the 1930s; and in spite of the author’s sophistication (unmistakeably conveyed through his foreword), he succeeds in creating a credible, simple-minded narrator. Here Kanthapura clearly differs from Rao’s later work where learned, sophisticated, even puzzling minds tell their stories and demonstrate their varying approaches to landscape and its features. The opening scene of Kanthapura is memorable not 173

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merely for the old woman’s story-telling style but also for possessing almost all the ingredients of landscape presentation that are taken up again in the course of the narration. For example, by merely naming topographical features of the village surroundings such as mountains, forests, gorges, valleys, and roads, the narrator largely refrains from embellishing, let alone from ascribing metaphorical or allegorical meaning to the landscape. Further, once the environment has been recreated imaginatively, it is made to serve as the setting for action: carts and lights move, voices, singing, and cattle bells can be heard as well as ‘the soft hiss of the Himavathy’ (Rao 2006: 1). The scene is rounded off by the narrator’s remark that people believe ‘the Goddess of the River plays through the night with the Goddess of the Hill’, and with an invocation to the goddess to be blessed (1). All in all then, a perception of landscape is transmitted where the villagers are supplied with their means of survival: that is, products to be traded, peace ruling among the people and protection guaranteed by the goddesses. The landscape of Kanthapura is painted as a safe habitat, and more so when the narrator details its mythological genesis emitted through Kenchamma hill and its red colour. Not only will it remind the villagers of a demon’s bloody defeat by the goddess but the choice of a hill as battleground is itself significant in terms of evolutionary psychology since an elevation in nature offers human beings the chance to survey their surroundings as well as to protect them. Rao’s narrative procedure then consists of listing physical features of a landscape, relating them to movement, to human life, and embedding both of them in their mythological context. It is a pattern we encounter again when the carts that had earlier left the village return (2006: 42‒3), or when Moorthy’s mother Narsamma dies outside the village by the river (46), and finally when the villagers experience the rains in the month of Vaisakh (114). A similarly patterned landscape description also assumes the meaning of a hazard as we come across examples when the villagers’ fate has turned around when they are dropped on the Ghats. They feel like being in a jungle and are relieved only when they see ‘the dangling light of a cart’ on top of the hill (2006: 136); or when we turn at Kanthapura’s opponent, the partly cultivated, partly uncultivated landscape of the Skeffington Coffee Estate, especially during the rainy season. Nature is perceived as an unsafe place with its snakes (52–3), its lack of protection against the rain (54–5), and ensuing illness and death (57). Initially though, the estate had seemed to offer an abode to the coolies because its landscape features held this promise (48‒50) evoked by the old woman’s description of the landscape and the movement of people. Yet in comparison to Kanthapura, the Coffee Estate lacks two essential elements: people’s free choice of a habitat and its divinely guaranteed protection. Economic need enforces the coolies’ choice of their habitat, and in place of Kenchamma there is the unlikely god-like figure of the Sahib, ‘a tall, fat man with golden hair’ (50).

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Rao’s radical move from a political to a philosophical perspective finds expression also in his landscape presentation in The Serpent and the Rope. Here, infrequent references basically relate to five or six topographical clusters, that is, rivers, mountains, sea, regions, cities, and the world, but rarely to specific features such as a rock, a tree, or a road. We do not encounter extended, detailed, let alone poetically rendered representations. Importantly though, as Rama travels in France, India, and England, his sensitive experiences of local landscapes—Mont Sainte-Victoire, the Pyrenees, the Alps, the Himalayas, Ganges, Cam, Thames, and Rhône—and cities—Benares, London, Paris, and Aix—gradually merge into and create a comprehensive understanding of nature that foregrounds the general—the mountain, the river, the sea, the city, and finally, the land. In the end, his travelling through space and time mirrors the narrator’s increasing awareness of his need for a guru and an early return to India. The function of landscape, I would like to propose, lies in permitting Rama to affirm the existence of the world as both a tangible and a transcendental reality. How then does Rao invoke landscape and evoke responses of an aesthetic nature in his narrator? At the end of his stay in Europe Rama’s often quoted words, ‘India is not a country like France is, or like England; India is an idea, a metaphysic’ (Rao 1995: 376), summarise his experiences of Europe, including its landscapes, in comparison to those of his homeland. Yet it is important to note that both equally evoke positive responses throughout. At the most, mountains and rivers are awe-inspiring but never hazardous, let alone threatening. It is their beauty and their power, their age and continuity that impress the mind and the safety they promise and the nourishment and sustenance they provide that are reassuring. Looked at from an evolutionary angle, these landscapes promise humanity an abode—and yet they differ by degree, as a comparison between European and Indian mountains illustrates: one saw on a day of the mistral the beautiful Mont SainteVictoire . . . clear as though you could talk to it. The mistral blew and blew so vigorously: one could see one’s body float away, like pantaloon, vest and scarf, and one’s soul sit and shine on the top of Mont Sainte-Victoire. (1995: 14) And further: Mont Sainte-Victoire itself. There was a sainthood about that elevation of the mountain . . . because the good Cézanne saw it day after day; and it carried such a message of strength, and of the possible, that it was something of a Kailās for us. (54)

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As for the ‘noble Pyrenees’, ‘you could look at . . . [them] and know that to be strong one must be pure as snow’ (95), while the marital air of the mountains, the convexity of spring; the anemones and the blue irises of the Alps; the lavender, the thyme and the rosemary; they seemed like death become white, like blood in the limbs and freshness in one’s eyes. (364) The sensual perception of Mont Sainte-Victoire, the Pyrenees, and the Alps proves less of an aesthetic than a cognitive experience that indicates the speaker’s outer and inner distance, a detachment conveyed through relativising comparisons—‘as though you could talk’, ‘something of a Kailās’, ‘they seemed like death’—or assumptions: ‘one could see’, ‘you could look’. The observing subject and the observed object remain apart, an insight that questions the function of the mountain as an abode advantageous to one’s survival. The references to ‘sainthood’ and ‘Cézanne’ underline Mont Sainte-Victoire’s ‘in-between-the-two’ status referred to earlier. The closest to transcend this subject–object split occurs at the time of Madeleine’s 41-day fast when ‘one heard strange musical sounds . . . and as each sound ended another more powerful one rose as if creating mountains, rivers, seas, roads, man’ (323‒4). Indeed, the assumed birth of such tangible objects from sound takes us to Rama’s experience of India’s landscape, especially the Himalayas. From the train window on his way to Hardwar, Rama watches ‘the birches and the deodhars of the Himalayas . . . a whole tribe of deer [that] jumped away across the pools of the forest’, and the parrots with ‘very lovely yellow rings round their throats’, and he feels ‘the Himalayas shone above them, simple, aware, vibrant with sound’ (1995: 41). He concludes that somewhere between the interstices of those trees, somewhere in the movement of the hinds, in the mountain stillness of Hardwar did I feel a new knowledge. I  felt absence. The mountain echoed an absence that seemed primordial, a syllable, a name. (40–1) Years later one night in Paris, Rama recollects virtually the same landscape to which he wants to return now, to the ‘deodhars of the Himalayas . . . the deer in the forests . . . [and] the keen call of the elephant in the grave ocellate [sic] silence of the forests’ (376). Here, landscape is experienced—and recreated in the mind—through details in nature that merge into a living entity where sound and stillness, presence and absence conflate and create ‘a new knowledge’ (41). From the perspective of evolutionary psychology the 176

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Himalayas are experienced as the observer’s transcendental home or abode, a place which does not so much guarantee the physical than the spiritual survival of human beings in the sense of leading them to moksha. Having so far focused solely on Rama’s experiences of mountains, I  should add that rivers are often part of them, with the Ganges being of prime importance. Again, his responses are always positive, and his descriptions consist of merely a few (topographical) features combined with reading them or reflecting upon their meaning. But more importantly, the Ganges is a ‘grave and knowing river’ (1995: 23) that invokes Rama’s worship. The experience of such unequivocal subject–object relationship is not yet overcome when he speaks of her motherliness, of her ‘who had borne the sorrows of our sorrowful land’ and of the impurity ‘we made her bear’ (33). Yet, the ‘ashes and bones  .  .  . let down into the Ganges in Benares’ letting her know of ‘our secret’ and patrimony shifts the subject–object relationship towards the river’s ability to merge presence and absence, much in the same way as the Himalayas do (34). Finally, Rama’s own dipping into the Ganges makes him realise her knowledge, her wisdom, and a feeling of purity. It is an act of expiation for the ‘kidnapped and the forsaken . . . [and] for the dead’ that lets him conclude that there ‘is no absence if you have the feel of your own presence’ (41); the duality of subject and object has been realised as non-duality. Again, the river does not so much stand for man’s physical protection or his sustenance as for his transcendental abode; and everlasting at that, since the Ganges waters flow into the sea, return as snowflakes that melt and turn again into Ganges water (170). Recollecting many years later in Paris, Rama is anxious to return to India, hoping and wishing he ‘could be a river, a tree, an aptitude of incumbent silence’ (376). By contrast, European rivers like the Cam, the Thames, or the Rhône fail him, the first because it is embedded in time, in history, while the Rhône— not unlike Mont Sainte-Victoire—‘somewhere . . . must know the mysteries of Mother Ganga’ (1995: 245). But it does not, and instead takes up that in-between position that separates Petit Avignon and Avignon des Papes, preventing us from crossing ‘the broken bridge of Saint-Bénézet’ (377). At the most one can evoke Mother Rhône to go to India (389). Ultimately, the Cam and the Thames remain mere tangible objects, the one silent, selfreflective, and outside history, teaching us ‘that history is made by others and not by oneself’ (168), the other imperial, mature with a knowledge of herself that occasionally makes history so intimately connected with the river that it stops to look at itself as would ‘two lovers arm hooked to arm’ (199). Throughout, Rama projects his meanings on the landscapes he encounters, seemingly anthropomorphising them but in reality conceiving of his European mountains and rivers as tangible objects as against his transcendental Indian abode that he wishes to make his home. Yet there can be no doubt that his culturally moulded aesthetic sensation and cognitive 177

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perception of landscape is rooted in our perception of our environment as a result of his adaptation to a habitat that offers us the chance to survive. Thematically and in its narrative manner, Rao’s novella The Cat and Shakespeare relates to The Serpent and the Rope and has evoked perhaps even more disparate critical reactions than his novel. Not unlike Rama, its first-person narrator Ramakrishna Pai is an inward-looking, self-centred, and highly speculative person also preoccupied with love, women, and truth, but for him landscape plays a minor role if we perceive of it in its natural state. However, as indicated already, landscape features have been employed universally to create parks, gardens, and buildings, and it is here that Pai’s repeated references especially to the house but also to the wall and garden come in. Attended to briefly at the beginning of his narrative they gradually accumulate weight and eventually merge in a revelatory experience that basically closes the story. The author employs very much the same manner of describing and creating a landscape as in his previous writing. Having been instigated on the idea of building a house of three storeys by his neighbour Govindan Nair (Rao 1965: 10), Pai looks at the boundary wall which, ‘tile-covered, bulging and obstreperous’, runs along, ‘dips and rises, running about on its wild, vicarious course’ (11). Characteristically, observations of movement and life complement the picture: leaves falling, fruit dropping, and cattle rising. And again, a reflection and an invocation round it off: ‘Purity is so near, so concrete. Let us build the house. Lord, let me build the house’ (11). This, by now, familiar manner of drawing a landscape recurs when Pai imagines the house he will give Shanta, ‘a house three stories [sic] high’, with a tamarind tree in the back yard, dahlias, a mango tree with fruit ripe like Shanta’s womb ‘that has grown round’, and a koel singing (51). Having eventually built a house two storeys high ‘to prove the world is’ (108), Pai then wishes to add the third storey ‘so that [he] could see up to the end of the sea’ (111), a notion now laughed at and rejected by Nair who had originally spoken of three storeys. Yet Pai realises the truth of his neighbour’s reaction once he has crossed the wall, walked through a garden landscape of plants and people—again drawn in simple terms—and steps up inside a house where he does not see the sea but ‘eyes seeing eyes seeing’ (113); and where ‘if [he went] on seeing a point, [he] bec[a]me the point’ (114); where opposites cease and subject and object coalesce. It is an experience that once and for all tells Pai to ‘never build a house three stories high’ (116). Analysed from the perspective of evolutionary psychology, climbing to the top of the house promises prospect, which is not unlike climbing a tree in the savannah or the top of a mountain: to see, explore, and understand his surroundings and to safeguard himself against danger. For Rao and his narrator, the cultural transformation of this genetically evolved adaptation to one’s environment lies in the realisation of both the individual’s and the world’s transcendental non-dual nature. Nair’s ‘third storey’, taken 178

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literally by Pai initially, reveals itself as a metaphor of the elevation one has to ascend to see not ‘up to the end of the sea’ (1965: 111), or as Rama says, the horizon falsely taken for the rope when perceived from the angle of the serpent, but for what language cannot name, or as Pai puts it, the ‘nose (not the nose) and eyes seeing eyes’, or the love which ‘knew not its name but [was] heard . . . as sound’ (113). Unlike Rama who arrives at this truth cognitively, Pai experiences it, confirming K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar’s view that Rao had moved on ‘from jñana in The Serpent and the Rope . . . to bhaktiprapatti in The Cat and Shakespeare’ (1969: 305). The most important landscape scene in the final text, On the Ganga Ghat, occurs at the very end of the last story. Here, it is less the narrator’s sensual-aesthetic sensation of the river than his cognitive perception of its flowing that triggers his philosophical reflections upon flowing and unflowing, death and truth, place and time. Interrogating whether death has a meaning, the Ganga answers that death is as much of a superstition as the probability of the river growing dry. What one must learn though is to see through movement as no movement, through space as no space in order to understand that ‘where there is no end there is no beginning’, and that this is the simple truth ‘if only we listen to ourselves’ (Rao 1989: 127). Eventually returning to his sensation of the river, Rao concludes: ‘if you dare have a deep look on the Ganges evenings, and see the Ganges unflowing, then you know there is no Ganges. Water is just water’ (127). As we have noted often, Rao’s landscape representation ends with an aphorism and an invocation, a paradoxical one as it seems, when the speaker pleads with Mother Ganga, ‘please be gracious, and,—flow’ (127). It is his admission of being able only to take the in-between stance of the poet who needs words to speak to express the unsayable. Yet such culturally evolved perception is grounded in the genetically evolved adaptation to a habitat that signals safety and survival to the mind of the viewer in the sense of his material and of his spiritual well-being. In substance, landscape representations in Rao’s works do not change. Their features are neither sensed negatively nor are they without bearing on the perceiver. Judged from a cultural perspective, these sensory signals are cognitively perceived as embedded in the specific memetic heritage of brahmanic India, yet when viewed from an evolutionary psychological angle they are also grounded in our genetically evolved responses to our habitat— and thus cross-culturally significant as universals of human nature.

Note 1 This chapter is a revised version of an essay, ‘Nature and Landscape: An Evolutionary Psychological Analysis of Raja Rao’s Writing’, which first appeared in 2016 in my collection of essays on Indian English writing entitled Gentle Round the Curves: Selected Essays on Indian Writing in English, pp. 114–24, Tranzlit: Kronberg.

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References Appleton, Jay. 1990. The Symbolism of Habitat: An Interpretation of Landscape in the Arts, Seattle and London: University of Washington Press. Barkow, Jerome H. 1992. ‘Environmental Aesthetics’, in Jerome H. Barkow, John Tooby, and Leda Cosmides (eds), The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, pp. 551‒3, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Desani, G. V. 1949. All About H. Hatterr, London: Saturn. Ghosh, Amitav. 2004. The Hungry Tide, New Delhi: Ravi Dayal. Iyengar, K. R. Srinivasa. 1969. ‘Literature as Sadhana: A  Note on The Cat and Shakespeare’, Aryan Path, 40(6): 301–5. Kaplan, Stephen. 1992. ‘Environmental Preference in a Knowledge-Seeking, Knowledge-Using Organism’, in Jerome H. Barkow, John Tooby, and Leda ­Cosmides (eds), The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, pp. 581–98, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marath, S. Menon. 1948–49. ‘Three Indian Novelists’, Life and Letters, 59: 187–92. Orians, Gordon H., and Judith H. Heerwagen. 1992. ‘Evolved Responses to Landscapes’, in Jerome H. Barkow, John Tooby, and Leda Cosmides (eds), The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, pp. 556–79, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rao, Raja. 1965. The Cat and Shakespeare, New York: Macmillan. ———. 1989. On the Ganga Ghat, New Delhi: Vision. ———. 1995. The Serpent and the Rope, New Delhi: Orient. ———. 2006. Kanthapura, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Riemenschneider, Dieter. 2005a. Bibliography, the Indian Novel in English: Its Critical Discourse 1934–2004, pp. 346–76, Jaipur: Rawat. ———. 2005b. ‘Literature as Sādhāna: The Reception of Raja Rao’s Novels’, in The Indian Novel in English: Its Critical Discourse 1934–2004, pp. 289–380, Jaipur: Rawat. Rushdie, Salman. 1982. Midnight’s Children, London: Picador. Simmons, Alan H. 2007. The Neolithic Revolution in the Near East: Transforming the Human Landscape, Tucson: The University of Arizona Press. Stilz, Gerhard. 1995. ‘Return to the Jungle? Colonial and Post-colonial Landscapes in Indian-English Literature’, in Hena Maes-Jelinek, Gordon Collier, and Geoffrey Davis (eds), A Talent(ed) Digger, pp. 324–34, Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi.

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13 SEARCH IN CONFUSION Reading transnational friendships in Raja Rao’s Kanthapura and Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi Waseem Anwar and Farrah Fatima

Friends again, yet aware that they would meet no more . . . and the scenery . . . fell like gravestone on any human hope. ‘No, not yet’ . . . ‘No, not there.’ (Forster 1988: 285, 288‒9) All these separations and gaps shall be taken/up and hook’d and link’d together. (Whitman 1995: 376)

Backgrounding a passage: national to transnational In his novel Kanthapura, Raja Rao takes on the persona of a grandmotherly narrator, Achakka, who is fond of telling tales in a typical Mahabharata style. Through this engendered author-narrator exchange, Rao recounts thoughtfully, but at times exaggeratedly, a poignant tale of human loss. His tale reflects the suffering of the South Asian subcontinent populations, charged with an environment of bewildering geopolitical and sociocultural partitions. Two years later, Rao’s author-friend, Ahmed Ali, contextualises a similar environment of heightened sociopolitical turmoil. In comparison with Kanthapura, Ali’s tale in Twilight in Delhi grows poetic but more apprehensive of communal downfalls. Whatever else, the narrators in both these works try to overcome a state of impasse that would lead to actual partition of the subcontinent in 1947. Kanthapura and Twilight, thereby, represent pre-Partition India that allows us to think about the twists in human fate foreshadowing the fast-diminishing glory of Indian history, culture, and values. Leela Gandhi and Deborah L. Nelson describe this condition as a challenge to ‘the once-civilizational wholeness of India’ 181

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(2014: 296).1 Reading partition and its resultant decay in the light of postcolonial transnational hybridity helps us understand this fading civilisational wholeness in terms of the absence of human understanding, friendship, and love that impacts the overall loss of land. The fragility of subcontinental Indo-Pakistan partitioning portrayed in these fictional works reminds us that when humanity gets injured, many other psychical and sentimental divisions of the homeland/motherland also take place. As readers we realise the impact of these losses and divisions although we try to rejuvenate in another radically changed milieu the kind of humanism that Rao and Ali had been struggling to promote. Drawing on postcolonial transnational hybridity, though apart from all its related international and national variants—religious, secular, literary, or others—Rocío G. Davis considers the fluid and cosmopolitan dynamism of transnationalism as a rethinking of the ‘national in both creative and critical practice’ (2013: 2).2 In its engagement with rethinking within the postcolonial ‘processual’ hybridity in South Asia, transnationalism consents with Homi K. Bhabha’s ‘third space’, a shuttling ethical reality and discursive strategy that re-appropriates power by displacing its own colonial and national history to encounter ambivalent repressive silences (1994: 112). Bhabha argues that this displacement is transformatory: it is a kind of ‘translation’ into new yet recognisable structural initiatives (1990b: 211), a process of diffusion and change that he calls postcolonial ‘hybridity’ (1994: 114).3 Our reading and [re]thinking amid diversity thus equates the transnational-hybrid dynamism with what Bhabha elaborates to be a narration of the nation that vanguards its ‘DissemiNation’: Nation and Narration seeks to affirm . . . international dimension both within the margins of the nation-space and in the boundaries in-between nations and peoples  .  .  . whereby the anti-nationalist ambivalent nation-space becomes the crossroads to a new transnational culture. (1990a: 4) And then towards the very end of the book, he writes: I have suggested that the people emerge in the finitude of the nation, marking the liminality of cultural identity, producing the doubleedged discourse. . . . For it is by living on the borderline of history and language, on the limits of race and gender, that we are in a position to translate the differences . . . from the nation’s edge . . . from the periphery of the people, in culture’s transnational dissemination. (320)

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A postcolonial transnational reading of the nation and its dissemination from disenfranchised peripheries help us locate the de-formation of Empire that Edward Said would point out as de-nationalisation, or Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire would label as de-colonisation.4 It allows the reading of a nation, its narrative, and its literariness as a space complemented by what Bhabha calls ‘metaphoric displacements, subtexts’ (1990a: 2). Consequently, nation, narration, and the novel offer room for (re)examining the sub-textual subtractions and abstractions in the form of unseen and unrecorded biases, prejudices, attachments, associations, affinities, or attractions, be they sociopolitical or just friendly (1990a: 297). It is such sceptical patches of dispersed relationships, such inchoate and unattended sense of loss of land and love, that we try to recover through the memories of bygone togetherness; reflections and remembrances transformed into yearnings and nostalgias around places, spaces, locales, and localities evinced in both Kanthapura and Twilight. These marginalised scenes lie deep in the heart-felt or wistful liminalities of the people. The pursuit of human kinship, love, and friendship in both Kanthapura and Twilight remains central to their thematic unity. Years ago, when E. M. Forster in his novel A Passage to India established that human friendship can easily transform into a dilemma, and also that the wished-for friendship amid political prejudices or racial tensions may materialise as failure or un-fulfillment, his observation was taken as a sign of his desire for covert homoerotic relationships. Even though Forster believed in betraying a country rather than a friend, the best offering he could give to ‘the subcontinent of India’ remained ‘friendship and affection’ (Singh 1964: ix).5 Whether the suspicion and mistrust of Forster’s Chandrapore in Passage—its Marabar Caves and their Indianness, their sociocultural and sociopolitical muddles where ‘air’ becomes ‘thick with religion and rain’ (1988: 269)—had any haunting effect on Rao’s Kanthapura or Ali’s post-Mutiny Delhi, the ‘boum’, ‘ou-boum’ of colonial partitioning in Passage does reverberate as a powerful backdrop for these authors. One does not necessarily have to ascribe Forster’s ‘friendship’ onto Rao and Ali, but one can see the loss of friendly coexistence in Kanthapura and Twilight since various separations and splits are hinted in these novels much before the actual fire (of Partition) broke out.6 Forster’s Passage not only helps us track obliquely the many unpredictable tearing/s of human congeniality in general, but his works also contextualise specific losses like, for example, the Hindu–Muslim intimacy between Rao and Ali at Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) under the common tutelage of the British professor, Eric C. Dickinson.7 In an interview, Ali relates his cherished closeness with Rao: ‘he and I used to talk a great deal. We had the same tastes, the same desires, the wishes and ideals’, but then it appears that their friendship ended because apart from multiple other reasons they had to get ‘out of the circumstances’ (Ali and JSAL 1998: 123). Ali

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explains that Rao was more transcendental, whereas he himself remained soil-bound, and that may have been the reason why they separated despite their cross-religious affinities under Dickinson’s tutelage (123).8 Tied adherently to their geographical and genealogical lineages, the Hindu and Muslim populations in Kanthapura and Twilight foreground for us a sense of loss resulting from religious and ideological discrimination, so that the abysmal search for reunion amid confusion continues to impress upon us hard. In Kanthapura, this loss is revealed to us through the yearnings attached to a metaphysical metabolism, an energy-awarding hopefulness that ends up in devious idealism: ‘They say the Mahatma will . . . bring us Swaraj . . . there will be a rain of flowers’; and again: ‘Protect us, Mother! . . . Protect us, Father’ (1971: 257, 258). The very same loss dawns upon us in Twilight through nostalgias built over physical and emotional decays: ‘He lay on the bed in a state of coma. . . . And the night came striding fast . . . and covered up the empires of the world in its blanket of darkness and gloom’ (2007: 288). If Rao’s Kanthapura garners for us a much awaited Mahatma to be the South Asian metaphysical god embroidered by a ‘pastoral mode’ (Boehmer 1995: 137), Ali’s Twilight unfolds a ‘cunning stealth and destruction’ of the communal culture through a romantic collapse of its realism into nostalgic surrealism (Rahman 2015: 49). Focusing on the significance of literary nationalism of the time, Snehal Shingavi in her book The Mahatma Misunderstood elaborates how ‘Gandhian’ nationalistic religiosity got fictionalised against the Nehruvian secularised one. Shingavi argues that these differences split the Indian nation and its civilisational wholeness into cultural, linguistic, communal, ethnic, and attitudinal ‘charismatic underconfidence’ (2013: 3, 14, 70‒1, 96). Torn between the conflicting modes of representation, the Hindu chauvinistic orthodoxy versus Gandhian non-violent Indian nationalism contest in various similar capacities. These religious and ideological splits amid British colonial nationalism pave ways for altering Indian cultural and literary nationalisms, opening ways for us to see through the differences that Shingavi terms nationalism’s ‘others’—the ‘untouchables, women, Muslims’ (5). That Indian nationalism as a contested space has for long been replete with oppositions, separations, and deeper internal communal rifts based on liberal, moderate, or extremist socio-historical and sociopolitical tendencies is something that G. K. Das also elaborates in his ‘A Passage to India: A SocioHistorical Study’. Das sets a fertile ground for dialogic Indian nationalism to understand how novels dealing with ‘Indo-British’ relations get split into perspectives on the basis of what Forster had explicated as the ‘ “accent” of . . . feeling rather than a strict adherence to facts’ (1985: 14‒15). Since the postcolonial nation and its identity refers to the subject formed within colonial systems and discourses, and because postcolonial ‘nationalism’ is a consequence of the nation’s marginalised others as much as the exclusive centre, a transnational reading of nationalistic identities in 184

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all three novels—Passage, Kanthapura, and Twilight—opens avenues for exploring Partition in the subcontinent. In The Colonial Rise of the Novel, Firdous Azim signifies how our transnational readings can transform these novels as a reliable resource ‘to look again at the colonial world and the divisions that it brought about’ (1993: 219). In this regard the postcolonial critical readers of Rao and Ali would look for those factors that represent dialogic difference—religious, political, sociocultural, or literary—making it possible for these differences to become viable spaces for an examination of the shibboleths, customs, and beliefs affecting these writers. It is possible to argue that the works of Rao and Ali deconstruct the myths of nationalism, allowing the transnationally hybrid, postcolonial readers to re-contextualise the formation of colonial literary texts. Such an investigation would open a wider scope for us to reimagine the once imagined communities, in Benedict Anderson’s terms, as both ‘inherently limited and sovereign’ (2016: 6). Despite their portrayal of the colonial and national dream worlds and their lost loves, Kanthapura and Twilight are drenched with disenchantment within that monolithic nationalism to highlight perhaps a more pluralistic and transnationalistic reconfiguration of partitioned territories marked by human vulnerability. As referred to earlier, though at one point in time Ali and Rao had the ‘same tastes . . . desires . . . wishes and ideals’ (Ali and JSAL 1998: 123), they had to let go their togetherness, a situation comparable to the Fielding–Aziz split at the end of Passage, ‘Why can’t we be friends now?’ (1988: 289). Directed by their conditions and circumstances, the friendship, whether that of Fielding and Aziz or Rao and Ali, could only revive through yearnings and nostalgias.

Reading yearnings and nostalgias: Kanthapura In Kanthapura, Rao projects an important coastal village high on the ghats, offering an air of romance. Through her subtle and synchronising monologue, Achakka informs us that the narrow roads of this colonially exploited village wind their way to the sea to connect with Britain (1971: 7). Evidently bound by its rituals and religion, Kanthapura celebrates multicultural interaction as if to question Indian nationalistic ideologies by embedding the physical within the fairly obvious metaphysical spaces. It interrogates the sectarian division of community against Nature’s primeval spirituality; against the Mahatma’s redemptive appearance and the fasting of Moorthy, the hero; and above all against the Indian Sanskritised and civilisational wholeness. Kenchamma, the shared goddess of Kanthapura’s disturbing geographical demarcations, had killed a demon ages ago, to be honoured thus as a protector against death, disease, and despair (8). But for the readers, Kenchamma also lends, as Shingavi points out, the harikatha, sthalapurana, Mahabharata, Ramayana, Purana, or Ram Rajya-inspired folkloric aura for Achakka’s narration (2013: 72‒5). The postcolonial 185

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linguistic, cultural, historical, intellectual, or other forms of transnationalism in Kanthapura enable us to reconfigure the events from an ‘emphatically non-national’ perspective to re-examine the ‘genealogies of . . . decolonizing thought, ranging from anticolonial . . . to subaltern studies’ (Briggs et al. 2008: 627‒8). It can be contended that Kanthapura and its locale weave into diversely contested transnationalisms that emerge as a provocative yet liberating space for studying the ‘movements of people’, or what Said would connote as ‘interventionism’ (1994: 345) in relation to domination, making even the subaltern subjectivities more of ‘a thing . . . interrupted, and always shot through with contradiction’ (Briggs et al. 2008: 627‒30).9 A transnationally liberating analysis of Kanthapura would negotiate against the territorial or ideological containment of its evident nationalism. The topographical representations in Kanthapura initiate a hierarchical divisiveness based on minute classifications of the Hindu caste system that have proved disruptive for India since ancient times. The Brahmin quarters, the Kannayya-House, the pariah or the poorly fed, and the always under-debt Sudra quarters on the other side of the village, where even the narrator cannot go (1971: 13), take us to a level of severance even more fraught than the colonial divide or its civilisational repercussions that Niall Ferguson lately identifies as the ‘West and the Rest’ (2012). Staying as a solid genealogical-cum-xylogical background to Kanthapura’s caste and creed-based hierarchies, the simmering sub-textual and subsumed stories of people partitioned as the brahmanical ‘best’ versus all the marginalised ‘rest’ imply economic, ethnic, psychological, and other forms of splintering. And though the Main Street Promontory is pronounced to be the centre of religious life, the mapping of Kanthapura represents its sectarianism along socially segregated boundaries. If at the religious level, the communal harmony among villagers stays charged with an unleashed fervour for bhajans and harikathas (15‒17), at the political level, the village space is awash with Gandhian moralistic jargon that would echo in Rao’s later fictional works like ‘The Cow of the Barricades’: ‘The Mahatma may be all wrong about politics, but he is right about the fullness of love in all creatures—the speechful and the mute’ (1947: 181‒2). Notwithstanding the evocation of a sanctified sense of togetherness which turns Kanthapura into a metaphoric, parabolic, and allegorical text, there is the presence of displacement as one examines the sub-textual discriminations. The novel shows that the native Indian freedom struggle against British colonial rule as well as that against its own political and religious idealism, including Gandhian rhetorical politics, ravages upon the subterranean local creeds and caste systems. Even as the novel speaks of Gandhi moving ‘from village to village to slay the serpent of the foreign rule’, urging the villagers to ‘harm no soul’ but to ‘love all . . . Hindu, Mohomedan, Christian or Pariah, for all are equal before God’ (1971: 21‒2), it can be surmised that whereas godly love might have prevailed, humanitarian love 186

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remains a distant dream. Humanity here endures hardships amid the only ray of hope that resides in Moorthy. Moorthy replicates Gandhi’s ambivalent yet hybrid philosophy of non-violent nationalism or ‘satyagraha’ that Gandhi describes as a ‘soul-force’ against violence, free of ‘impure motives’, a ‘light . . . to darkness’, an education above ordinary education that can ‘conquer hate by love’ (2000: 275‒6). Decrying the sheer absence of human value for love and empathy within the colonial providential order, Aimé Césaire highlights the dual discursiveness of wrongs that colonialism committed. Césaire argues that colonial relationships generate not only epistemological and intertextual complications but also sociocultural and psychopathological dilemmas. It can be alleged, correspondingly, that the dual discursiveness of Kanthapura foregrounds human experiences of multiple forms of divisiveness on the one hand and the paradoxical parable of Gandhian passive resistance politics on the other, an incongruity that trails along the Indian democratic system even today. The hierarchical and infrastructural divisions within Kanthapura can be read as a forewarning or a preamble to the actual partition of the country that was to happen, evident in the ambivalence of Moorthy’s pronouncement: ‘Send out love where there is hatred  .  .  . love your enemy’ (1971: 180–1). As a corollary and not as a conclusive substitute, one can also argue that the spirit of coexistence preached by Gandhi or the mythologically promoted idealism forwarded through Rama’s destruction of Ravana in the novel poses a challenge to the brahmanical-branded Hindutva that also resonates to an extent the hegemonic designs of British colonial mentality. In many ways, then, a modern transnationalistic understanding of this condition, and struggles related to it, resists such subtle imperium that prevails within Indian democracy to date. Among other issues, the tale of Kanthapura fundamentally exposes the economic exploitation of the villagers and peasantry not just by the foreign British rulers but by local landlords as well (Shingavi 2013: 87‒8, 92), such as Bhatta, the ‘First Brahmin’ (Rao 1971: 35). Shingavi describes this expository portrayal by Rao as an attempt to democratise Hinduism through ‘alternative Brahminical leadership’ as much as through the ‘democratic impulses’ of figures like Gandhi (86). Though at many places in Kanthapura, the metaphysical conjuncts with the physical to offer a pseudoliberating experience,10 it is through the three days of Moorthy’s fasting that the narrator depicts an imagined redemptive permeation of soft spiritual Hindutva linked with Mother Nature’s primordiality, accentuating the metaphoric worth of such religio-political acts (Rao 1971: 94, 99). For Shingavi, these incredulously transformational situations are about ‘indigenizing, de-­Sanskritizing [and] modernizing the puranic’ India (2013: 86), while as transnational readers, we comprehend these representations as a means to probe the nationalistic mobilisation of those times. As Rao projects these occasions of communal harmony for some universally ideal though 187

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unattainable love, we believe scepticism should be employed in assessing Moorthy’s ritualistic realisation to question if such acts service the economic interests of the poor or benefit the socio-political objectives of the Mahatma and his unorthodox methods of securing nationalism. In short, change in Kanthapura takes place in a very problematic manner so that rivalries and vendettas create confusion and add to the muddle. Amid a jeopardised communal congruence, the only relief comes in the form of festivals (Rao 1971: 120). Life continues in Kanthapura with splintered dreams. Fuelled with chaos, tumult, torture, and separation, Rao’s novel anticipates the release of an extremely complex village from all sorts of exploitation, hoping for the recuperation of an essential humanity. Kanthapura, Shingavi concludes in The Mahatma Misunderstood, ‘achieves its imagined national unity by reference to religious forms’ but at the same time it corrupts ‘those religious forms’ by representing them as ‘more democratic’ and authentic (2013: 100). What remains in the end is an unfulfilled promise at best, a past full of lost relationships and congenialities that haunt Kanthapura, indeed all of India and its present, perhaps for a long time to come.

Split country, split nation: Ali’s beloved Delhi in Twilight While Rao’s Kanthapura delineates the division of humanity amid colonial and communal rifts, Ahmed Ali’s Twilight addresses the turbidity of British–Indian relationship that had split one country into multiple national affinities. The subcontinental wholeness crumbled to create a British– Indian–Pakistani or English–Hindu–Muslim triad, which was responsible for ruining cities like Delhi, ungoverned any more by the Gandhian idealistic and rhetorical politics of common human love and compassion. Twilight portrays the Delhi of Ali’s times as a ‘storm-tossed place’ (2007: 5), where a Muslim community laments its national as well as personal losses: the loss of a vanishing culture as well as the loss of migrating from one’s beloved city.11 An Indian national, belonging to a saintly Muslim family, Ali was a poet, teacher, and scholar at the time of Twilight’s publication in 1940, whose family moved to Pakistan after Partition. Following the epic scales of British and Indian English novels, Ali’s Twilight highlights separation in terms of decay of the Muslim glorious past. The story of loss portrayed in Twilight is heartbreaking, coloured as it is with Ali’s own hyperbolic fascination with melodrama. If Rao’s Kanthapura projects a rural locale as the struggling space for its inhabitants and their search for human harmony in confusion, Ali’s Twilight represents the fate of segregated and shadowy Muslims of a city amidst ambivalent attitudes of people they live with. Representing the historical marginalisation of the Muslim community, Twilight is associated with Passage and Kanthapura, something that the author himself relates in his introduction to the novel: ‘Finished in 1939, I took it to England and 188

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showed it to E. M. Forster who liked it and eventually associated it with his great novel, A Passage to India, in the “Preface” to its Everyman’s Library edition’ (2007: xvii). Disturbed by Rao’s ‘over-conscious . . . Indian-ness’ in Kanthapura (Ali 1968: 18‒19), Ali’s story in Twilight supplements as well as complements Rao’s narrative. Twilight focuses on the history of the Muslim population and their feeling of displacement and disenchantment under the voluminous pressures of British colonial rule in a Hindu majority state. Delhi, once a city of splendour, but now a remnant of the Muslim heritage, gives the impression of vanished grandeur and lost love: ‘Destruction is in its foundations and blood is in its soil’ (2007: 4). Using the famous verse-epitaph from the last Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar’s ‘Delhi was once a paradise’, the narrator merges the lyrical with the real to reiterate the Persian poet Hafiz Sherazi’s philosophical musings: ‘The night is dark, the waves rise mountains high/ . . . What do the pedestrians know my plight’ (2007: 1, 32). And then tuning it with images from T. S. Eliot’s ‘Wasteland’, the allusive narration shapes into what critics like Khurshid Alam would describe as ‘a heteroglossia . . . to reflect on colonial subjectivities and the prevailing political conditions’ (2015: 351). Reiterating the damage done to history and the heritage of the colonially as well as culturally conquered India, Ali explains in his 1993 ‘Introduction: The Raison d’Etre of Twilight in Delhi’: [T]he Hindu English novelists of the thirties and later, in search of the real India, turned to the . . . India of ‘Brahma and Prajapati . . . of Rama  .  .  . and Yagnavalkys [sic]’ (in the words of Raja Rao), symbols of the India the West preserved but . . . in glaring contrast to their unseating of the Mughals and erasing of everything Islamic. (xiv) And again: Yet beyond the ravages of unpredictable fate, my purpose in writing the novel was to depict a phase of our national life and the decay of the whole culture, a particular mode of thought and living, values now dead and gone before our eyes. (xix) Ali’s words affirm how the loss of ‘a whole culture’ impacted the already disintegrating sensibility of Delhi and its inhabitants. The decay might involve sociopolitical imbalances, but it resulted from the sheer deficit of human values at all ends—British, Indian, and Pakistani-to-be. It is because of this fact that the ‘Hindu English’ fictional works of the 1930s and 1940s appear as a disjuncture to Ali. Ali looks up to his author-friends and mentors to comment nostalgically of his long-term personal association with 189

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Rao and Dickinson, the graceful English man from ‘a different world’ who had brought to the Muslim University of Aligarh ‘the love and grace of Oxford’ (1968: 16). Despite their closeness, Ali’s dreams as a Muslim and a nationalist mark him off from Rao in espousing a brand of Indian political nationalism that got tainted gradually with communal loyalties based on the corollary of a two-nation theory, referred to either as Congress nationalism or Muslim League nationalism, both in aggressive altercation with each other. Such a broad-based bifurcation of Indian nationalism and its wholeness still had complexities related to religious against secular modernity. For such a creeping divide over religious and sectarian fragmentation, Shingavi comments: ‘Even if the threat of covert Hindu politics was not enough to make Muslims weary, the alternative was a thoroughly secular set of politics that were hostile to Islam in a different way’ (2013: 106). In his book, Muslim Narratives and the Discourse of English, Amin Malak speaks of Ali’s recuperation of collective memory in Twilight that is ‘emotionally charged’ with ‘rhetoric’ to integrate ‘nationalism with religion’ (2004: 21). Ali’s religiously informed anti-colonialist fervour for imagining new forms of nationalism mingles nostalgia with prophecy. The loss of Delhi pronounces for Ali the rebirth of new Muslim identities, even though partitioned and fractured, a matter he considers worth serious realisation. In his History of Pakistani Literature in English, Rahman describes Ali’s realistic stance and its historical authenticity merging with a romanticised classification of the Indian Muslim’s plight. He focuses on the loss of the open-minded gentlemanly culture, especially the Delhi Muslim middle class ‘shurafa’ subculture12 based on the liberal behaviour of ‘ephebophilia’ (2015: 55), declining into existential despair, and then to disappointment in love. Rahman delegates this to be an important part of Twilight (52), one that helps us understand the nuances of intellectual and emotional partitioning of the subcontinent.13 In the novel, there are clues to multiple other failures of sensual love and sexual flirtation among female as well as male friends: ‘Their mouths search each other and meet in a kiss’ (Ali 2007: 16); ‘Asghar was reminded of his life at Bhopal . . . there he was the loved one not the lover . . . he could not help thinking of Hazoor Ali [who] had not succeeded in making Asghar love him’ (24‒25). Loaded with lyricism and philosophy based on lost amorous acquaintances, Twilight records ambivalent if not transgressive attitudes towards colonial–oriental Muslim representations surrounded by conflicting national identities. Above all, Twilight delineates the disenfranchisement and disenchantment of the Muslim minority amid Indian colonial nationalistic frenzy. Delhi’s architecture, its fallen monuments, broken minarets, neglected gardens, and a web of intricate, narrow alleys and by-lanes represent the complex, partitioned lives of its residents. The isolated house of Mir Nihal, segmented into male and female quarters—where Nihal flies pigeons and dresses in a typical Mughal manner while his son Asghar wears a red Turkish 190

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cap with an English shirt beneath his sherwani—symbolise the father–son split. While the father stays monotoned with his Mughal idealism, the son appears confused among the varied sartorial cultures hailing from the English ‘farangis’, the divided Hindus, and the fractured Muslim community. The Nihal family’s alienation from the community leads to other implications of self-exile that make a youth like Asghar yearn for love: ‘I have known neither love nor happiness’ (2007: 45). Such is the life of the Delhi inhabitants in Twilight that moves on to make way for the British king’s coronation, an event that Nihal considers as priestly treachery against their own people and Islam (145). Delhi in Twilight thus transforms from the national to the transnational in what Hashmi describes as the ‘resoiling [of] the culture’ in ‘search [of] harmony, love, and renewal’ (1994: 47). Such blending of fact and fiction gives Twilight a uniqueness that Ali strives for through human dignity and harmony amid chaotic situations. As personal and political love weakens in Delhi, physical decay leads to moral and metaphysical deterioration; a ‘hybrid culture which had nothing in it of the past’ forces itself ‘upon Hindustan, a hodgepodge of Indian and Western ways’ (2007: 240).

Conclusion: ‘ideological hangovers’, alternative structures, and hybrid spaces Does decay, death, disenchantment, and loss in Kanthapura and Twilight allow us to imagine a transnational India beyond its ‘once-civilizational wholeness’ (Gandhi and Nelson 2014: 296), its anti-British colonialist nationalism, or its Indo-Pak postcolonialism? The question may remain unanswered. However, as tense or dense as they may appear, Kanthapura and Twilight remain bound to both the glorious and inglorious pasts of India. The chaotic nervousness of the representative villages/cities of Rao and Ali reminds us of India’s rejuvenating humanism and its transnational friendships based on memory, yearning, and nostalgia that indemnify lost loves. But whereas Kanthapura emerges as politically complex, Twilight grows sentimentally abstract. The narrative in both the novels serves as a transnationalistic caveat for reductionist nationalisms. The precariousness of the Indo-Pak subcontinental partings portrayed in these works makes us realise that Rao and Ali, and their memorable mentor-friends Forster and Dickinson, had imagined for us the humanistic traditions that cross borders and barricades—geographical, national, emotional, as well as spiritual. In many ways, the dynamism of transnational readings of Passage, Kanthapura, and Twilight complement what Bhabha describes as alternative structures in the form of metaphoric spaces and subtexts (1990a: 2). Kanthapura and Twilight point out India’s much (mis)construed nationhood peopled with long-forgotten loves and relationships. Our transnational 191

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and intersectional rethinking through the decaying locales links us with the ungraspable friendships explored within the ‘muddle’ of India Forster spoke of, or perhaps even of contemporary South Asia.14 The relative geographies depicted in these novels offer instead an alternative heterogeneity of the dialogic over the dominant. Indian nationalism therefore becomes a postcolonial, transnational, ‘hybrid’, ‘third’, ‘subaltern’, or a ‘something . . . missing’ space (Shingavi 2013: 202) that helps re-contextualise the losses of human traditions. Both Kanthapura and Twilight review humanism as a contact zone for friendly reevaluation with which to appraise contemporary India and Pakistan beyond the secular or liberal precincts that Henry Schwarz would identify as illusive ‘ideological hangovers’ (1997: 153), or which Gayatri Spivak would proclaim as multiple continuing forms of ‘epistemic violence’ (1994: 76).

Notes Dedication: This chapter is dedicated to our senior colleague/friend, Professor Kamal D. Verma, former president and a pioneering member of the South Asian Literary Association (SALA). 1 Gandhi and Nelson in their ‘Editor’s Introduction’ argue that transnational analysis demands new forms of interdisciplinary collaborations so that terms like universal, civilisation, cosmopolitan, empire, nationalism, and citizenship are reviewed in light of transnational plurality (2014: 287, 297). 2 For details, see Davis’s 2013 edited essays. 3 Transnationalism offers a hybrid understanding in terms of exclusions, absences, and exterminations within an intra- as well as inter-nationalistic scenario, encouraging polyvalent perspectives that question the rigidly defined national formations. 4 See Said 1990, 1994; Fanon 2005; Césaire 2000. 5 Contradiction regarding Forster’s version of personal friendly relations sprouts from the ethos that oscillates between his Howards End epigraph ‘Only connect’ and the interrogative summation of Passage: ‘No, not yet’ (1988: 285). Resultantly, Oliver Stallybrass’s ‘Can one connect?’ in the ‘Editor’s Introduction’ to Passage (23) questions the human social interaction beyond pre-Partition binaries. See Rao and Ali in Natwar Singh 1964: 16, 35. 6 Forster’s engendered perspectives on friendship in Passage certainly allude to what Lauren Goodlad identifies as his ‘Queer Internationalism’ of ethics and care. For details, see Goodlad (2006); and Sedgwick (1985). 7 Rao was one of the rare Hindus to be educated at the Muslim Madrasa-e-Aliya of Hyderabad, India, an example of a mixed education system supporting neutral religiosities. 8 See Ali and JSAL (1998: 117‒94). 9 Briggs et al. identify transnationalism as a category that may overlap with the global, but holds ‘nationalism and imperialism as . . . transnational processes’ (2008: 626). 10 References to ‘godlike hero.  .  .  [passing] by the village’ (Rao 1971: 5), ‘Siva  .  .  .  [like Swaraj  .  .  . being] three-eyed: Self-purification, Hindu-Moslem unity, Khaddar’ (20), and the presence of ‘one God in life and that is the God of all’ (53) are obvious examples from the novel.

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11 Hashmi points out that ‘the split-up country and the split-up Muslim community or nation were as much a fact in India . . . and this fact presented a challenge to any writer whose earlier work rested on the One Country/Two Nation framework’ (1990: 181). He quotes Khushwant Singh who considered Ali ‘unpardonable’ for leaving ‘his beloved Delhi by opting for Pakistan’ (177). 12 ‘Shurafa’, from ‘shareef’, meaning gentle, here refers to an urban subculture that privileged young men to socialise and mingle; listen to music, poetry, and enjoy revelries, including even sexual flirtations. 13 Rahman connotes that one reason for the fall of the Mughal Empire was the curse of separating one male lover from another; burying Mohammad Shah between the great mystic saints Hazrat Mahboob Elahi (or Hazrat Nizamuddin) and Hazrat Amir Khusro (Ali 2007: 142). 14 Segregations in the South Asian subcontinent begin with the 1947 Partition and division of Pakistan into East and West, and later to the 1971 re-christening of East Pakistan as Bangladesh. Sara Suleri speaks about the ‘idioms of empire and nation’ (1992: 10) to explicate this duality of Pakistani existence, while Cara Cilano (2010, 2013) questions the notion of identity, given Pakistan’s second partition. Cilano agrees with Suleri that post-Partition Pakistan loses its sense of national identity by over-hinging upon Islam and Urdu, constructing thus a monolingual literary tradition (2009: 9). For more details about identity crisis in Pakistani literary/poetic tradition and idiom, see also Anwar 2019: 370‒80.

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Suleri, Sara. 1992. The Rhetoric of English India, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Whitman, Walt. 1995. ‘Passage to India’, in The Works of Walt Whitman, pp. 372‒81, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Poetry Library.

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14 ON TRANSLATING RAJA RAO IN THE TRANSNATIONAL ERA Alessandro Monti

According to a received Dravidian tradition, Raja Rao, who was living in France at the end of the 1930s, could not find a suitable language for his maiden novel Kanthapura.1 Standard British English seemed out of question, given especially the rural flavour of the narration and its fluent spontaneity. As a matter of fact, the intradiegetic voice of the narrator belongs to an old Brahmin widow, who introduces the village and its inhabitants to the readers. A regional language like Kannada (or another Dravidian idiom, because of the southern location of the novel) was equally deemed unsuitable: although deeply rooted in the local culture of Karnataka, Kanthapura was meant to convey a Gandhian message of pan-Indian identity and national belonging, even if Muslims were excluded from that vision. Rao’s well-known and often cited foreword to Kanthapura is usually considered to be the first manifesto of Indian English. The foreword is more like a plea for a unified version of this language, whose origins seem to suggest colonial fragmentation rather than shared identity or undivided nationhood. Considering these linguistic contexts, which varieties of English, either spoken or written in India, could Raja Rao have resorted to? It could be neither Babu English, a bureaucratic and generalised avatar of educated Bengali English, nor the spawning or mesolectic and half-broken types of Kitchen, Madras English and the like. The knowledge and use of English in India have been the resulting outcome of colonisation. It is not a coincidence for instance that years ago when the Mysore scholar C. D. Narasimhaiah came to visit our University in Turin and was duly introduced to our Punjab-born lecturer of Hindi, the latter apologised rather sarcastically for his poor English (as he refused to speak in Hindi with a south Indian), since the people from the north did not consider themselves to have been enslaved by the English language. Even in contemporary India, English is a matter of division rather than unification, and often symptomatic of a linguistic splitting, even as it paradoxically 196

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transcends regional issues in a way that cuts radically across caste and class, education, and religion. Things get worse when we consider the case of Hindi, a north Indian language, which became the ideologically imposed language of the newly independent India. In any case, Hindi is not a native language to Raja Rao. It is often the case that Hindi speakers in the north of the country still look down on typically southern intonations or pronunciation of words from their language. In Kanthapura, the budding use of Hindi in the southern rural area is acceptable as a side effect of the Gandhian movement of Independence— a consequence of the centralised resistance to English. This issue of incipient bilingualism anticipates a future fragmentation within the nascent Hindu nation. Indeed, I  would like to argue that the manifesto advocating the native, or desi, character of the English language, such as used in the Indian subcontinent, should be viewed in terms of sheer personal or idiosyncratic choice, more as an agency constituting hybridisation than a principle of uniformity. The notion of hybridity here concerns the possibility of harmonising both a local culture and a local speech (a dimension of the sthala purana) with a pan-national pattern of anti-colonial (and successively postcolonial) integration. Having made this point about hybridisation in Rao’s text, this chapter intends to examine the hybrid and idiosyncratic aspects of the translation of Kanthapura into Italian. Such a continuous shifting between the subterranean awareness (and maintaining) of difference within national identity and resistant politics against colonial hegemony cannot be endorsed by an authorial voice articulating an individual point of view. Thus, Raja Rao resorts to a local mouthpiece, a widow from the fictional village, who narrates the events by word of mouth. This restricted diegetic point of view is compensated by the implied hegemony of the Gandhian movement constructed as the ideological background to the novel. What follows is a splitting of language responsibilities concerning the reactive nature of Indian English, acknowledged by Raja Rao in his foreword: not the call for a new language, but a literary compromise at the very heart of many accommodating cultural transitions. Stylistically, this strategic rebound from a nativist setting (well beyond the usual and worn-out pattern of a timeless India) to a colonially inherited English, which creates a distancing effect out of a constructed spontaneity, offers a shifting perspective that involves a range of individual accommodations and relocations. For instance, very few features are shared between R. K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, and Raja Rao in their own versions of English. Although contemporaries, their Indianised Englishes mirror different and heterogeneous experiences through surprisingly assimilative linguistic paths. Perhaps unity has been achieved here through fragmentation, even though it might be very difficult to find points of contact between the Hindu conservative middle class depicted in the Malgudi stories, in which linguistic 197

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changes from a pre-Independence status to Independence are not made clear, and the rustic insurgency of the peasants in Kanthapura. Given this unstable linguistic variety, my Italian translation of Kanthapura raised many questions (Rao 1994). A valuable case in point may be provided by lexical choice. Obsolete or regional words in English were frequently found in Rao’s novel, such as ‘byre’ for a ‘cowherd’ or ‘conch’ for a ‘sacred shell’: ‘And as dusk fell, Seenu lighted the oil-lamps of the sanctum, and going up the Promontory he rang the bell and blew the conch’ (Rao 1938: 98). ‘Conch’, for instance, in the Words in Indian English dictionary is described as ‘a spiral-shaped, sea shell blown as a horn during Hindu rituals’ (Muthiah 1991: 52), whereas the Dictionary of World English Encarta describes it simply as ‘tropical sea animal with shell, a tropical marine mollusc with a large, often brightly coloured, spiral shell’ (Soukhanov 1999: 394). Another dictionary of British English gives information beyond the mere biological side of the aspect, speaking instead about ‘the large brightly coloured shell of this animal, used as a trumpet or valued as a collector’s item’ (Robinson and Davidson 1996: 284). Of course, this implicit dichotomy between the sacred and the ornamental lays bare, as it were, the semantic range of the word ‘conch’ both from eastern and western perspectives. As a matter of fact, a translation, say into Italian, should perhaps expand the single lexeme ‘shell’ into the extended paraphrase ‘sacred shell’ (conchiglia sacra). A different, tentative translation like buccina (a Roman trumpet) should then be discarded as unsuitable even if it may be referred in Italian to a kind of snail, so called for the likeness of its shell to the above-mentioned instrument or because the shell itself was used as a trumpet.2 An Italian reader may well be reminded of marching Roman legions or peplum (an Italian term for pseudo-historical films with a Roman or Greek fake setting). To translate ‘conch’, one has thus to emphasise the ritual side of the Indian lexicon into English in a sort of enforced nationalism that seems to overwhelm the semantic codes. However, we should not misunderstand Indian English for Hindi English since the Oxford Hindi-English dictionary meaning of ‘conch’, or ‘shankh’, is first given as ‘a conch shell’ (traditionally used to pour libations) and only as a second entry do we have ‘mus. horn made from a conch shell’ (McGregor 2003: 941). No religious overtones are present here. Perhaps, in order to visualise the scene evoked by Raja Rao, of conches blowing in temples, a translator might remember a Bengali film, Antarmahal (Ghosh 2005), in which a life-size painting of Queen Victoria arrives in a palatial yard amid numinous and sudden gusts of rushing wind and the auspicious blowing of a conch. These few considerations highlight the extent to which Raja Rao’s English is relevant to postcolonial discourse. More precisely, we should rather speak of anti-colonial resistance, given the year in which Kanthapura was ­written—1938. However, the novel can be said to anticipate in an inchoate 198

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form the ideology of nativism. Albeit couched, according to the author, into an intuitive rendition of Kannada, Kanthapura actually transforms relocated forms of English into sthala puranas. The late critic C. D. Narasimhaiah once read out a hymn to Kenchamma from the novel to a peasant, whose answer was something like: ‘I can’t understand the words, but it sounds like a prayer to me.’3 This would be a clear indication that nativism seems to reside in the sound, not in the words themselves. Furthering my discussion of translation practice, it might be possible to detect in this novel the influence of some seminal points of Sanskrit aesthetics, with particular reference to the notion of rasa (essence; essential part; taste, by extension): in my own extended interpretation, it is something that is supposed to awake emphatically within us a process of comprehension. As a consequence, the Indian English used by Raja Rao in Kanthapura would introduce the reader to an inner dimension of reality—as the rope beyond the serpent, the language behind the language, the universal beside the mere local. Perhaps the apparently simple word ‘conch’ should also be viewed as a multiple and resonant container, whose authenticity could be found in the polysemic confusion it evokes, since it obliges a forlorn translator to go beyond what he or she knows. To appreciate a ‘sacred conch’ (conchiglia sacra) one must then be aware of the deferring power of difference and thus include, through the exclusion of what one previously knew, the noxious serpent within the innocent rope. A similar process concerning the coterminous reference of meanings is discovered again when an anxious translator has to face a rather uncouth expression such as the ‘village platform’—reminiscent of railway stations and loud announcements. One might of course know what a village platform looks like—a round or square elevated place, either of beaten earth or concrete, which mainly stands at the centre of an open space (a kind of square) in most villages of southern India. As a rule, a peepul tree grows on it, as it does on the platform by the river where women wash clothes in Kanthapura (1938: 51), so as to make the site sacred. It acts as a local meeting place and even as an open-air site of local worship. The term ‘platform’ also seems to conceal a bureaucratic Anglophone agency, indicated by the dictionary entry in which it supplants the original meaning of ‘bench’ or ‘pyol’, which is then replaced by the extended paraphrase in Indian English that includes the word ‘platform’. Although Raja Rao tries to relocate English by introducing a new meaning into the standard word ‘platform’, he subsumes de facto an implied idiom like ‘station platform’ into the literary coinage ‘village platform’. Consequently, the author must recognise the implied hegemony of the loan word ‘platform’ upon the virtual ‘bench’ suggested by ‘pyol’. Quite a mouthful for just a single word, and one quite impossible to render concisely without the dubious help of a garrulous footnote. My imperfect translation of Raja Rao’s ‘platform’ as ‘pyol’ tries to transmit the rasa 199

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(taste, plus the ensuing sentiment) implied in the cultural backdrop of the term when transferred from Indic languages to accommodate English.4 But by referring to the Anglo-Indian term, I  have indubitably deferred Western comprehension to a glossary in my translated volume, since I have retranslated ‘village platform’ back into its autochthonous version ‘pyol’, in a restoring movement that infuses local nativism into my own interpretation of the word. Of course, it would be quite impossible to globalise ‘village platform’ differently from words such as ‘pi-dogs’ or ‘masala’, for instance. In any case, ‘pyal’ is given as the Anglo-Indian version of ‘pyol’, in its original meaning as ‘seat’ or ‘bench’, and more extensively as ‘a raised platform for sitting-out purposes’ (Muthiah 1991: 168), a function it shares in the public sphere of life with similar connotations found in the squares of southern Italy. My choice in translating the word implies a further design, namely the abrogation of the literary coinage in Indian English contrived with originality by Raja Rao and a recovery of the lexicon from the colonial ‘Anglo-Indian’ period. In other words, I am intentionally bringing back hegemonic hybridisation, while keeping in mind that the word ‘pyol’ is also used frequently by R. K. Narayan whose mother tongue was Tamil. Such a process emphasises the double or rather multiple nature of interpretation that Indian English is heir to. Each word has a previous version behind it—being the product of many transactions and mutations in time and languages. For example, the very word ‘conch’ reaches out to the Portuguese ‘cancha’, a double origin which stands side-by-side with the Sanskrit/Hindi ‘ðaükh’/‘shankh’. It seems almost impossible to evade a colonial or Western intermediate spelling, given the unavoidable net of interconnecting relationships. A further issue concerns a word like ‘bull’ as exemplified in the following quotation. In Indian English, this term may assume a celebratory overtone, which is not usual in Western languages. As testified by Raja Rao, it designates a male son, one pampered by the family group: ‘But it was Moorthy, the youngest, whom Narsamma loved the most—the youngest is always the holy bull, they say, don’t they?—and she thought that he, with his looks and his intelligence, should one day be a Sub-Collector at least’ (Rao 1938: 51–2). This transition in usage is made possible in Indian English by the sacred identity which is attributed to the bull Nandi (Nandî), the guardian of the temples of Siva. This notion of male hegemony informs the actual meaning behind the term ‘bull’ in Raja Rao’s writing. To fully understand the hierarchical emphasis of ‘bull = son’, it is necessary to consider another novel, Gauri or The Old Woman and the Cow, by Mulk Raj Anand. Here a young bride in a Punjabi village is almost always addressed as a ‘cow’ or as ‘the gentle cow’ (1960: 43); for example, ‘[she] had the reputation of being as gentle as a cow in her village’ (38); or, ‘[she] is like a cow, very gentle and very good’ (6). A young wife is thus equated to a tame cow, whose outstanding feature is the submission to patriarchal rule, whereas a male son is a 200

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‘bull’ at large within the family circle. Raja Rao uses the term rather uncritically, without laying bare the juxtaposition between bull and cow. This truncated reference constitutes, however, the true essence of the desi flavour in Raja Rao’s Indian English. It seems to uphold the dharmic hierarchies of the Hindu world, surpassing even the Gandhian manifesto in Kanthapura. Gandhi’s public orientation in the novel is exposed through the choice of representing a disenfranchised mass of militant-villagers, whose homogeneity moves across castes and to some extent gender. They are viewed as a group according to the Hindu system of social belonging and values, not as individual agencies. Even the political tensions that may arise out of this clash of behaviours are usually driven back to a philogenetic bias, in both purpose and scope. To better understand the word ‘bull’, we have to resort to the implied paradigm ‘bull’ versus ‘cow’, a juxtaposition whose silenced connotations are perhaps regulated by the reference to the Indian struggle for Independence in Kanthapura, which itself is controlled by the mythical reference to the helpless Sita who is kidnapped by the demon-king Ravana, as the epic story tells us, and serves as the archetype for the Indian nation or Bharat Mata (Mother India) who is oppressed by the British. Undoubtedly the metaphor begs for a male hero, Rama, who will rescue the incarcerated woman. The embodiment of Bharat Mata into a subaltern feminine persona uncovers a subordinate cow-like passive role for the woman: the all-suffering wife tied to the fulfilment of her stridharma, or her duty as woman. We should be well aware of the twist in the mythical tale of Independence operated by Raja Rao—the writer discards once and for all the Bengali figuration of the goddess Durga, such as the one devised in Anandamath (1992) by Bankimchandra Chatterjee, as a Sacred Mother who nurtures the freedom of the country with the blood of her ‘sons’ fighting on her behalf. The cosmogonic southern myth of Chamundi defeating the buffalo demon Mahisasura to rescue the world is instead employed by Rao to introduce the reader to the events taking place in Kanthapura. Yet the reference to the warrior goddess intimates only a distanced reference to theology and abstract ritual, without implying a call to resistance or evoking the possibility of an organised revolt. In Kanthapura the anti-demonic myth stands in high isolation with respect to the events which are narrated—it acts as a fragment of sthala purana giving local flavour to the story in a way that suggests the more familiar public festivity of Navaratri instead of an anti-colonial resistance. The militant meaning assumed by the myth of the Devi in Anandamath yields here too easily to a ‘domestic’ version, one substituting the wife Sita for the ‘ðakti’ [shakti] identity of the Goddess, as female principle of divine energy. By doing so, Raja Rao anticipates the post-Independence eulogy of female suffering such as extolled later in Mehboob Khan’s film, Mother India (Khan 1957). Self-sacrifice, subordination, and renunciation 201

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are the hallmarks of a post-Gandhian India in the age of Nehru—the cry seems to be for unblemished Sitas and committed Ramas. Instead of the narrow fictional universe shaped by R. K. Narayan or the heterogeneous claims Mulk Raj Anand has given voice to, it is the Hindu orthodoxy highlighted by Raja Rao that vies for attention with the linguistic experiment he conducts. The novel is clearly about a Hindu nation, whose ideal and ideological borders must be contained within a dharmic frame. The notion of dharma advocated by the writer in Kanthapura would later underscore an altogether different politics of nationhood identified with crude communalism, a theme Rao has addressed ideologically in his volume of short stories, On the Ganga Ghat (1989), with its exclusive focus on traditional Hinduism. To conclude, it is only on translating Kanthapura that one comes across a number of problems that have to be addressed. Solutions cannot exist by transforming lexicon or style alone, or by imparting a puranic flavour to the narration even if a degree of discursive fluency and a dignified epic tone are achieved. In my opinion, Kanthapura undoubtedly pushes the urge to impose one hegemonic English throughout the Empire back to the lumber room. In its stead, it posits a growth of linguistic varieties which reflect the multicultural and pluralistic nature of India even as it insists upon a conformity to certain universalising metaphysics.

Notes 1 Subsequent references in the text are from my Italian translation of the novel (Rao 1994). 2 ‘Buccina’, from the Greek word, meaning ‘to blow’. It indicates a military horn, spiral in shape. ‘Buccino’ is a marine snail whose shell looks like the horn. It could be used as a musical instrument. 3 Recollection from personal correspondence between myself and C. D. Narasimhaiah carried out in the 1990s. 4 There is, however, another Anglo-Indian version of the term—‘pyal/pial’ (Rao 1994: 277).

References Anand, Mulk Raj. 1960. The Old Woman and the Cow, Bombay: Kutub-Popular. Chatterjee, Bankimchandra. 1992. Anandamath [1882], trans. Basanta Koomar Ray, Bombay and Delhi: Vision. Ghosh, Rituparno (dir). 2005. Antarmahal, Calcutta: Rituparno Ghosh Productions. Khan, Mehboob (dir). 1957. Mother India, Bombay: Mehboob Productions. McGregor, R. S. 2003. The Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Muthiah, S. 1991. Words in Indian English, New Delhi: Indus. Rao, Raja. 1938. Kanthapura, London: Orient. ———. 1994. Kanthapura, trans. Alessandro Monti, Como: Ibis.

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———. 1989. On the Ganga Ghat, New Delhi: Vision. Robinson, Mairi, and George W. Davidson. 1996, Chambers 21st Century Dictionary, Edinburgh: Larousse. Soukhanov, Anne. 1999. Encarta World English Dictionary, New York: Bloomsbury.

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Part IV REMINISCENCES

RAJA RAO AT HIS BED TABLE Susan Raja Rao

Raja, the sacred wordsmith, has now departed. His small grey typewriter sits idle in the closet, leaning against boxes full of the manuscripts he created with its help. Raja always wrote in bed. Propped up by pillows, he would sit upright, writing on his rectangular, dark brown, eight-inch-tall handcrafted writing table. Over the years, he’d tapped out thousands of precious pages on his small, ancient Hermes-Rocket manual typewriter. Occasionally, he would break into longhand, although with such illegible handwriting even he could hardly decipher what he’d scribbled down. From a young age, Raja knew he would be a writer. Born to a Brahmin family, Vedantin priests and advisors to kings since the 13th century, he grew up with a profound knowledge of classical Indian philosophy and culture. He knew from a young age that writing was his dharma, what he was born to do. The act of writing was his sadhana, the practice that leads to one’s spiritual goal. Raja’s spiritual and literary quests were interwoven. He was committed to fulfilling his dharma—writing—no matter what the consequences, be they poverty, starvation, or even death. He never wrote for money, fame, or an audience. In his early years, he wanted to publish anonymously, but his publisher would not allow it. He often said that when one follows his dharma, with no thought of reward, the universe itself comes to help, opening all doors. Raja lived his dharma more devotedly than any human being I’ve ever known. He followed his path with absolute commitment, unshakeable courage, and unbounded, joyous enthusiasm. Raja had such reverence for the word that he would never use abbreviations and abhorred American slang. In the 26  years we were together, I never heard him utter one frivolous word. He was adamantly opposed to any mental manipulations of the word, therefore disliked creative writing classes. He was aware that the true art of writing arises from one’s inmost principle, as a spontaneous expression beyond the personal self. Raja always said, ‘The word is sacred, and writing is worship.’ This from his acceptance speech when awarded the 1988 Neustadt Prize for Literature: I am a man of silence. And words emerge from that silence with light, of light, and light is sacred. . . . The writer or the poet is he 207

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who seeks back the common word to its origin of silence, that the manifested word become light. Raja would initiate his writing sessions in two different ways, the most dramatic when he would be seized by a burning desire to write. This would come upon him at any time of day or night. Many nights I would be awakened by bright lights and Raja racing wildly around our room shouting, ‘Where is my paper, I need my paper and pen! I need to be alone!’ I would help him find his writing tools, arrange his writing table and pillows on his bed, then either leave the room, or he would ask me to stay and lie silently beside him. He would work for one or two hours, beginning a new novel or essay, or continuing one in progress. The writing that came from these spontaneous sessions was unknown to him before that moment, unplanned, and unimagined. It was pure expression, from the depths of his being. The other form his writing sessions would take was methodical and planned, at least in timing and topic. The early mornings were spent in serious preparation for it. He would always meditate upon awakening, eat breakfast, then take a peaceful nature walk, followed by a shower and another brief meditation. His final preparatory act would be a purifying ritual, sprinkling sanctified water on himself, his bed table, typewriter, and writing area, all the while intoning mantras. He might work on a novel or essay, or a speech for a conference. While these sessions were quiet, he was always in the same inspired state of consciousness as in his explosive outpourings. He would write alone, absolutely silent and inwardly absorbed. Again, he would write for several hours. The writing that both types of sessions produced would always have the same level of exalted beauty. While Raja worked day after day in an absolutely disciplined manner, his writing would take on a sporadic pattern during his lifetime. He would write nothing for long periods of time, then suddenly motivated by some mysterious spark of creativity, begin again. Once, he gave up writing altogether, vowing never to write again until he found his Sat Guru, his life’s ultimate goal. For ten desperate years Raja searched for his Guru, seeking out and listening to great spiritual teachers of India such as Pandit Taranath, Sri Aurobindo, Sri Krishnamurti, Mahatma Gandhi, and Ramana Maharshi. While he was deeply moved by these great men, he knew that none was the Guru he was seeking. While staying in Maharshi’s ashram, Raja reached a point of utter despair, thinking he would never find his true Guru. Finally, an Englishman living at the ashram told Raja he knew where he could find what he was searching for in the city of Trivandrum. In later years, Raja loved to tell the story of how an Englishman led him by the hand to his Sat Guru, Sri Atmananda of Trivandrum. Raja would always say, ‘Sri Atmananda answered all my questions of one hundred lives.’ But, as an initiate in the Guru’s home, Raja had yet to resume writing. One day Sri Atmananda asked him, ‘Raja, what are you doing?’ To which Raja replied, 208

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‘Nothing at all.’ The Guru then instructed him, ‘I think you should begin writing again.’ The renewal of his writing produced a philosophical essay, ‘The Song of Love’, followed by his internationally acclaimed novel The Serpent and the Rope. He continued to write several novels, many short stories and essays, and half a dozen non-fiction books, his articles and speeches numbering in the hundreds. Though many of these works are currently being prepared for publication, the reader may already be familiar with some of them. After meeting Sri Atmananda, Raja’s entire creative literary genius turned inward to the spiritual. As he grew spiritually, his writing continued to evolve, attaining ever more transcendental heights throughout his long life. The pinnacle of his literary pilgrimage is his trilogy, The Chessmaster and His Moves, containing some 2,000 pages typed on his little typewriter while sitting in bed. Only the first volume has been published, with the next two volumes currently undergoing editing. Raja would always say, in genuine humility, ‘What is good about my writing belongs to The Guru. The mistakes are mine.’ A favourite time for us was the late afternoon or early evening, when he would read to me what he’d written during the day. He would sometimes ask me about a certain word, line, or phrase for possible correction, but to me the words were always perfect. If he did make corrections, it was ­invariably to polish words—again, words so beautiful, to me they seemed impossible to improve upon, though he’d always make them even more exquisite. From bed, he would read to me while I sat facing him in a chair. We knew the writing was true when its breathtaking beauty would take us both into a deep silence. We would sit in that silence, unmoving, as the evening dusk fell.

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RAJA RAO The untold story Makarand R. Paranjape

I On the morning of 8 July 2006, Raja Rao passed away at the age of 97 years and eight months. He was one of the great writers of the 20th century. His life not only overlapped almost the entire century, but his works engaged with all its major events and intellectual cross-currents. A small, even frail man, Raja Rao lived life on a grand scale. For years he suffered from asthma, taking heavy doses of steroids, until a fish-swallowing remedy offered by Hyderabad-based traditional healers almost cured him. Yet there is nothing small or frail about his life. If his story were to be told in celluloid, it would be a 70-mm film, with an international star cast, spanning three continents. It would show a handsome young Brahmin arriving in Paris in the late 1920s, marrying Camille Mouly, a French professor much older than him, and giving up his PhD to pursue a writing career. Later, the marriage would break up and Raja Rao would return to India to look for a guru. After a decisive event, Raja Rao finally found him in Atmananda Guru (P. Krishna Menon, 1883‒1959) in Kerala. He then moved to the United States where he taught philosophy at the University of Texas in Austin. His classes were very popular. He was known to walk into the lecture theatre filled with 250 young, inquisitive minds and say: ‘You may ask me any question you like.’ He was married a second time to Catherine Jones and had a son, Christopher Rama. But this marriage also ended in a divorce. Married a third time to Susan, who became his faithful companion, and in his last years, a devoted nurse, he lived as a recluse in a small apartment in Austin, Texas. That is where I last saw him in June 2004. When we parted, I was not sure I would see him again. His health was failing. He did not even remember the names of his own books, novels such as Kanthapura and The Serpent and the Rope, which made him internationally known years ago. His shortterm memory was almost gone. He also suffered from bouts of dementia. He

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thought I was a literary agent who had come to take a look at his unpublished work. His third wife, Susan, many years younger, and an American woman, who served and tended to him more wholeheartedly than any traditional Hindu wife I know, made us excellent pumpkin soup. Her kitchen in their small apartment always smelled of herbs. Everything served at her table was organically grown and, of course, vegetarian. The only exceptions were the occasional rich desserts specially ordered from a shop nearby or some South Indian food brought from a restaurant. Though I was no literary agent, I had indeed come to look at Raja Rao’s unpublished manuscripts. There were literally dozens of them, with precious scribblings in Raja Rao’s own hand in the margins, including the two unpublished volumes of The Chessmaster trilogy. If these were to come out, this three-part novel would be one of the most distinguished, and certainly one of the longest books of our times, perhaps rivalling the achievement of James Joyce or Marcel Proust. I wonder now when and how these works will be published. Who else but Raja Rao would have been able to supervise, approve, and oversee their final versions? Raja Rao considered his writing a sadhana, a spiritual discipline. Reading him is also a sadhana. Like towering writers such as Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, his fiction pushes us deeper and higher into ourselves. ‘I am a man of silence’, he said famously, ‘the word seems to come first as an impulsion from the nowhere, and then as a prehension, and it becomes less and less esoteric—till it begins to be concrete. And the concrete becoming ever more earthy, and the earthy communicated, as the common word, alas, seems to possess least of that original light’ (Paranjape 1998: 188). Raja Rao has returned to the silence whence he came, merging into that light, that sacred luminosity that he managed to capture in words.

II I still remember my first encounter with Raja Rao. It was Fall 1981, in a class taught by Professor Braj B. Kachru at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where I was a graduate student. The course was a seminar in World Englishes. We were discussing non-native creativity in English and the guest of honour was an Indian novelist, Raja Rao. We had read his celebrated foreword to Kanthapura, where he had spoken of the challenge ‘to convey in a language that is not one’s own the spirit that is one’s own’ (1938: 5). Raja Rao had boldly declared: ‘We cannot write like the English. We should not. We cannot write only as Indians’ (5). Now, we were to meet the writer himself. Of all the members of our internationally mixed class, I was possibly the most excited. Not only had I read and admired Raja Rao’s works, but I also intended to specialise in Indian English literature.

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The big day finally arrived. We waited with bated breath for the arrival of our special guest. I was taken aback when I set eyes on him. He was diminutive, almost frail, seeming even smaller sitting in the large mahogany chair with burgundy upholstery that he was asked to occupy. His hair was grey, long, and curling at the ends. Some of his teeth were missing, but there was a gold-capped tooth which revealed itself when he smiled. Raja Rao was then about 73 years old but he looked not a day over 60. Normally sprightly, it was only on that particular day that he looked tired. Right in the middle of the class, I found him dozing off from time to time with the simplicity and unselfconsciousness of a child. The class discussion was neither very stimulating nor entirely successful. Raja Rao actually seemed outright distracted if not little interested by our questions. He seemed a trifle bored, not particularly stirred by our queries, especially those expected ones on the craft of a writer, his use of tools, materials, themes, and techniques. Even the topic of the course, how non-native creative writers in English twisted, altered, and manipulated the language to their own ends, did not seem to absorb him. At one point, he said very earnestly to a Thai student: ‘Dear lady, is it easy to understand an ancient civilization like India? It requires enormous involvement, caring, and an inwardness.’ To another question about the source of his inspiration, he replied: ‘Sir, I am a man of silence.’ And he spoke little thereafter. His silence seemed gradually to fill up the room until all of us felt uncomfortable. Rather irrelevantly I asked: ‘You seem a little tired, have you not slept well?’ He seemed somehow to be interested in the question and looked at me intently before replying: ‘It is 1 to 2 a.m. in India, you know.’ We all looked expectantly at him to finish his sentence, to solve the riddle. Instead he pulled out a gold pocket watch from inside his grey Nehru jacket and remarked: ‘Ah, it is 2 a.m.’ This seemed puzzling because the time was actually about 4:30 p.m. I looked at him quizzically. ‘The watch, you see, is on India time’, he explained. All of us were quite amazed. I asked, ‘Sir, did you come back from India recently?’ He looked a bit perplexed, as if the question did not seem pertinent. At length he sighed, ‘Yes, ah! . . . It was actually a couple of months back.’ Did it mean that he lived in multiple, even contrasting, temporalities, more Indian than American? The class ended there. While walking back home, I remember feeling odd, unsettled. It was most startling that for months this man was on Indian time despite residing in America! In the years to come, as I  got to know Raja Rao better, I  understood how that first encounter had revealed an important facet of his personality, a truth of his being. It was driven home more and more forcefully that he indeed lived in a world of his own making. Though physically he lived in America, the innermost core of his self always abided in India. In that sense, he never left India, at least spiritually; or at any rate, he carried this India within him, like a pot of Ganges water that pilgrims take with them to 212

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far-off places. It was to this India of the imagination that he retreated from time to time to refresh himself, to draw his sustenance, to remind himself of who he was. Like a pilgrim taking a dip in the holy water of Ganges, Raja Rao repeatedly nourished and cleansed himself in the purifying stream of this inner India. As he himself famously said later in The Meaning of India: ‘India is not a country (desa), it is a perspective (darsana)’ (2007: 17). Though we had met in the classroom, my real encounter with Raja Rao was to happen a few days later at an informal gathering—an evening party in his honour at the Kachru residence. He first mingled with those gathered, making polite conversation and small talk for a few minutes. Then he sat quietly in a corner of the room. After talking amongst ourselves for a while, I realised suddenly that I had been wasting my time with my student buddies when I should have been sitting with Raja Rao, trying to observe him, learn from him, or even simply to experience his presence. Not without trepidation, I cautiously advanced to where he was seated, then asked his permission to sit next to him. He nodded his assent. After a few moments, he asked, ‘What is your name?’ When I told him, he smiled. He then said: ‘At one time these things mattered a lot, your name, your family, who you are, your sanskars . . . but those days are gone.’ I immediately responded: ‘The opening sentence of The Serpent of the Rope says it all, doesn’t it?’: ‘I was born a Brahmin—that is, devoted to Truth and all that. “Brahmin is he who knows Brahman,” etc. etc.’ (1960: 5). Raja Rao nodded again and smiled slightly. I said: ‘Yes, these days, we believe in a casteless society. Equality.’ Raja Rao sat up and pointing a bony finger at me explained: ‘If you believe in karma, how can you believe in equality?’ Too surprised to respond immediately, I  diverted myself by noticing his fingers—long and tapering they were, like a philosopher’s. His face had a large, domed, luminous forehead and a beaked, aquiline nose suggesting an old and distinguished lineage. The question he asked was one of the many unsettling challenges he posed, not just to me, but to all those he knew intimately. But this day was special to me because I was to be jolted not once but three times. The second time I  found Raja Rao shake my suppositions was on the subject of the then most famous Indian god-man, Satya Sai Baba of Puttaparathi. I boasted that I had the occasion to have Baba’s darsana (sighting) scores of times over a number of years. I  had started to say some negative things about his publically performed ‘miracles’ when Raja Rao cut me short: ‘Do you have a Guru?’ When I did not reply, he continued: ‘Without a guru, you know very little about spirituality. You must pay attention to your own sadhana and not worry about rightness and wrongness of others.’ As the conversation progressed, and we were not even 20 minutes into it, it seemed as if Raja Rao was not satisfied. He wanted to pull me into something more important, more intense, more meaningful. Of course, I did not realise it then. But, the moment he asked me his next unsettling question, 213

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I knew something had shifted inside me. He looked directly my way, ‘What do you want?’ I  felt unnerved, I  stammered: ‘I am trying to get an M.A. in English.’ He said: ‘That’s not what I meant. What do you really want? What do we all want?’ I responded not without a degree of peevishness if not bitterness: ‘Can we really get what we want? Suppose I say to you that I want a Mercedes, will I get one? Or, even if I get that car, suppose I said, I want to be free of my ego; I want to be enlightened. Will I succeed? Will I  get what I want?’ Raja Rao sat back with his eyes closed and clasped his hands almost prayerfully. The silence seemed to stretch from him to all the people in the room and beyond us to the darkened lawn outside. Raja Rao opened his eyes at last. Looking straight at him, I said: I tried so hard, but I realised that the person who wants to be free is the very entity from which freedom is required. I myself am the problem. Whatever I do is from the centre that is me. I want to be free from myself, of my ego. How is that possible? Every attempt to free myself only adds to my ego. It’s an impasse. How to go forward? We are all stuck. Very softly he said: ‘Only the guru can show you how to.’ That night I found myself deeply moved, quite disturbed. I felt as if a fundamental aspect of my being, which I had ignored in order to pursue the mundane goals of life, was reawakened. Pushing its way to the forefront of my consciousness, it now demanded attention again. I had let it alone for so long. Now, without my knowing it, Rao had stirred it. He had turned me just so slightly on the axis of my being and pointed me back to the path of self-realisation. The adventure of consciousness beckoned me once again, urging me towards the true purpose of my life. As the years passed, the importance of my relationship with Raja Rao was only reinforced. Of all the living masters, I felt the closest to him and his work. Raja Rao had made a big difference in my life. His work moved me deeply. I read and re-read it. I was among the first to comment on his new work and among the few people in the world to have read all his unpublished material. I stayed at his small home in Austin, got to know most of his close friends, and was close to his wife, Susan, too. Perhaps, I made a small difference in Raja Rao’s life also. But most of all, what is it that defined our relationship? Both of us were sadhakas, seekers of higher truth and light. Why is his writing so important? Because only Raja Rao, of those few creators of a new rhythm and style, the makers and changers of language and meaning, was above all a writer of great spiritual promise. It was only he who showed the way to uplift modern men and women from their condition of alienation and anomie. His work inspired and changed me the way few other writers did. How privileged I felt to know him as closely as I did. 214

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III Of my many memorable encounters with Raja Rao, I have chosen two or three from the period March to May 1995 when Susan and he visited India. What follows are excerpts from my journal in which I have recorded those moments. I still remember how thrilling some of these meetings were, and how I woke up early in the morning with a sense of urgency, to write about them. 3 March 1995 Have met Raja Rao twice on this trip. He is accompanied by Susan and Raman Srinivasan, a young academic who worked for the Rockefeller Foundation. The first meeting was over lunch on 3 March, Friday. It was Eid. I met Raja Rao for lunch at the India International Centre with Srinivasan. Susan was indisposed and stayed in her room. Raja Rao is 86. He has begun, as it were, to ‘tell all’ in his old age. He seems to want to hold nothing back. But there is a line of what may be called ‘sense’ which he seems to cross now and then. During this meeting, he alluded to a mission of great importance, a project which brought him to India. He revealed what it was yesterday, but I shall come to that later. He told me how The Serpent and the Rope was published. At first no one would take it. Then he showed it to E. M. Forster, who was an old man by then, but such a friend of India. One day, John Murray happened to be passing by Forster’s quarters in Cambridge. Murray was the son of an English aristocrat, his father a member of the House of Lords. He had just started a publishing house and was looking for manuscripts. So he was in Cambridge and was passing by Forster’s flat. Something made him turn back. At that moment, Raja Rao’s manuscript was lying on Forster’s table. Murray asked Forster: ‘Do you have any good manuscripts about?’ And Forster said: ‘As a matter of fact I’m looking at one right now.’ Murray loved the book. That is how the English edition came out. The American edition was published by a German (Jewish) publisher, Alfred Knoff, who had just started a publishing outfit in the United States. He came across the John Murray edition in Switzerland, contacted Raja Rao, and subsequently brought out the U.S. edition. What Raja Rao had been trying to tell me was that nothing in his life had been of his own doing. It was all because of the Guru’s grace. Writing itself was a sadhana for him. So, the publication part came in only later. The writing was in itself of supreme importance. That afternoon, the dining room of the India International Centre was full of very important people, ministers, politicians, bureaucrats, ambassadors, and of course Raja Rao himself. The then director of IIC was Dr  Karan Singh, Member of Parliament, distinguished writer, scholar, statesman, and former minister.1 How graciously he went around the room, meeting people 215

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to make them feel at home, making polite conversation, inviting us all to eat. While we were eating, another very interesting incident took place. Arun Shourie, an important journalist, economist, and politician, was having lunch at the adjacent table with Jagmohan, former governor of Jammu and Kashmir. As it happened, that was the table Raja Rao wanted but it had already been reserved. Shourie had heard from his friend Gurumurthy that Srinivasan was in town. Shourie recognised both Raja Rao and Srinivasan and said: ‘Gurumurthy had phoned me from Madras (now Chennai) that you would be in Delhi. I’ve brought my copy of The Serpent and the Rope, which I read and admired as a student in Syracuse long ago. Will you sign it?’ Raja Rao nodded but when Shourie actually brought the book he said: ‘I can’t sign it now. I’ll have to wash my hands first. It has my Guru’s name you see.’ Shourie was disappointed but took it well. Raja Rao displayed supreme indifference to people of position and power, when he needed to. He did not want to sign with his hands soiled with food; Shourie did not expect him to get up, to cut his meal short, wash his hands just to sign the book. I was more fortunate. Raja Rao did inscribe my copy, so lovingly and movingly, as he signed all his other books for me, one after the other. I know no one who signed books as beautifully as he did. This is what he wrote in his own hand on my volume of The Serpent and the Rope: ‘For Makarand, this old book, written in Paris, oh, so long ago to show human love is only a premonition of the Absolute. From Raja Rao, once a Parisian-Brahmin.— Raja Rao, 21.5.95.’ 7 March 1995 This meeting with Raja Rao was most extraordinary for a number of reasons. Srinivasan said to me: ‘I’ve been looking for you but today seems to be a day of missed connections and confusions.’ I was to discover the meaning of that only later. While Raja Rao was holding forth on one of his cherished topics, the reason for his present trip to India, the phone rang. Srinivasan said he would go down to pick up the new visitor. I heard the name ‘Susheela’ and my heart skipped a beat. So this was she, the ‘Savithri’ and the ‘Jayalakshmi’ of the novels. It was rather amazing because one of my agendas for today’s meeting had been to ask Raja Rao to introduce me to her. She was supposed to have come much earlier, for lunch in fact, but her driver had not shown up. Susheelaji was a woman in her early 70s, well preserved, still rather striking. But her face looked a bit tired and pinched. Her upper lip was thin with a wide ridge between the nose and the lips. She had a prominent mole on the upper lip, a strong almost masculine nose, and quite lovely eyes. Susheela was the daughter of Sir J. P. Srivastava, member of the Constituent Assembly of India, and one of the wealthy industrialists of North India, and the 216

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wife of Rajeshwar Dayal, one of India’s most distinguished diplomats. They lived in a large bungalow on Palam Marg, Vasant Vihar. Raja Rao was quite excited by her arrival too. It turned out that they were meeting after nearly ten years. It was Raja Rao’s attempt to round off his life, to close some incomplete circles. Raja Rao told many stories about how Susheela and he always seemed to miss each other, not just metaphorically but physically, when they were friends many years back. There was one particularly moving story about how Susheela kept Raja Rao waiting from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris. She had been in Switzerland with her father. Instead of putting her on a train, he had driven her to the border of France, from where she had to take another train anyway. Raja Rao was concerned because she had been wearing a lot of jewellery and it was just after the war. ‘Susheela doesn’t see too well and was perfectly innocent, you see. I was so anxious and afraid for her. There she came swinging her bag and strolling down as though nothing had happened.’ But apart from Susheela, the greatest surprise was the source of Comrade Kirillov. Raja Rao revealed him to be a man called Shelvankar, a Marathi Brahmin of Tanjore extraction, who became India’s ambassador to Russia.2 He married a Scottish communist, Mary. Raja Rao said that Shelvankar was presumably on the KGB payroll, if not actually spying for them. Inadvertently, he had helped India by toeing the Soviet line during the Quit India Movement thereby alienating India from the Communists. He wrote an anti-Gandhian tract called Ends Are Means in refutation of Aldous Huxley’s better-known book Ends or Means? (1937). His income was reported to have come from translations from German and other literary work, but he was probably a spy reiterated Raja Rao. After the break-up of the Soviet Union, Raja Rao wondered if many such stories of Indians spying for Russia had come to light. Actually, they had; I  remember detailed lists being published.3 Susheelaji said that India’s intelligence agency, RAW, and its first director Kaw (hence RAW Cowboys) had been created by Indira Gandhi not to spy on others but on Indians themselves! The most important revelation of the evening was the purpose of Raja Rao’s visit to India. He said he wanted to create a ‘Royalist’ party in India if not a new version of a dharmic kingdom. He was looking for a prince whom he could take to his Guru’s son (Gurudev, son of Gurunathan/Guru Atmananda), in Malakara, Kerala. Once that was done, his job, he said, would be over. I guessed easily that he had Dr Karan Singh in mind. Raja Rao’s scheme, though expressed in that sensational manner, was not as far-fetched as it seemed. The source of these ideas was a book by Ananda Coomaraswamy, Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power. Rao said he had suggested a similar experiment earlier in his attempt to revive the Vijayanagar Empire. Once again, I guessed that he was referring to Rameshwar Rao, Raja of Vanaparthi. It seemed that when Rameshwar Rao ascended the throne of the principality, Rao urged him to offer the throne to Gurunathan. 217

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He consequently became the disinterested Brahmin advisor to the Kshatriya king. They wanted to establish an ideal state. Raja Rao was the first holder of an account which contained rupees 35 lakh, that too in the 1930s! Later the Rani Saheba asked Rameshwar Rao to choose between Rao and her. Since the prince was a posthumous son, Rao withdrew. But apparently Raja Rao had not given up on his attempt at creating or at least serving a Hindu kingdom. Rameshwar Rao and he had then spent nights camping in the ruins of Hampi, the seat of the Vijayanagar Empire, waiting for a signal. Rao’s ancestor was reputed to be Vidyaranya or Madhavacharya, the greatest exponent of advaita since Sankara, the author of Sarvadharmasangraha, and the real brain behind the founding of the Vijayanagar Empire. The Raja of Vanaparthi, Rameshwar Rao, too, was a descendant of the kings of Vijayanagar. It so happened that the descendants of both king and priest went out to camp in the ruins, accompanied by Raja Rao’s sister. The first night nothing happened. On the second night, Rao awoke to find a light sweeping the valley. He likened it to the headlight of a train. When he said, ‘Ra  .  .  .’ to wake the prince, the vision disappeared. Later, his sister, who used to sleep very soundly, said that she had seen it too. Raja Rao thought that his task was to take the prince to Gurudev. And once that happened, then his life’s work would be done. But that was never to be. Now Raja Rao said that the next generation was his only hope because they were fed up of all the rubbish that comes with democracy. Much of the damage could be undone if a few people were sincere and disinterested. Indians, he said, would easily respond to a genuine person. He also said that his Guru taught him to live in the world but to look at all things with the perspective of non-dualism. However, he was able to sustain the feeling that all things come from the Guru only for a very short time.4 When I left the room, Raja Rao was trying to persuade Susheela to stay for dinner. She was reluctant because she had promised her husband she would be back by 8 p.m. It seemed Mr Dayal was not too well. But in Rao’s company her body and face had softened completely. She looked young and happy, glowing and radiant. They constantly broke into French, both teasingly and also to escape from us, their listeners. There was, unquestionably, a palpable chemistry there that no one could escape noticing. Earlier on 4 March, Rao recounted how his marriage with Camille Mouly broke up. When they were married, Camille, who was 11 years older, had got her property registered under their joint names. She had Raja Rao promise ‘never to leave her’. Yet, in the end she had wanted to de-register the property deed so that she would not lose what was hers. The marriage had, of course, floundered by then. Rao said, almost to precipitate matters, ‘Yes, but you must divorce me first’, implying that a Hindu couple shared everything; if the trust was gone, so was the marriage.

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Maurice Friedman, Gandhian, Jew, devotee of Ramana Maharshi, an exceptional man by all counts, was the recurring third in the love triangles that are part of the novels. When Raja Rao and Camille went to Tiruvannamalai in the early 1940s, Camille fell in love with Friedman. Raja Rao was totally broken. When he prostrated before the Maharshi, the cool slate floor was bathed with Raja Rao’s tears. An Englishman took him then to Atmananda Guru in Kerala. Upon his return, Friedman very crudely said that he and Camille had not slept with each other and that he loved Rao more than Camille. Yet for Rao the marriage was over. In the books (Serpent and the Rope and The Chessmaster), however, it is the character modelled on Rao who cheats, not the loyal wife. On returning to France, Rao would have liked to continue with the marriage, but Camille insisted that Susheela had to stay away when her (Camille’s) parents came visiting. Rao and Susheela were so much in love, and had been for years, even though Susheela was married to Rajeshwar Dayal, Rao’s friend. At that time, Rao said to Camille, ‘I can’t promise.’ I did not understand why he said that, because the likelihood of an embarrassing encounter of Susheela coming face to face with Camille’s parents was rather remote. Perhaps all of them were stubborn in their own ways. What an extraordinary set of relationships: Raja Rao, Camille, and ­Susheela—one amazing love triangle. And Susheela, Rajeshwar, and Rao, quite another. As Susheela recounted that day, Gurunathan once spoke of her and Raja Rao as if they were one couple, even as Rajeshwar Dayal was sitting with them in the same row of seats. 10 March 1995 Raja Rao delivered a talk on ‘The Meaning of India’ at the India International Centre. Although he was extremely weak and taking steroids, he managed to raise a lot of provocative questions. He said Europe believed in history whereas we Indians did not. The Europeans are frightened and obsessed with death; hence, Europe was full of cemeteries. They also invented the gas chamber. China gave the world gunpowder, the printing press, and bureaucracy. Confucianism was the best of humanistic civilisations. India offered, on the other hand, dissolution—the zero—the end of the ego. In the discussion that followed, Rao challenged both Ranjit Nair and Rukmini Bhaya Nair, friends and colleagues of mine, to try to disprove Vedanta with the help of modern science. Rukmini, a PhD from Cambridge, was my colleague at the Indian Institute of Technology, while Ranjit was at the National Institute of Science, Technology and Development Studies, both in Delhi. The fact that Rao had met Oppenheimer, Prigogine, Weinberg, and other leading lights of modern physics and mathematics made a suitable impression on the young couple. Raja Rao said: ‘I asked Ilya

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Prigogine: “Sir, have you seen an object?” Prigogine was silent.’ Much of Rao’s advaitic ammunition came from Ramana Maharshi, even though his guru was Atmananda. Afterwards, we went to the Dayals’ home. I drove Raja Rao and Susan. The Dayals made quite an impression on me. I  had met Susheela earlier, but this was my first meeting with her husband. Rajeshwar Dayal, who had qualified for the ICS before independence, had held important posts in the Government of India, including ambassadorships and a stint at the UN, besides sensitive postings at home earlier in his career. He retired as India’s Foreign Secretary and was later honoured with India’s second highest civilian honour, the Padma Vibhushan. He was also the author of some half-adozen books, including A Life of Our Times (1998), a memoir. The Dayal home in Vasant Vihar was elegantly and tastefully furnished. Susheela’s sister, Sarla, was also there. Hers was the grand wedding described in The Serpent and the Rope. I walked Sarla to her home next door when she had to leave. She too was quite an impressive lady. Hanging on the wall in her house was a striking portrait of Susheela (but without the mole on the upper lip) by Svetoslav Roerich. What a stunningly beautiful woman she must have been. She and Raja Rao were so much in love still, I thought. Rajeshwar Dayal spoke of his experience with the American secret service, the CIA, which he called Langley, how the latter had plotted to kill the prime minister of ____, and how he, as the head of the UN peace-keeping force, would not allow it. Finally, he, Rajeshwar Dayal, had to leave the UN, returning to his position as Indian High Commissioner in Pakistan. I dropped Raja Rao at the IIC and came home with a feeling of spent energy and exhilaration. That night there was a strange storm, with the door to the roof banging all the time. I went up later, shut it, and secured the house. Raja Rao was leaving for Kerala in the morning. I was up early at 2:30 a.m. and knew they would be up too. At 5:30 a.m., when I actually got up, I knew they were out of my orbit. 16 May 1995 Met Raja Rao and Susan from 6:00 a.m. to 7:35 in the evening. Raja Rao talked about his two sisters and three half sisters, of whom one lived in Delhi. The other from Hyderabad, the Saroja of The Serpent and the Rope, was to see him that evening. But they were late and we could not wait. Rao also talked about his step-mother, Chikkamma, a much younger woman, who was beautiful and who epitomised Indian womanhood. She had cancer 20 years ago and did not get good health care in Hyderabad. Raja Rao also spoke of Iqbal Singh, his friend and co-editor of the book Changing India, and the way in which his English wife was a staunch

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Stalinist. Apparently, Singh was rather stingy, preferring walking to taking the tube. Raja Rao also talked about one of his Guru’s sons, Sri Adwayananda or Gurudev, as he was popularly known. One of the latter’s disciples had sold the copyright of the Guru’s works to some ashram in California. That had resulted in a lot of pain and sorrow for the Guru’s son, who now wanted all references to the Guru and his words out of the books of Raja Rao, including The Meaning of India. He asked me to help him with that but insisted that on no account was my work to suffer. 17 May 1995 Met Raja Rao and Susan at 4:05 in the afternoon. We talked of Mulk Raj Anand and R. K. Narayan. About the latter, he said Narayan was a boring person with few interests; his temperament was orthodox and mechanical. To him humour was the most important aspect of writing. Narayan was not spiritual at all. Anand, Raja Rao said, was quite a Socialist and rather antispiritual; but I told him that he had changed, recounting my own encounters with Anand. We talked about Rao’s siblings once again. His father had had ten children of whom eight survived. There were two girls, both from Raja Rao’s mother, and five from ‘Little Mother’. ‘Saroja’, now 75 years old, was still impressed by money and things like that, he observed wryly. She used to adore her handsome and famous brother, whom she called her Prince Charming. Raja Rao spoke of Buddhism and its attractions. He confessed that at one time he had also wanted to become a Catholic monk. But then, after he met Gurunathan, he accepted Vedanta as the way. Though he knew that only the transcendent was Real, he had also been very human at one level; once he had accepted Gurunathan, there was no one else to look for. We talked about my novel.5 I was not sure how he would react to it. I told him a few things about it. I was rather insecure disclosing more. He said lots of people had reacted badly to his treatment of the woman–man relationship. He was very gracious in saying, ‘You have a long life ahead of you and you have a plan, so it remains to be seen how things go for you.’ 20  May 1995, 5 p.m. My last meeting, of this visit, with Raja Rao. He told me he thought of me as a younger brother. He said I had everything required to be a major writer ‘provided that your sadhana is going all right.’ I replied very humbly, ‘I know I need to get my sadhana to the heart of my writing. It’s taken me quite a long time to get to that point, but now I think

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I’m ready for that. There’s nothing to prove, nowhere to go, but to submit to the Guru and let him write on my behalf.’ Before he left, Susheelaji arrived with Rajeshwar Dayal. There were interesting reminiscences once again, but just the presence of the three of them together was so moving. I was touched to the core of my heart with the complexity and accumulated sorrow of human relationships: so many desires, so much pain. Susan was very happy with what she saw in me. She thought I  was so much more mature and aware this time. Raja Rao said: ‘Once someone has a guru you don’t interfere with his or her sadhana. That’s a rule of spirituality.’ This time he didn’t say anything about my practice, but quietly accepted that I was on the way.

IV After Raja Rao’s passing in 2006, I met Meera Rao, Susheelaji’s niece. I had met her mother and Susheelaji’s sister, Sarlaji, briefly. I asked Meera what had happened to Susheelaji’s papers after her death. Both Rajeshwar Dayal and Susheelaji had passed away before Raja Rao, in 1999 and 2001, respectively. Meera said: ‘We burned her personal papers.’ I was aghast. ‘But they belong to posterity, to the nation, to all of us’, I remonstrated. I told her of my contact with Raja Rao and my meetings with Susheelaji. She said: ‘What to do? I didn’t want others prying into their lives. I burnt them myself.’ Meera claimed that Susheela and Raja Rao were not really in love. ‘Oh, I doubt whether it was something all that serious. It was just a pose.’ I said, ‘I’ve seen them together and I don’t think that’s the case. There was a real bond between them, you know.’ Meera replied, ‘Perhaps what you say is true. As far as I’ve heard from my family, they knew of Raja Rao’s interest in my aunt, but who was he then? A penniless Brahmin, while she was the daughter of one of the wealthiest men in the United Provinces.’ I paused before I asked gently, but more persistently, this time, ‘When you burned her papers, did you find anything by Raja Rao?’ Something came over her. I saw her face changing. ‘Yes’, she said softly, her eyes moistening. ‘There were actually two carved, wooden boxes full of letters, kept very neatly. One was full of letters from her husband, Rajeshwar, and the other from Raja Rao.’

Notes An earlier version of this memoir appeared in 2006, South Asian Review, 27(2): 152‒68. I  am grateful to Professor Kamal D. Verma, its former editor, for the permission to publish this revised and corrected version. 1 Dr Karan Singh belongs to the royal family of Jammu and Kashmir. His father was the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir till the Indian Independence in 1947. Karan Singh succeeded him as the Regent of the State of Jammu and Kashmir, then

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as elected ‘Sadar-i-Riyasat’ (head of state) and finally as Governor. After 1967, he became Member of the Indian Parliament. 2 K. S., or Krishnarao Shiva Shelvankar (1906‒96), is author of The Problem of India (1940), one of the first books by an Indian published by Penguin. He was born in Chennai and educated at the Theosophical School, Adyar. He later attended the University of Madison-Wisconsin, United States, and the London School of Economics. He was also a correspondent for The Hindu from 1942 to 1968. 3 See, for instance, Andrew and Mitrokhin’s The Mitrokhin Archive (2005). 4 Of course, such a party was never formed. As it turned out, Dr  Karan Singh, whose name was shortlisted for the Presidentship of India, lost out to the Indira Gandhi loyalist, Pratibha Devi Singh Patil, in 2007. Raja Rao’s views, it must be admitted, were quite unconventional, to say the least. But they always made one reflect deeply on the nature of the culture, society, institutions, and political practices of India. 5 Published later that year as The Narrator, New Delhi: Rupa, 1995.

References Andrew, Christopher, and Vasili Mitrokhin. 2005. The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB and the World, London: Allen Lane. Paranjape, Makarand R. (ed). 1998. The Best of Raja Rao, New Delhi: Katha. Rao, Raja. 1938. Kanthapura, New Delhi: Orient. ———. 1960. The Serpent and the Rope, New Delhi: Orient. ———. 2007. The Meaning of India, New Delhi: Vision.

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KRISHNA (for Raja Rao) Edwin Thumboo

Before he became a god To tidy up the world, Krishna Searched a thousand years, Along the peaks, the lesser hills, Each sudden plain, persistent star, The columns of his thought, Down deeply anxious limbs, His great inclines of heart To the rim of the world at sunset. . . . Searched among the maidens of the day, The maidens of the night, A face for Brindavan. Under her consequential sun, Computations of every rising moon, That face grew, asserted All his love, his dreams Softly magical, destinations. She gazed upon him With a look of morning lotus, Till each stood within the other. So the blue god, his votive flute Multiplying his love, the gopis, Sporting with them all, He sported with but one. Perched upon a chord of time, His yearning flute unfolds The lovely burden of her eyes

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To feed his nimble fingers. Within the radiance of each note So bound to her answering look, The world revives, quickens, Renews itself, turns whole, Adores their love unparalleled. And so they sit, ever moving, Ever still, in stone, In ivory, in us.

225

AFTERWORD Vijay Mishra

I came to Raja Rao after reading the great polymath Damodar Dharmananda Kosambi (2002). Both stood for the kinds of intellectual rigour that this civilisation was once famous for. Kosambi, like the followers of the Lokāyata and Cārvāka materialist schools of philosophy,1 taught me how to relativise knowledge and place Indian philosophy in historical contexts. Raja Rao taught me that transcendental ideas in perennial philosophy also have historical depth. Historical depth—a system embedded in what may be called phylogenetic cultural consciousness—affects the social order and resonates within us. Where Kosambi for me is Kant’s first Critique of Reason, Rao is the third Critique of Judgement. Fashions changed, but Raja Rao remained a transcendentalist throughout his long life. It was a life in which he effectively saw an entire century. It may be noted that at the high point of French surrealism, Raja Rao saw in it not so much a reaction to classical forms but a philosophical extension of debates about the real and the unreal, the world of phenomena and the world of dreams, the idea of a self other than that understood by the senses. As a Vedantin espousing the daivīm or the godly, and not the āsurīm or the demonic principle, he resisted the overtly realistic location of the fictional world primarily in the world of prakr ti, that is, a world controlled mainly ˙ this reason—a desire to transcend by our sense perceptions. And it is for the materiality of being so as to arrive at the foundational principle of a Higher Consciousness, of Brahman—that he looked for truth in ways not always open to rational testing or discrimination. The reason was simple: his horizon of expectations transcended the limits of the material world. In this way, he was neither an empiricist nor a phenomenologist but a follower of an advaitic system finessed by the great 8th-century thinker Śaṅkara, for whom, too, religious texts that turned to myth, including the opening chapter of the Bhagavadgītā itself, were in the end a little embarrassing. Śaṅkara, for instance, says nothing about the first chapter of the Gītā in his Gītābhāṣya. And it is at this point I want to say that Raja Rao, of all the writers in the English language (with the singular exception perhaps of Samuel Beckett), came to writing, and especially to the novel form—that degraded epic of 226

A fterword

modernity—with a high degree of cynicism. Indeed, one senses in his novels a discourse which destabilises the form, which stretches and shudders as words make their way into syntax, which shows signs of annoyance with a genre, itself a low mimetic mode, located in a world bereft of any sense of the spiritual. And this is the point which has been missed by so many critics of Raja Rao. Look at his first novel Kanthapura (1989), published in 1938 and written, it seems, in seclusion in France. It has been said often enough that what one gets in this novel is a break with the tradition of imitative, realist prose, the kind of prose which could only reproduce the sentimental novel in India, such as Saratchandra Chattopadhyay’s influential Devdas (2002). Using the concept of a sthala-purāṇa—the story of place, or better still, the Wordsworthian sense of place and spots of time—Raja Rao, it is argued, created an original novelistic genre where the inflections of native vernaculars and stories displaced the received standard English of the colonial masters and where the novel form could be used to link village life to a much larger national and civic agenda. Here was sly mimicry, a protosubaltern novel if ever there was one, so went the argument. Yet when I returned to this novel after so many years, I sensed the extent to which the writer had felt uncomfortable with the genre, and for all the author’s gifts as a new and original stylist, the novel effectively tells us why it should not be written. It is as if in the Indian context the bourgeois novel creates a dissonance between the form and the substance, a failure in the objective correlative. And this is in fact Raja Rao’s great insight which we find over and over again in his other writings. His reference to the links between śoka and śloka as Vālmīki hears the cry of the krauñca bird whose male partner a hunter had shot (‘the utterance I produced in this moment of śoka, grief, shall be called śloka, poetry, and nothing else’: śokārtasya pravṛtto me śloko bhavatu nānyathā [Bhatt 1982: I.2.17]); his reference to the search for the mystical śabda; his claim that he is a man of silence; and revealingly, his account of his conversation with the nuclear physicist Oppenheimer who when asked by Raja Rao if he had ever seen an ‘object’ replied, emphatically, ‘No’. All these instances point to the limits of the novel, capacious as it is, to adequately reflect a world which has steadfastly refused the order of the binary or be limited by nationalism. So Raja Rao has taught us how to theorise, through the novel itself, the impossibility of a truly Indian novel. And this is the point missed in such a spectacular fashion by one Salman Rushdie, self-proclaimed expressionist of everything Indian to the rest of the world: ‘Raja Rao, a scholarly Sanskritist, wrote determinedly of the need to make an Indian English for himself, but even his much-praised portrait of village life, Kanthapura, now seems dated, its approach at once grandiloquent and archaic’ (2002: 152–3). For Raja Rao, the world is not either/ or but both, and precisely the kind of world that Rushdie himself seems to create, at least in his fiction. The great Dostoyevsky—second only to Shakespeare as Freud was fond of saying—declared that we all came out 227

V ijay M ishra

of Gogol’s cloak; from Raja Rao we learn that we can never stop rewriting what has been written before, and in doing so search for a medium through which silence itself may be captured. Raja Rao wrote not to claim a special space for himself (as Rushdie seems to suggest) but to show how culturally sensitive he in fact was when it came to aesthetic matters. Indeed Raja Rao, like no other writer and thinker, would have said what more could one write when faced with Droṇa’s words to Yudhiṣṭhira when the latter, at the end of the Krishna–Arjuna dialogue in the Gītā, goes to his teacher, Droṇa, to seek not only his permission to fight but also to ask how he could be killed. Says Droṇa prophetically: śāstram cāham rane jahyām śrutvā sumahad apriyam śraddheya vākyāt purusād etat satyam bravīmi te And I  swear to you, I  shall lay down my weapons only when I have heard a great untruth from a man whose word I trust. (Belvakar and Vaidya 1947: VI.41.1.61) The untruth is uttered by Yudhiṣṭhira when he cunningly proclaims that Ashvatthaman, Drona’s son, is dead in the great war, whereas it is in fact an elephant with the˙ same name who is dead. The rest is history as dharma itself becomes topsy-turvy and the Mahābhārata leaves us with a disturbing image of the apocalypse. Raja Rao would have found these lines not only grand, but also words that a writer should aspire to. This volume, in so many ways, is conscious of the special place of Raja Rao in the modern literary imaginary of India.

Note 1 There is a rich Hindu ‘heretical’ tradition of materialist thought sadly laid to rest in Anandagiri’s 13th-century essay ‘Decisive Victory of Shankara’ (cited in Doniger 2013: 41). Among the more prominent heretics were the Materialists known as Lokāyatas (worldly people), Nāstikas (nay sayers), or Cārvākas (followers of the teachings of the philosopher Cārvāka, a philosopher of the pre-Christian era about whom nothing further is known) ‘who mocked and rejected the Vedas, sacrifice and other religious rituals’ (Doniger 2013: 41, 45). The Lokāyatas or Cārvākas believed that ‘physical sense data were the only source of knowledge’ (Doniger 2010: 185). They argued that there was no soul and, therefore, ‘there is no beyond and no retribution of good and bad actions’ (Frauwallner 1973: 222). In other words, there was ‘no self other than the body’ and consciousness arose out of the corporeal self (Dasgupta 1975: 139). The Bhagavadgītā addresses them at XVI, 7–18, as āsurāḥ janāḥ, the demonic men who are without truth (asatyam) and therefore unstable (apratiṣṭhaṃ). For them, the cause of the world was desire or kāma, the mutual union of man and woman. Krishna opts for the daivīm, the godly principle; but the eruption of the āsurīm principle, even when it is denied, has something of the effect of a supplement, a trace, through which a more materialist theory of causality surfaces. See Mishra (1998: 76–9).

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References Belvakar, S. K., and P. L. Vaidya (eds). 1947. The Mahābhārata [Poona Critical Edition], vol. VI, Poona: Bhandarkar Institute. Bhatt, G. H. (ed). 1982. The Vālmīki-Rāmāyaṇa [Critical Edition], vol. I, Baroda: Oriental Institute. Chattopadhyay, Saratchandra. 2002. Devdas [1917], trans. Sreejata Guha, Delhi: Penguin. Dasgupta, Surendranath. 1975. A History of Indian Philosophy, vol. III, New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. Doniger, Wendy. 2010. The Hindus: An Alternative History, New York: Penguin. ———. 2013. On Hinduism, New Delhi: Aleph. Frauwallner, Erich. 1973. History of Indian Philosophy, trans. V. M. Bedekar, vol. II, New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. Kosambi, D. D. 2002. Combined Methods in Indology and Other Writings, comp., ed. and intr. Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Mishra, Vijay. 1998. Devotional Poetics and the Indian Sublime, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Rao, Raja. 1989. Kanthapura, New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Rushdie, Salman. 2002. Step Across This Line, New York: Random House.

229

GLOSSARY

[This glossary is not intended to be a complete guide. The Sanskrit/foreign terms are only briefly explained to facilitate a reading of the anthology.] advaita vedanta Sankara’s philosophy of the illusory nature of the world (maya) until the recognition of reality is attained through true knowledge of the self (atman) and an intellectual apprehension of Brahman advaitin the follower of a non-dualistic philosophical school within Hinduism ahimsa non-violence ananda  absolute joy experienced at the moment of full awareness angarkha torso garment that overlaps and ties apratistham unstable arthashastra the science of politics asatyam untruth ashram hermitage; a spiritual retreat; place of rest of a hermit asura demons atman one’s inner self bandhgala formal suit from Jodhpur State bhajan religious hymn bhakti devotion Bharat Mata Mother India Brahman a term signifying the Ultimate Reality, or the Absolute, or godhead. Beyond definition, Brahman symbolises the union of male and female principles and is hence neuter chakra wheel (of life) chanderi a textured woven cloth charkha spinning wheel chaturanga chess daiva godly 230

G lossary

demons, evil spirits danava darsana to behold a reverential figure, and in effect, receive blessing dastar traditional headgear worn by men desa one’s country desi indigenous, native deva gods dharma/dharmic righteousness; religious, moral, or ethical law which shapes the individual in Hindu philosophy dhoti piece of cloth tied around the torso and lower body farangi/firangi foreigner gayathri religious Hindu poem gopis the Hindu god Krishna’s female companions; cowherd girls harikatha literally, ‘stories of the lord’; ancient art of storytelling containing poetry, music, drama, dance, and philosophy. Its subject matter is almost always the life of a saint or stories from Indian scriptural texts Hindutva  Hindu-ness; for some, the ideology of aggressive Hindu nationhood jivanmukta a fully enlightened soul jnana yoga intuitive intellectual understanding of Brahman kama sexual desire karma/karma yoga salvation through deeds; a belief in the cycle of cause and effect kavi poet khadi homespun cotton cloth kurta a loose, collarless shirt or tunic lathi stick lila/leela play lungi a kind of Indian sarong, mostly worn in south India madarasa Islamic school maheshwari cotton or silk woven fabric maya illusion moksha deliverance nastik atheist neti ‘not this’ pagri traditional headgear worn by men parabrahman the cosmic absolute prakrti nature puranas  ancient; subject of ancient quality, primarily religious, containing legends of gods ramraj rule of the Hindu god Rama; metaphorically, a just and well-governed rule by a good leader 231

G lossary

essence; essential part; taste, by extension rasa rishi wise man or sage sabda the word, speech sound sadhaka  devotee or spiritual seeker; one who is trying to attain realisation by the practice of sadhana sadhana spiritual devotion or discipline directed towards an intended goal sangam confluence, especially of rivers sanskar Hindu rites of passage sat truth sati practice of self-immolation by a woman after the death of a husband satyagraha truth-force or soul-force, according to Gandhi shakti cosmic power or energy sherwani a long, coat-like garment shikari hunter shishya disciple Shivoham the realisation of oneness with God shuddhi purification ritual sloka poetry, verse soka grief sthala purana legendary history (Raja Rao’s own trans.) stridharma the duty of women sunya zero sunyata emptiness sura deities swadesi indigenous, especially in terms of the refusal to buy British-made cloth swaraj self-rule or home rule tapas  literally ‘heat’, the magical power derived from intense meditation. Vedanta the essence of the Vedas contained in the Upanishads are referred to as Vedanta Vedantin the follower of the school of Vedanta

232

CONTRIBUTORS

Letizia Alterno is Teaching Fellow of Advance HE and Honorary Research Fellow in Postcolonial Studies at the University of Manchester, UK. She has authored the monograph Raja Rao: An Introduction for the Contemporary Indian Writers Series (2011) and volume contributions internationally on the work of Raja Rao, including Rao’s obituary in The Guardian (2006) and an article on the legacy of his work in The Times of India (2010). From 2006 to 2014 she was dedicated to The Raja Rao Publication Project in her role as Editor-in-Chief and secured crucial publishing contracts to reprint Rao’s novels as Modern Classics. She has published essays on Indian writers, including M. R. Anand, Ved Mehta, Manju Kapur, and Amitav Ghosh, and on postcolonial works in international journals. She has taught English and postcolonial studies at several universities and cultural institutes in the United Kingdom, Italy, and India. Ulka Anjaria is Professor of English at Brandeis University, USA. She is the author of Understanding Bollywood: The Grammar of Hindi Cinema (2021), Reading India Now: Contemporary Formations in Literature and Popular Culture (2019), and Realism in the Twentieth-Century Indian Novel (2012) and editor of A History of the Indian Novel in English (2015). Waseem Anwar is Professor (English) and former Dean (Humanities) at Forman Christian College, Lahore. Fulbright Scholar twice (1995 and 2007), Gale Group American Scholar, Pakistan Higher Education Commission’s ‘Best Teacher Award 2003’ recipient, he is Executive Committee Member of South Asian Literary Association. He authored ‘Black’ Women’s Dramatic Discourse (2009) and co-guest-edited 2010 South Asian Review’s special issue. Farrah Fatima is Assistant Professor (English) at Government Postgraduate College for Women, Gulberg, Lahore, and conducts seminars and workshops on literature and language for various local institutes. As 233

C ontributors

a Pakistan Higher Education Commission scholar, her doctoral thesis focused on ‘The Integration of Verbal and Non-verbal Codes in Girish Karnad’s Plays’. She has published a number of scholarly articles and reviews. Rahul K. Gairola,  PhD (University of Washington, USA), is the Krishna Somers Lecturer in English and Postcolonial Literature and a Fellow of the Asia Research Centre at Murdoch University, Western Australia. He is the co-editor and author/co-author of five books including South Asian Digital Humanities (2020); Migration, Gender and Home Economics in Rural North India  (2019); and  Homelandings: Postcolonial Diasporas and Transatlantic Belonging (2016). He previously taught at IIT Roorkee, India, and the City University of New York, USA. Neelum Saran Gour has authored six novels, four short story collections, a work of translation, two books of non-fiction, as also numerous book reviews for the TLS, Indian Review of Books, The Book Review, and Biblio. Her latest novel, Requiem in Raga Janki, won The Hindu Fiction Prize 2018. She has been a columnist and academic, teaching English literature at the University of Allahabad, India. John C. Hawley is Professor of English at Santa Clara University and former President of the South Asian Literary Association and of the U.S. chapter of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies. He is the author of Amitav Ghosh: An Introduction and co-editor with Revathi Krishnaswamy of The Postcolonial and the Global. He was a Fulbright scholar at Humboldt University (Berlin) and a resident at Rockefeller Bellagio Centre in Italy. Vijay Mishra is Emeritus Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Murdoch University, Western Australia. His most recent publications are Annotating Salman Rushdie: Reading the Postcolonial (2018), Salman Rushdie and the Genesis of Secrecy (2019), ‘The Writer and the Critic’ (in Nasta and Stein, eds, Black and Asian British Writing, 2020), ‘Homi Bhabha and “Signs Taken for Wonders”: a second reading’ (Textual Practice, 2020), and ‘Reading the Tulsa V S Naipaul Archive’ (Media International Australia, 2021). He is a Fellow of the Australian Humanities Academy. Alessandro Monti is a retired professor of English and Contemporary Indian Studies, Universities of Palermo and Turin, Italy. Formerly Head of Oriental Studies and member of the National Committee for the evaluation of University Research, CESMEO and Le GRIMH, he was Visiting Professor and ICCR Fellow in India and joined the Committee for Commonwealth Studies replacing M. R. Anand. He founded and directed the research international series DOST on Oriental Studies, editing and 234

C ontributors

authoring more than 20 books. Previously, he edited the series Paradoxa. He has recently co-edited The Partition of Indian Women (Authorspress, 2021). Alastair Niven was born in Edinburgh, studied at Cambridge University, and has held academic posts at the Universities of Ghana, Leeds, Stirling, Aarhus, and London. He is a Fellow of Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford. He was President of English PEN, 2003–7 and is a former Editor of The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. He has published books on D. H. Lawrence, Mulk Raj Anand, and Raja Rao, as well as over a hundred articles on postcolonial writing. He is also the author of In Glad or Sorry Hours: A Memoir. Makarand R. Paranjape is the author of 20 and editor of over two-dozen books, in addition to hundreds of academic papers and popular articles. His latest books include Swami Vivekananda: Hinduism and India’s Road to Modernity (2020), New Perspectives in Indian Science and Civilization (2020), Debating the ‘Post’ Condition in India (2018), and The Death and Afterlife of Mahatma Gandhi (2015). Makarand is a columnist in Open magazine, Gulf News, The New Indian Express, and The Print. He is currently Director, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. Janet M. Powers, Professor Emerita of Interdisciplinary Studies and Women Studies at Gettysburg College, Pennsylvania, taught for 40 years in the fields of South Asian literature and civilisation, women studies, and peace studies. She holds a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and is the author of Blossoms on the Olive Tree: Israeli and Palestinian Women Working for Peace; Kites over the Mango Tree: Restoring Harmony between Hindus and Muslims in Gujarat, and a book of poetry, Difficult to Subdue as the Wind. She is co-author of Circles on the Mountain: Bosnian Women in the 21st Century. Susan Raja Rao is the founding director of The Raja Rao Memorial Literary Endowment. A nonprofit organisation, Sacred Wordsmith’s mission is to catalogue, research, edit, publish, and preserve the published and unpublished works of Raja Rao. Publications to date include Letters, Raja Rao and Kathleen Raine (2012); The Song of Woman, Kannada translation (2012); and The Serpent and the Rope, Kanthapura, The Cat and Shakespeare, and Raja Rao Collected Stories (2012). Recently, The Meaning of India and Mahatma Gandhi, The Great Indian Way (2020) were also published. Future publications will be The Sacred Wordsmith, Essays on Writing and the Word (2021), and In Search of Reality (2022). Dieter Riemenschneider obtained his PhD with the (first German) thesis on The Modern Indian Novel in English (1971) and was Professor of 235

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English Language Literatures at Goethe-University, Frankfurt (1972– 99). He taught German in India (1963–66), was Visiting Professor at IIT Madras; Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand; and the Universities of Lyon and Nice, France. Indian English literature has remained his main research area with more than a hundred publications between 1973 and 2016. Chitra Sankaran is an associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore. Her areas of research interest include postcolonial fiction, environmental humanities, and ecofeminism. She has published four monographs, five edited volumes, and research articles in many journals including Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE), and Theatre Research International. She has written two monographs on Raja Rao, including Myth Connections, an expanded version of the first with two extra chapters and a new introduction. Rumina Sethi is a nominated member of the General Council of the Sahitya Akademi (National Academy of Letters), New Delhi, India. She pursued her doctoral research at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was a British Academy Fellow at Oxford, UK. She has been a senior associate member at the Department of English, Oxford, and has held Fellowships at the Rockefeller Centre, Bellagio, Italy, and at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. At present, she is a professor of English and Cultural Studies at Panjab University, Chandigarh, India. She has received several awards including the Charles Wallace, the Mountbatten Educational Trust, and the Smuts at Cambridge. She also has the rare honour of winning the Cambridge University La Bas Prize. Her books include Myths of the Nation (1999) and The Politics of Postcolonialism (2011). Sakoon Singh is an alumnus of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and Panjab University, Chandigarh. She teaches Literature and Cultural Studies at DAV College, Chandigarh. A recipient of the Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Texas, Austin, she has published her academic writings extensively, including contribution to Cultural Studies in India by Routledge (2015). She is currently Associate Fellow at Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. She has recently published a novel titled In the Land of the Lovers (2020). Paul Sharrad is Senior Fellow at the University of Wollongong where he taught and published on postcolonial literatures, in particular, on Indian English, Pacific,  and Australian writing. He has monographs on Raja Rao, Albert Wendt, and Thomas Keneally; co-edited volume 12 of The Oxford History of the Novel in English and a collection of writing by 236

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Australians of Indian origin; and contributes to The Year’s Work in English Studies. Edwin Thumboo (b. 1933), Emeritus Professor and Professorial Fellow, Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore, was Dean, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, for 11 years from July 1980. Among the significant developments during his tenure was the introduction of majors in Chinese Language, English Language, Japanese Studies, Linguistics, European Studies, Mass Communications, and Psychology. Harish Trivedi, former Professor of English at the University of Delhi, was Visiting Professor at the universities of Chicago and London. He is the author of Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India (1993, 1995) and has co-edited Kipling in India: India in Kipling (2021); Literature and Nation: Britain and India 1800–1990 (2001); and Interrogating Post-colonialism (1996). He has published essays on Kipling, Forster, R. K. Narayan, and Salman Rushdie and edited a book in Hindi on the medieval poet Rahim (2019).

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INDEX

Acharya, M. P. T. 54 Adiga, Arvind 84 advaita vedanta xi, 6, 37, 40, 45, 47n2, 50, 75, 123 – 5, 152, 171, 218, 226, 235 Ahmad, Aijaz 5, 168n1 ‘Akkayya’ 103, 111 – 12, 113n4 Ali, Ahmed 14, 57n15; Twilight in Delhi 181, 188 – 91 Aligarh Muslim University ix, 14, 97 Anand, Mulk Raj x, xii, xiii, 60, 75, 82, 84n1; Private Life of an Indian Prince 33; Two Leaves and a Bud 171; Untouchable x, 221 Anderson, Benedict 51, 157 Anglo-Indian 200 anthropocentrism 118 anti-colonialism see colonialism Atmananda, Swami xi, 38, 208 – 9, 210, 219 Auerbach, Erich 15 Australian literature 89, 97, 100 Ayodhya 41, 46, 47n8, 105, 113n2 Benares see Varanasi Besant, Annie 41, 92 Bhabha, Homi 50, 51, 55n2, 182, 183, 191; The Location of Culture 52 Bhagat, Chetan 84 Bhagavadgita x, 36, 141, 226, 228, 228n1 bhakti 121 Bharat Mata see Mother India bilingualism 9, 11, 197 ‘Books Which Have Influenced Me’ 79 Bose, Subhas Chandra 51 brahmanism 36, 37, 38, 44, 125 – 6, 179, 207

British Raj 62, 64, 82, 106, 107 Buddha, Gautam 45, 90 Buddhism 8, 26, 36, 37, 40, 98 Butler, Judith 65 – 6, 67 Caillois, Roger 132 Capra, Fritjof 150 caste see Hinduism Cat and Shakespeare xi, 6, 13, 35, 74, 77, 90, 96, 115, 138, 178; gurushishya relationship in 39 – 40, 47n5, 80; perception of landscape 178 – 9 Cathars see Serpent and the Rope centre-periphery see East-West encounter Cesaire, Aimé 76, 187 Changing India 51 – 3, 220 Chatterjee, Bankimchandra 7; Anandamath 51, 112n1; Dharmatattva 8; ‘Vande Mataram’ 51, 102, 103 – 4, 105, 112n1 Chatterjee, Partha 2 – 3; Nationalist Thought 7 – 9 Chattopadhyay, Saratchandra 227 Chaudhuri, Amit 56n9 Chessmaster and His Moves xii, 6, 55, 76, 84, 96, 129; game of chess 153, 209; lila 131 – 4, 151; mathematics 144 – 7; sunya 144 – 8 Civil Disobedience Movement 106 Cold War 96 colonialism 3, 9, 35, 56n9, 82; anticolonialism 53 – 5, 59, 61, 66, 68, 71, 76, 82, 104, 108; colonisation of the mind 53; resistance to 35, 60, 68, 69, 106 Commonwealth Literature 2 communism 90, 92, 94, 99

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INDEX

Comrade Kirillov xi, 13, 32, 35, 55, 91; guru-shishya relationship in 40 – 1; notion of scales 96 – 9; origins 217; similarities with Serpent and the Rope 91, 93, 94, 96, 99; transnationalism in 97 – 100 Coomaraswamy, Ananda 56n5, 217 cosmopolitanism 9 Cow of the Barricades 1, 5 – 6, 102, 103, 106, 108, 109 – 10 creolisation 9; as hybridisation 197 Damas, Léon-Gontran 76 Dante 79 Das, Chittaranjan 52, 56n6 Dayal, Rajeshwar 217, 220, 222 Dayal, Susheela 216 – 20, 222 decolonisation 2, 3, 15 Desai, Anita ix Desani, G. V.: All about H. Hatterr 171 Descartes, René 118 – 20 Devanagari 51 dharma 36, 38, 107, 130, 202, 207, 236 diaspora 2, 3, 84, 97 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 95, 227; The Possessed 90, 92 East-West encounter ix, 90, 96; binaries 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 36, 39, 53, 99 English in India 11 – 12 environmental aesthetics 172, 175, 176, 179 Fanon, Frantz 52, 53; Black Skin, White Masks 52 fascism 29 Feuerbach, Ludwig 120 FitzGerald, R. D. 89, 90 Forbes, Geraldine 107, 109 Forster, E. M. xi, 98, 183 – 4, 189, 215; A Passage to India 183, 184, 185, 188 – 9, 191, 192n5, 192n6 Friedman, Maurice 219 Gandhi, Mahatma x, xi, 14, 36, 44, 51, 55, 56n5, 64, 67, 77, 78, 94, 95, 98, 103, 105, 106 – 7, 110, 112, 186, 208; Gandhianism 35, 36, 63, 157, 163; Gandhian national movement x, 59, 63, 67, 69, 71, 91, 107, 109; My Experiments with Truth 77;

non-violence 69, 108; treatment of women 106 – 7; Young India 107 Ganges 38, 42, 45, 69, 175, 177, 179, 212, 213 Gangotri 79 Gangulee, N. 54 – 5 Ghose, Aurobindo 41, 84n1, 102, 105, 208 Ghosh, Amitav: Hungry Tide 171 Gilroy, Paul 3 globalisation xii, 2, 3, 4, 97 Golwalkar, M. S. 42 Green, H. M.: A History of Australian Literature 89 Hall, Stuart 6 Harihalli ix Harry Ransom Centre 76 Hassan ix Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 120 Heidegger, Martin 75, 146 Hemingway, Ernest 94 heterogeneity 54 – 5 Himalayas 79, 109, 176, 177 Hindi 43, 51 Hindu 1, 6, 8, 12, 13, 36, 38, 39, 54, 68, 79, 102, 104, 105, 108, 112, 197, 202; Hindu-Muslim intimacy 183, 188; Hindu nationalism 37, 41, 42, 44, 55; mythology 104 – 6; revivalism 36, 41, 42, 44 Hinduism 36, 41, 98, 104; and caste 37, 41, 42, 44, 68, 69, 94, 98, 103, 104, 110 – 11, 187, 201 Hindutva 42; Hindu right wing 2, 41, 46, 236; saffronisation of India 12, 187 Hitler 29, 82, 91, 92 Holocaust 136 – 7 humanism 116 hybridity 3, 9, 15, 45, 182, 197 Ignatius of Loyola: Spiritual Exercises 82 imperialism 10, 53 – 4, 108 India-British encounter 51 – 2, 108 Indian English 200 Indian Independence/ freedom struggle 50 – 1, 67, 70, 91, 98, 104, 105, 107, 109, 112, 186, 201 Indian National Army 51 Indian National Congress 51, 65, 71 Indianness see Indian tradition

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Indian tradition 35 – 6, 40, 82, 97, 104; culture 129, 131, 181; democracy 187; identity 130, 196; Indian nationalism 184, 190, 192, 201; Indianness 40, 44, 45, 95, 99, 183, 189 intertextuality 1, 55 Iyengar, Masti Venkatesh 21 Jameson, Fredric 157, 168 ‘Javni’ 103, 110 – 11 Jhabvala, Ruth ix Jinnah, Muhammad Ali 54, 57n14 Kachru, Braj B. xiiin5, 211, 213 Kanthapura ix, x – xi, 13, 14, 21, 35, 38, 40, 41, 44, 51, 55, 59, 90, 91, 94, 96, 97 – 8, 109, 227; as anti-hegemonic 201 – 2; and caste 60 – 1, 62 – 3, 67, 68 – 9; foreword x, 1, 5, 9, 10 – 11, 35, 211; as Gandhian novel 158; and gender identity 60, 63, 67; and landscape 173 – 4; masculinity in 62 – 4; as national allegory 158, 162 – 6, 168; and religion 61; translation 196 – 7; as transnational 185 – 8 Kanyakumari 94, 99 Karanth, Shivram 21 Kaviraj, Sudipta 103, 104 khadi 61, 63, 65; and nationalism 68 – 70 Khair, Tabish 79 King, Bruce 38 Kosambi, Damodar Dharmananda 226 Krishna 131, 224 Kristeva, Julia 123 Lal, Vinay 46, 48n11 landscape, in literature 123 Lefebvre, Henri 97 liberalisation 2 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 61 – 2 Madhava 84n1 Mahabharata 6, 45, 106, 107, 181, 228 Maharshi, Ramana 220 Malgonkar, Manohar: The Princes 33 Malgudi xi Mani, Lata 111 Mansfield, Katherine 25 – 6 Marxism 40, 41, 55, 82, 92 – 3, 94, 95 maya xi, 122, 146, 152, 236 Mayo, Katherine: Mother India 113n4

Meaning of India ix, 7, 78, 213, 221 Mehrotra, Arvind Krishna 53; History of Indian Literature in English 53 migration 3, 4 modernisation 7, 35 modernism 97 monism 40 Montpellier ix Mother India/Bharat Mata 42, 70, 102 – 3, 104, 105, 108, 109, 112, 113n1, 113n3, 113n4, 201 Mouly, Camille ix, 93, 210, 218, 219 Mukherjee, Meenakshi 10, 55 Murray, John 215 Muslim ix, 14, 36, 42, 54, 55, 64, 71, 97, 107 Muslim League 57 Mysore 98 Nagarjuna 146 Naidu, Sarojini 110 – 11 Nandy, Ashis 35, 47, 53, 56n10, 79 Narasimhaiah, C. D. 31, 173 Narayan, Jayaprakash 41, 54 Narayan, R. K. x, xii, xiii, 75, 82; Swami and Friends x, 221 ‘Narsiga’ 5, 102, 105, 108; gendering in 105, 108 nation 5, 8, 50 – 1, 55, 78, 97, 99, 104; as cultural imaginary 2, 103, 109 National Education Policy (NEP) 11 – 12 nationalism 35, 51, 53, 54, 59, 68, 103, 104, 158, 184, 187; and internationalism 38, 97, 98, 99 nation-state 2, 7, 97, 99, 109 nativism 2 Négritude Movement 76 Nehru, Jawaharlal ix, x, 7 – 8, 51, 52 – 4, 55, 56n5, 57n13, 94; An Autobiography 56n11 neocolonialism 35 Nietzsche 79 Non-Cooperation Movement 59, 67 non-violence see Gandhi, Mahatma On the Ganga Ghat 171, 172, 179 orientalism 6, 9, 15, 53 Pamuk, Orhan 80 partition 56n7, 181 – 2, 183, 188, 192n5, 193n14

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postcolonial x, 1, 2, 6, 7, 12, 35, 36, 41, 97, 99, 157, 198; postcolonialism 35, 185; postcolonial studies 2, 7, 12, 97, 99 posthumanism 122 postmodern i, 2, 3, 6, 43 Prakash, Uday 158; Mohandas 164 – 8 Premchand xi; Rangabhumi xi purana 43, 44, 47, 59, 90, 98, 236 Queen Elizabeth II 21 – 2, 25, 28, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34 Quit India Movement 56n7, 91 Raja Rao Publication Project 76 Ramakrishna Mission 41 Ramanuja 39, 40 Ramayana 6, 28, 45, 104 – 5, 106, 107, 113n2, 142 Ram Janmabhoomi 41, 46, 47, 47n8 Ramraj 106, 236 Ransom Centre see Harry Ransom Centre Rao, Raja: anti-colonial stance 53; and authenticity 7, 41; English as mother tongue 11; exile and expatriation 36, 39, 47, 96; experiment with English 9, 89, 199; idea of India 79; and metaphysics xi, 6, 29, 34, 36, 39, 40, 41, 44, 46, 78, 82, 93, 94, 144; orality 89; philosophy of nondualism 6, 15, 47n6, 130, 137, 173, 177, 178, 218; political activism 50; as royalist 21 – 2, 24, 28 – 9, 32, 55, 217; search for guru xi, 6, 12, 35, 38, 93, 98, 175, 208 – 9, 214; search for Truth 22, 23, 25, 27, 28, 33, 34, 37 – 9, 45, 75, 77 – 8, 80, 81 – 2, 83; spirituality 41, 42; treatment of women 65 – 8, 106 – 7, 109 – 12 rasa 198, 236 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) 37, 41 – 2, 47n3 right wing see Hindu, Hindu nationalism Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 120 Roy, Arundhati 76 Roy, Raja Rammohan 51, 56n5 Rushdie, Salman 9 – 10, 76, 227; Imaginary Homelands 10; Midnight’s Children x, 171; Vintage Book of Indian Writing 10

sadhaka 214 – 15, 237 sadhana 207, 211, 221, 222, 237 saffronisation of India see Hindutva Sahitya Akademi xii, 1, 11 Said, Edward 9; Orientalism 53, 57n12 Sankara/Sankaracharya xi, 39, 40, 47n2, 75, 84n1, 218, 226 Sanskrit 12, 28, 29, 30, 31, 42, 46, 113n1; Sanskrit aesthetics 199 sati 111, 237 Second World War 15, 32, 33, 51, 91 Serpent and the Rope xi, xii, 1, 5, 6, 12, 13, 35, 55, 90, 97; Albigensian heresy/Cathars 26 – 7, 30, 32, 36, 95; as autobiography 21; Buddhism 26, 36, 37, 40; evolutionary psychology 175 – 7; Freudianism in 24; illusion and reality 37, 38, 39, 45, 47n6; Manichean dualism 37; metaphysics in 146; representation of ‘real’ India 45; spatial treatment in 98; theme of monarchy 28, 34, 213, 215 Shakespeare 74, 75, 79, 227 Shelvankar, K. S. 54, 217, 223n2 Simon Commission 52, 56n6 Singh, Iqbal 51, 220 socialism 40, 41, 42, 54 Sorbonne ix Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 111 Stalin 26, 29, 40, 91, 94, 95 sthala purana 185, 197, 199, 201, 227, 237 subaltern x sunya 43, 44, 144 – 8, 219, 237 swadesi 59, 60, 106, 237 swaraj 5, 56, 106, 237 Tagore, Rabindranath 44; Gora 44, 56n5 Theosophical Society 41 Thiong’o, Ngugi wa 56n10 Thiruvananthapuram/Trivandrum xi, 208 Thornton, Lawrence: Imagining Argentina 80 Tilak, Bal Gangadhar 56n5 Tonnies, Ferdinand 104 transnationalism 2, 5, 6, 9, 13 – 15, 21 – 2, 28, 30, 32, 38, 45, 59, 65, 68, 70 – 1, 75, 89, 97 – 8, 181 Travancore 91, 97, 98 trilingualism 11 Trivandrum see Thiruvananthapuram

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Upanishads ix, 36, 38, 39, 40, 79, 121, 138

Vishva Hindu Parishad 41 – 2 Vivekananda, Swami 41, 56n5, 94

Vālmīki 227 ‘Vande Mataram’ see Chatterjee, Bankimchandra Varanasi/Benaras 93, 98, 99, 175, 177 Vedanta 8, 13, 23, 25, 40, 41, 44, 82, 84n1, 89, 92, 94, 97, 99, 130, 150, 237 Vedas ix, 36, 39 Vertovec, Steven 3 – 4

Weil, Simone 26 westernisation 69 White, Patrick 89 Whither India? 41, 53, 54, 55 widowhood 62, 66 – 7, 68, 103, 109, 110 – 12 Woolf, Virginia 26 Wright, Judith 89, 90 ‘Writer and the Word’ 84

242