Raja Rao (1908-2006) was one of the most influential novelists of the 20th century. He was a South Indian Brahmin and belonged to a family of Vedantin priests. Born in Hassan, Karnataka, Rao's education was initiated at a madrassa in Hyderabad, then at Nizam College, and finally at Aligarh Muslim University where he studied till the age of twenty-one, after which he left for Montpellier in France. Yet, in all his writings, he harnessed the idea of the traditional Hindu metaphysical values of the union of the self (atman) with Brahman (paramatman). His personal quest is evident throughout his work, which is an endeavour to reach a meaning that has value for us in the face of the crisis of human consciousness, outlining his spiritual ways of nurturing a world of hope and peace. Perhaps that is the reason why he is best known today as a philosopher of a metaphysical and spiritual "reality". His writings are a significant contribution to not only Indian writings in English, but also to the history of traditional Indian philosophy and mysticism that, to a great extent, governed his political thought. In 1964, Raja Rao received the Sahitya Akademi Award, India's highest literary award, for his novel, The Serpent and the Rope. In 1966, Rao left for Austin, Texas, where he began to teach Indian philosophy. In 1998, he received the Neustadt Prize; and in 2007, he received the Padma Vibhushan posthumously.
Rumina Sethi is Dean of University Instruction at Panjab University, Chandigarh, India. She holds a Ph.D. from Trinity College, Cambridge, and was a British Academy Fellow at Oxford. Professor Rumina Sethi has been a Senior Associate Member at the Department of English, Oxford University, and has also held various Fellowships at the University of Cardiff at Wales, the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship at Bellagio, Italy, and the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. She currently holds the Mulk Raj Anand Chair Professorship at the Dept. of English and Cultural Studies. Rumina Sethi was nominated to the General Council of the Sahitya Akademi (2018-2022). Her books include Myths of the Nation (Clarendon, Oxford), The Politics of Postcolonialism (Pluto, London), and Reading India in a Transnational Era (Routledge). She has lectured widely and is published in many reputed international journals.
As always with distinguished men and women of letters, it is difficult to find a starting point: from which side does one grasp the core of their magisterial contribution to literature or the sum total of the opinions of their characters? Can their vast themes that work upwards from local concerns to global phenomenon be articulated easily, and how is one able to encapsulate the ideology and philosophy that we remember them for?
Raja Rao, who lived from 1908 to 2006 spanned almost a complete century, and that in itself seems to be his contribution to the literary world. Not that he wrote a great deal, but his works are so dignified in their conception of serious themes and his language so noble in its philosophy that he is regarded today as a literary giant. Very often, and especially in some of 20th century histories of Anglophone writing, Raja Rao was situated along with two of his contemporaries who lived as long as he did-R.K. Narayan and Mulk Raj Anand. But the comparison between the three authors which is almost always inevitably done could not have been more unfair or irrelevant, for each was as different from the other as chalk from cheese. R.K. Narayan was considered to be a satirist who wrote about a fictional Indian village, Malgudi. Mulk Raj Anand was generally regarded as a socialist revolutionary, hell- bent on exposing the rift that existed between the rich and the poor, the upper castes and the lowly. But it was Raja Rao whose mind travelled across continents-from India to Europe and back again in search of his roots and whose knowledge ranged from the smallest hamlet in South India from where he hailed to the bustling cities of the world. Similarly, he could write with complete empathy for the rustic agriculturalist as he could with felicity for the philosophical mathematician.
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