Heir to Two Worlds: Influences on Raja Rao

HEIR TO TWO WORLDS:
INFLUENCES ON RAJA RAO

Dr: M. K. NAIK, M. A., Ph. D., A. M. (Pennsylvania)
Professor of English, Karnatak University, Dharwar

Raja Rao’s major fiction achieves a unique blend of techniques of modern Western fiction and age-old Hindu methods of literary expression. He has been able to achieve this blend because of his intimate knowledge of two worlds–one, the world of his birth and heritage, and the other, the world where he has passed the major part of his adult life. He has, therefore, been influenced by the best in both Eastern and Western thought. Among modern Indian writers few can make the claim that he has made in his brief article on Books which have influenced me. (The “Illustrated Weekly of India,” Feb. 10, 1963. p. 45):

“I have read The Paradiso in Varanasi and found it familiar. I have read Tulasidas in Tuscany, by Dante’s Arno in Florence, and found him surprisingly contemporary. The Arno is a younger river than the Saraju, and if you looked up and saw the San Miniato, the battlements of Michaelangelo running down in young leaps of turreted silences, as if time were a substance one could catch and keep Fiorenza dentro dalla cerchica antica you might see Sri Rama himself coming out with Vasishta, Lakshmana behind them. The sun of Tuscany seemed oft-times the light of Ayodhya. The Seine, one feels, understands Shankara as no other river in Europe could, the Seine somewhere had a premonition of the verbal alchemy of wisdom and the word......I have often recited Kalidasa to the Seine and she seemed to remember.”

An extremely erudite and well-read person, Raja Rao is steeped in the world’s philosophical, religious, historical and creative writings, as is clear from references to these in The Serpent and the Rope. He has, however, singled out certain authors and books as having had specific influence on him. Among Indian books, he singles out the Ramayana as “the book that has influenced me most, as it has every Indian.” He adds:

“What could be more glorious, more sacred, more fantastic, a book of books–showing every beauty and treachery of this our tragic-comic existence, absurd, inhuman, gentle, devout, noble, cruel, yet not altogether felt as of this world, described for our terror and our joy, and final wisdom–than the Ramayana...The book that has filled my imagination and come to me for years at every crucial point of my life, to interpret and to help, is the Ramayana.”

After the Ramayana Raja Rao mentions the Mahabharata in which the character that impressed him most is that of Bhishma, the Nestor of the Indian epic:

Bhishma made me understand India, at some fixed point in Indian experience. He who does not understand Bhishma, and through Bhishma’s words Sri Krishna himself, will never know India.

The Ramayana and the Mahabharata are the epitome of Indian culture, and if, as I hope to show later, Raja Rao’s work has a typically Indian ethos, the influence of these two epics on him needs no further corroboration. Savitri in The Serpent and the Rope (a character at once a symbol and a living human being) is in the same tradition to which belong Sita of the Ramayana and Draupadi of the Mahabharata–characters which, for every Hindu, are paragons of all that is sacred in womanhood. And if the Indian epics, like the later Puranas, are a medley of narration, history, description and philosophical and religious discourse, so is The Serpent and the Rope, though on a much smaller scale.

The next work mentioned is the Brihatstotraratnakara, a compilation of devotional Sanskrit verses selected by Vasudevashastri Panshikar. Raja Rao’s own copy, he says:

“is so crabbed and torn that its pages seem to hide in many places around me wherever I go. This anthology contains some of the most beautiful poetry in Sanskrit....and has waves of holiness. It has Shankara in it and Valmiki and Kalidasa–it has even Jagannatha Bhatta.”

Devotional verses of the kind collected in the Brihatstotraratnakarahave always been recited daily in orthodox Brahmin families, and it is not surprising that Raja Rao who comes from such a family should quote many verses from this collection in The Serpent and the Rope.

Raja Rao also states that the Buddhist texts, “with their poetry and rich humanity” have deeply stirred him. From among the writers in his mother-tongue, Kannada, he singles out the Vachanakaras(devotional writers) and Kanakadasa and Purandaradasa. They have, he says, “affected me so profoundly that they seem to have changed my style of writing.” The ‘Vachanakaras’ (literally, ‘makers of sayings’) were twelfth century medieval Kannada saints of the Lingayat faith, among whom Basaveshwara, Prabhudeva, Akka Mahadevi, Channabasava and Siddharama were prominent. They expressed their religious thought in simple rhythmical language which, while capable of expounding the most intricate religious and theological principles, is at the same time replete with intense devotional fervour. The Vachanas have altogether a trenchant and memorable quality. Kanakadasa and Purandaradasa belong to another major religious movement which swept Karnatak in the 16th century and continued to be powerful for about two centuries more. The Dasaswere mostly worshippers of Vishnu and followers of Madhwacharya, the founder of the school of the dualistic school of Vedanta. They preached their doctrine of Bhakti (devotion) in songs marked by simple diction, homely imagery and a large variety of moods ranging from castigation of hypocrisy to mystical rapture. It is possible to see traces of the rhythms of these songs and Vachanas in the lyrical passages in Raja Rao’s novels, while his trenchant aphorisms are also in the style of the Vachanakaras. Among other Indian writers, Rao mentions Gandhi whose My Experiments with Truth he read, he tells us, “at the Nizam College reading-room as the text appeared, week after week in Young India;”and Ananda Coomaraswamy, the noted art historian about whom Rao writes:

No sensitive Indian could have read Ananda Coomaraswamy’s books...without having felt that here at last one was discovering an India that one felt but could not have named. For with Coomaraswamy,...you come to the Upanishad and the Vedanta, realizing that wheresoever you go, you always return to the Himalayas.

Above all, Indian philosophical and religious thought has deeply influenced all Raja Rao’s works and he himself believes that his greatest work, The Serpent and the Rope–took shape under his Guru’s grace.

Raja Rao’s association with the sage Pandit Taranath has perhaps also had its share in his development. The Master in the short story Narsigain The Cow of the Barricades and other Stories is perhaps Taranath who was a remarkable man–doctor, social reformer, freedom-fighter, writer, musician, philosopher and yogi all rolled into one. His conception of art, as revealed in his diaries¹ which are unfortunately yet unpublished, rings a sure bell for a student of Raja Rao:

“Art is no mongrel composition, no mattoid’s flutter, no trick of legerdemain, but the well-directed overflow of the economised sum of inner energies. It so flows in waves of joy and strength that it can never cloy the aspirant. It does not stop at mere titillation of nerves but elevates. It is whole and wholesome in origin and effect, rising from and appealing to the whole Chitta. Not caitiffs but only kings of the spirit can produce or appreciate true art...Art can surely be recognised as the stepping stone to spirituality.”

About the function of literature, Taranath writes:

“The function of literature is to illumine. The scattered rays of the sun are concentrated by the lens and real and intense image is reflected of the objects. You are scorched by the reflection unless you are at a respectful distance. Even so should high class literature be scorching all dross of ignorance once its reflection is focussed on it. Great, aphorisms and high class poetry come under this...Then is the reflection by plane mirror, of light. They shed more light, but have not the power to pierce straight into the dross and burn it. In their light further discipline has to be undertaken still. Such writings are second class. Merely argumentative literature without force of experience comes under this. Then come the images enlarged and distorted by concave mirrors....such is journalistic literature.”

Raja Rao’s analysis of the relation between the writer and the word noted earlier will seem to be similar to Taranath’s views on the question:

“What are words to (the) author? Are they the warp and the woof he weaves after a pattern? Or, are they the petals or the pollen which by their bloom charm, allure, delight, refresh and recreate? If the former, the author is at best an artisan. Only he whose expression is the perfume of the heart in blossom is an artist.”

Taranath’s philosophical position would seem to be substantially the same as that of Raja Rao’s guru Sri Atmanand, for the saying of the latter which forms the epigraph to The Serpent the Rope–‘Waves are nothing but water. So is the Sea’ has a parallel in Taranath’s diaries: ‘The wave is in the ocean, of the ocean and the ocean too.’

The list of Western authors mentioned by Rao is formidable. The pride of place is given to Shakespeare, who, according to him,

“is almost an Indian of my India–so he too has influenced me fundamentally–Hamlet, first and foremost, then King Lear, and finally The Tempest.”

It is significant that Rao has given Shakespeare a place in the title of his latest novel–The Cat and Shakespeare–inwhich there is something of both Hamlet and The Tempest. Similarly, Rao regards Plato as ‘a companion to all pilgrimages.’ The two Russian writers in his list are Dostoevsky and Gorki:

“First of all Dostoevsky–his Brothers Karamazov which I discovered, while still a student, in a second-hand bookshop off the Boulevard St. Michel in Paris; I squeezed the book under my overcoat (for it was raining, I still remember) and returning to my damp, unfamiliar room read page after page as if it had all happened around, and to me...Nor should forget to mention Gorki and his Mother, a singularly moving book of the human condition.”

During World War II, Raja Rao travelled a great deal in India, “discovering India,” as he puts it, “with passion and devotion, almost a pilgrim.” He adds:

“And during all these years, two authors always accompanied me: Rainer Maria Rilke, his Duino Elegies...and his rich treasury of letters to his friends. The second author who never left me was W. B. Yeats. His autobiography I consider one of the most beautiful books in the English tongue.”

Raja Rao’s affinities with Rilke appear to be numerous, and he seems to have much in common with that extremely sensitive Austrian poet, who too was an expatriate. They share an intense admiration for Paris, a city which Rilke describes in his letters as: “full to the brim of sadness–Nowhere else has life become so real as here so genuine in all its manifestations, in the best and most distressing..A human landscape emerges here; the heavens form a canopy over this city, the real, heavens in all their vast expanse, as they do over the sea.” ² As Rilke’s biographer observes, “There are few ‘aughts’ in Rilke’s vocabulary. So the recurrent phrases, ‘I ought to have stayed in Paris’, ‘I ought to go ’ have a special significance.”³ Rao, too, makes his hero in The Serpent and the Rope, (pp. 53-4) go into raptures over Paris, which for him (and for his creator also, evidently) is ‘a Benares turned outward’ and ‘not a city’ but ‘an area in oneself, a concorde in one’s being’. Both Rilke and Raja Rao admire Paul Valery, and it is perhaps no coincidence that Rao should, in The Serpent and the Rope, quote from Valery’s poem, Le Cimetiere Marin, a passage from which fired Rilke’s imagination and became the central doctrine of Sonnets to Orpheus. Again, both are essentially, deeply philosophical writers with a strong mystical element in their make-up. Rilke’s account of how, at Duino Castle, a voice from the storm seemed to call to him: ‘Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders?’ and thus inspired him to write the monumental Duino Elegies, and Rao’s claim that The Serpent and the Rope took shape under the grace of his Guru reveal their essential kinship as mystics. Little wonder then that their conception of art also should show significant resemblances. For Rilke, as for Rao, Art is a sacred activity. In his Letters, Rilke observes.

“In artistic work one needs nothing so much as conscience. It is the sole standard.”⁴ And again, “Whoever does not consecrate himself wholly to art with all his wishes and values can never reach the highest goal...I regard art...as a battle the chosen one has to wage with himself and his environment in order to go forward with a pure heart to the greatest goal, the one day of celebration, and with full hands to give to all successors of the rich reconciliation finally achieved. But that needs a whole men! Not a few weary leisure hours.”⁵

Another curious bond of kinship between the Indian writer the Austrian is the fascination which woman exercises over them. A reference to this has already been made in the pen-portrait of Rao given earlier; and the glorification of the feminine principle will be seen to have been one of the leading themes in his fiction. As for Rilke, the following extract from one of his letters is significant:

“It is so natural for me to understand girls and women; the deepest experience of the creator is feminine–for it is experience of receiving and bearing. The poet Obstfelder once wrote, when describing the face of a strange man: ‘it was’ (when he began to speak) ‘as if there were a woman in him’–it seems to me that would fit every poet who begins to speak.” ⁶

This is corroborated by people who were close to Rilke. Princess Thurn and Taxis-Hohenlohe speak of “the extraordinary attraction women exercise over him.” “He has often told me,” she adds, “that he can only converse with them, that they are the only human beings he understands, and the only ones he cares to associate with.” ⁷

Rilke, thus, may be said to have been a major Western influence on Raja Rao. In fact, as will be seen later, part of the plan of The Serpent and the Rope was suggested by Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.

Raja Rao also mentions Kafka. “Who has not been influenced by him? The Castle and The Trial are among the basic tales of contemporary mythology,” he adds. At first sight, the answer would seem to be ‘not Rao,’ for the haunted, nightmarish world of Kafka on which the pall of hell has settled, and the Vedantic world of Rao which struggles to reach upward to light are poles apart. Yet a fascination for myth and symbol are common to both.

The only Italian writer in Rao’s list is Ignazio Silone, whose novel Fontamara, he declares, ‘combines folklore and politics, raising them to a new level of poetical experience.’ As will be shown later, Raja Rao had Fontamaraat the of his mind when he wrote his first novel, Kanthapura.

Apart from Rilke, it is perhaps French writers among his Western masters that Rao seems to have learnt most. He tells us that:

“While still a student...I had discovered Romain Rolland’s Jean Christophe, in that extraordinarily poetical unfrench French, and it had left a deep intellectual mark on me.

Romain Rolland’s keen understanding of Indian philosophy and culture, and his interest in the Indian freedom struggle must also have drawn young Raja Rao to the French writer, on whom he wrote an enthusiastic essay in Kannada. It is also possible to see traces of the influence of Jean Christophe on the technique of Rao’s The Serpent and the Rope. Both novels are sprawling chronicles of the careers of their protagonists, and in both the central organising principle is the ego of the hero.

“In my maturer years (continues Rao) two authors, both French (and incidentally friends, of one another), have influenced me: Paul Valery and Andre Gide. Valery is not only one of the major poets of our century, if not its only great poet, but is also a prose-writer of classical integrity. His critical essays and especially, his short novel, Monsieur Teste, sharpened my intellectual processes, and made the rigours of literary discipline an over-exhilarating task. Andre Gide brought, alongside Valery, a greater humanity and a more precise sense of the play of ethics and poetical sensibility. His Porte Etroite, with its anguished fervour and its accomplished simplicity of style, is a minor masterpiece.”

The extent of Raja Rao’s debt to this ‘minor masterpiece’ is revealed when one compares this novel with The Serpent and the Rope. The story of the love between Jerome and Alissa in Gide’s novel is similar to that of Rama and Savitri in The Serpent and the Rope in that in both cases it is a love which is not fruitful in the ordinary sense of the term. The dialogues between Raja Rao’s lovers recall in their tone and temper those between Gide’s hero and heroine. In technique also, the use of the hero’s diary in Raja Rao’s novel has a parallel in Alissa’s Journal in Gide’s work. The narrators in the two novels, who are also the chief protagonists, make almost identical claims for their narratives: Gide’s hero says:

“Some people might have made a book out of it; but the story I am going to tell is one which took all my strength to live and over which I have spent all my virtue. So I shall set down my recollections quite simply, and if in places they are ragged I shall have recourse to no invention and neither path nor connect them.” ⁸

Compare this with Raja Rao’s Ramaswamy in The Serpent and the Rope:  

“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 an historian.” (p. 233)

The last French writer Raja Rao mentions is Andre Malraux:

“The onlyliving writer who has influenced me is Andre Malraux. Not merely his novels, important as they are, but his aesthetic essays that have a metaphysical acuityand importance that will outlast most of what has appeared in our times.”

Malraux in fact, has been a personal friend, and when he came to India to meet Nehru in 1958, he was accompanied by Raja Rao. Curiously enough, no two men could differ more widely in temperament than the Frenchman who has lived dangerously in the cause of freedom, and the essentially philosophical-minded Hindu Brahmin. But just as there was a metaphysician deep down in Malraux, so was there a potential activist (circumscribed by his delicate health) in Raja Rao. This might explain the mutual admiration and the friendship.

Raja Rao has learnt as much from the French language as from its authors. To quote from the Prajnainterview:

“From the French language I learnt discipline and grace. From the English language I learnt not to take it at its face value but to mould it, to transmute it into the sublimity and music of the Sanskrit language.” ⁹

It has been said that: “The French language, spare, elegant, mobile, purged to a greater extent than English, of encumbering concretions, has an extraordinary dexterity in the manipulation of ideas, an unequalled power of rapid generalization as well as sophistic insinuation. The mere use of French as a vehicle of expression constitutes a temptation to elegance–to rhetoric, to that form of ambiguity which is not the organic complexity of poetry but the complication of an attitude.” ¹⁰

It is possible to see both the ‘dexterity in the manipulation of ideas’ and the ‘temptation to rhetoric’, which have been noted as typical of the French language, in the prose of The Serpent and the Rope. Nevertheless, it is significant that Raja Rao remarked to me, he had two reasons for his choice: First, he felt that the French language lacked the emotional richness of English; and secondly, that being far more disciplined and precise, it allowed less room for the kind of experimentation which he felt he had to do to adapt a Western language to his oriental sensibility. English, he thought, gave him full freedom to do this. His argument, here again, underscores the fact that, though his debt to the West is considerable, his sensibility has remained Indian to the core. Heir to both the intellectual worlds of the East and the West, he has not, as some of his compatriots seem to have done, lost the East to gain the West.

¹ I had the opportunity to consult these diaries through the courtesy of Dr. Rajeev Taranath.
² Jane B. Greene and M. D. Herter Norton, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke(N.Y., 1945), p. 86.
³ E. M. Butler, Rainer Maria Rilke (Cambridge, 1941) p. 140.
⁴ Op., cit., p. 319.
⁵ Ibid.,pp. 27-28.
⁶ Ibid.,p. 181.
⁷ Quoted by E. M. Butler, op. cit., p. 298.
⁸ Andre Gide, Straight is the Gate, trans. Dorothy Bussy(Paris, 1952) p. 5.
⁹ PrajnaXI, 2 (Benares, 1966) pp. CLXXX-CLXXXIV.
¹⁰ Lawrence Thomas, Andre Gide; The ethic of the Artist (London, 1950) p. 3.