The concept of love in Raja Rao’s “The Serpent and the Rope”

THE CONCEPT OF LOVE IN RAJA RAO’S
“THE SERPENT AND THE ROPE”

CHOI KIM YAK
University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur

Who can take away love, who give it,
who receives? I could not even say
that I loved Savitri. It is just
like saying ‘I love myself’ or
‘Love loves love’.¹

This concept is derived from the Advaita-Vedanta theory of non-dualism, ² based on the belief that there is only one Self (the Atman) for all beings, that human life is part and parcel of the Divine Being. There is a Self in Man, at the very centre of his being, deeper than his intellect, something that is akin to the Supreme.

In The Serpent and the Rope, love is equated with this Self, the ‘I’. The Self is what is real. Rama says to Madeleine that “Love is not a feeling, it is...a stateless state, the whole condition of oneself”.³ “Love,” he says again, “is contiguous with dimension, love is the light of space...you cannot go beyond yourself. Love, my love, is the Self. Love is the loving of love”.⁴ Love, the Self, is impersonal, and in various discourses of Rama, it is equated with Joy, Knowledge (Jnanam) and Truth, which are also impersonal.

The core idea in the book is the assertion of the impersonality of the individual–also a basic idea of Vedanta. This search for unity in the heart of diversity is the theme of Atma-Brahman. It is a spiritual quest whose Holy Grail is the Self. The whole aim is to realise that the rope is the rope and not the serpent. The two things are often correlated in Indian literature. A Hindu figure of speech for serpent is ‘toothed rope’. For instance, many Hindu theosophic texts establish the following comparison:

As a rope which is not clearly seen
in the dark is mistaken for a serpent,
so the unenlightened mistake of the
character of their own soul.

That is to say, they do not comprehend the divine nature of their self. Man’s goal is to realise all beings in his own self and himself in all beings.

Madeleine’s world, the world of the poetic, of sainthood, is neither serpent nor rope, neither unreal nor real. It is only identification, not realisation. Her relationship with Rama disintegrates because the Personal and the Impersonal must necessarily take separate paths. Disintegration is complete when as an ascetic, she denies the womanhood that Rama seeks, the Female Principle that makes life whole, for “the fact of womanhood is the meaning of (Man’s) life”. ⁵

Buddhism left the country of its birth because, according to Rama, India is impitoyable. One can become a Buddhist but one can only be born an Indian, i.e., a Vedantin. Irony lies in the similarity between the heretical Cathar and Albigensian revolt against the Catholic Dharma and the heretical Buddhist revolt against the Hindu Dharma. Implicit in the irony is that Madeleine, seeking her own God, ‘revolts’ against her husband. ‘India’ is what separates them. “Buddhism died in India because it became ascetic, and so denied womanhood its right to exist”. ⁶

Rama becomes truly aware of his spiritual heritage when he meets Savitri. He finds in Savitri a kindred spirit to his own. She is the perfect response, the Woman, the Female Principle, who harmonises with himself, the Male Principle. The One is composed of both Principles. Thus in the Rama-Savitri relationship, there is always only one point of reference –the ‘I’ – “Savitri is I”; “Savitri proved that I could be I.” An emotion of this kind resembles the sublime love which is the very essence of God because Divine love is not something belonging to God: it is God himself. Therefore who gives? who receives? The individual drama is drowned in the whole.

There is constant reference of the man-woman relationship in comparison with the gods and the Divine incarnations. The main emphases are on Siva and Parvati; Sri Rama and Sita; Krishna and Radha; and Satyavan and Savitri. One must always bear in mind that duality is delusion because there is but one and the same God Principle. For example, Siva (the Annihilator), in order that he can carry out his function of destruction, must have the ‘capacity’ to destroy, and that is why we have Parvati (the Prakriti, the Phenomenal world). This is why Savitri says

Woman is the meaning of death....The
Woman is the world. The Truth of the
world is dissolution. Or rather Truth
can only be because death is. If the
I world were the world, there would be no Truth.’ ⁷

Therefore, “The woman must die”⁸ but Man, the Truth, the Supreme Light, must live. Satyavan cannot die because he is the Self; the Truth, for “Man is simply Man: a principle, the Truth”.⁹ Satyavan, the Truthful in Indian mythology, marries the princess Savitri. Truth must be, and thus, even when he ‘dies’, Yama the God of Death, is tricked by Savitri (the embodiment of Love and devotion) into bringing him to life. So Man is eternal, Deathless, and Rama says to Savitri, “Then you, become me, will be the real Savitri”. When Truth is united with Devotion, Man can transcend Death.

Just as Man is incomplete without Woman, Woman can only find her God through Man. “Man must unto himself be himself and his bride”, Rama says, for “all brides be Benares born”.¹⁰ Savitri, with full understanding, replies, “If Benares be inner, My Lord, the bride too is in Benares”. Benares represents the holiness of the Self; the Truth. For Rama, marriages are not made in heaven or earth, but in Benares.

Savitri is portrayed as a woman in search of Truth, like “some princess in the fables (who) would wed but he who could solve the riddle” which is “what is the IT that I seek?” ¹¹ It is Rama who can give her insight. He quotes Kalidasa:

Just as word and meaning be binomial
Indeed be Parvati and Siva himself. ¹²

Rama tells Savitri, “Love can never be a movement, a feeling, an act. All that acts can only be of the body, or the mind or the ego. Only the selfish love”–“And the loveless?”–“they become love”. ¹³

Savitri wants to surrender to Truth, to be free, for in accepting a bondage one is free. According to Ramon Liyull, a Mediaeval spiritual thinker, “love is that which places the free in bondage, and those in bondage gives freedom.” True freedom implies liberation. In Tristan and Iseul, ^{14 liberation} is Tristan’s way. His passion seeks to love without limits; it seeks that heaven where lover and beloved are identified in a single being. Similarly, Savitri knows that liberation is the meaning of life. Rama tells her about the Ramayana. Sri Rama is “the river of life, the movement towards self-liberation, the affirmation of one’s true existence”.¹⁵ Through Rama, Savitri sees the meaning of human existence.

Savitri is seen by Rama to be filled with a steady, self-sounding silence. She is “the source of which words were made, the Mother of Sound, Akshara-Lakshmi, divinity of the syllable”.¹⁶ Woman is Sound, the celebration of the Feminine Principle. Savitri, to Rama, is as meaningful as the silence, as primordial as the Sound. And it is in this deep silence of the soul man can be in union with himself, his own Self, because “Silence is Truth”.¹⁷ Between himself and Savitri, Rama explains:

Nothing morehad happened than if you
see deep and long at silence you per-
ceive an orb of centripetal sound which
explains why Parvati is daughter of
Himalay and Sita born to the furrow
of the field. She became the aware-
ness behind my awareness, the leap
of my understanding. I lost the
world and she became it. ¹⁸

Inheritor of the world, and symbolic of it, Woman seeks Man for her fulfilment. Rama believes:

The woman needs our worship for her
fulfilment, for in worshipping her
we know the world and annihilate it,
absorbing it into ourself. ¹⁹

Similarly, Man’s fulfilment in life is found in Woman. “There is only one Woman”, Rama insists, “not for one life, but for all lives; indeed, the earth was created...that we might seek her”. ²⁰

For Rama, womanhood is holy, demanding “a deep and and reverential mystery”. ²¹ Therefore, “Man must wed to know this earth. “The womb (Bhaga) is the great Prakriti (Nature), and the possessor of the womb (Bhagavan) is Shiva”.²² Rama is convinced that “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”.²³ Through Savitri, Rama finds completeness. “To know Savitri,” he says, “was to wake into the truth of life to be remembered–unto God”. ²⁴

The symbolic roles of Man and Woman are explained thus;

Truth is the fact of existence.     That is,
truth is the essence of fact; and as
such truth and existence are one and the
same. Man sees himself in woman as essence,
the fact of womanhood is the meaning of
his life. If there were no other, you
could not know that you are. If Parvati
had not sat and prayed that Shiva would
open his eyes, Shiva would never have
opened his eyes and there would never
have been a world. Love is the honey of
knowledge, knowing is sweet because
woman is. ²⁵

The whole meaning of the man-woman relationship on earth is identified with that of Shiva and Parvati, of God and Man, of Brahman and Atman. God-realisation is Self-realisation.

The spiritual quest is the union of the individual soul with the Supreme Soul. But before this is possible, Rama (the individual soul), like the four silent disciples of Shiva, ²⁶ must overcome the three Faults’–ego, deeds (Karma) and illusion (Maya). Rama’s pilgrimage involves the transcending of these.

Rama explains to Madeleine that all men “are perfect when they turn inward, and that the ultimate is man’s destiny. No man is bad that know “Lord, we be not of this kingdom”. ²⁷ Rama realises that “Saint I had to become if I would wed Savitri...one which had known the extinction of ego”, ²⁸ and “you can marry when you are one. That is, you can marry when there is no one to marry another. The real marriage is 00. When the ego is dead is marriage true”. ²⁹

It is Time which separates Rama and Savitri. “It was myself. When the becoming was stopped–I would wed, Savitri”. ³⁰ Rama knows that as long as they are still in the process of becoming which is lodged in Time, there will be no union. Hence his words “All brides be Benares born”. Marriage can only be when Man is himself as well as his wife.

Yagnyavalkya’s words to Maitreyi occur several times in the novel.

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. ³¹

“Not one is the Truth”, says Rama, “yet not two is the Truth. Savitri proved that I could be I” ³² for “Union is proof that the Truth is non-dual”.³³ Ramakrishna Paramahamsa himself once said that the Lover, the Beloved and Love are one and the same.

“Rilke was right”, Rama thinks, “you discover the nature of love as you grow older....What does one know of love at nineteen?” he asks himself, thinking of his marriage to Madeleine. Now he realises that

Love demands nothing, it says nothing,
it knows nothing, it lives for itself,
like the Seine does, for whom the build-
ings rising on either side makes no dif-
ference who can take away love, who
gives it, who receives? I could not even
say that I loved Savitri. It is just like
saying “I love myself” or “Love loves love”. ³⁵

The Hindu concept of love (human or Divine) stresses on union. Savitri marries Rama in the Spirit. The symbolism of their ritual marriage is clear: Rama (the individual Self) unites with Savitri (the power of devotion) as Satyavan and Savitri did.

The emotion, in Meera’s songs to Lord Krishna, and in the extracts from Kalidasa’s poem Meghaduta, resemble that which exists in the love of Rama and Savitri. The novel is imbued with a spiritual euphoria, full of that deep longing for the merging of one into the other, whether it is between Yaksha and Yakshini, between Gopi and Krishna, or between Man and Woman.

But Brindavan is not yet. The law of Karma still operates. Like all Hindu women, Savitri must resign herself to her fate. Life is a bullock-cart wheel and it turns whether the sun scorches or the rain pours. “Nobody could marry Savitri, nobody could marry a soul, so why not marry any one?” ³⁶

Rama understands, “one cannot possess the world, one can become it: I could not possess Savitri–I became I”.³⁷ When both have shed their lower self, they unite as Shiva and Parvati did. True oneness, to Rama, lies beyond the world of cause and effect. Oneness with the Supreme implies oneness of Rama and Savitri. It is the drama of the whole that matters. Rama is still not Rama and only on achieving realisation can Rama be Rama.

The mortal paradox of man is that when Krishna, is not Krishna there is Radha. The sin of Radha is because “Krishna is not yet. And when he is Krishna there is no Radha as Radha, but Radha is himself”.³⁸ Similarly, there will always be Savitri as long as Rama is not Rama. Therefore, Rama tells Savitri in the hospital,

who can take who?...there where we
take there is no love, and there
where we love there is no taking.
You can but take yourself. ³⁹

The answer for Rama is in discipleship of his spiritual Guru. The answer for Savitri is in the acceptance of her Dharma, for the “plane must accept the direction of the radar” that the law of Dharma be not broken. In her marriage to Pratap is her fulfilment with Rama as well, for Krishna is Gopika-Priya. Rama, representing the highest Self is that which she seeks, from life to life.

Both must rejoice in the rejoicings of others because joy is the identity of love. This is the affirmation of joy in both ethical and spiritual life. Rama advises Savitri:

Wheresoever there be no pain, Savitri,
that is where Krishna plays the flute.⁴⁰

That is, only when one is free from the pain of birth and death, can one reach Gauloka. ⁴¹

Illusion, the last of the ‘Faults’ must be left behind. Rama, towards the end, is reminded of the story of Radha, Krishna and Durvasa. The world is an illusion. Maya cannot be where Brahmin is”. ⁴² The world is an illusion. One cannot possess that which is beyond mind and body–the Principle, the Absolute, the ‘I’. When illusion is overcome, there is only ‘Shivoham’ ⁴³ –I am Shiva, I am God. Only on attaining true knowledge can the fundamental unreality of the world be understood, when the apparent world of the serpent vanishes into the reality of the rope, when the Self is realised as pure bliss and pure intelligence, when one is Shiva himself.

Rama at last is free. “To be free,” he says, “is to know one is free, beyond body and mind, to love is to know one is love, to be pure is to know one is purity”.⁴⁴ Raja Rao brings in two important Vedantic principles–‘Tat Tvam Asi’–That (Immortal Self) art thou, meaning God is the centre of our Being, and this Self is the state of ‘Sat Chit Ananda’–perfect being, perfect consciousness and perfect freedom. Freedom for the Vedantin means to be free of the Laws of Cause and Effect and of Causation, and to quit the cycles of rebirth. The real law is the “Life that prolongs itself beyond death...” Never at any time am I subject to Death’, says the Rigveda”.45 The real illusion is Death:

“When, the whole is taken from the whole,
what remains is the whole,” say the Upa-
nishads. Resurrection is not because death
is, resurrection is because life is.
Nobody is just a negative thought.⁴⁶

Rama, towards the end, is going where there is no returning. “To return you must not be. For if you are, where can you return”? ⁴⁷ The light of Truth is the end of the journey. The aim of his pilgrimage is toward the liberation from self to knowledge of his Self, to assimilate Himself into Himself. In pure joy Rama becomes a disciple in Travancore (symbolic of India). The words that sounded skeptical in the beginning have become meaningful to him: “A Brahmin is he who knows Brahman”. What delusion, what sorrow, can afflict him who is the seer of the unity of existence? He knows that when Rama becomes Rama he will have wed Savitri.

References

¹ Raja Rao, The Serpent and the Rope, London. John Murray, 1960, p. 231.
² In Sankara’s philosophy, salvation rests on the intuitive grasp of the truth that the soul and the Brahman are one. The realisation of Atman is the realisation of Selfhood or Godhood.
³ Raja Rao, The Serpent and the Rope, p. 336.
⁴ to ¹¹ Ibid., pages 395, 172, 115, 364-365, 365, 115, 365, 293.
¹² Ibid., p. 188. From 1st verse of Raghuvamsa.According to the Hindu concept, Parvati represents the unity of God and Goddess, Man and Woman.
¹³ Ibid., p. 176.
¹⁴ Rama and Savitri compare themselves to Tristan and Iseult in page 365.
¹⁵ The Serpent and the Rope, p. 184.
¹⁶ Ibid., p. 169.
¹⁷ Ibid., p. 301. Sri. Sankara says “Thaunavyaka Prakatitha parabrahma Tatvam.”–“The publishing of Truth is the vocable of silence.”
¹⁸ Ibid., p. 171. Rama identifies his relationship with Savitri with that of Siva and Parvati.
¹⁹ to ²⁵ Ibid., pages 174, 232, 52, 375, 172, 171, 172.
²⁶ The Silent Teacher (Mauna Guru Dakshinamurti ) teaches his four silent disciples the lesson of salvation. Truth is taught and learned in silence.
²⁷ The Serpent and the Rope, p. 314.
²⁸ to ³⁰ pages 171, 296, 296.
³¹ From the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad.
³² The Serpent and the Rope, p. 172.
³³ to ⁴⁰ Ibid., pages 172, 231, 231, 199, 172, 368, 368, 369.
⁴¹ Gauloka–the plane where Krishna resides–where all Bhakta, (lovers of God) go eventually. ⁴² The Serpent and the Rope, p. 112.
⁴³ So’ham (I am That) is more correct than ‘Shivoham’.
⁴⁴ The Serpent and the Rope, p. 387.
⁴⁵ to ⁴⁷ Ibid., pages 389, 112, 408.