The Novelist as a Marxist

A Study of Raja Rao’s “Comrade Kirillov”

Comrade Kirillov is certainly Raja Rao’s most fascinating, if only a bafflingly erudite, novel, defying any cogent analysis or critical interpretation, perhaps a characteristic which it shares with its predecessors. The novel was published in 1966 in French under the title Le Comrade Kirillov, and not until 1976 the English version reached the literary circles, though Raja Rao was reported to have confessed that it was written first in English (vide Raja Rao by M. K. Naik, Twaynes World Author Series, 1972). The novel was written obviously under the influence of Socialist movement in Paris. Those were the days when Raja Rao wooed communism and had even some liaison with the French trade unionists and Trotskyists. This very nearly sets the tone and texture of the novel, though this enthusiasm with Raja Rao remained curiously sporadic what with his preoccupation with “The Ganges and her Sisters” and a book on Gandhi in South Africa he is said to be writing. His uncertain days in Paris, his discovery of America, and a “re-discovery of the metaphysic of life,” constitute another aspect of his personality, another aspect of his fiction, which made possible two of his metaphysical novels and won for him the unstinted reputation the world over as a major Indian fiction writer.

But Comrade Kirillov, as the title apparently suggests, is not a political novel, though assuredly politics becomes its theme; nor is it a tract on Marxism with all its assimilated and unassimilated bits of scholarship, quiddities and eccentricities. It is, at the vantage point, the story of an Indian intellectual who turns communist, and whose quest is beyond the perimeters of human existence much in the manner of a Moorthy, a Rama or a Govindan Nair, Raja Rao’s earlier protagonists, though cast as they were in a different mould and set in a different situation. Thus, four novels – Kanthapura, The Serpent and the Rope, The Cat and Shakespeare, and the present novel under review–form an interesting tetralogy, the moral and the spiritual strains in them tending to become a single whole or a single continuum.

There is not much of a story in Comrade Kirillov. It centres around the protagonist, Kirillov alias Padmanabha Iyer, an Indian expatriate who settles down in England and whose only obsession is with Marxism. Though he lives too long in the West, Kirillov has’nt changed a whit, insidiously. He is still an Indian who carries India with him, like his author, in his portmanteu, as it were. The Publishers’ blurb says: “India is too powerful in an Indian to allow him to lead an alien life. She loves her children much, for the mother is bigger than all politics, all economics, all castes and all philosophies” Kirillov marries Irene, a Czeck by birth who studies in the London School of Economics. “Her comradely duty was to be faithful to this man and to fight for the party”, suspending, if possible, all her cultural ground and personal tantrums. Time fleets happily for the Kirillovs amid friends who include the narrator, an immigrant Sikh who marries Peggy, and Peggy herself. A child is born to them whom they call Kamal Dev and keep up their Indianness. Kirillov visits India when the freedom struggle was at its peak, comes to England and is ever busy with his dialectical fiddlesticks. He even betakes himself to write a book on “Mahatma Gandhi; A Marxian Interpretation”, and to do some articles for “People’s War”, a weekly that comes from India. Thus the major part of the story is conducted through discussions, speculations and interpretations which provide verily the substance for Kirillov’s vicariousness, bragging and rodomantade. The later part of the story is in the nature of denouement. The narrator quickly recounts the events – the death of Irene in child-birth, Kirillov’s despondency, and his making a journey first to Russia, and later to China, the land of his party forbears. It is significant that Kirillov’s pilgrimage terminates in Communist China and not in India, just as Ram’s pilgrimage takes him to the Upanishadic India, and not France.

Not only this. There are remarkable correspondences and filiations, thematic or otherwise, between The Serpent and the Rope and Comrade Kirillov; it is as though the characters transmigrate from body to body and novel to novel. Irene, for instance, reminds one of Madeleine with all her intellectual exclusiveness and “bourgeois virtue” minus her cultural hybris. Like Madeleine, she too refuses to come to India. This is merely the symptom of neurotic self-hatred and false romanticism which made her deny Indian values, and rituals, a trait which almost forced Madeleine to seek refuge in the Buddhistic idea of Nirvana. Kirillov, like Rama, visits India in the middle of the book, a visit which changes the whole perspective of his life even as it does of Rama’s. The liberal use of episodes, anecdotes and the interspersion of the diary entries with the narration are the same old gimmick. The discussion on Indian metaphysics, Albigensions and the Cathars is something which Raja Rao cannot resist. They are implacably repeated here, more out of enthusiasm than what the fictional context warranted. The Sanskritic quotations, albeit used with an unusual dexterity, smacks of a virtuosity that is almost pedantic. These appear to be a part of Raja Rao’s technical legerdemain to secure facile “Indianness.”

But one may, of course, say that all this forms the riot of Kirillov’s consciousness, a consciousness which astonishingly absorbs all details of myth and legend, and of history, and forges links between the past and the present, between various historical incidents and epochs. Kirillov’s India is essentially “material” and is set off against Rama’s India which is “metaphysical” Kirillov has declared “logic is my religion and communism my motherland.” For him, there exists neither God nor religion; it is “rank humbug”, he says, and yet waxes poetic when he talks on the Vedantic affirmation of life and the self. He is a Marxian who perceives essential unity and oneness in history, but draws his conclusions from theology to interpret history. In brief, he is a bundle of contradictions seeking succour and comfort in antinomies rather than affirmations. As the narrator observes: “You brag about progress and remain a vegetarian. You brag about Islam and Communism and call your son Kamal Dev instead of calling him Stephovich you are an old hypocrite, I am sure, and an unrepentent one.”

However, Kirillov’s Communism has “a metaphysic, and a logic of fearful power.” And, therefore, one cannot easily by-pass his commitment. In his flair for dialectical will-of-wisp, he deifies Marx and Feurbach, and with his entrenched belief inMarxism, bestirs even an unbeliever. He betakes himself to prove the relevance to the modern context. Kirillov can talk with equal alacrity on a variety of Marxian paraphernalia like the surplus value of economic determinism, of the rise of the proletariat, the class war, etc. He reminisces a host of historical personalities and situations which become a veritable resume of the Communist heyday. His thought-provoking obiter dicta, centring around the Marxian dialectics, runs thus: “Man was born to fight–fighting is an instrument of Darwinian evolution, which made dialectics possible.” This is both the matrix and the manifesto of Marxism, which bestirs Kirillov into proving their relevance to the modern context. He draws conclusions from history. Fighting is a “biological instinct” which makes man belligerent by nature. It is this instinct which leads him into conflict with the other individuals of his race in the society, which ultimately paves the way for the “survival of the fittest.” This is, in fact, the ground and the goal of the Communistic creed. The class war is almost an historical inevitability, a Sine qua non, without which the human race becomes lethargic, and life a moribund activity. Kirillov disapproves of the Gandhian pacifism, which is utopian and antithetical to Marxism, says Kirillov; “Gandhi came and upset Marx...Mahatma Gandhi should have been born in the Middle Ages. He should not have troubled us with his theology in the rational age of ours.” Even Nehru’s socialism, with all its potential of “equal-distributionism”, comes in for a mild ridicule and systematic debunking. “Nehru’s neophyte speeches are only for nightingales. We are realists and the new world would have to be made of steel.” Kirillov is all for Stalin, that iron man who lived up to the Communistic ideals and who reached “the apex of history.” He decries Mussolinism and Hitlerism, with equal swiftness and acerbity. “Mussolini is a low-class buffoon. Hitler’s triumphs are of the underworld.” All those who are opposed to Marx are traitors, including Trotsky, because he was sold out to the capitalists. All this avowal of Kirillov’s is too naive and candid to need any explanation. But how is one to solve the problems besetting the world? The magic formula, which Kirillov unhesitatingly puts forth, is Communism. He envisages the rise of the proletariat to break the stronghold of Capitalism. When capitalist tendencies are obliterated, the world ever, by the class war, a State, based on the principles of equal opportunity, will emerge. “Then Kirillov will kill himself and the Communist State will rise. Marxism has no trafficking with the individuals.” There is thus, in Kirillov’s Communism, “a joyous knowledge for the neophyte.” One may not approve of what Kirillov has said and see eye to eye with him on all points, but one cannot easily forget in what he asserts.

Kirillov is on surer grounds as long as he adumbrates the Marxian dialectics. But where he appears biased is in his censure of men of letters. He is hyper-critical of Tagore and “Tagore industry.” He calls him “our Olympian film-star, beard insured.” He is for the Indian Kalidasa, the German Goethe and the Russian Dostoevsky. He can effortlessly forge a comparison between “Shakuntala” and “Iphigenia,” talk admiringly of D. M. Lawrence and “A Farewell to Arms.” The figures of Werther, Aloysha and Dimitri almost haunt his imagination.