The World of Books

THE WORLD OF BOOKS
THE ART OF RAJA RAO
(With special reference to the Serpent and the Rope)

Dr. D. Anjaneyulu

Among the Indian writers in English - or any other language, for that matter ­there are few who have written so little and yet left so deep and abiding an impression on the discerning reader as Raja Rao.

It is heartening that his novel The Serpent and the Rope (1960) had been awarded the Sahitya Akademi prize, though it has had to wait for three to four years for recognition in his land of birth, after being acclaimed as a modern classic abroad in England, France and America. Not surprising, this since the time of Tagore, over half-a-century ago that we sometimes choose to take the cue from others, possibly less familiar with an Indian literary work than us, in giving the author his due.

We seem to be suffering from a kind of schizophrenia in matters of literary criticism as see from the double standards sought to be applied in judging works of art by Indian authors. In the regional languages, almost every other writer is built up as a near genius for whom all the prizes of this country are inadequate. If by some chance, he fails to click in the best of translations, it is conveniently blamed on the hapless translator.

In English, on the other hand, where the multiple eloquence of the deaf is luckily not possible, a novel, a story or other creative work often meets with a resistance from the reader and a rivalry from the practising writer, while the professional critic, not free from prejudice, tries to judge it by the highest of world standards and comes to the inevitable conclusion that it is no patch on Proust or Tolstoy, Huxley or Priestley, Hemingway or Faulkner. Otherwise, it is difficult to imagine why only two books (The Serpent and the Rope and R. K. Narayan’s The Guide) were chosen for honour in about ten years or so, whereas almost every year, there is a book ready at hand in each of the regional languages to snatch the coveted prize.

As for Raja Rao’s solid book of substantial worth, one might say ‘Better late than never’, though what has so far been accorded to it is too little in terms of public recognition. If it has not been received more widely and appreciated more fully, it is no fault of the book or its author, but a fair measure of the intellectual climate in which we live and have our being.

The average reader in India is neither sufficiently deep-rooted in his own cultural tradition nor intellectually sophisticated enough in the modern, Western sense of the term. Raja Rao can hardly manage to win the easy popularity and quick success of some of his less gifted, but more flashy and resourceful, colleagues in the profession, because writing is to him more a vocation than a profession, rather a fulfilment, a sadhana, in his own words.

He seeks to bring the precision and acuity of the classical tradition to the keenness and resilience of modern experience and contemporary sensibility. Impenitently obsessed with Sanskrit and obviously in love with his mother tongue, Kannada, he is more Indian than many Indians. Drunk deep at the fountain-source of French culture, he is possibly more French, in a real way, than those who cannot help it because of their ethnic origin or national allegiance. But, his normal vehicle of expression is the English language, which he approaches with the sensitiveness of a verbal artist and the freedom and comprehension of a born poet.

In the high quality and limited volume of his output and in his serenity of outook too, perhaps Raja Rao comes closest to K.M. Forster, among writers in English. Up to date, he has published only three volumes of fiction, Kanthapura (1938) The Cow of the Barricades (1946) and The Serpent and the Rope (1960). A fourth volume entitled The Cat and Shakespeare was published in 1964, the quarter Centenary year of the Bard. Kanthapura an ear-filling name, worthy of a modern Kalidasa, which strikes the Indian imagination was an impassioned attempt to portray the powerful impact of the Mahatma and his movement on the Indian village. The sharp overtones of the Gandhian catharsis are all there, when rustic superstitions, local vested interests and patriotic impulses are thrown into the crucible of a freedom struggle under the consuming fire of a national upsurge.

The story is simple, a grandmother’s tale, told with a disarming naivette, absorbing interest and effective, but not without a trace of immaturity in its turns and twists. The dialogue is very much Indian and eloquent, though it tends to be harsh at places. In spite of its limitations, it remains a memorable picture of the exciting and eventful period.

The Cow of the Barricades is a collection of nine stories, written over a decade (from 1993 to 1994), most of them treating of homely familiar themes with the transforming touch of dream and phantasy. The title story reads like an extract from Kanthapura, the mother­worship motif being worked out with the cow as a symbol of resistance against the forces of evil. But the long story entitled “Akkayya” (Elder sister, in Kannada and Telugu) lingers in the reader’s memory, with its vivid complex of ambivalent love-­hate relations in a Hindu joint family.

Of his more recent works, appearing in a few Indian periodicals, one has to confess to a mixed reaction, for while the sketches, vignettes of Indian life like Varanasi, Deepavali and so on, including some other Indian cities, are almost poetic in their evocation of atmosphere, the stories, if they can be called as such, are rather tenuous in their links and tentative in their workmanship. They have a casualness of approach, which is far from satisfying.

The Serpent and the Rope is, however, not only Raja Rao’s most ambitious work up-to-date and chief title to fame, but the most significant contribution to Indian creative writing in English and possibly to Indian thought itself. It functions on two or more levels of consciousness, the physical and the metaphysical, the temporal and the spiritual, the political and the religious, and swings the reader in a blinding flash from France to India and , from, Paris and London to Banaras and Hariharapura, leaving him thrilled and excited, baffled and bewildered, irritated and exasperated at times, but chastened and satisfied at the end. It is, no doubt, heavy going as a narrative, because of the frequent quotations from Sankara and Kalidasa, the Vedas and Upanishads, the Subhashitas of Bhatrihari and the sayings of the Vachanakaras not to speak of the epigrams and analects of the French masters of prose and verse. It is not a straight and connected story, as the author himself mentions, but an uneven chronicle, full of musings in the flash-.

The story is rather thin in its basic elements if there be any story at all in the conventional structure of having a beginning, a middle and an end. It is the love, marriage-and-divorce of Rama, the Indian student, who goes to France for higher studies and Medeleine, the French­-woman, a lecturer at the University. Their union and separation are the two coping stores of this arch. Their coming together was something more than a youthful infatuation and their getting apart was quite other than a case of incompatibility of temperaments. No man and woman could be soaking in taste and temperament. Both are reflective, sensitive to a degree and share each other’s life as fully as possible, including each other’s personal superstitions. Intellectually, they come more than halfway towards each other.

Rama is engaged in researching into the Albigensian heresy of the Cathars in the south of France and Madeleine’s self-­chosen field of interest is Indian philosophy tapering off into Tibetan Buddhism towards the end. Delicately made in body and mind, they are totally devoted to each other and she, his senior in age by several years, worships him on this side of idolatry and he adores her as an angel. India is always on her mind and France is part of his consciousness.

With all the factors flowing from like-­minds being conducive to a lasting union, they fail to integrate with one another as each does not succeed in integrating with one’s own self. Rama sees the involutions of Hindu metaphysics in the Christian heresy and Madeleine seeks the Holy Grail unconsciously though in the concept of the eighteen aggregates of the Buddhist philosophy. It is not so much a conflict of cultures as a confusion of identities. Rama finds the Indian girl Savitri more in tune with the music of his life than the French woman scholar inspite of her (i.e. Savitri’s) drinking, smoking and other tomboyish ways.

Savitri takes him as lord and master, though she finally marries a tiger-shooting and polo-playing young philistine of her father’s choice. On a purely biological level he finds and gives greater consolation in the protective arms of the matronly wife of a friend in Bombay who, after a visit to the West, learns to prefer the white skin to the brown and therefore neglects her. Even the brief encounter with Lakshmi, a Cambridge under graduate, bumptious and persistent, is not without attraction, though he feels like showing her the door after a visit or two.

Rama and Madeleine fade away from each other’s consciousness with a vivid gradualness reminiscent of the changing scene of a motion picture. Their separation has a curious inevitability, which is underlined by the Hindu philosophy of life, with such delightful acuteness in the Raju ­Sarpa Bhranti, which involves confusion of the illusion with the reality. There is no room for compromise here, as Rama explains towards the end:

            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. You might go on saying all the time, “No, no, it’s the rope”, and stand on the serpent. And looking at the rope from the serpent is to see paradise, saints, avatars, gods, heroes, universes. For wheresoever you go, you see only with the serpent’s eyes. Whether you call it duality or modified duality, you invent a belvedere to heaven, you look at the rope from the posture of the serpent, you feel you are the Serpent, you are, the rope is. But in true fact, with whatever eyes you see, there is no serpent, there never was a serpent...you see the serpent and in fear you feel you are it, the serpent, the saint. Once the Guru­ brings you the lantern, the road is seen, the long, white road, going with the stars. ‘It’s only the rope’. He shows it to you. And you touch your eyes and know there never was a serpent. Where was it, where? I ask you. The poet who saw the rope as serpent become the serpent and so a saint. Now, the saint is shown that his sainthood was identification, not realisation. The actual, the real has no name. The rope is no rope to itself.

In this rather lengthy quotation is summed up the central philosophy of the book. The need for a Guru to light one’s path is vital to a seeker, though the whole philosophy may be there in the living tradition. Just as at the opening of the book, Rama cries, in his loneliness, for a mother, who was no more, at the end, in his utter helplessness, he cries out for a Guru, who is no where near. Says the diary:

            No, not a God but a Guru is what I need, “Oh lord My Guru, My Lord”, I cried in the middle of this dreadful winter night. It was last night; the winds of April had arisen, the trees of the Luxembourg were crying till you could hear them like the triple oceans of the Goddess at Cape Comorin, “Lord, Lord my Guru, come to me, tell me; give me thy touch, vouchsafe”, I cried,” the vision of Truth, Lord my Lord”.

It is not for nothing that this novel is autobiographical in form. Possibly, it is so, in substance too. A character in the book says that all books are autobiographical be they of history or science. That possibly reflects the author’s own view of the subject. Raja Rao himself can be described as a Brahmin in France. He is a pilgrim who prays on the Ghats of the Ganga at Benaras and meditates on the riverside of the Seine in Paris. He was once married to a French wife and sought his Guru in Swami Atmananda in Trivandrum, not far from the Cape.

He writes with the intensity of personal experience and the story has the depth and authenticity of real life. In his case, more than in any other, it is true to say that the style is the man. It is a compound of all the agony and beauty of the man’s personality. The purple patches and the precious writing here and there might irritate or prejudice the impatient reader, but it would be churlish to dismiss it as pretentious. The style has a poignancy into which have gone the dignity and majestic harmony of Sanskrit, the flavour and urbane delicacy of French and the homely intimacy of one’s own mother­-tongue.