The Soul In Its Village

Brahminhood. Casteism and untouchability. Mahatma Gan­dhi and the Indian independence struggle. These were the themes Raja Rao (1909-2006) obsessed over in his writing. The note resonating like an Omkaar over them all, however, is that of a passionate search for spiritual fulfilment. For this pioneering sage of Indian writing in English, the act of writing was an act of meditation (which it certainly can be for practising atheists too). What differentiated this process in Rao was its deep foundation in the Vedantic tradit­ion and its simultaneous questioning of social inequalities that run contrary to the unity Vedanta propounds. This is seen in Rao’s very first short story, Javni, written as a man in his twenties studying on a scholarship in France. Ram­­appa—a south Indian Brahmin, as many of Rao’s protagonists are—visits his sister in a village and interacts with her servant woman Javni, a widow in her forties from one of the lower castes. The young man, wafting in questions of existence, is amazed by her mute acceptance of her inferior position and her blank inability to recognise the indignities she endures for what they are. Towards the end, as the family leaves the village by bullock-cart, from across a river he sees her, a shimmering dot in the distance. He concludes, wondering: ‘Who is she?’ The twin question, unspoken, is: ‘Who am I?’

Penguin has republished some of Rao’s works—Kanthapura, The Serpent and the Rope, The Cat and Shakespeare, and Collected Stories—for a century that is unified by digital electronics and splintered ide­n­tities, meaningless bustle and meaningless terror. They serve as a reminder of an epoch when the ever-contriving intellect did not dominate the inner life of man. In the West as in the East, there was a yearning for those essentially human experiences that may be des­cr­ibed as mystical and induce an expansive feeling of oneness with all creation. But receptiveness, surrender, acceptance—these wat­ch­words of the mystic path equally enforced a cruel status-quoism in the outer world. Seers like Ram­akrishna Paramahamsa, Sri Aurobindo, Ramana Maharishi and Sai Baba taught the means of personal growth but expected social change to follow in its wake. The maverick Gandhi tried to unite spiritual, social and political change in his own complex and sometimes questionable ways. It cannot be denied, though, that he also served as the catalyst of the emancipat­ory movements of the lower castes.

For Rao, like for most Indians during the independence struggle, there was no separating Gan­­dhi’s spiritual and socio-political sides. Indeed, in Kanthapura, the idealistic Moorthy’s meeting with Gandhi is his moment of spiritual transformation: the Mahatma pats him, “and through that touch was revealed to him as the day is revealed to the night the she­a­thless being of his soul”. Just the way St Francis’s touch sanctified the mud­-spattered sow. Into the bonfire his foreign clothes and college books go—and he goes back to his village a soldier-servant of ahimsa, sat­yagraha, independe­nce, doing his 1,008 Gayatris thrice daily but supping in par­iah houses, spinning at the charkha, teaching and leading villagers, facing the brutal British boot and lathi.

As a writer, Rao’s masterful achievement was as a stylist, most evident in Kanthapura, The Cat and Shakespeare (this reviewer’s favourite) and The Great Indian Way, his pauranic biography of Gandhi. Pincher Martin and The Inheritors, in which William Golding inv­ented new languages-in-English for a dro­wning sailor and the Neanderthals, come to mind as equivalents. Rao deliberately chose to write an English suffu­sed with Indianness, one that winds this way and that, names and nicknames every person, place and thing, places story within story, like layers of an onion, smells as much of Sanskrit as of the prevalent language of the places he writes about. In Kantha­­pura, the dominant device he uses for this effect is the polysynde­ton—long sentences with clause after clause after clause linked by conjuncti­ons. In The Cat and Shakespeare, it is the many digressions of the irrepressibly comic Govindan Nair, philosopher and rat­ion-shop clerk of Trivandrum, who—even when he in jail for pilfering ration cards—has answers to everything. Why? Because he, like a kitten, unworryingly trusts the Great Mother Cat to carry him to safety!

The vivid cover illustrations by Robert Nicol make this reissue an attractive collection. It will certainly draw new readers of new generations to Rao, who did not enjoy the prodigious popularity of Mulk Raj Anand and R.K. Narayan, the other two masters of the triumvirate of Indian writing in English.