but of the modern human experience in general,
forever encountering absurdity and relentlessly
striving toward ultimate success and happiness.
James R. FlemingRao, Raja (1908– )
Born to a Brahmin family in Mysore in South
India, Raja Rao left India in 1927 to study in
France and stayed abroad for most of his life. The
long stay in France and the United States was in-
terrupted by many forays back to India, where he
stayed at various ashrams, including Gandhi’s in
Sevagram, in search of a guru. As a writer, Rao be-
longs to the generation of preindependence novel-
ists, like Mulk Raj Anand, Bhabani Bhattacharya,
and G. V. DESANI, to name a few, whose writing is
imbued with a strong anticolonial nationalism.
Rao’s writing also displays a cosmopolitan blend
of Indian and Western sensibilities as a result of his
having spent the impressionable years of his life in
Europe. His later pieces, on the other hand, par-
ticularly the novels written after the long gap that
followed Kanthapura (1938), is saturated with the
deep mystical vision of Vedantic philosophy.
Kanthapura, Rao’s only preindependence novel,
has become a classic text in postcolonial studies for
its foreword that functions as a manifesto on the
urgent need to indigenize the English language:
“One has to convey in a language that is not one’s
own the spirit that is one’s own.... We cannot
write like the English. We should not... .” Rao
tackles the ambiguities and complexities arising
from the use of the colonial master tongue, Eng-
lish, to express a cultural and historical sensibility
that is far distant from it. He announces his bold
attempt to forge a narrative in the oral tradition of
the Puranas of Hindu tradition. But Kanthapura
is no Purana in the religious mold; instead, it is a
superb blend of the visionary and the secular, as it
tells the inspiring tale of the influence of Gandhi
on a remote Indian village at the height of the civil
disobedience movement in the 1920s and 1930s.
Rao’s text idealizes the village community, even as
it foregrounds the radical activism of women in
the freedom movement. Kanthapura’s Gandhian
nationalism is tempered with a strong strain of so-
cial realism that turns an inward eye to problems
endemic to Indian society, such as untouchability
and superstition.
With The Serpent and the Rope (1960), Rao
abandons the rural Indian milieu to narrate a
cosmopolitan tale set across India and Europe.
Semiautobiographical in inspiration, it marks a
deliberate shift in his fiction from nationalist poli-
tics to metaphysical themes, as Rao rehearses the
personal trajectory of the breakdown of his mar-
riage to a French academic. The narrative traces
the quest for spiritual salvation by Ramaswamy,
the novel’s somewhat self-absorbed protagonist,
even as it explores the gap between East and West,
articulated through the different world views of
Ramaswamy and Madeline, his French wife. The
novel explores the philosophy of Advaita Vedanta,
who asserts that reality is undifferentiated, so that
the serpent and the rope, which appear at odds,
are really one.
The Cat and Shakespeare (1965), a companion
novel to The Serpent and the Rope in its philosoph-
ical bent, delves even deeper into the issue of mys-
tical self-understanding. Comrade Kirillov (1976),
The Chessmaster and his Moves (1988), and his
other novels continue Rao’s preoccupation with
metaphysical themes. Rao has also written two col-
lections of critically acclaimed short stories: The
Cow of the Barricades, and Other Stories (1947)
and The Policeman and the Rose (1978). The Ganga
Ghat (1993), a set of three interconnected stories
on Benares, the holiest of Hindu cities, grapples
with the question of death.
Rao’s work stands out for its relentlessly philo-
sophical focus and his consistent experimentation
with generic boundaries that define the predomi-
nantly social realism of his contemporaries.
Rajender KaurRizzuto, Rahna Reiko (1963– )
Rizzuto was born in Honolulu and raised in
nearby Kamuela on the big island of Hawaii. Her
father was half Italian and half Irish. Her mother,
a second-generation Japanese American born inRizzuto, Rahna Reiko 251