Raja Rao

Raja Rao (8 November 1908 – 8 July 2006) was an Indian-American writer of English-language novels and short stories, whose works are deeply rooted in metaphysics. The Serpent and the Rope (1960), a semi-autobiographical novel recounting a search for spiritual truth in Europe and India, established him as one of the finest Indian prose stylists and won him the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1964. For the entire body of his work, Rao was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1988. Rao's wide-ranging body of work, spanning a number of genres, is seen as a varied and significant contribution to Indian English literature, as well as World literature as a whole.

Quotes

• “I am a man of silence. And words emerge from that silence with light, of light, and light is sacred. One wonders that there is the word at all ‐Sabda-‐and one asks oneself, where did it come from? How does it arise? I have asked this question for many, many years. I’ve asked it of linguists, I’ve asked it of poets, I’ve asked it of scholars. The word seems to come first as an impulsion from the nowhere, and then as a prehension, and it becomes less and less esoteric – – till it begins to be concrete. And the concrete becoming ever more earthy, and the earthy communicated, as the common word, alas, seems to possess least of that original light. The writer or the poet is he who seeks back the common word to its origin of silence that the manifested word become light. […] Thus the word coming of light is seen eventually by light. That is, every word-image is seen by light, and that is its meaning. Therefore the effort of the writer, if he’s sincere, is to forget himself in the process and go back to the light from which words come. Go back where? Those who read or those who hear must reach back to their own light. And that light I think is prayer.”
  • from his Neustadt Prize acceptance speech (June 1988):
  • [1]

• “We cannot write like the English. We should not. We can write only as Indians” because the “tempo of Indian life must be infused into our English expression. . . . We, in India, think quickly, and when we move we move quickly.” ... “There must be something in the sun of India that makes us rush and tumble and run on. . . . Episode follows episode, and when our thoughts stop our breath stops, and we move on to another thought. This was and still is the ordinary style of our storytelling.”
  • [2]
  • preface of His first novel, Kanthapura, written in 1937

from interviews/conversations

in Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World (1992)

book edited by Feroza Jussawalla and Reed Way Dasenbrock

• we are here after Joyce, and Joyce was very daring, very creative. Now we must all be very daring, and do what we want with the language we use.

• Being oneself is truly living. Gandhiji said, "If I don't live the truth, I am and will never be free." And being free is the essence of expressing oneself and Being. This is Moksha-Dharma and Moksha-that is what I am interested in. Dharma is the honesty of oneself with oneself.

• England and America are industrialized societies and therefore have a very superficial culture, what do they call it, a "horizontal" culture. They have lost touch with themselves, that is with a deeper, spiritual dimension. It is only out of this deeper experience that great literature arises...It is hard to be truly spiritual in a country like England today. Except Kathleene Raine, who writes authentic poetry in England today?

• (F.J.: How do we define the classics?) Rao: Whatever talks of realities, not supposed realities, interests me. Iread the classics because of their concerns with fundamentals. The classics are concerned only with fundamentals; otherwise, they wouldn't endure. I would much rather read a great spiritual writer like Dostoevsky or Valery than what is written today. Why read a superficial novel when I could read the Mahabharata or Shankaracharya?...(F.J. Could you name the key classics for you? Rao: The Odyssey, Tristan und Isolde, Genji in Japan, Chinese classical poetry, and of course the Indian literature of all ages. The revival of old Greek myths, in the contemporary literature of France, is very important The classics are always contemporary because they speak of our essential relation to love, life and death. (F.J.: Is the cultural context important here?) Rao: There is no cultural context to love, life and death - Hamlet is universal. Orpheus, Oedipus- these are the fundamental myths of man.