Indian author Raja Rao passed away in Austin, Texas, at the grand old age of 96. 
He’s best known as the author of Kanthapura, and is one of those authors so strongly identified with the 1930s and 40s that it was actually a little surprising to find out he was still alive. (But then, his contemporary Mulk Raj Anand only passed away fairly recently himself.)
Rao lived a nomadic, complicated, 20th century life. He was born and raised in Mysore, and oddly enough for a South Indian Brahmin boy, he received his education mainly at Muslim schools in Hyderabad (his father worked for the local government, I believe). According to excerpts of his memoirs here, he also studied at Aligarh Muslim University until he received an invitation to come to a university in Montpellier, France, from a visiting French professor. This was around 1928; he ended up staying in France for more than a decade, studying, again surprisingly, Christian theology, and marrying a French woman who was also in academia. The marriage soon fell apart, and Rao returned to India on the eve of the Second World War, becoming more and more religious. He spent a great deal of time in ashrams in the 1940s, though he was also active in the independence movement. Though Rao later returned to France, he finally settled in Austin, Texas, where he taught in the Philosophy department (alongside G.V. Desani) until he retired in 1980. One of the most remarked-upon aspects of Rao’s writing is his language. Though Rao spoke Kannada and studied extensively in France, he wrote in English. Some critics have said that he didn’t actually know English all that well at the time he wrote his first novel, while others have presumed that he intentionally implanted a Kannada rhythm into his language in Kanthapura, for effect. Here are the opening paragraphs — what do you think?
Our village–I don’t think you have ever heard about it–Kanthapura is its name, and it is in the province of Kara. High on the Ghats is it, high up the steep mountains that face the cool Arabian seas, up the Malabar coast is it, up Mangalore and Puttur and many a centre of cardamom and coffee, rice and sugar cane. Roads, narrow, dusty, rut-covered roads, wind through the forest of teak and of jack, of sandal and of sal, and hanging over bellowing gorges and leaping over elephant-haunted valleys, they turn now to the left and now to the right and bring you through the Alambe and Champa and Mena and Kola passes into the great granaries of trade. There, on the blue waters, they say, our carted cardamoms and coffee get into the ships the Red-men bring, and, so they say, they go across the seven oceans into the countries where our rulers live.
Cart after cart groans through the roads of Kanthapura, and on many a night, before the eyes are shut, the last lights we see are those of the train of carts, and the last voice we hear is that of the cartman who sings through the hollows of the night. The carts pass through the main street and through the Potters’ lane, and then they turn by Chennayya’s pond, and up they go, up the passes into the morning that will rise over the sea. Sometimes when Rama Chetty or Subba Chetty has merchandise, the carts stop and there are greetigns, and in every house we can hear Subba Chetty’s 350-rupee bulls ringing their bells as they get under the yoke.
While some of the unusual stylistic elements here may be for effect, there are a few phrases that do come across as non-idiomatic English. I find it somewhat uninteresting (and unlikely) to think that the unusual idiom of Kanthapura is purely an accident of the author’s imperfect mastery of the English language. It might be both correct and charitable to say that most of the effects are intentional, while some odd phrases (“granaries of trade”) are accidents of Rao’s newness to the language.
Unlike some readers of the book who might find the eccentric language charming, I tend to think that the more awkward phrases ought to have been edited out of the book by a friend or an editor.
One doesn’t see such phrases in Rao’s later fiction, though I must confess that aside from The Serpent and the Rope I haven’t read very many of the later books. And I even found The Serpent and the Rope quite difficult to get through, though I was an impatient graduate student the last time I tried it. (It might read differently now; perhaps it’s time for a re-visit.)
Milosz and Rao. Rao studied in Europe near the peak of the modernist moment, and was hardly untouched by that experience. Indeed, in some ways even his approach to Hindu and Buddhist mysticism in his later books seems to be tied up with modern western philosophical concerns. Throughout his career, he was in continual dialogue with many of the great world writers of his era, one of them being the great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz. Milosz devoted one beautiful poem to Rao, which explored their commonalities (they were both nomads as well as religious seekers), but also stressed at least one key philosophical difference. Here is an excerpt from Milosz’s poem “To Raja Rao” (1969):
[From “To Raja Rao”]
Raja, I wish I knew
the cause of that malady.
For years I could not accept
the place I was in.
I felt I should be somewhere else.
A city, trees, human voices
lacked the quality of presence.
I would live by the hopes of moving on.
Somewhere else there was a city of real presence,
of real trees and voices and friendship and love.
Link, if you wish, my peculiar case
(on the border of schizophrenia)
to the messianic hope
of my civilization.
Ill at ease in the tyranny, ill at ease in the republic,
in the one I longed for freedom, in the other for the end of
corruption.
Building in my mind a permanent polis
forever depreived of aimless bustle.
I learned at last to say: this is my home,
here, before the glowing coal of ocean sunsets,
on the shore which faces the shores of your Asia,
in a great republic, moderately corrupt.
A couple of things should be said to explain these lines. First, one might want to refer to some biographical background on Milosz. The “tyranny” above is Poland under the Nazis. One “republic” would have been Paris, where Milosz lived in the 1950s (Rao was there then as well; I don’t know if they knew each other personally). After 1960 Milosz lived in the U.S., the “great republic, moderately corrupt” mentioned above. Those places are important in MiloszÂ’s writing more broadly (he writes a great deal about California, which he loved and hated in equal measure).
Philosophically, Milosz extends the framework of the Platonic ideal (“the city of real presence”) to modern social and political anxieties. For him the “city of real presence” (which is clearly an allusion to PlatoÂ’s Republic) is longed for not just because it represents Truth, but because it represents something like a functional, happy community. ThatÂ’s happiness. And itÂ’s not that the “republic” doesnÂ’t exist at all. Republics do exist, but they are all in some sense corrupt. By the last stanza quoted above, it seems like Milosz has taught himself to accept them as they are, far from ideal.
The end of the poem brings us back to Rao (I’m omitting the middle part of the poem):
I hear you saying that liberation is possible
and that Socratic wisdom
is identical with your guruÂ’s.
No, Raja, I must start from where I am.
I am those monsters which visit my dreams
and reveal to me my hidden essence.
If I am sick, there is no proof whatsoever
that man is a healthy creature.
Greece had to lose, her pure consciousness
had to make our agony only more acute.
We needed God loving us in our weakness
and not in the glory of beatitude.
No help, Raja, my part is agony,
struggle, abjection, self-love, and self-hate,
prayer for the kingdom
and reading Pascal.
Like Milosz, Rao also led a very complex, nomadic, 20th century life. Rao, like Milosz, studied Catholic theology intensely at a time of political repression. And they were both in France after the War, and ended up in the States.
In the section of the poem above, “liberation” seems to have somewhat of a political connotation, though clearly the primary emphasis is spiritual. Milosz, I think is partly defining himself as a realist against Rao’s spiritual idealism (“I must start from what I am”), and partly marking the lessons learned from the violence of the 20th century first hand. “I am those monsters which visit my dreams” is a way of talking about the psyche, though it also probably refers, historically, to Poland in the war. And of course, it’s an acknowledgment of Milosz’s attachment to Catholicism, in which “my part is agony,/ struggle, abjection, self-love, and self-hate,/ prayer for the kingdom/ and reading Pascal.” The difference between Milosz and Rao is in that sense theological: Rao’s is a sprituality without “self-hate,” while the “agony” must be the starting point for Milosz as a philosophical Catholic.
As far as I know, Rao did not respond publicly to this poem, though I am quite curious as to what his thoughts might have been.
[Note: a predecessor for this post can be found here, warts and all.]
I love Milosz but I’m unfamiliar with Rao. Thanks for a wide-ranging and informative post, Amardeep.
“If I am sick, there is no proof whatsoever that man is a healthy creature.”
Yes. I embrace that whole-heartedly. Milosz’s doubt I’d take anyday over the certainty that plagues lesser mortals.
I also enjoyed the opening paragraphs of Kanthapura: I don’t think it needs editing, actually. It does sound a bit like Yoda but, as with Shakespeare, the ear quickly adapts to the text at hand regardless of its peculiarities. Kanthapura has lovely rural rhythms. It brings to mind some of Tagore’s non-fiction writing (which pertained, of course, to a different coast), as well as a journey I once took from Maharashtra down the Konkan coast.
This is why I love SM – you get to know remarkable desis who are rarely discussed anywhere else. Thanks for the post.
M. Nam
Mr Kobayashi, I also tend to be closer to Milosz intellectually, which feels weird because he’s so clearly a Catholic (of a sort), and I’m so clearly not.
I couldn’t say that I know Rao’s later philosophy well enough to make any claims as to whether Milosz was right about Rao’s approach to his Guru. It isn’t necessarily clear that he was : the Hindu mystical tradition can be as deeply involved with precisely “agony, struggle, abjection, self-love, and self-hate” as Catholicism. And I mean that in a good way — the rigors of the spiritual quest.
A bit more of Rao’s religious philosophy can be found here. Check out the quote from “The Chessmaster and His Moves” (1988), which gets into Krishna.
Outstanding post Amardeep!
I couldn’t say that I know Rao’s later philosophy well enough to make any claims as to whether Milosz was right about Rao’s approach to his Guru. It isn’t necessarily clear that he was : the Hindu mystical tradition can be as deeply involved with precisely “agony, struggle, abjection, self-love, and self-hate” as Catholicism. And I mean that in a good way — the rigors of the spiritual quest.
In Advaita Vedanta (non-dual Vedanta) the self is eternally free, the indivisble wholeness; our bondage – avidya – is only notional, so agony, abjection, self-love and self-hate are entirely illusory.
From your link on Rao:
…I want to say to you in utter honesty: And it is of that reality that the sages have spoken. The sage is one, someone beyond the saint. He is no one. He is the real seer. In fact, we are all sages, but we don’t recognize it. That is what the Indian tradition says.
Yes, isness sings, the song, the woman, and the affirmation, and the man who is no man: Man. It’s this transcendence from duality that makes life possible, and meaning self-evident.
Milosz calls this state the “beatitude,” and considers it an unstable condition, at least for him.
If I am sick, there is no proof whatsoever that man is a healthy creature.
Greece had to lose, her pure consciousness had to make our agony only more acute.
We needed God loving us in our weakness and not in the glory of beatitude.
No, Raja, I must start from where I am.
This suffering is the source of Miloz’s creativity:
I am those monsters which visit my dreams and reveal to me my hidden essence.
Whereas Rao considers the beautitude is the source of his creativity!:
Meaning itself, of course, is beyond the sound of the word, which comes to me only as an image in the brain, but that which sees the image in the brain (says our great sage of the sixth century, Sri Shankara) nobody has ever seen. 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 is sincere, is to forget himself in the process and go back to the light from which words come
Great post! Haven’t read Rao before and now can’t wait to pick up Kanthapura.
Great job Amardeep. As always, a very enlightening post. I have to second Moor Nam’s comments. Don’t know nothin’ about these folks. Good to learn about them.
On a separate note, most writers of english from india who write for indians, not the roys, seths and the lahiri’s, who mostly write for a western audience, seem to have a very distinctive style that may come from non-english speaking roots. That style seems to be on it’s way out but I am all for keeping it in.
Amardeep-
Thanks for this post and for the link to Rao’s more philosophical quotes. I was delighted to find in his musings on “silence” and “the word” echoes of the spandha karikas.
Before that link in the comments, I’d gone looking for Milosz and California and come up with this gem: http://www.alumni.berkeley.edu/Alumni/Cal_Monthly/September_2000/An_Invisible_Rope_-_The_Poetry_of_Czelsaw_Milosz.asp (sorry my browser won’t let me– or I can’t figure out how to– put those tidy links into my comments)
Initially, I was attracted by this sentence, “But Czeslaw Milosz is not, in fact, Polish,” thinking “Aha! Amardeep missed a beat!” On further reading it became clear that Milosz wrote in Polish, though he was born in Lithuania, and so I just went on to enjoy the article.
And the reason for this post (aside from offering props to you for opening this window, these two windows, on worthy authors) is this poem, quoted in the article:
So I wonÂ’t have power, wonÂ’t save the world? Fame will pass me by, no tiara, no crown? Did I then train myself, myself the Unique To compose stanzas for gulls and sea haze, To listen to the foghorns blaring down below?
Until it passed. What passed? Life. Now I am not ashamed of my defeat.
One murky island with its barking seals Or a parched desert is enough To make us say: yes, oui, si. “Even asleep we partake in the becoming of the world.” Endurance comes only from enduring. With a flick of the wrist I fashioned an invisible rope, And climbed it and it held me.
and the following text from the article: That phrase, “an invisible rope,” became a catchword for the artistic survival of émigré writers everywhere, in foreign countries where their names were unpronounceable, their work untranslated, and their literature peripheral. Milosz himself concentrated on building a Polish network—his own “invisible rope.”
And to thank Sepia Mutiny for being (for me) a part of that invisible rope.
Thanks Amardeep. Another great post.
you’re not?!
Well, maybe just a little, Anakin. I do have huge posters of St. Sebastian that I like to look at as I listen to Morrissey’s “The Boy With the Thorn In His Side.”
😉
And Gitanjali, thanks for the link and the poem — that is a rockstar comment contribution.
Lots of Desi writers abroad do the invisible rope thing too (and yes, in its ideal form this blog would be part of that).
What a grand trinity they were – RK Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, and Raja Rao. Now they are no more. Not for me those deep analyses or that ill concealed contempt for Indians thinking in “Indian” but struggling to write in English. Raja Rao’s metaphors are such a pleasure and so powerful. How can we forget his first South Indian metaphor “crushed in the seed” (that sounds so robust in Kannada or Tamizh and is common to both languages) instead of the more commonplace “nipped in the bud”.
Amardeep:Great post!! Just like your name keep reminding the folks about the “Eternal Lamp” of wisdom from Indians (or, should I say South Asians)- regardless where they live. As someone has said: “Science is organized Knowledge, while Wisdom is organized Life. His writing reminds me of Rabindranath Thakur of Bengal, K. M. Munshi, and Umashanker Joshi of Gujarat. You sound like a scholar and a decent man. Good luck with your teaching job at Penn.
Great Post.
Just to say, this is one reason why I tend to seperate diasporic responses to Indian lit. from those within: while I read (and loved) Kanthapura a long time back indeed, in high school in India, I don’t recall blinking at the particular phrase you mention. “Granaries of trade” still, somehow, feels like a “natural” turn-of-phrase.
Or perhaps, that my training isn’t in lit. is showing.
If I remember correctly, the only poem Milosz ever wrote in English was the one he wrote for Raja Rao (did someone already say this?)
Also on the list of poets and authors is A.K. Ramanujan, a “modernist” [and nephew of mathematician Srinivas Ramanujan], who translated and subsequently introduced Indian folklore and classical Tamil poetry (Sangam-era), to the “West.” His poetry is widely anthologized (most conspicuously by Norton), and a posthumous volume of his collected work was published in 1993(?); although he was fluent in Kannada and Tamil, much like Rao, he wrote poetry only in English.
Amardeep, its interesting what you say about Rao’s language in Kanthapura, its eccentricity, as I see it as a result of his being a poet and not intentional styling or difficulties with a new language–the cadence and balance suggests that his trouble was not in transitioning from one tongue to another, but from poetry to prose. Maybe I’m wrong, but phrases such as “granaries of trade,” however awkward in sound and meaning, don’t sit as crooked in verse and, the patched-up, broken feeling of his sentences (i.e. Kanthapura is its name, and it is in the province of Kara. High on the Ghats is it…), seems to make sense as line breaks, pauses, etc. in poetry:
Kanthapura is its name and it is
in the province of Kara high on the Ghats
is it…
Obviously I’m giving him a generous [revisionist] reading, but then again, it seems odd that a poet could write without consequence in a language he or she did not entirely comprehend. Similarly, if it was a deliberate exercise in aesthetics to implant a Kannada-rhythm in his work, it also seems odd that after causing much confusion as to his intent, the man simply abandon what was, at the time, a compelling experiment regarding language and identity.
In the end, who knows, not me. Very good post.
Dogday, thanks. I take your point about the poetic rhythm. He only does that (“is it”) in the second sentence, and then moves onto a conventional sentence structure — which supports your point. And yes, Ramanujan is one of the greats. I’ve read some of his short stories in translation too… might do a post…
Akshay, you’re right, “granaries of trade” isn’t that awkward, and perhaps it works as a literary metaphor. And don’t worry about training and whatnot — your views are always welcome.
Thanks for the fascinating post.
Raja Rao’s voice in Kanthapura seems so “old school” that I figured he passed away a long time ago until I read this. I think we should all feel a tinge of the sadness of inevitability as the voices of those who lived and wrote about a different, pre-independence India (Raja Rao, Nirad Chaudhri, and my favorite R.K. Narayan) slowly fade into the night
A Free adaptation of Czeslaw Milosz’s poem into Urdu:
Iss sheher meiN haiN ab talak Kuchh peR aise anchhuye shaakheN haiN phailiN duur tak saaye bhi haiN ghane ghane
kuchh the bashar jo iss jagaah vo kyaa hue, kahaaN gaye kuchh duur unke the makaaN lagte the yuuN pare pare maano sheher meiN aan pahuNche bin bulaaye, bevajeh
ye mulk jo meraa nahiN kehtaa na kuchh, suntaa nahiN ye sheher jo teraa nahiN koi dost na dushman nahiN
iss sheher meiN maiN aalimoN sa phir rahaa huuN badgumaaN aazaad huuN parvaaz meiN barbaad maiN Sukraat saa na hi kaamil na hi aamil na huuN guzraa na huuN shaamil
na hai tehzeeb hi koi na hai koi mumaalig bhi meiN kehta kisko ghar apna huaa jaataa tha sab sapnaa kahaaN haiN ilmo taalib jo chale Yuunaan se ik din meiN DhuuNDha har jageh unko na jo pahuNche zameeNne HiNd
hue jaate fanaa vo din nazar aate jo mujassim vo laMhe, ghaRiyaaN, vo pal chhin kitaaboN ke varaq har siMt
Amardeep,
It is quite a coincidence to encounter precisely the poem, the last four lines of which I was qouting to ze management to put off a discussion on marriage (with the minor emendation of ‘reading Milosz’) a few evenings ago. You may also listen to Milosz make few very interesting comments (one of which is that Milosz says this was the only poem he wrote directly in English), and then read this poem in a Lannan Foundation recording to which I have returned to often. It begins around 21.00 minutes into the reading. The follow up conversation with Helen Vendler is also worth a listen.
excellent site including poems to remember the great giant of literature. we deeply feel his death which can not be replaced in near future.
As I said earlier one of the most remarked-upon aspects of Rao’s writing is his language. Though Rao spoke Kannada and studied extensively in France, he wrote in English. Some critics have said that he didn’t actually know English all that well at the time he wrote his first novel, while others have presumed that he intentionally implanted a Kannada rhythm into his language in Kanthapura, for effect. But his writings made it clear that what sort of talent he had could not be replaced n near future.