(b. 1909), Indian novelist. Raja Rao was born in Hassan, a provincial town of Karnataka, India. He graduated from the University of Madras and continued his studies at Montpellier and the Sorbonne. His remarkable literary reputation is based mainly on...

Raja Rao (November 8, 1908 – July 8, 2006) was an Indian writer of English language novels and short stories, whose works are deeply rooted in Hinduism. Raja Rao's semi-autobiographical novel, The Serpent and the Rope (1960), is a story of a search...

Raja Rao: An Anthology of Recent Criticism Ragini Ramachandra, ed. Delhi. Pencraft International. 2000. 192 pages. Rs350 ISBN 81-85753-39-3 OF THE THREE nonagenarians who established the Indian novel in English (the others being Mulk Raj Anand and R. K. Narayan), Raja Rao...

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS The Record (Bergen County, NJ) 07-16-2006 Raja Rao, 97; eminent Indian novelist THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Date: 07-16-2006, Sunday Section: LOCAL Edtion: All Editions Biographical: Raja Rao NEW YORK — Raja Rao, a novelist who helped create the English...

Of the few [Third World] writers who have managed to synthesize forms and idioms out of the clash of the native and Western, one certainly thinks of Raja Rao, whom many consider the most brilliant Indian ever to write fiction in English. Forty years ago, in a preface to his first book Kanthapura, he wrote one of the first manifestos on Third World literary style.

… English is not really an alien language to us. It is the language of our intellectual makeup—like Sanskrit or Persian...

[In Kanthapura,] Raja Rao has abandoned his position as story teller, giving it over to his fictive female persona [Achakka]. I can think of few other instances in Third World fiction where a male novelist has done this. (p. 134) With the exception of Afro-American fiction, I would have to say that in most Third World novels female characters play lesser roles than their male counterparts—no doubt in large part because Western (romantic) love is missing as a theme. If women are present in any of thes...

Raja Rao's The Serpent and the Rope, the classic of Indo-English literature, portrays the encounter between East and West on the intimate plane of sex, love, and marriage. The recurring theme of interracial and intercultural relationships in Indo-English literature is explored in Raja Rao's novel with a set of variables not used elsewhere…. Rama, who is a curious mixture of sensuousness and asceticism, is as strongly attracted by the beauty of Madeleine's body as by the virtues o...