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...

[Raja Rao] published his first novel Kanthapura in 1938, which, but for its title, would have met with greater success than it did. It had a pictorial quality of its own both in word and style, and an approach to life and its problems more serious than had hitherto been made by any Indian writing in English, while it carried a sensibility and intelligence not found in many vernacular writers of the day. It centres round a small village in Mysore and the struggle for Independence through Satyagrah and non-co...

In The Cat and Shakespeare (1965) the larger natural symbols of The Serpent and the Rope (1960) have been adapted for a deeper and more intensive examination of Truth, now sought in the familiar domestic details of the ordinary workaday life—houses, walls, cats, coffee, illness, and so on. These are the dominant symbols of the novel, which recur page after page. The wall defines a threshold between the physical and supraphysical worlds; the bilva-tree hangs over the wall, thereby sanctifying it throu...

[The Serpent and the Rope] reflects the cultural synthesis effected in the mind of the author in his own encounter with Europe as epitomized by his intellectual French wife. Transcending these is his love for Savithri, a pseudonym for an Indian woman with whom Rao has maintained a Platonic relationship for some thirty years. To express the divine quality of their love, Rao borrows from the literature of Europe and India both, and the result is a monument to absolute love coupled with a series of metaphysica...

The Serpent and the Rope is much more than the description of the spiritual journey of an Indian visitor to a new land…. In his main character, Ramaswamy, the author has the East turn West in its search for one of the fulfilling mysteries of the universal quest. Rama comes to Europe to study the Albigensian heresy and to complete his doctoral thesis. During his immersion in his studies he meets and marries a beautiful French girl, Madeleine…. Ostensibly, the story is about the dissolution of t...

To some schools of Indian religion the cat has a metaphorical significance. There are two theories of Grace: In the first, man's responsibility is to cling to God as a baby monkey clings to its mother in flight. In the second, man depends wholly upon God for his protection and progress, as a kitten depends upon its mother to carry it about by the scruff of its neck. Raja Rao has used this latter metaphor as a point of departure for his third novel…. The Cat and Shakespeare is a tender and dece...

Whether writing of sophisticates or peasants, Raja Rao has a style that is slow-moving and difficult, and his texts require, for the ordinary reader, many notes of explication. Nevertheless, there are passages of immense beauty in his novels, and his notes are often delightful brief essays on Indian customs, history, philosophy and religion. Raja Rao's Kanthapura, written almost 35 years ago, has been belatedly published in the United States…. [Kanthapura] must be recommended to all interested...

If Raja Rao's The Serpent and the Rope has a shape of its own, it is one altogether outside the duality of the Western mind. Such is both the intent and fascination of this first-person narration of a Hindu-French marriage in terms of the metaphysical quest on both sides. As one travels with it from France to India on its various threads of time-place description, seeing the persona at both the inner and the impersonal distance, participating in talk-reflection which ranges, with a scholar's e...