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.

Raja Rao was born on 8 November 1908 in Hassan, in the princely state of Mysore (now in Karnataka in South India) into a Kannada-speaking Brahmin family and was the eldest of 9 siblings, with seven sisters and a brother named Yogeshwara Ananda.

His father, H.V. Krishnaswamy, taught Kannada, the native language of Karnataka, and Mathematics at Nizam College in Hyderabad.

His mother, Gauramma, was a homemaker who died when Raja Rao was 4 years old.

The death of his mother when he was four left a lasting impression on the novelist – the absence of a mother and orphanhood are recurring themes in his work.

Another influence from early life was his grandfather, with whom he lived in Hassan and Harihalli or Harohalli).

Rao was educated at a Muslim school, the Madarsa-e-Aliya in Hyderabad.

After matriculation in 1927, he studied for his degree at Nizam's College.

Osmania University, where he became friend with Ahmed Ali.

He began learning French.

After graduating from the University of Madras, having majored in English and history, he won the Asiatic Scholarship of the Government of Hydrabad in 1929, for studying abroad.

Rao moved to the University of Montpellier in France.

He studied French language and literature, and later at the Sorbonne in Paris, he explored the Indian influence on Irish literature.

He married Camille Mouly, who taught French at Montpellier, in 1931.

In 1931 to 1932, he contributed four articles written in Kannada for Jaya Karnataka, an influential journal.

The novel Kanthapura (1938) was an account of the impact of Gandhi's teaching on nonviolent resistance against the British.

Rao borrows the style and structure from Indian vernacular tales and folk-epics.

The marriage lasted until 1939.

Later he depicted the breakdown of their marriage in The Serpent and the Rope.

Rao published his first stories in French and English.

Returning to India in 1939, he edited Changing India with Iqbal Singh, an anthology of modern Indian thought from Ram Mohan Roy to Jawaharlal Nehru.

He participated in the Quit India Movement of 1942.

In 1943–1944 he co-edited a journal from Bombay called Tomorrow with Ahmad Ali.

He was a prime mover in the formation of cultural organisation Sri Vidya Samiti, devoted to reviving the values of ancient Indian civilisation.

Rao's involvement in the nationalist movement is reflected in his first two books.

He returned to the theme of Gandhism in the short story collection The Cow of the Barricades (1947).

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 1963.

The Serpent and the Rope (1960) was written after a long silence, and dramatised the relationships between Indian and Western culture.

The serpent in the title refers to illusion and the rope to reality.

Cat and Shakespeare (1965) was a metaphysical comedy that answered philosophical questions posed in the earlier novels.

He had great respect for women, and once said, "Women is the Earth, air, ether, sound, women is the microcosm of the mind".

In 1965, he married Katherine Jones, an American stage actress.

They had one son, Christopher Rama.

Rao relocated to the United States and was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin from 1966 to 1986, when he retired as Emeritus Professor.

Courses he taught included: Marxism to Gandhism; Mahayana Buddhism; Indian philosophy: The Upanishads; Indian philosophy: The Metaphysical Basis of the Male and Female Principle; and Razor's Edge.

In 1986, after his divorce from Katherine, Rao married his third wife, Susan Vaught, whom he met when she was a student at the University of Texas in the 1970s.

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.

In 1988 he received the prestigious International Neustadt Prize for Literature.

In 1998 he published Gandhi's biography Great Indian Way: A Life of Mahatma Gandhi.