Raja Rao : Explorer of East-West Spiritual Unity

Letizia Alterno pays homage in The Guardian to a legendary Indian author who died in his home in Austin, Texas, recently…thousands of miles away from his ancestral home in southern India.

Raja Rao, 97 (born November 8, 1908; died July 8, 2006), was one of the three founding fathers of Indian English writing. The other two in this “holy trinity” were Mulk Raj Anand and R.K. Narayan.

“In 1929, the promising young Indian writer Raja Rao received an invitation to study at Montpellier University. From then on his life took a different turn, leading to long periods in France, England, Italy and Texas – though India remained the place he always returned to.

“By the time of his death at the age of 97, his dozen or so novels and short-story collections had reflected in the profoundest way on some of the 20th-century’s most significant events and cultural divisions.

“Rao is mainly known in Europe as the author of Kanthapura (1938), his account of an Indian village’s response to the Gandhian non-violent civil disobedience movement of the time. It has become a classic text in Indian schools, hailed as the first literary manifesto to point to an Indian way of appropriating the English language.

“Following the outbreak of the second world war and the disintegration of his marriage, Rao returned to India in search of answers to his emotional ‘wavering’. Abandoning writing, he visited Gandhi’s ashram at Sevagram, in Maharashtra, in 1942, and got involved in the independence struggle; Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi were among his friends, he recalled in the anthology The Meaning of India (1996).

“Rao first visited America in 1950, five years before settling down there and marrying Catherine Jones, an actor. In 1966 he started teaching philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, retiring as emeritus professor in 1980. His second marriage ended in divorce, and he married Susan Vaught in 1986. He received India’s highest literary award, the Sahitya Akademi fellowship, in 1997.

“Although he settled in Austin, Rao made it a point to go back and forth to India, in real life as well as in fiction.”

For more on Raja Rao you may visit Outlook India magazine.

(Thanks Holly for drawing my attention to the passing away of this great author.)