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PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

The Meaning of India

RAJA RAO, a path-breaker of Indian writing in English, was born in Hassan, Mysore. He was awarded the Padma Vibhushan, the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature.

Introduction to the New Edition

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The late 1990s saw the publication of two important books on a similar theme. The Idea of India (1997) by Sunil Khilnani turned out to be an international bestseller. Widely read, discussed and promoted in India, it celebrated the Nehruvian idea of India. Putting India’s first prime minister at the very vanguard of the makers of modern India, Khilnani asserts: ‘But surpassing all in his influence on independent India’s political possibilities was Jawaharlal Nehru.’1 (32) The reason was that ‘Nehru wished to modernize India, to insert it into what he understood as the movement of universal history’ (32). Moreover, the Nehruvian state stood for certain values—‘democracy, religious tolerance, economic development and cultural pluralism’ (35).

Just a year before Khilnani’s The Idea of India, another book came out, but very quietly, with very little fuss or fanfare. Rather audaciously, it was called The Meaning of India. And why not? Its author was the legendary Raja Rao, almost ninety then, one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. The Meaning of India was published by Kapil Malhotra’s Vision Books. Malhotra had inherited one half of what used to be Dina Nath Malhotra’s Hind Pocket Books, India’s first paperback imprint. Despite such an impressive pedigree, Rao’s book was a sleeper.

Interestingly, The Meaning of India also prominently featured Jawaharlal Nehru. Rao, then resident in northern France, crossed the German border to see him. The location, just ten miles from the Swiss border town of Basel, was Badenweiler, in southern Germany. That is where Nehru’s wife, Kamala, suffering from tuberculosis, was convalescing. Nehru, just released from jail, had gone to Europe to spend time with her. The year was 1935. Kamala was to pass away a year later in Lausanne.

Raja Rao begins the chapter, ‘My First Meeting with Pandit Jawaharlal’, thus: ‘It was so very long ago. I was very young then. I used to dream of Bodhisattvas.’2 (22) Rao is carrying for Nehru a copy of Sur les traces du Bouddha by René Grousset, later translated into English as In the Footsteps of the Buddha. And three bottles of Evian. He is thrilled at the prospect of meeting Nehru: ‘When Jawaharlal was announced in Europe, I knew he was there. How could anyone, except an Indian, know the secret historicity of his presence?’ (23) ‘He’ here refers to the Bodhisattva—for Rao has convinced himself that Nehru was the one:

Lord, when I see your face, may it shine as that which brought compassion to man, quadruped and tree, twenty-five centuries ago. If Mahatma Gandhi was a Visvamitra, Pandit Jawaharlal was the Bodhisattva. Lord, mayst thou have a halo round thy auspicious face!

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