The urgency behind this recollection of Rao’s extraordinary life and oeuvre is the astonishing Raja Rao archive, bequeathed to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, UT-A, by his wife Susan. The Raja Rao papers are spread across forty-two cartons and five document boxes. I am fortunate to be the first scholar to take a comprehensive look at the whole collection. Before these papers were given to the Harry Ransom centre, they were stored in many boxes. The most important of these were lodged in the basement of Rao’s Pearl Street apartment, not too far from the university where he taught philosophy for twenty years.

My personal connection with Rao was nurtured from my very first contact with him in 1981 as a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Rao, then in his early seventies, had come to lecture in a class taught by the famous professor of linguistics and authority on world Englishes, Braj B. Kachru. Great writer though he was, Rao was not only unbelievably gracious to me but fostered a bond, which only grew deeper with the years. I was one of the few in the wide circle of Rao’s admirers, scholars, students and friends who not only saw some of these unpublished works when he was alive but also had an idea of what he meant to do with them. One of his strongest wishes was the publication of the two remaining volumes of his beloved Chessmaster trilogy.

Rao was working on the remaining unpublished volumes, ‘Daughter of the Mountain’ and ‘Myrobalan in the Palm of the Hand’, until practically his last days, stopping only when his health deteriorated. While I read the unedited typescripts, with squiggles of the author’s hand-written corrections, I was astounded at just how significant the unpublished works were. I am convinced that when the trilogy is finally published, it will be one of the longest and most distinguished works of fiction in the English language.

Rao, who considered writing a sadhana, a spiritual discipline, himself called the trilogy an extended dialogue between the Brahmin and the rabbi, or between zero and infinity. Reading and studying him, I felt his words, like Bhartrihari’s notion of vac, were meant to lead us from the mundane–material to the transcendental–sublime. Rao’s writings have the capacity to lift up our consciousness from the lowest depths of the horrors of human experience to the heights of wholeness, integrity and liberation.