After language the next problem is that of style. The tempo of Indian life must be infused into our English expression, even as the tempo of American or Irish life has gone into the making of theirs. We, in India, think quickly, we talk quickly, and when we move we move quickly. There must be something in the sun of India that makes us rush and tumble and run on. And our paths are paths interminable. The Mahabharata has 214,778 verses and the Ramayana 48,000. Puranas are endless and innumerable. We have neither punctuation nor the treacherous ‘ats’ and ‘ons’ to bother us—we tell one interminable tale. Episode follows episode, and when our thoughts stop our breath stops, and we move on to another thought. This was and still is the ordinary style of our storytelling. I have tried to follow it myself in this story.

It may have been told of an evening, when as the dusk falls, and through the sudden quiet, lights leap up in house after house, and stretching her bedding on the verandah, a grandmother might have told you, newcomer, the sad tale of her village.

Menton (Alpes Maritimes)

France

November 1937

Footnotes

1 Page numbers in parenthesis follow for quotations from the 2012 edition published by Penguin Books India.

2 Quotations from The Meaning of India are from the present edition, with page numbers in parenthesis.

Portions of what follows in this Introduction have been drawn and revised from my previously published work on Raja Rao, including ‘The Chessmaster and His Moves—A Review of Reviews and an Introduction’ (1992).

3 Makarand Paranjape, ‘First Philosopher-Novelist of Indian Fiction in English Raja Rao Dies’, India Today, 24 July 2006, https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/obituary/story/20060724-first-philosopher-novelist-of-indian-fiction-in-english-raja-rao-dies-782701-2006-07-24 (accessed on 21 February 2020).

4 Portions of the following overview appeared in an earlier version in my Introduction to The Best of Raja Rao (New Delhi: Katha, 1998) and in my earliest work on Raja Rao, an entry on the author published in The Survey of Long Fiction (New York: Prentice Hall, 1983), edited by Frank N. Magill.

5 Published first by John Murray in 1960, it was reprinted by Penguin Books India in 2014. Quotations are from the latter edition.

6 Quotations are from the Vision Books edition of 1988.

1. The Meaning of India

1 Benares.

2 The god Indra.

3 I have followed here closely an excellent English translation of the Jatakas by T.W. Rhys Davids.

4 Spiritual mode.

5 Sri Sankara (AD 788–820), the greatest Indian poet-sage (kavi) since the Vedas.

2. India—A Fable

1 See Note 2, p. 199.

2 Little Nigger, said affectionately.

3. My First Meeting with Pandit Jawaharlal

1 Rig Veda, Mandala 5.19.5, translated by Sri Aurobindo.

2 Buddhist Records of the Western World translated by Samuel Beal.

3 The above quotation is taken from the English translation of the book, In the Footsteps of the Buddha.

4 The Jatakas, translated by H.C. Warren.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid.

7 Rig Veda, 5.5.10, translated by Sri Aurobindo.

8 Bimbisara, king of Magadha, at the time of the Buddha.

9 Many years later Panditji went to see Krishnamurti several times.

10 Aligarh Muslim University.