The Chessmaster and His Moves, as we have already seen, was the last novel Rao published. When it came out in 1988, it practically polarized the Indian English critical community into those who couldn’t stand Rao and those who loved him. I am going to argue that Chessmaster, by being such an extreme example of a Raja Rao text, highlighted certain problems for its readers as never before. Not that these problems were absent in his earlier works, but while The Serpent and the Rope was praised and hailed as a classic, Chessmaster seems to have been viewed as an embarrassment. Even faithful Raja Rao fans do not seem to have wanted him to go so far. It would seem that even subversion of the Western novel, after all, has its limits. Rao seems to have delivered an impossible sort of book, a novel that is really an anti-novel, a novel to end novels, a book that not only challenges, but actually resists reading in the normal sense of the word. In short, a book that makes impossible demands on its readers, strains their patience and almost forces them to reject it.

In Chessmaster, we have a particular version of Advaita that has, as I see it, the following major sources. One is the philosophical practice of Sri Ramana Maharshi and the other is the sunyavada of the Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna. Allied to the former is, of course, the philosophy of Rao’s guru, Sri Atmananda, and Nagarjuna’s thought, equally obviously, is derived from the Buddha. In Chessmaster, not the realization of self is sought as in the earlier works, but a dissolution of self. While Moorthy through right action illustrates karma yoga, Rama jnana yoga or the path of knowledge, and Govindan Nair, a type of bhakti yoga, of complete self-surrender to the Divine, Sivarama Sastri represents the power of negative dialectics, the attempt not to achieve something, but to vaporize one’s self into nothing.

Here the familiar dichotomies between the male and the female, vowels and consonants, India and the West, the Brahmin and the Kshatriya, the sage and the saint, logic and devotion, truth and the world, all hinge on the opposition between zero and infinity. The Judeo-Christian tradition is shown to represent the quest for perfect society here on earth, which India is seen as denying the validity of the world itself. The way out, for Rao, is not to improve things as the saint-soldier does, but to dissolve contradictions completely. For him, all numbers dissolve into zero as they emerge out of it. Infinite is merely cumulative, while zero is total negation that cuts the root of illusion. One can never become perfect in time, but attain perfection only by negating time.