When I asked Rao himself, he said the original was a man called K.S. (Krishnarao Shivarao) Shelvankar (1906–96), author of The Problem of India (1940), one of the first books by an Indian published by Penguin. He was born in Chennai, and educated at the Theosophical School, Adyar. He later attended the University of Madison-Wisconsin, the United States, and the London School of Economics. He was also a correspondent for The Hindu from 1942 to 1968. Shelvankar eventually became the Indian ambassador to the USSR. Before Independence, he was working for the communists in Europe. He had married a European woman named Mary. Like Kirillov, he had written an anti-Gandhian tract. The other important thing about this neglected novel is that it predicts the downfall of communism. The paradox of history, however, is that though this ideology has collapsed the world over, it persists in India. In the novel, on the other hand, it is seen as inappropriate for India, whatever be its use to the rest of the world.

It is interesting to note that Comrade Kirillov, first published in a French translation in 1965, was written earlier. Thematically, it represents the stage of negation before the spiritual fulfilment of The Cat and Shakespeare. Kirillov, as a communist and atheist, has negated the karma yoga of Kanthapura and the jnana yoga of The Serpent and the Rope by denying the existence of the Absolute; thus, his quest results in failure. The bhakti yoga of The Cat and Shakespeare, especially in the character of Nair, is the culmination of the various stages of spiritual realization in the earlier novels. Nair is the first character in Rao’s novels who does not merely seek Truth, but who has found it, who actually practices it.

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.