Rao’s method of reduction is, therefore, more poetic than philosophical in the traditional sense of the word. The knowledge that this method produces is not knowledge in the strict sense of the term; it is more like a totalized realization. It is by employing this type of personalized, intuitional reduction that Siva comes to the conclusion that India represents the quest for zero, the vertical, the ahistorical and the abhuman, while the Judeo-Christian, Chinese and communist civilizations represent the quest for the infinite, the horizontal, the historical, the human. Moreover, it is by this system that each character comes to represent some sort of abstraction, a formula, and relationships become equations—to be solved and resolved.

Chessmaster, as I see it, is the most powerful attempt in contemporary English literature to temporize and legitimize an ideology that denies the reality of the phenomenal world. In doing this, Rao is going against the dominant culture not only of the West, where he has spent most of his life, but of today’s India. This book defies the dominant culture not only in its content, but also in its form. It goes against the practices of the Western book trade with its cynical consumerism, cheap sales gimmicks and corrupting system of incentives and threats. This is not the kind of book that will be promoted at black-tie cocktail parties or expensive publishers’ bashes. This is an embarrassing book to have been written in the present world. Certainly, no ‘mainstream’ author could have written such a book and found a publisher for it. It has no relevance to contemporary issues or to current publishing trends. It does not fit into any slot, not even into the slot of the great Indian English novel. It has not been written merely for the here and now, but for the hereafter.

Mulk Raj Anand once said to me about Raja Rao, ‘It’s not enough to go on and on about Atman and Brahman, about the reality of Brahman and the illusion of the world; it won’t do to cling blindly to Sankara’s Advaita of the ninth century. Our problems are different. How do we solve them? Can Sankara’s answers serve us today?’ These were challenging questions for an admirer of Rao to answer, so I kept quiet. But on reading Chessmaster, I think I have found at least one way of answering them. Rao does not deny the world or its suffering, brutality and violence. His book is imbued with the very real problem of dukkha, the cosmic sorrow that the Buddha sought to eliminate from the world.