Rao was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1964 by the Sahitya Akademi or the National Academy of Indian Letters. He received the Padma Bhushan from the Indian government in 1969 and the Padma Vibhushan, India’s second-highest civilian honour, in 2007. He also won the prestigious Neustadt Prize, often called the ‘mini Nobel’, in 1988. Living his life in India, France and the United States, he left an unmatched oeuvre of distinct literary genius. Raja Rao considered his writing a sadhana, a spiritual discipline. Reading him is also a sadhana. Like the great Russian writers Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, his fiction pushes us deeper and higher into ourselves. ‘I am a man of silence,’ he said. ‘The word seems to come first as an impulsion from the nowhere, and then as prehension, and it becomes less and less esoteric—till it begins to be concrete. And the concrete becoming ever more earthy, and the earthy communicated, as the common word, alas seems to possess least of that original light.’ (Makarand Paranjape, The Best of Raja Rao, 188) Raja Rao has returned to the silence from whence he came, merging into that light, that sacred luminosity that he managed to capture into words.

I am convinced that the time is ripe to offer this and other Raja Rao works to a discerning reading public, because India has changed so much. It is at last ready to receive his myriad gifts of heart, mind and spirit.

Shimla,
March 2020

Makarand R. Paranjape
Professor of English, Jawaharlal Nehru
University, New Delhi
Director, Indian Institute of Advanced
Study, Shimla

Select Further Reading on Raja Rao

Dey, Esha. The Novels of Raja Rao: The Theme of Quest. New Delhi: Prestige Books, in association with the Indian Society for Commonwealth Studies, 1992.

Hardgrave, Robert L. Word as Mantra, The Art of Raja Rao. Ed. Robert L. Hardgrave. New Delhi: Katha Publications in association with University of Texas, Austin, 1998.

Mittapalli, Rajeshwar, and Pier Paolo Piciucco. Eds. The Fiction of Raja Rao: Critical Studies. New Delhi: Atlantic Books, 2001.

Naik, M.K. Raja Rao. New York: Twayne Publishers Inc., 1972.

Narasimhaiah, C.D. Raja Rao. Indian Writer’s Series. New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann, 1973.

Narayan Shyamala, A. Raja Rao: Man and His Works. New Delhi: Sterling, 1988.

Niven, Alastair. Truth Within Fiction: A Study of Raja Rao’s The Serpent and the Rope. Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1987.

Raja Rao: 1988 Neustadt Laureate. Special issue of World Literature Today 62.4 (Autumn, 1988).

Paranjape, Makarand, ed. The Best of Raja Rao. New Delhi: Katha, 1998.

Sethi, Rumina. Myths of the Nation: National Identity and Literary Representation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999.

Sharrad, Paul. Raja Rao and Cultural Tradition. New Delhi: Sterling, 1987.

Preface

I am no scholar. I am a ‘creative’ writer. I love to play with ideas. It is like a chess game with horses, elephants, chamberlains, and the kings which might fight with one another. The game is not for winning. It is for rasa—delight.