For Rao, India alone, among all the nations of the world, stands for the vertical, the non-dual Absolute, the atemporal; the rest of the world seeks its perfection through time, moving towards an ever-receding Infinity at the projected end of the horizontal axis. But how do we go from the horizontal to the vertical? The only way is through sacrifice. The ego, the limited or false self, must be offered, just as the Boddhisattva leapt into the fire as a wise hare in the Jataka story that Rao recounts. And it is Agni, the sheer, vertical bridge between the dual and the non-dual, that connects the phenomenal to the noumenal.

It is not as if this whole book is nothing but abstruse metaphysics. There are engrossing accounts of Rao’s meetings, in addition to Nehru, with André Malraux, Mahatma Gandhi and E.M. Forster. There are also a couple of stories that have appeared earlier in The Policeman and the Rose, as also the famous preface to Kanthapura, and, finally, the acceptance speech for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature.

All told, this is a wonderfully engaging and stimulating book, which reminds us that the idea of India is certainly as, if not more, important than its physical reality.

Unfortunately, Rao’s opus was neither read nor circulated as widely as it ought to have been. Many decades would pass before its true worth was to be recognized.

Perhaps, that time has come with this new edition.

3

Raja Rao was born in an ancient and respected Brahmin family in Hassan, Karnataka. He was the eldest son in a family of two brothers and seven sisters. His father taught Kannada at Nizam’s College in the neighbouring Hyderabad princely state. When he was only four, his mother died. This was a defining, if tragic, loss. Indeed, the absence of his mother and the sense of being an orphan recur in his fiction. Perhaps the earliest influence on Raja was his grandfather, with whom he stayed both in Hassan and in Harihalli, in Karnataka, while his father was in Hyderabad. He seems to have imbued a spiritual orientation from his grandfather, a preoccupation that stayed with him throughout his life and is evident in all his works.

Raja joined his father in Hyderabad, going there to attend high school. He studied at the Madrasa-i-Aliya, then the most prestigious school in the state, where the aristocracy of Hyderabad sent their children. Raja was the only Hindu in his class. He was then sent to Aligarh Muslim University in northern India. His Aligarh days proved to be crucial in shaping his intellectual growth. Influenced by Eric Dickinson, Rao’s literary sensibilities were awakened. As a visiting professor from Oxford, Dickinson, though a minor poet in Britain, greatly inspired students in India.