Cover

PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

The Meaning of India

RAJA RAO, a path-breaker of Indian writing in English, was born in Hassan, Mysore. He was awarded the Padma Vibhushan, the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature.

Introduction to the New Edition

1

The late 1990s saw the publication of two important books on a similar theme. The Idea of India (1997) by Sunil Khilnani turned out to be an international bestseller. Widely read, discussed and promoted in India, it celebrated the Nehruvian idea of India. Putting India’s first prime minister at the very vanguard of the makers of modern India, Khilnani asserts: ‘But surpassing all in his influence on independent India’s political possibilities was Jawaharlal Nehru.’1 (32) The reason was that ‘Nehru wished to modernize India, to insert it into what he understood as the movement of universal history’ (32). Moreover, the Nehruvian state stood for certain values—‘democracy, religious tolerance, economic development and cultural pluralism’ (35).

Just a year before Khilnani’s The Idea of India, another book came out, but very quietly, with very little fuss or fanfare. Rather audaciously, it was called The Meaning of India. And why not? Its author was the legendary Raja Rao, almost ninety then, one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. The Meaning of India was published by Kapil Malhotra’s Vision Books. Malhotra had inherited one half of what used to be Dina Nath Malhotra’s Hind Pocket Books, India’s first paperback imprint. Despite such an impressive pedigree, Rao’s book was a sleeper.

Interestingly, The Meaning of India also prominently featured Jawaharlal Nehru. Rao, then resident in northern France, crossed the German border to see him. The location, just ten miles from the Swiss border town of Basel, was Badenweiler, in southern Germany. That is where Nehru’s wife, Kamala, suffering from tuberculosis, was convalescing. Nehru, just released from jail, had gone to Europe to spend time with her. The year was 1935. Kamala was to pass away a year later in Lausanne.

Raja Rao begins the chapter, ‘My First Meeting with Pandit Jawaharlal’, thus: ‘It was so very long ago. I was very young then. I used to dream of Bodhisattvas.’2 (22) Rao is carrying for Nehru a copy of Sur les traces du Bouddha by René Grousset, later translated into English as In the Footsteps of the Buddha. And three bottles of Evian. He is thrilled at the prospect of meeting Nehru: ‘When Jawaharlal was announced in Europe, I knew he was there. How could anyone, except an Indian, know the secret historicity of his presence?’ (23) ‘He’ here refers to the Bodhisattva—for Rao has convinced himself that Nehru was the one:

Lord, when I see your face, may it shine as that which brought compassion to man, quadruped and tree, twenty-five centuries ago. If Mahatma Gandhi was a Visvamitra, Pandit Jawaharlal was the Bodhisattva. Lord, mayst thou have a halo round thy auspicious face!

(26)

Such innocence, such anticipation! A contemporary reader would be taken aback. But Rao’s fertile imagination is informed by the urge and belief to replicate the archetypal ideal Indian state. Call it ‘Ram Rajya’, to use Mahatma Gandhi’s phrase for it. No wonder, unlike Khilnani, Rao has more than two telling chapters on Gandhi in The Meaning of India.

Thinking of Nehru, rather wistfully if not wishfully, Rao hopes and prays, ‘What a great thing it would be for India and the world . . . if Panditji were to declare: “Yes, of course, friend, this be my path. This, the sure, trodden, ancient way. The eightfold path to the knowledge of the root of bondage and freedom from sorrowings.”’ (26) But it would seem that Rao is fated to be disappointed. Nehru is quite unlike Rao’s image of him:

His quick gestures, his sudden solipsisms, silences, his radiant recognitions, were not of any Jataka text. I was taken aback, having almost reeled into the contemporaneity of the world. I felt lost. Why had I come? Where had I come?

(26)

There is also a slightly disconcerting exchange over the Evian bottles:

‘Here are the Evians you asked for,’ I said.

‘How much did you pay for them?’ he asked, taking them and leaving them with the cashier.

‘Oh, Panditji, for God’s sake!’ I begged.

‘For God’s sake what?’ he queried nervously.

‘I’m an Indian,’ I said.

‘What’s that got to do with it?’ he remarked with indifferent irritation. He didn’t know about my Kapilavastu.

‘Well, we’re not a nation of shopkeepers,’ I said. ‘That’s not the way I was brought up.’

‘We live in the world of today,’ he said . . .

(27–28)

Then Nehru, the supreme modernizer, as if to disabuse young Raja’s extreme Indophilia, declares:

We’ve had enough of Rama and Krishna. Not that I do not admire these great figures of our traditions, but there’s work to be done. And not to clasp hands before idols while misery and slavery beleaguer us.

(31)

Rao, though slightly shaken from his idealized conception of Nehru, doesn’t entirely give up on his dream. What follows this initial shock of partial disillusionment, however, is sheer magic. The old Kapilavastu appears—and disappears—as the two banter. Nehru wants some of Rao’s ample shock of hair. When the latter says he will happily surrender it, Nehru wonders, ‘But how will it stick?’ (29)

Kamala Nehru also appears, albeit briefly, as a luminous presence, as she ‘lay on her hospital bed with radiant naturalness’ (34). To Rao,

She seemed so like a figure from the Ramayana or the Mahabharata—simple, wise, dedicated, timeless. To her, acceptance seemed the very breath of beauty. She lay unafraid of the darkness of the clouds, the solitude of the hills, the cruelty of Hitlerite mankind.

(36)

2

In The Meaning of India, Raja Rao declares, ‘India is not a country (desa); it is a perspective (darsana).’ (10) The word ‘darsana’, incidentally, is the Hindu word for philosophy; it means seeing, experience, vision, perception, standpoint, insight and outlook. But what darsana does India embody? Absolute, non-dual consciousness, according to Rao. Even if there was no India in a physical, material sense, India as an idea would always exist. As Rao puts it, ‘India has no enemies. She only has adversaries’ (48), and she ‘has to turn defeat into victory’ (50).

The entire universe, sentient and non-sentient, in its own infinitely rich and diverse ways, also seeks the Absolute. That, I think, is what the Buddha meant when he said that the whole universe is on fire: ‘“What does not disappear does not exist.” For every sense perception is afire. “Look, the universe is burning!”’ (189) Again, to quote Rao, “There can be no world without duality, yet there can be no peace in duality.’ (82) Duality is primordial unhappiness. That is why everything that exists experiences this dukkha, which is the very essence of duality. Duality, two-ness, implies separation from the source. Whatever has individuality is therefore separated, ego-bound, vibhakt (divided), and therefore seeks self-transcendence—in dissolution or union—as the means to regain its lost wholeness.

But if everyone and everything seeks the same ‘thing’ that India seeks, what makes her different?

The difference is that it is in India where this seeking has become self-conscious, reiterated generation after generation, down the centuries. Not just that, one might even say that India has not only sought but found the Absolute. There is a prevalent Buddhist belief that if the world is to be saved from destruction, the inspiration for the radical transformation in consciousness must come from India.

Rao also states this position quite unequivocally:

There are, it seems to me, only two possible perspectives on human understanding: the horizontal and (or) the vertical. They could also be named the anthropomorphic and the abhuman. The vertical movement is the sheer upward thrust towards the unnamable, the unutterable, the very source of wholeness. The horizontal is the human condition expressing itself, in terms of concern for man as one’s neighbour—biological and social, the predicament of one who knows how to say, I and you.

The vertical rises slowly, desperately, to move from the I to the non-I, as non-dual Vedanta would say. It is the move towards the impersonal, the universal (though there is no universe there, so to say) reaching out to ultimate being, where there are no two entities, no you and I.

The horizontal again, on its long, arduous and confused pathways, will reach the same ultimacy by stripping the I of its many vestments, through concern and compassion for the other . . .The vertical then is the inherent reality in the horizontal . . .

(139–140)

Or again:

There are only two pathways to looking at the world: the causal way or the unpredictable: or to use my metaphor . . . the horizontal or the vertical . . . In the context of Indian philosophy, we could say, either there is duality or non-duality.

(194)

Rao, using a method akin to scientific reductionism, ensures that the crux of the matter boils down to one contest—between duality and non-duality.

For him, ‘There are indeed no horizontal solutions, the human has no answer ever.’ (192) Locating this contrast in a trans-civilizational dialogue with André Malraux, Rao quotes the latter as saying, ‘You remember what Dostoevsky said: Europe is a cemetery of ideas—yes, we cannot go beyond good and evil. We can never go, as the Indians can, beyond duality.’ (46)

The dukkha, the deep suffering that we experience as human beings, is, therefore, the distress of duality, the sadness of time, process, growth, decay, causality, contingency—in a word, the sorrow of temporality, of horizontal existence. As Rao observes, ‘In the dissolution of the object, then is happiness.’ (80) The dissolution of the object, of the world itself, is only possible by a radical negation. It is a negation that rests on the denial of objective reality, of anything other than the self. Upon such a negation of duality, the whole world is reduced to its primal state of pure consciousness, Advaita (non-duality).

Raja Rao characterizes earthly life as an exercise in duality; that is why the merely mundane feels like a curse, Sisyphian or otherwise:

For the world is war—the war of the opposites. Good and bad, night and day, man and woman, are all, as it were at war with each other, in the sense that the two things can never be at harmony—harmony is always transcendence.

(82)

The world, which is duality, which is the war of opposites, craves for peace, a peace that comes only from transcendence: ‘Thus transcendence is man’s only need. In transcendence there is neither man nor woman, day nor night . . .’ (82)

The purpose of the world is to lead, force, us to transcendence. Every object, in other words, points by its very partiality and limitation to that from which it arises for the time being and to that in which it dissolves upon its true cognition—the absolute, the ultimate reality, non-separate from us. The aim of life, according to this view, is ‘the abolition of duality, of contradiction—and of the peace it should bring to one’ (liii). It is in this schema that India is ‘not a country (desa), it is a perspective (darsana)’ (10). And the meaning of India is ‘Knowledge, Jnana, itself the “I”’ (196), as the last page of the book, once more, affirms.

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.

Rao’s fellow student friend, Ahmed Ali, went on to become a famous novelist, another peer, Chetan Anand, an influential film producer–director. Rao also began learning French at Aligarh, which contributed to his decision to go to France a couple of years later. After matriculating in 1927, he returned to Hyderabad to enrol in a BA course at Nizam’s College. Two years later, he graduated, having majored in English and history.

In 1929, Rao won the Asiatic Scholarship of the government of Hyderabad for study abroad. He went out of India for the first time in his life. In a sense, he never quite returned home again. His scholarship took him to the University of Montpellier in France. He was researching the missing link in India’s impact on Europe, especially if the Cathars, whom he believed had been influenced by Buddhism, could provide the vital clue.

At Montpellier he also met Camille Mouly, a French teacher. They married later that same year. As Rao told me, ‘We had a very simple arrangement. I would write and she would support me.’ No question that Camille was the most important person in his life till the marriage broke up some ten years after. She features, thinly disguised as a fictional character, in his major works such as The Serpent and the Rope and The Chessmaster and His Moves.

Rao’s first efforts as a writer were in Kannada, his mother tongue. Between 1931 and 1933, he published three essays and a poem in Kannada in a journal called Jaya Karnataka. For the next two years, he researched the influence of India on Irish literature at the Sorbonne. His first short stories were published in journals such as Asia (New York) and Les Cahiers du Sud (Paris). In 1933, Rao abandoned research to devote himself to writing.

Rao, however, soon shifted to English from Kannada. As he recalled to me, ‘I realized that the time was not ripe to become a global writer in Kannada. Though I was proudly nationalistic, I thought writing in English would make a greater impact on the world.’ His early short stories were published in a collection called The Cow of the Barricades and Other Stories in 1947. Another volume, The Policeman and the Rose (1978), came out much later. It retained the seven earlier published stories, with three new ones written in the 1960s.

In addition to novels and short stories, Rao published essays, travelogues and biographical sketches in various journals and popular magazines. Some of these have been collected in The Meaning of India. But much earlier, he co-edited with Iqbal Singh two collections of essays, Changing India (1939) and Whither India (1948). He was also the editor of Jawaharlal Nehru’s Soviet Russia: Some Random Sketches and Impressions (1949).

Although Rao lived abroad, he never ceased to be an Indian in temperament and sensibility. In fact, his awareness of Indian culture grew, even though he could not settle down permanently in India. He became a compulsive visitor, returning to India again and again for spiritual and cultural nourishment. In that sense, Rao never completely left India. In 1933, he visited Pandit Taranath’s ashram in his quest for self-realization. In 1938, his small masterpiece, Kanthapura, although written earlier, was published from London.

One year later, Rao’s marriage disintegrated; he found himself back in India, his spiritual search renewed. He even appeared to give up writing to seek the truth. In the next few years, Rao visited a number of ashrams and religious teachers, notably Ramana Maharshi of Tiruvannamalai and Narayana Maharaj of Kedgaon. He also called on Mahatma Gandhi at Sevagram, an account of which is in The Meaning of India. Around this time, Rao also became a public figure in India, active in several social and political causes.

In 1942, when most of India’s major leaders were imprisoned during the Quit India movement, he participated in the underground agitation, along with several Congress socialists such as Aruna Asaf Ali and Achyut Patwardhan. During this period, Rao also started a journal called Tomorrow, to be published from Bombay (now Mumbai), co-edited with his friend and fellow-writer Ahmed Ali. Rao was also associated with the cultural-spiritual organization Chetana, which still exists. Another of Rao’s dream projects during this period was to start Sri Vidya Samiti, with the help of his then friend and patron Raja J. Rameshwar Rao of Wanaparthy. However, his plans failed to take off and he also parted ways with Rameshwar Rao.

Around the same time, in 1943, Rao’s life, however, took a decisive turn from politics back to spirituality. He found his preceptor at last in Krishna Menon, better known as Sri Atmananda Guru. Menon had been a police officer before being shown his true vocation by a mysterious wandering spiritual master from north India. Rao’s life underwent a great change after meeting his master. He shifted to Trivandrum (now Thiruvananthapuram), living there on and off for several years.

After India became independent, Rao returned to France in 1948, finding it difficult to settle down permanently in India. He visited the United States in 1953. The same year, his fable, ‘India—A Story’, appeared in Encounter (London) and was reprinted in The Meaning of India with a slightly altered title. He came back to India in 1958 with André Malraux, Charles de Gaulle’s emissary to Nehru. Rao’s account of that important visit is also included in The Meaning of India.

In 1959, he published ‘The Cat’ in The Chelsea Review (New York). This story would later be expanded into his novel, The Cat and Shakespeare (1965). In 1960, twenty-two years after Kanthapura, Rao’s masterpiece, The Serpent and the Rope, was published. About ten years later, Comrade Kirillov (1970) came out in English, although it had appeared earlier in a French translation, Le Comrade Kirillov (1965). That year, Rao moved permanently to the United States, when he was invited to be a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin (UT-A). Also in 1965, he married Katherine Jones, an American stage actress. They had a son, Christopher Rama. Rao divided his time between the United States, France and India until his retirement from the University of Texas in 1980.

At UT-A, Rao was a legendary teacher, lecturing to very large classes. His pedagogy was most unusual. He was known to come to class and announce, ‘Ask me a question, any question you like.’ The class took off from such a challenge. I asked him once, ‘What if you didn’t know the answer?’ He replied, ‘I meditated on my guru; the answer would come.’ He also cultivated, over the years, friendships with writers, scholars, poets and a variety of influential people. These included the great proto-Indo-European linguist and machine translation pioneer Winfred P. Lehmann, who had invited him to UT-A; physical scientist and Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine; and theoretical physicist E.C. George Sudarshan. All of them worked on the same campus, as did other famous subcontinental novelists, including G.V. Desani and Zulfikar Ghose. Rao was also acquainted with a number of extraordinary personalities, including E.M. Forster, Albert Camus, J. Krishnamurti, Czeslaw Milosz, Octavio Paz, Woodrow Wilson and Indira Gandhi, all of whom he corresponded with and wrote about.

In 1986, after his divorce with Katherine, Rao married Susan, who is today the custodian of his incredible legacy. His third wife, Susan, many years younger, served and tended to him more devotedly than any Hindu wife I know. Her kitchen in their small apartment always smelt of herbs. Everything served at her table was organically grown and, of course, vegetarian. The only exceptions were some rich desserts specially ordered from a shop nearby or some south Indian food brought from a restaurant.

The Story Continues on BooksBarbecue!

Enjoyed this preview? ❤️ Do not stop here!

Read the complete book free online → 🔗

Continue reading now on BooksBarbecue and discover every page!

Love reading? Bookmark BooksBarbecue.com for more amazing books!

Happy Reading!