The Cat and Shakespeare

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Author

Introduction

1

Author’s Note

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RAJA RAO (1909-2006), a path-breaker of Indian writing in English, was born in Hassan, Mysore. After he graduated from Madras University, he went on to the University of Montpellier in France on a scholarship. He moved to the United States in 1966, where he taught at the University of Texas at Austin until 1983, when he retired as emeritus professor.

A powerful and profound writer, and a superb stylist, Rao successfully and imaginatively appropriated English for the Indian narrative. He was honoured with India’s second-highest civilian award, the Padma Vibhushan, in 2007, the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1964, and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1988.

*

R. PARTHASARATHY is a poet and translator. The author of the long poem ‘Rough Passage’, he edited the influential anthology
Ten Twentieth-Century Indian Poets.
His translation of the fifth-century Tamil epic, the
Cilappatikāram,
was awarded the 1995 Sahitya Akademi Award. He is a professor emeritus of English and Asian studies at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. He was Raja Rao’s editor from 1974 to 1998.

In 1929, a young Brahmin from Hyderabad in southern India set out for France, for Montpellier in fact, ‘that ancient Greek and Saracenic town, so close to Sète where Valéry was born,’
¹
at the invitation of Sir Patrick Geddes (1854-1932), the Scottish town planner, who had established the Collège des Écossais there. It was, however, at Soissons, where Abelard was imprisoned and condemned, that the Brahmin Raja Rao (1908-2006) wrote his first stories, ‘Javni’ and ‘The Little Gram Shop’.
Kanthapura
was, for the most part, written in a thirteenth-century French castle in the Alps, and published in 1938 by Allen and Unwin.

‘Unless you be a pilgrim you will never know yourself.’
²
In his search for a guru, Rao wandered in and out of the ashrams of Pandit Taranath (1891-1942), near Mantralayam on the Tungabhadra River; Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) in Pondicherry; Ramana Maharshi (1879-1950) in Tiruvannamalai; Narayana Maharaj (1885-1945) in Kedgaon, near Pune; and Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) in Sevagram, near Wardha. His search ended in 1943, in Trivandrum, when he met Sri Atmananda (1883-1959).

In 1947, Oxford University Press, Bombay published
The Cow of the Barricades and Other Stories.
Rao’s spiritual experiences as a Vedantin form the basis of his next two novels,
The Cat and Shakespeare—
published as ‘The Cat’ in the Summer 1959 issue of the
Chelsea Review,
New York, and in 1965 by Macmillan—and
The Serpent and the Rope,
published in 1960 by John Murray.

Rao moved to Austin, Texas in 1966 to begin teaching Indian philosophy at the University of Texas, a position he held till his retirement in 1980. In 1978, as his editor at Oxford University Press, Madras, I published
The Policeman and the Rose: Stories.
Meanwhile, in 1965, Rao’s fourth novel,
Comrade Kirillov,
had appeared in a French translation in Paris. And, finally, in 1988, exactly fifty years after the publication of his first novel, Vision Books, New Delhi published
The Chessmaster and His Moves,
the first volume of a trilogy, to be followed by
The Daughter of the Mountain
and A
Myrobalan in the Palm of Your Hand.
The novel was awarded the tenth Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1988. Vision Books also published
On the Ganga Ghat
in 1993, and
The Meaning of India,
a collection of essays, in 1996.

One of the most innovative novelists of the twentieth century, Rao departed boldly from the European tradition of the novel, which he indigenized in the process of assimilating material from the Indian literary tradition. He put the novel to uses to which it had not perhaps been put before, by exploring the metaphysical basis of writing itself—of, in fact, the word. In the Indian tradition, literature is a way of realizing the Absolute (Brahman) through the mediation of language.

As a writer, Rao’s concern is with the human condition rather than with a particular nation or ethnic group. Rao told me one pleasant February morning in 1976 in Adyar, Madras:

One of the disciplines that has interested me in Indian literature is its sense of
sadhana
(
exercitia spiritualia
)—a
form of spiritual growth. In that sense, one is alone in the world. I can say that all I write is for myself. If I were to live in a forest, I would still go on writing. If I were to live anywhere else, I would still go on writing, because I enjoy the magic of the word. That magic is cultivated mainly by inner silence, one that is cultivated not by associating oneself with society, but often by being away from it. I think I try to belong to the great Indian tradition of the past when literature was considered a
sadhana.
In fact, I wanted to publish my books anonymously because I think they do not belong to me. But my publisher refused.
³

The house of fiction that Rao has built is thus founded on the metaphysical and linguistic speculations of the Indians. It is to the masters of fiction in our time, such as Proust and Joyce, that we must ultimately turn for a writer of comparable stature.

One of the difficulties a reader encounters in the presence of Indian literature in English is that of understanding the nature of the world projected by the text and, by implication, the strategies of discourse adopted by the writer to nativize the English language. Not enough attention has so far been paid to this in the Indian context, with the exception of Braj B. Kachru’s study.
⁴
Kachru examines the problem from the perspective of a sociolinguist. I will try, however, to explore its implications generally in the context of Indian literature in English, and specifically in the context of the fiction of Raja Rao. His fiction offers a paradigm of Indian literature in English with all its contradictions.

The preface to
Kanthapura
is revolutionary in its declaration of independence from English literature, and it has, as a result, become a classic stylistic guide for non-native English writers everywhere.

There is no village in India, however mean, that has not a rich
sthala-purana,
or legendary history, of its own. Some god or god-like hero has passed by the village . . . the Mahatma himself, on one of his many pilgrimages through the country, might have slept in this hut, the low one, by the village gate. In this way the past mingles with the present, and the gods mingle with men to make the repertory of your grandmother always bright. One such story from the contemporary annals of my village I have tried to tell.
⁵

Kanthapura
is the story of how Gandhi’s struggle for independence from the British came to a remote village in southern India. The struggle takes the form, on the one hand, of non-violent resistance to Pax Britannica and, on the other, of a social protest to reform Indian society. References to specific events in India in the late 1920s and early 1930s suggest that the novel has grown out of a distinct historical context. Told by an old woman, Achakka, the story evokes the spirit and discourse of the traditional folk narratives, the Puranas. In an attempt to elucidate Rao’s intentions, I shall examine the preface as an introduction to his own fiction.

Since the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century, its philosophical bias has been towards the particular; hence, its focus on the individual in an objective world. An entirely opposite view is expressed in
The Serpent and the Rope:
India is ‘perhaps the only nation that throughout history has questioned the existence of the world—of the object.’
⁶
When a non-native English writer such as Rao chooses this specific genre rather than one that is traditional to his own culture, the epic, for instance, and further chooses to project this genre in a second language, he takes upon himself the burden of synthesizing the projections of both cultures. Out of these circumstances, Rao has forged what I consider a truly exemplary style in Indian literature in English—in fact, in world literature in English. He has, above all, tried to show how the spirit of one culture can be possessed by, and communicated in, another language.

English as a code is now universally shared by both native and non-native speakers. What is not always shared or recognized are the manifestations of a specific culture embedded by the writer in the language. Though the language can now be taken for granted, what cannot any longer be taken for granted are the cultural deposits transmitted by the language. To understand them, the reader, especially if he is a native speaker, must equip himself with a knowledge of the writer’s sociocultural milieu. Would he not be expected to do so if he were to read an English translation of, say, the Mahabharata or, for that matter, the Iliad?

Culture determines literary form, and the form of the novel from cultures within India has been strongly influenced by those cultures themselves, resulting in something different from the form of the novel in the West. Rao himself is of the opinion that an Indian can never write a novel; he can only write a Purana. The Puranas are sacred history included in the canon of scripture, and they tell the stories of the origin of the universe, the exploits of gods and heroes, and the genealogies of kings. Their impact on the minds and imaginations of the people of India has been profound. Through them the Vedas and the Upanishads and the ideas of the great tradition of Hinduism were communicated by intention and organized effort to the people and woven into their lives in festivals and rituals. The Mahabharata and the Ramayana were expressly composed for the same purpose. There is, at least in southern India, an unbroken tradition of recitation of the two epics by ruler and teacher in the vernacular languages. The epics were recited in the form of stories by the
sutapauran,
the bards who recite the Puranas.

Sanskrit is, in fact, an obsession with Rao: ‘It is the source of our culture . . . and I have wished a thousand times that I had written in Sanskrit.’
⁷
Intellectually and emotionally, he is deeply rooted in the Indian tradition, especially in the philosophical tradition of the Advaita (‘monism’) Vedanta of Shankara (8th century). Shankara was interested in the nature of the relationship of the individual self
(
atman
)
with the universal Self (
Brahman
).
He insisted that they were identical (
tat tvam asi,
‘You are That’),
⁸
and that all appearances of plurality and difference arose from the false interpretation of the data presented by the mind and senses. He therefore rejected subject-object dualism. The only reality is
Brahman.
For Shankara, liberation
(
moksha
)
was the ultimate aim, and he defined it as intuitive knowledge of the identity of
atman
and
Brahman,
and not, it is to be remembered, as union with God.

Rao’s ideas of language, especially the empowerment of the word, are formed by the linguistic speculations of the Indians, notably Patanjali (2nd century bce) and Bhartrhari (5th century ce). Rao himself observes:

To say ‘flower’ . . . you must be able to say it in such a way that the force of the vocable has the power to create the flower. Unless word becomes mantra, no writer is a writer, and no reader a reader . . . We in India need but to recognize our inheritance. Let us never forget Bhartrhari.
⁹

Mantra may be understood either as an instrument of thought (< Skt.
man
, to think +
tra,
a suffix used to make words denote instruments), or as salvific thought (< Skt.
man
, to think +
trai,
to save). In an oral culture, such as that of the Indians, thinking is done mnemonically to facilitate oral recurrence. Thought comes into existence in rhythmic, balanced patterns, in repetitions or antitheses, in epithetic, aphoristic or formulaic utterances, in proverbs or in other mnemonic forms. Words are therefore invested with power, and this relates them to the sacral, to the ultimate concerns of existence.

In examining Rao’s use of English, it is important to keep in mind his philosophical and linguistic orientations. The house of fiction that he has built rests on these twin foundations. Among Indian writers in English he is perhaps unique in his attempt not only to nativize but also to Sanskritize the English language. Sanskritization is used here in the sense it is understood by anthropologists as a process of social and cultural change in Indian civilization. Rao strains to the limit all the expressive resources of the language. As a result, the Indian reality that emerges from his writing is authentic. Foremost among the problems the Indian writer has to wrestle with are, first, the expression of modes of thinking and feeling specific to his culture, and, second, terminology. Rao overcomes the first problem by invariably drawing upon Kannada and Sanskrit, and in the process he uses devices like loan translation, idiomatic and syntactic equivalences, and the imitation of native-style repertoires. He overcomes the second problem of finding words for culturally bound objects by contextualizing them so that their meanings are self-evident. By evoking the necessary cultural ambience, these strategies help the writer to be part of the mainstream of the literatures of India.

Among Kannada, Sanskrit, English and French, it is English that Rao most consummately possesses, and it is in that language that his fiction most consummately speaks to us. From the beginning, English is ritually de-anglicized. In
Kanthapura,
English is thick with the agglutinations of Kannada; in
The Serpent and the Rope,
the Indo-European kinship between English and Sanskrit is creatively exploited; and in
The Cat and Shakespeare,
English is made to approximate the rhythm of Sanskrit chants. At the apex of this linguistic pyramid is
The Chessmaster and His Moves,
wherein Rao has perfected an idiolect uniquely and inimitably his own. It is the culmination of his experiments with the English language spanning more than fifty years.
The Chessmaster and His Moves
has none of the self-consciousness in the use of English that characterizes his other work. In it he realizes the style that had eluded him in
The Serpent and the Rope.
Of style, he writes:

The style of a man . . . the way he weaves word against word, intricates the existence of sentences with the values of
sound,
makes a comma here, puts a dash there: all are signs of the inner movement, the speed of his life, his breath (
prāṇa
), the nature of his thought, the ardour and age of his soul. (1960: 164-65)

A peasant society such as Kanthapura has a homogeneous outlook and tradition. Its relationship to tradition produces a sense of unity and continuity between the present and past generations. Tradition is therefore an important instrument in ensuring social interdependence. Under the Raj, even villages were not spared the blessings of Pax Britannica, which triggered socioeconomic changes that eventually split up the small communities. The oral tradition itself became fragmented, though it remained the chronicler of the motherland through a poetically gifted individual’s repertoire.