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Editing Raja Rao
R. PARTHASARATHY
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It is in English that Raja Rao's fiction most consummately speaks to us.
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Unusually expressive: Raja Rao. Photo: Susan Raja Rao
"I was born in a dharmasala, room number one, in (the town) Beautiful, Hassana... "
THE words caught my eye as I unwrapped the typescript of The Policeman and the Rose, Raja Rao's first collection of short stories since The Cow of the Barricades (1947). It was also the first of Raja's books that I had edited. "One of the disciplines that has interested me in Indian literature," Raja told me one pleasant February morning in 1976 at Vasanta Vihar, one of those sprawling houses on the north bank of the Adyar River in Chennai that is the home of the Krishnamurti Foundation, "is its sense of sadhana — a form of spiritual growth."
Dressed simply but elegantly in khadi, I found him propped up in bed with his eyes shut. He was physically a rather small man, but his unusually expressive face commanded attention. His thick grey hair billowed in the wind as he came to. And he continued, "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."
Metaphysical speculations
The house of fiction that Raja has built is thus founded on the metaphysical and linguistic speculations of the Indians. As Raja's editor at Oxford University Press, I saw The Policeman and the Rose through the press, and it was published in 1978.
In the 1970s, English departments in universities across the country were at last beginning to take notice of Indian literature in English. Annotated editions of novels were in demand, and to meet this demand OUP published educational editions of Kanthapura (1974) and The Serpent and the Rope (1978), with introductions by C. D. Narasimhaiah of the University of Mysore, a scholar who has done more than anyone else to win international attention for Raja's works. With Raja's approval, I had abridged The Serpent and the Rope.
However, my greatest challenge as an editor came after I had left OUP and moved to Austin, Texas to work on a verse translation of the Cilappatikaram for my Ph.D. degree. I stayed with Raja at 1806 Pearl Street from September 1982 to February 1983 in a sparsely furnished two-bedroom apartment above a garage, where I would work for a few hours every day on the typescript of The Chessmaster and His Moves, a novel unlike any other that I was familiar with. We would spend the evenings at the kitchen table going over the pages that I had edited during the day. Raja approved, for the most part, my suggestions for revision. Editing the novel was an education in itself as we talked about the Indian philosophical, religious, and literary traditions well into the night, and rewrote the 50-odd pages of translations and glossary. I learned more about writing from Raja during those six months than I did from my teachers in high school, college, or university.
Linguistic pyramid
I was fascinated by Raja's use of English, and I came under its spell instantly. English is ritually de-anglicised: in Kanthapura English is thick with the agglutinants of Kannada; in The Serpent and the Rope the Indo-European kinship between English and Sanskrit is exploited creatively; 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 Raja has perfected an idiolect uniquely his own. It is the culmination of his experiments with the English language spanning more than fifty years. "The style of a man . . . ," he had written, "the way he weaves word against word . . . makes a comma here, puts a dash there: all are signs of the inner movement, . . . the nature of his thought."
The Chessmaster and His Moves is structured as a commentary (bhasya) on Indian esoteric knowledge from the Upanishads down, often expressed in the terse, aphoristic style characteristic of that literature. The narrative pattern is indigenous: it derives from the story (katha) tradition of which the finest example is Bana's Kadambari. The novel has an explicit metaphysical position — that of Advaita Vedanta which provides the focus for both understanding and assessing what happens in it. It was published in 1988 in New Delhi by Vision Books, Raja's primary publishers. It is the first volume of a trilogy, to be followed by The Daughter of the Mountain (in press) and A Myrobalan in the Palm of Your Hand. It was awarded the 10th Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1988. Raja was the first and only Asian to be so honoured.
The last book of Raja's that I had edited was The Great Indian Way: A Life of Mahatma Gandhi in 1997. It is a sprawling oral history, interspersed with tales from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. Raja had lived at Sevagram for six months in 1942, and every page of the book speaks of his awe of Gandhi.
Establishing status of literature
In his "Acceptance Speech" on March 24, 1997 in Austin, when he was elected a Fellow of the Sahitya Akademi, Raja observed somewhat wistfully: "To have been born in India and not have written in Sanskrit, or at least in Kannada is believe me, an acute humiliation. But I still dream of writing in Sanskrit — one day!" But the truth of the matter is that among Kannada, Sanskrit, French, and English, it is English that Raja most consummately possesses, and it is in that language that his fiction most consummately speaks to us. It was Raja who, more than any other writer of his generation, which included Mulk Raj Anand (1905-2004) and R. K. Narayan (1906-2001), established the status of Indian literature in English during India's struggle for independence from British rule.
It was a warm July morning at the Onion Creek Memorial Park in Austin. In a grove of live oaks and flowering myrtles under a clear Texan sky, Raja ended his long journey that had begun almost a hundred years ago in a small town in South India.
The cremation could as well have taken place on the banks of his beloved Pampa at Anandavadi, his guru Sri Atmananda's ashram in Malakkara in central Kerala. To the gentle recorded sounds of Radha Devi Amma's chanting and to the strains of the Gayatri mantra, Raja was cremated.
He was robed in a white dhoti with a red zari border, raw silk kurta, brown Nehru jacket, and off-white Kashmiri shawl. A garland of jasmine, lilies, and basil leaves covered his neck. Three of his guru's books, frayed at the edges, were placed on his heart at his request.
Susan, Raja's wife of 20 years, strewed rose petals around his body that lay in a casket made of ordinary cardboard. The ceremony was over in 20 minutes. Meanwhile, the Pampa waits for Raja's ashes, and when she receives them, Raja would have truly come home.
R. Parthasarathy was Raja Rao's editor from 1974 to 1998. He received a Sahitya Akademi Prize for his acclaimed translation of Cilappatikaram (Penguin Classics).
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