The BURIED Book Club discussion

Author suggested by Rand's review
New Directions 15

Hard to believe that Raja Rao's books are buried but Goodreads' ratings don't lie.
There was a time,when Rao ,along with Mulk Raj Anand & R K Narayan, was one of the leading lights of Indo-Anglian literature.
In the fifties & sixties when the west was looking towards Indian spiritualism ( and India was looking at western materialism [We are never satisfied with what we've got!]), Rao's works provided a bridge to Indian culture to his western readership:
"His writing is the voice of an ancient, insightful culture that speaks to the modern world."
A professor of philosophy,his writings were often a vehicle for his philosophical thoughts, in the manner that Shaw's plays came to be known as drama of ideas– to readers that might mean his biggest strength or drawback,depending on how you choose to see it.
I read his The Serpent and the Rope & Kanthapura as part of my English lit syllabus & was blown by the former– the book is sadly out of print now. If I ever get a copy,I'd love to reread & review it.
A year back,I was in Landmark bookstore in India & the only book they had in their database was Kanthapura! I don't think this book is a good introduction to Rao's world– though it does show a unique way of using English language in the folk tale format. I'd highly recommend The Serpent and the Rope,& The Chessmaster and His Moves.

The Wiki link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raja_Rao

Bibliography:
Novels:
Kanthapura (1938)
The Serpent and the Rope (1960)
The Cat and Shakespeare: A Tale of India (1965)
Comrade Kirillov (1976)
The Chessmaster and His Moves (1988)

Short story collections
The Cow of the Barricades and Other Stories (1947)
"Javni"
"The Little Gram Shop"
"The True Story of Kanakapala, Protector of Gold"
"Akkayya"
"Narsiga"
"A Client"
"In Khandesh"
"Companions"
"The Cow of the Barricades"
The Policeman and the Rose (1978)
On the Ganga Ghat (1989)

Non-fiction
Changing India: An Anthology (edited with Iqbal Singh) (1939)
Tomorrow (edited with Ahmed Ali) (1943–44)
Whither India? (edited with Iqbal Singh) (1948)
The Meaning of India, essays (1996)
The Great Indian Way: A Life of Mahatma Gandhi, biography (1998)

Anthologies
The Best of Raja Rao (1998)
5 Indian Masters (Raja Rao, Rabindranath Tagore, Premchand, Dr. Mulk Raj Anand, Khushwant Singh) (2003)

Selected unpublished works
Daughter of the Mountain (vol. 2 of the Chessmaster trilogy)
A Myrobalan in the Palm of Your Hand (vol. 3 of the Chessmaster trilogy)


An excerpt from his Guardian obit:
"In 1929, the promising young Indian writer Raja Rao received an invitation to study at Montpellier University. From then on his life took a different turn, leading to long periods in France, England, Italy and Texas - though India remained the place he always returned to. By the time of his death at the age of 97, his dozen or so novels and short-story collections had reflected in the profoundest way on some of the 20th-century's most significant events and cultural divisions.
Rao is mainly known in Europe as the author of Kanthapura (1938), his account of an Indian village's response to the Gandhian non-violent civil disobedience movement of the time. It has become a classic text in Indian schools, hailed as the first literary manifesto to point to an Indian way of appropriating the English language.
(...)Rao viewed his writing as sadhana, a quest for truth; his stories never narrate events, but rather their protagonists' inner evolution and self-analysis.
Their surrounding reality is always filtered through the author's Vedantic lenses: Advaita Vedanta, or non-dualism, one of the six main schools of Hindu philosophy, holds that the world is the expression of an all-encompassing unity - Brahman - the ultimate and impersonal principle of the universe, from which all being originates, and to which it returns. It was first systematised by the sixth-century scholar Adi Shankara and, unlike the dualism of Dvaita Vedanta, views the individual self and the universal self, Brahman, as one. What captivates the western reader is the unusual blending of this monism with the ways of thinking of such diverse writers as André Malraux, Paul Valery, Dostoevsky, Baudelaire, Romain Rolland, Ignazio Silone, Rainer Maria Rilke, Kakfa, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson."

Here's the link:
Obituary: Raja Rao | World news | The Guardian

http://www.theguardian.com/news/2006/...

A must visit site for all things Raja Rao:
Raja Rao: Scholar, Philosopher, Literary Artist

http://therajaraoendowment.org/home.html

Wow, I gotta check this guy out.

Gregsamsa wrote: "Wow, I gotta check this guy out."

Yes you do.

Now for a microphone check, why this guy doesn't get this thread listed on his author page. Let's try this link :: Raja Rao. And for good measure, his top (?) three ::
Kanthapura
The Serpent and the Rope
The Chessmaster and His Moves