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RAJA RAO
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Raja Rao
Indian writer
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Raja Rao, (born November 8, 1908, Hassan, Mysore [now Karnataka], India—died July 8, 2006, Austin, Texas, U.S.), author who was among the most-significant Indian novelists writing in English during the middle decades of the 20th century.
Raja Rao
QUICK FACTS
BORNNovember 8, 1908
Hassan, India
DIEDJuly 8, 2006 (aged 97)
Austin, Texas
NOTABLE WORKS
“The Serpent and the Rope”
Descended from a distinguished Brahman family in southern India, Rao studied English at Nizam College, Hyderabad, and then at the University of Madras, where he received a bachelor’s degree in 1929. He left India for France to study literature and history at the University of Montpellier and the Sorbonne. Also while in France he married Camille Mouly, in 1931. He returned to India in 1933—the same year that, in Europe and the United States, some his earliest short stories were published—and spent the next decade there moving among ashrams. He also participated in the movement for Indian independence and engaged in underground activities against the British. Roa returned to France in 1948 and subsequently alternated for a time between India and Europe. He first visited the United States in 1950, and in 1966 he became a professor of philosophy at the University of Texasat Austin, though he continued to travel widely. He retired and was named professor emeritus in 1980. His first marriage having ended in 1949, he married twice more, in 1965 (to Catherine Jones) and 1986 (to Susan Vaught).
Rao wrote a few of his early short stories in Kannada while studying in France; he also wrote in French and English. He went on to write his major works in English. His short stories of the 1930s were collected in The Cow of the Barricades, and Other Stories (1947). Like those stories, his first novel, Kanthapura (1938), is in a largely realist vein. It describes a village and its residents in southern India. Through its narrator, one of the village’s older women, the novel explores the effects of India’s independence movement. Kanthapura is Rao’s best-known novel, particularly outside India.
His subsequent novels took an increasingly broad focus, and by 1988 one critic hazarded that Rao’s “greatest achievement is the perfection of the metaphysical novel.” Rao’s second novel, The Serpent and the Rope (1960), is an autobiographical account of the narrator, a young intellectualBrahman, and his wife seeking spiritual truth in India, France, and England. The novel takes Rao’s first marriage and its disintegration as its subject. More broadly, it investigates the intersections of Eastern and Western cultural traditions, a subject reinforced by the novel’s style, which brings together many literary forms and texts from across those traditions. The Serpent and the Ropedrew wide praise and is considered by many critics to be his masterpiece.
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