Sankara praises the river in his ‘Hymn to Ganga’ (‘Gangastotrarn’):
Rather a fish or a turtle in Thy waters,
A tiny lizard on Thy bank, would I be,
Or even a shunned and hated outcaste
Living but a mile from Thy sacred stream,
Than the proudest emperor afar from Thee.24
The true protagonist of these stories are not the men and women who throng the ghats of Kashi, but the Ganga herself. Like a thread of gold, the river braids the stories into a seamless whole. On the Ganga Ghat is steeped in the spiritual life of Kashi and is an eloquent reminder of the centrality of the city and the river in the Indian consciousness.
What is remarkable about these three stories is Rao’s understanding of women. Javni, Nimka and Sudha come across as real people whom we may have known. They are not characters in fiction. Sudha’s story is especially poignant. Born into a wealthy family, she gives up a life of ease and privilege. A spiritual aspirant, she leaves home and goes forth into homelessness in search of, as her name implies, the nectar of Knowledge.
It was Rao, 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. Neither Anand nor Narayan had come anywhere close to Rao’s innovative approach to fiction. Rao’s fiction is a philosophical quest in search of the word as mantra that would lead to liberation. Rao never considered himself to be solely an Indian writer. He had spent his formative years in France and not in England. Though his novels are rooted in the Indian philosophical tradition, they are universal in scope. Rao was conscious of the fact that English is an Indo-European language and therefore distantly related to Sanskrit. In his fiction, English, French and Sanskrit rub shoulders with one another in a linguistic family reunion of sorts. What is explored is the nature of language itself in an attempt to know the Truth.
The English language does not have sufficiently deep roots in India. It is therefore important for the writer to find his own individual style through which to express his world view. The reader, on his part, if he is not to misread the text, must get to know the writer’s epistemological viewpoint, or the sum total of beliefs, preconceptions and values which the writer shares with others within a sociocultural context.
R. Parathasarathy
Saratoga Springs, New York
15 January 2014
The Serpent and the Rope
‘Waves are nothing but water. So is the sea.’
Author’s Foreword
This is an Indian novel. That it is an Indian writing does not make it more Indian than the fact it is written in English make it less so. Both are, if one might say, accidental, thus irrelevant to the principal situation. The Serpent and the Rope is Indian in the sense that it is Indian in tradition — a parrot, one of the loquacious and ancient ones of our tales might have said it, with its natural longueurs, apopthegms, citations, fervours, involute statements, or, it might be an anonymous manuscript come out of our rivers. The faults, however, I hasten to add, are my very own, the truth anonymous.
Tradition makes us anonymous. Tradition is only the past (in us) contemporaneous with the future.
But tradition gives to time and personality a new texture and rhythm so that some things we would know far seem immediate and some facts congruous to us seem traced on the waters. Essentially tradition is concerned with honesty, but we, being sociable animals, with the sincere.
The writing in English too is part of an honesty. The English language is not alien to me — Sir William Jones, Monier Monier- Williams, H. H. Wilson, Max Müller and Romesh Chandra Dutt in carrying over the majesty and holiness of Sanskrit into English have given this alien tongue, as it were, thread, flame and sanctuary amongst us.
Now, Heaven’s Daughter has appeared before us,
A maiden shining in resplendent garments.
The Sovran lady of all earthly treasures,
Auspicious Dawn, shine here today upon us. (Rig Veda)
27 September 1954
Paris
1
I was born a Brahmin — that is, devoted to Truth and all that.
‘Brahmin is he who knows Brahman,’ etc. etc…. But how many of my ancestors since the excellent Yagnyavalkya, my legendary and Upanishadic ancestor, have really known the Truth excepting the Sage Madhava, who founded an Empire or, rather, helped to build an Empire, and wrote some of the most profound of Vedantic texts since Sri Sankara? There were others, so I’m told, who left hearth and riverside fields, and wandered to mountains distant and hermitages ‘to see God face to face’. And some of them did see God face to face and built temples. But when they died — for indeed they did ‘die’— they too must have been burnt by tank or grove or meeting of two rivers, and they too must have known they did not die. I can feel them in me, and know they knew they did not die. Who is it that tells me they did not die? Who but me.
So my ancestors went one by one and were burnt, and their ashes have gone down the rivers.
Whenever I stand in a river I remember how when young, on the day the monster ate the moon and the day fell into an eclipse, I used with til and kusha grass to offer the manes my filial devotion. For withal I was a good Brahmin. I even knew grammar and the Brahma Sutras, read the Upanishads at the age of four, was given the holy thread at seven — because my mother was dead and I had to perform her funeral ceremonies, year after year — my father having married again. So with wet cloth and an empty stomach, with devotion, and sandal paste on my forehead, I fell before the rice-balls of my mother and I sobbed. I was born an orphan, and have remained one. I have wandered the world and have sobbed in hotel rooms and in trains, have looked at the cold mountains and sobbed, for I had no mother. One day, and that was when I was twenty-two, I sat in an hotel — it was in the Pyrénées — and I sobbed, for I knew I would never see my mother again.
They say my mother was very beautiful and very holy. Grandfather Kittanna said, ‘Her voice, son, was like a vina playing to itself, after evensong is over, when one has left the instrument beside a pillar in the temple. Her voice too was like those musical pillars at the Rameshwaram temple — it resonated from the depths, from some unknown space, and one felt God shone the brighter with this worship. She reminded me of concubine Chandramma. She had the same voice. That was long before your time,’ Grandfather concluded, ‘it was in Mysore, and I have not been there these fifty years.’
Grandfather Kittanna was a noble type, a heroic figure among us. It must be from him I have this natural love of the impossible — I can think that a building may just decide to fly, or that Stalin may become a saint, or that all the Japanese have become Buddhist monks, or that Mahatma Gandhi is walking with us now. I sometimes feel I can make the railway line stand up, or the elephant bear its young one in twenty-four days; I can see an aeroplane float over a mountain and sit carefully on a peak, or I could go to Fathepur Sikri and speak to the Emperor Akbar. It would be difficult for me not to think, when I am in Versailles, that I hear the uncouth voice of Roi Soleil, or in Meaux that Bossuet rubs his snuff in the palm of his hand, as they still do in India, and offers a pinch to me. I can sneeze with it, and hear Bossuet make one more of his funeral orations. For Bossuet believed — and so did Roi Soleil — that he never would die. And if they’ve died, I ask you, where indeed did they go?