Mahatma Gandhi, page 3
The Serpent and the Rope is an extremely challenging work thematically as well. Savithri’s words in the novel sum it up well. It is ‘a sacred text, a cryptogram, with different meanings at different hierarchies of awareness’ (235).4 It may be approached on at least two levels, the literal and the symbolic, although the two usually operate simultaneously.
At the literal level of plot, the novel may appear puzzling and unsatisfying. The crux is: Why does the marriage of Rama and Madeleine disintegrate? Critics have attempted various answers, ranging from incompatibility between the Indian Rama and the French Madeleine, to Rama’s infidelity. Although such answers are plausible, they do not satisfy completely because these reasons are not perceived by the characters themselves. Rama and Madeleine are both aware of the growing rift between them, but they do not attempt to bridge it on a practical level.
Instead, both watch the dissolution of the union with an almost fatalistic helplessness. Similarly, it is hard to understand why Rama seeks fulfilment in other women while averring his love for Madeleine at the same time, or why he never tells her of his affairs in spite of his claim that he keeps no secrets from her. Rama, the narrator, does not answer such questions; he only chronicles the breakdown of the relationship almost impersonally, as if there were little he could do to save it. He also does not feel himself responsible for having affairs with other women, one of which involves a ritual second marriage, while being married to Madeleine at the same time.
What is lacking, then, is adequate motivation for the actions of the characters, something that most readers are conditioned to expect from a novel. Instead of asking of the novel something that it did not intend to give, perhaps a better approach is to consider what it does clearly provide; indeed, questions that appear unresolved on the literal level are resolved more satisfactorily on the symbolic level.
Rama, the Brahmin hero, is a seeker of Truth both by birth and by vocation (a Brahmin is one who seeks Brahman, or the Absolute). As an Indian scholar in France, Rama is seeking Truth in the form of the missing link in the puzzle of India’s influence on the West. According to Rama, this missing link is the Albigensian heresy; he thinks that the Cathars were driven to heresy by the influence of Buddhism, which had left India. Rama’s quest for Truth is also manifested in his search for the ideal woman, because, in the Hindu tradition, the union of man and wife is symbolic of the union of man and God. The marriage of Shiva and Parvati is one such paradigmatic union, in which Shiva, the Absolute, the abstract, the ascetic, is wedded to Parvati, the human, the concrete, the possessor of the Earth. Another such union is that between the mythical Savithri and her husband, Satyavan (‘satya’ means ‘truth’). Savithri, through her devotion, restores her dead husband to life.
In keeping with these paradigms, Rama—the thinker, the meditator, the seeker of Truth—can only find fulfilment in a Parvati or a Savithri who can bring him back to Earth by her devotion. Madeleine, however, who has given up her Catholicism for Buddhism, becomes an ascetic, renouncing the Earth, denying her body through abstinence and penance. Significantly, her union with Rama is barren; both their children are stillborn. Madeleine also regards Truth as something outside of herself, something that has to be striven for in order to be realized. Her dualism is the philosophical opposite of Rama’s non-dualism.
Rama believes, following the Advaita Vedanta, that the self is part of Truth, as the wave is part of the sea, and that all separateness is illusion, like the illusion in which a rope is mistaken for a serpent. Rama’s true mate is an Indian undergraduate at Cambridge named, interestingly, Savithri. Savithri, despite her modishness—she dances to jazz music, smokes, wears Western clothes and so on—is essentially an Indian. Unlike Madeleine, Savithri does not seek Truth, but instinctively and unselfconsciously is Truth. Her union with Rama is thus a natural and fulfilling one. Savithri, however, like Rama’s sister, Saroja, opts for an arranged marriage in the traditional Indian manner with someone else; hence, her relationship with Rama is never consummated. At the end of the book, Rama, divorced from Madeleine, sees a vision of his guru in Travancore and plans to leave France for India.
Rama’s path to Truth, unlike Moorthy’s karma yoga, is jnana yoga (the path of knowledge), also enunciated in the Bhagavad Gita. Rama is not a man of action but an intellectual. Although he has accumulated knowledge, he does not apprehend Truth clearly; like the deluded seeker in the fable, he mistakes the rope for the serpent, failing to see himself already united with Truth as Savithri is. Traditionally, a guru is necessary for the jnana yogi, because only a guru can cure his delusion by showing him that what appears to be a serpent is really a rope. Thus, in the end, Rama resolves to seek his guru to be cured of his delusion.
The Cat and Shakespeare, Rao’s next novel, which he described as ‘a metaphysical comedy’, clearly shows a strong Upanishadic influence in its form. The spiritual experiences of its narrator, Ramakrishna Pai, are reminiscent of the illuminative passages in the Chandogya Upanishad, which describe the experience of the Infinite. The dialogues in the novel are also Upanishadic in their question-and-answer patterns; the best example is the conversation between Govindan Nair and Lakshmi in the brothel.
Nair’s metaphysical speculations, such as ‘Is there seeing first or the object first?’, seem to be modelled on philosophical queries in the Upanishads. Though the cat links the novel to the Indian beast fable and Nair’s comic roguery shows similarities to the rogue fable in the Panchatantra, the story, really, illustrates the marjara nyaya (the path of the cat) of vishistadvaita, not the practical and crafty animals of the Panchatantra.
The major Western debt is to William Shakespeare, who is acknowledged in the title. Shakespeare is a symbol for the universal; according to Rao, Shakespeare’s vision transcends duality and arrives at a unified view of the world. There are numerous allusions to Hamlet in the novel, culminating in the ‘rat-trap episode’, in which a cat is trapped in a large rat-trap; this prompts Nair to deliver a parody of Hamlet, which begins, ‘A kitten sans cat, that is the question.’
The Cat and Shakespeare is Rao’s sequel to The Serpent and the Rope in that it shows what happens after a seeker’s veil of illusion has been removed by the guru. Its theme may be summed up in Hamlet’s words to Horatio towards the end of the play: ‘There is a divinity that shapes our ends. / Rough-hew them how we will.’ A similar view of grace is embodied in the novel in what Nair, the man who is united to Truth, calls ‘the way of the Cat’. The ‘way of the Cat’, simply, is the notion that just as the kitten is carried by the scruff of its neck by the mother cat, man is completely at the mercy of the Divine; consequently, the only way to live is to surrender oneself to divine grace, as the helpless kitten surrenders itself to the mother cat. Nair lives this philosophy and is responsible for teaching it to his ignorant neighbour, the narrator Pai. Pai is like the innocent hunter in the story who unknowingly heaped leaves on a Shivalingam and was rewarded with a vision.
Between Pai’s house and Nair’s is a wall over which Nair leaps every time he visits Pai. The wall is an important symbol because it represents the division between illusion and Truth, or duality and non-duality, or the relative and the Absolute. Nair crosses it easily, but Pai has never gone across. Towards the end of the novel, following Nair’s cat, Pai accidentally crosses the wall. Like the lucky hunter, he, too, is vouchsafed a divine vision: For the first time, Pai sees the whole universe as a unity of sense, meaning and existence.
The novel ends with Pai’s spiritual as well as material fulfilment, having partially realized his lifelong ambition of owning a three-storey house. The Cat and Shakespeare, although not as ambitious as Kanthapura, is as successful on its own terms. The novel is an elaborate puzzle, which the author challenges the reader to solve; a solution is not only possible at all levels, but is completely satisfying as well. The way to the Absolute here is not karma yoga or jnana yoga of the two previous novels, but bhakti yoga, or the path of devotion. The seeker recognizes himself as dependent on divine grace for his salvation and surrenders himself to the Benevolent Mother like a trusting kitten.
Comrade Kirillov, published in English in 1976, is generally recognized as Rao’s least ambitious novel; it is clearly a minor work compared to its three illustrious predecessors. Formally, it is an extended vyakti-chitra, or character sketch, a popular genre in Indian regional literature. The main story, narrated by one ‘R.’, standing perhaps for Rao himself, is a mere ninety-three pages in large type, to which are appended twenty-seven pages of the diary of Kirillov’s wife, Irene, and a concluding seven pages by the narrator; the effect is of a slight, sketchy novella. Kirillov, alias Padmanabha Iyer, leaves India for California to propagate theosophy but, after a period of disillusionment, becomes a communist.
From California, he moves to London, where, marrying a Czech immigrant, Irene, he settles down to the life of an expatriate intellectual. Like Rao’s other protagonists, Kirillov starts as a seeker of Truth, but after becoming a communist, he is increasingly revealed by the narrator to be caught in a system that curtails his access to Truth. Thus, Kirillov continuously rationalizes the major events in the world to suit his perspective. Nevertheless, following a visit to India several years after he has left, he realizes that his communism is only a thin upper layer in an essentially Indian psyche. Irene also recognizes in her diary that he is almost biologically an Indian Brahmin, and only intellectually a Marxist. By the end of the book, Kirillov is shown to be a man of contradictions: attacking and worshipping Gandhi simultaneously, deeply loving traditional India but campaigning for a communist revolution, reciting Sanskrit shlokas but professing communism.
The narrator is Kirillov’s intellectual opposite, an adherent of Advaita Vedanta. There are numerous interesting discussions on communism in the book, which add to its value as a social document, capturing the life of Indian expatriate intellectuals between 1920 and 1950. Also of interest is Kirillov’s relationship with Irene, which recalls Rama’s relationship with Madeleine. Numerous similarities aside, this relationship is more successful; this marriage lasts, and the couple have a child, Kamal. Soon after Kirillov’s return from India, however, Irene dies in childbirth, followed by her newborn daughter. Kirillov leaves for Moscow and is last heard of in Peking. The novel ends with the narrator taking Kamal, now in India, to Kanyakumari. Despite its humour, pathos and realism, Comrade Kirillov falls short of Rao’s three previous novels.
There has been a great deal of speculation as to the identity of Kirillov. Critics have wondered if the character is based on V.K. Krishna Menon or M.N. Roy. I myself have argued that Kirillov might have been inspired by Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, Sarojini Naidu’s younger brother, who wrote a thesis on India and imperialism, which was presented at the Third Congress of the Communist International. Chatto, as he was called, was killed in the Stalinist purges.
When I asked Rao himself, he said the original was a man called K.S. (Krishnarao Shivarao) Shelvankar (1906–96), author of The Problem of India (1940), one of the first books by an Indian published by Penguin. He was born in Chennai, and educated at the Theosophical School, Adyar. He later attended the University of Madison-Wisconsin, the United States, and the London School of Economics. He was also a correspondent for The Hindu from 1942 to 1968. Shelvankar eventually became the Indian ambassador to the USSR. Before Independence, he was working for the communists in Europe. He had married a European woman named Mary. Like Kirillov, he had written an anti-Gandhian tract.
The other important thing about this neglected novel is that it predicts the downfall of communism. The paradox of history, however, is that though this ideology has collapsed the world over, it persists in India. In the novel, on the other hand, it is seen as inappropriate for India, whatever be its use to the rest of the world.
It is interesting to note that Comrade Kirillov, first published in a French translation in 1965, was written earlier. Thematically, it represents the stage of negation before the spiritual fulfilment of The Cat and Shakespeare. Kirillov, as a communist and atheist, has negated the karma yoga of Kanthapura and the jnana yoga of The Serpent and the Rope by denying the existence of the Absolute; thus, his quest results in failure. The bhakti yoga of The Cat and Shakespeare, especially in the character of Nair, is the culmination of the various stages of spiritual realization in the earlier novels. Nair is the first character in Rao’s novels who does not merely seek Truth, but who has found it, who actually practises it.
The Chessmaster and His Moves, as we have already seen, was the last novel Rao published. When it came out in 1988, it practically polarized the Indian English critical community into those who couldn’t stand Rao and those who loved him. I am going to argue that Chessmaster, by being such an extreme example of a Raja Rao text, highlighted certain problems for its readers as never before. Not that these problems were absent in his earlier works, but while The Serpent and the Rope was praised and hailed as a classic, Chessmaster seems to have been viewed as an embarrassment. Even faithful Raja Rao fans do not seem to have wanted him to go so far. It would appear that even subversion of the Western novel, after all, has its limits. Rao seems to have delivered an impossible sort of book, a novel that is really an anti-novel, a novel to end novels, a book that not only challenges, but actually resists reading in the normal sense of the word. In short, a book that makes impossible demands on its readers, strains their patience and almost forces them to reject it.
In Chessmaster, we have a particular version of Advaita that has, as I see it, the following major sources. One is the philosophical practice of Sri Ramana Maharshi and the other is the sunyavada of the Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna. Allied to the former is, of course, the philosophy of Rao’s guru, Sri Atmananda, and Nagarjuna’s thought, equally obviously, is derived from the Buddha. What is sought here is not the realization of self as in the earlier works, but a dissolution. While Moorthy through right action illustrates karma yoga, Rama, jnana yoga or the path of knowledge, and Govindan Nair, a type of bhakti yoga, of complete self-surrender to the Divine, Sivarama Sastri represents the power of negative dialectics, the attempt not to achieve something, but to vaporize one’s self into nothing.
Here the familiar dichotomies between the male and the female, vowels and consonants, India and the West, the Brahmin and the Kshatriya, the sage and the saint, logic and devotion, truth and the world, all hinge on the opposition between zero and infinity. The Judeo-Christian tradition is shown to represent the quest for perfect society here on earth, while India is seen as denying the validity of the world itself. The way out, for Rao, is not to improve things as the saint-soldier does, but to dissolve contradictions completely. For him, all numbers dissolve into zero as they emerge out of it. Infinity is merely cumulative, while zero is total negation that cuts the root of illusion. One can never become perfect in time, but attain perfection only by negating time.
The only meaningful dialogue, for Rao, is between the Brahmin (zero, dissolution, negation) and the rabbi (infinity, completion, affirmation). The former is vertical, denying time; the latter is horizontal, finding fulfilment through time. It is such a framework that provides the skeleton of the plot of the novel. The first part, ‘The Turk and the Tiger Hunt’, shows the incompatibility of Siva and Suzanne like that of Rama and Madeleine in the earlier novel; the second part is dominated by Siva’s affair with Mireille; and the third with the dialogue with Michel, the Jewish Holocaust survivor. Rao said in an interview that the book is a tribute to and acknowledgment of the great suffering of the Jews on behalf of humankind; this is elaborated at length in the story of Michel. But the suffering of Michel does not make the world any more real for Siva; his solution to the world’s problems still lies in self-extinction—not suicide, but an undoing of the self.
The steadfastness of the Siva–Jayalakshmi relationship and the impossibility of its consummation, and Siva’s relationship with his stepsister, Uma, and her inability to bear a child—these two relationships provide the glue that keeps the novel together. In addition, there are the usual asides, departures, stories within stories, letters, diary extracts and long speculative internal monologues that characterize Rao’s narrative technique. A certain degree of novelty is offered in two or three characters whose role in the lot is minimal, but who are important—Abd’l Krim, the exiled Algerian leader, and Ratilal, the French Jain diamond merchant.
Chessmaster is an ambiguous book in which neither zero nor infinity wins. It accommodates not just the Brahmin and the rabbi, but the Jain and the revolutionary—though the violent ways of the latter are viewed unfavourably through Gandhian eyes. Chessmaster moves beyond these positions to a kind of indeterminacy. Siva, Rao’s spokesman, is no longer always right. Nor does he pretend to be in full control of his metaphysical project. There is always the more powerful presence of the ‘Chessmaster’ behind the movements of the characters in the book. Of course, any notion of a personalized chessmaster or prime mover is just another version of the God that Siva, the rationalist mathematician, would deny till he realizes that it is the guru in human form who is the real agent of transformation rather than some abstract or distant God. But this is one of the apparent contradictions of the book, which will only be resolved in the later volumes of the trilogy, only when Siva encounters the guru.
Chessmaster is almost a rewriting to The Serpent and the Rope. In the earlier novel, Rama tells Savithri:
Zero makes all numbers, so zero begins everything. All numbers are possible when they are in and of zero. Similarly all philosophies are possible in and around Vedanta. But you can no more improve on Vedanta than improve on zero. The zero, you see, the sunya, is impersonal; whereas one, two, three and so on are all dualistic. (226)
