THE FREIGHT OF CULTURE

Abstract

This article addresses the issue of the intersection of Indian and Western traditions in Raja Rao’s short stories. In death, as in life, Rao’s ideological underpinnings remain the centre of controversial attention. His unstinted leanings towards an upper‐caste Indian ethos deeply split his readership into admirers and adversaries. It is imperative to revaluate Rao’s work from the position of Indian aesthetics and a social reality specific to India and dissimilar to Western notions of realism. This paper attempts to explore the issue by focusing specifically on the inception of Raja Rao’s literary production within modal forms in the endeavour to investigate whether his literary lineage derives from Indian or Western forms, or both.

Keywords:

• Indian writing in English
• Raja Rao
• Indian tradition
• The Cow of the Barricades
• “Narsiga”
• Gandhi

Notes

1 These short stories were published separately during the 1930s, then collected in 1947.

2 Mill, Elphinstone and Smith were among the popular historians of India in the 19th and early 20th centuries. See Majumdar, “Nationalist Historians”.

3 As Rao says, “I am interested in authenticity. One should be authentic [ … ] It is to those who are not authentic that misery comes” (qtd in Sharrad 125).

4 To a limited extent, S.C. Harrex has also analysed Rao’s fiction through the modal approach of Scholes and Wicks. In following the analogy, I have drawn parallels with indigenous models of storytelling, accommodating them within the typology of Scholes and Wicks. See also my paper “History and Romance” in which I use this typology to discuss Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s Anandamath.

5 India has often been associated with a goddess‐like configuration of Mother India. Conventionally, the extreme North symbolizes her crown, the West (Gujarat) and the East (Bengal) her hands, while the tapering peninsula represents her feet. Thus the very landmass is made into an icon, which is frequently exploited in election posters. The equivalent figure in Irish nationalism is the figure of an old woman who has four green fields, one of which, Ulster, is lost. Yeats, in Cathleen Ni Houlihan, capitalizes on this symbol.

6 For details of the intermixing of genres, see Sethi, Myths of the Nation.

7 The education of the protagonist develops analogies with Rao’s later novels in which the instructor–student relationship becomes manifest in the author–reader alliance. The reader has to accept his ignorance in the presence of the author‐guru. The treatment of the reader in “Narsiga” is different.

8 Vermillion.

9 Only good deeds, sacrifice, asceticism, and other difficult mental disciplines can offer “deliverance” from samsara, and a rebirth in the form of a brahmin, prince, or a noble.

10 Although the West also has a tradition of oral storytelling, it identifies more readily with a written tradition, which differs from the maukhik (oral) Indian tradition. In the guru‐shishya (disciple) system of instruction, the written word is not considered as important as vak (speech).

11 See, for instance, Narayan, A Tiger for Malgudi.

12 Rao, “Kanakapala”.

13 Rao, Ganga Ghat. The stories in this collection are narrated by a parrot, as in the prakrit folktale Suka‐sapati (AD 950) or The Enchanted Parrot.

14 Animal stories are a means of ensuring complete comprehension. The Panchatantra was a shrewd form of instructing the dull sons of a certain king. By the skilful use of fable, the narrator, Vishnusharma, is believed to have instructed the princes in statecraft. The instructive function of the text looks forward to the relationship between the author and reader in Rao’s later novels.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rumina Sethi

Rumina Sethi, an Associate Professor in the Department of English, Panjab University, is currently an Associate Member at the Faculty of English, University of Oxford. She has been a British Academy Fellow at the University of Oxford and a Fellow at the Rockefeller Centre, Italy. She is the author of Myths of the Nation (Clarendon). Her forthcoming books include The Politics of Postcolonialism (London: Pluto) and Women, Culture and Politics in Punjab (New Delhi: Zubaan/Kali for Women).