Raja Rao: The Serpent and the Rope

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

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

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?

Grandfather Kittanna was heroic in another manner. He could manage a horse, the fiercest, with a simplicity that made it go where it did not wish to go. I was brought up with the story how Grandfather Kittanna actually pushed his horse into the Chandrapur forest one evening — the horse, Sundar, biting his lips off his face; the tiger that met him in the middle of the jungle; the leap Sundar gave, high above my Lord Sher, and the custard-apples that splashed on his back, so high he soared— and before my grandfather knew where he was, with sash and blue — Maratha saddle, there he stood, Sundar, in the middle of the courtyard. The lamps were being lit, and when stableman Chowdayya heard the neigh he came and led the steed to the tank for a swish of water. Grandfather went into the bathroom, had his evening bath — he loved it to be very hot, and Aunt Seethamma had always to serve him potful after potful — and he rubbed himself till his body shone as the young of a banana tree. He washed and sat in prayer. When Achakka asked, ‘Sundar is all full of scratches…?’ then Grandfather spoke of the tiger, and the leap. For him, if the horse had soared into the sky and landed in holy Brindavan he would not have been much surprised. Grandfather Kittanna was like that. He rode Sundar for another three years, and then the horse died — of some form of dysentery, for, you know, horses die too — and we buried him on the top of the Kittur Hill, with fife and filigree. We still make an annual pilgrimage to his tomb, and for Hyderabad reasons we cover it up with a rose-coloured muslin, like the Muslims do. Horses we think came from Arabia, and so they need a Muslim burial. Where is Sundar now? Where?

The impossible, for Grandfather, was always possible. He never — he, a Brahmin — never for once was afraid of gun or sword, and yet what depth he had in his prayers. When he came out, Aunt Seethamma used to say, ‘He has the shine of a Dharma Raja.’

But I, I’ve the fright of gun and sword, and the smallest trick of violence can make me run a hundred leagues. But once having gone a hundred leagues I shall come back a thousand, for I do not really have the fear of fear. I only have fear.