A Mythic and Symbolic Study of Raja Rao’s The Serpent and the Rope

Raja Rao is one of the greatest of Indian novelists writing in English language. Only two others Mulk Raj Anand and R.K.Narayan could come near him as Uma Parameswaran suggests this in her rigorous study titled A Study of Representative Indo-English Novelists, “Among the novelists one could narrow down the choice to Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao....Yet, in the final analysis Raja Rao comes out several steps ahead of Anand” (141). He hailed from a traditional South Indian Brahmin family and after having matriculated from Hyderabad, he went over to Aligarh for higher education and earned his graduate degree. Thenceforth, he proceeded to France on a scholarship awarded to him by government and studied at the universities of Montpellier and Sorborne. Due to a streak of spiritual recluse in him, he returned India and visited the Asharam of Sri Aurobindo, Pandit Taranath and Ramana Maharshi.

Raja Rao was a prolific writer, though not in the sense that he wrote much but whatever he wrote was an outcome of his slow and earnest creative endeavor. He wrote slowly, revised frequently and got published his works at great intervals because he wanted to achieve perfection in his creative works:

He wrote his first novel Kanthapura in 1938, and a collection of short stories. But he failed to produce any other piece of fiction immediately because at that time he was experiencing deep stirring of spiritual crisis, he emerged a changed man and a religion and philosophy have a prior claim on him now. After this spiritual metamorphosis, he wrote The Serpent and the Rope (1960), The Cat and Shakespeare (1965) and Comrade Kirillove (1976), The Chess Master and His Moves (1988) and he appears in them as more of a religious philosopher . . . . (370)

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