Siva and Shakti in Raja Rao's Novels
1988; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 62; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/40144512
ISSN1945-8134
Autores Tópico(s)South Asian Cinema and Culture
Resumonation by many critics in India and by the reviewers of Time and the New York Times abroad. Rao is a powerful writer. He is profoundly metaphysical in the way he thinks and feels, and he has a scholarly background, an intimate familiarity with primary texts of Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian philosophies; his mastery of English vocabulary is indisputable (as is his mastery of French), and his prose is often scintillating poetry. His major problem, or perhaps the reader's, is his superabundance of words, a verbosity that led one reviewer to parody Rao's epigraph in The Serpent and the Rope with Sentences are nothing but words. So are novels. All of Rao's novels explore philosophical concepts. Kanthapura (1938)1 deals with the power of ahimsa (nonviolence) and satyagraha that build up moral invincibility in individuals and nations. The Serpent and the Rope (1960) deals with linear Time and concurrent Time (isness or Eternity) through the personae of two historians: Madeleine, the successful professor of history, symbolizing the blind streets of linear Time; and Rama, the not-too-successful student of Cathars and Albigensian heresy, showing the direction in which lies the open sea of isness. In The Cat and Shakespeare (1965) Ramakrishna Pai instinctively realizes what Rama has sought through intellectual peregrinations, that mar jar a nyaya (where the man-God relationship may be seen as that of a kittencat bond in which the kitten is carried to safety by its mother without any effort of its own) is superior to markata-nyaya (the monkey mother-baby relationship in which the baby monkey must hold on to its mother while being carried). Comrade Kirillov (1976) is a novel fragment that explores the potentials and prospects of communism through a somewhat ambivalent symbolism implied in the death of Kirillov's wife Irene in childbirth and in the ritualistic baptism of their older son by the narrator R at Kanya Kumari, where Parvati, symbolic of India, waits, eternally unwed, for Siva, who is lost in meditation. The most recent novel, The Chessmaster and His Moves (1988), is the story of Sivarama, a mathematician in France, and his search to solve the puzzle of life, metaphorically alluded to as a chess game in which the Master's moves are subtle. His hand is on your shoulder, not to tell you where to move, but to show the nature of essensic movement (506). All of Rao's protagonists are essentially the same person; all quest for the Absolute through gnana, the path of intellectual perception; all are Brahmins versed in Upanishadic literature; all have some physical ailment, showing the insignificance of the body; and all except Moorthy (of Kanthapura) have, at the core of their search, relationships with women. Common to all his protagonists (again with the exception of Moorthy) is a worshipful sensuality which, taken with the symbolic physical malaise afflicting each, indicates that their relationships transcend the sexual component, whether or not there is a physical level to the relationship. Although Shantha's relationship with Pai is naturally and unostentatiously sexual, the relationship between Savithri and Rama and between Jaya and Sivarama is not physical, though it would certainly be inappropriate to call it Platonic. It is very definitely sexual; as in Keats's poems, it is an eternalizing of the rapturous moment before the moment, when the woman is bride yet still unravished, perpetually poised on the peak of anticipation before the moment of fulfillment, which is also that of disappointment, for what lies ahead is all downhill: Bold lover, never never canst thou kiss . Thus the frequent allusion to Kanya Kumari, the eternally unwed bride. It is as though Raja Rao is convinced that the heterosexual relationship is essential to the TruthSeeker and so has explored various ways of defining and delineating how the masculine and feminine principles work in man's search for the oneness and isness of Shivoham.2 Unfortunately, man's search, as portrayed by Rao, could be taken to mean just that: gender-oriented and male rather than generically human. Read one way, Rao's generalizations on men and women could be quite annoying to some readers for one or more of the following reasons. 1) The we/ they duality detracts from the universal and human aspects of characters. Men and women seem different in everything; even the shared sorrows and ecstasies of each gender are made to sound antipodal. 2) All of Rao's protagonists, particularly Rama and Sivarama, could come across to some readers as both selfrighteous prigs and impotent wimps in their actions and attitudes. 3) Rao presents three types of women: the idealized Hindu woman who is the incarnation of Shakti, the feminine principle behind the manifested world; the fallen Hindu woman, like Lakshmi in The Serpent and the Rope; and the non-Hindu woman who is intelligent and sensual yet flawed in some essential way. What is disturbing about this is not only the categorization of women according to traditional conventions of morality but the implicit distinction between Hindu and non-Hindu women.3 Thus, not only does Rao resort to the standard Indianmovie convention of postponing the consummation of
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