"I am a man of silence. And words emerge from that silence with light, of light, and light is sacred" And that "light"Raja Raohas rejoined the "perennial" light. Raja Rao"a proud Indian" Sadhaka of Sabda as Mantra left for his heavenly abode on July 8, 2006 leaving behind his "magic casement(s)"Kanthapura, The Serpent and the Rope, The Chess Master and his Moves, The Cat and Shakespeare for us to meditate upon for times to come.
His
Kanthapura is "the finest novel to come out of
India" The idiom he has chosen to describe the peasant
life in it has a touch of the spiritual and the religious,
while its inspiration tilted more towards moral and humanistic
values. The author's longing for co-existence of all sections
with no discrimination is well conveyed when Moorthythe young
brahmin boy, and the protagonist of the novel who enters a
pariah's house much before entering a jail during the freedom
strugglesaid: "you know, brothers and sisters, we are
here in a temple, and the temple is the temple of the One,
and we are one with everything that is in the One, and who
shall say he is at the head of the One and another at the
foot?"
The
intense passion of the author for "putting aside the
idea of holy brahmin and the untouchable pariah" was
displayed through Moorthy's assertion: "brothers, and
this too ye shall remember, whether brahmin or bangle
seller, pariah or priest, we are all one, one as the mustered
seed in a sack of mustered seeds, equal in shape and hue and
all."
His
magnum opus The Serpent and the Rope, is more than
a novel, for he has used it as a conduit to illuminate the
minds of readers with the profound themes of "Vedantic
conception of illusion and reality". Through his
philosophical pilgrimage he made his novel to state: "India
lies beyond sorrow" (for, how else, as Nehru wondered
once, can one explain its "endurance amidst the horror
of poverty and misery?") The novel articulates that reality
is not an "object" but a living experienceits ground
is Sat-chit-ananda (being-consciousness-bliss).
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