Raja Rao, Kanthapura
Raja Rao (1908-2006) Raja Rao was an Indian Kannada writer of English language novels and short stories whose works are deeply rooted in Hinduism. The Serpent and the Rope written in 1960, a semi auto-biographical novel recounting a search for spiritual truth in Europe and India, established him as one of the finest Indian prose stylist and won him the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1964. For the entire body of his work, Rao was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for literature in 1998. The novel “Kanthapura” (1938) was an account of the impact of Gandhi’s teachings on non-violent resistance against British. Rao returned to the theme of ‘Gandhism’ in the short story collection “The Cow of the Barricades (1947). In 1998, he published Gandhi’s biography “Great Indian Way: A life of Mahatma Gandhi”. The Serpent and the Rope dramatized the relation between Indian and western culture. The Serpent in the title refers to ‘illusion’ and the Rope refers to ‘realty