Raja Rao and World Literature

Abstract

Raja Rao is rightly recognised as one of the three founders of the Indian novel written in English. His later writing, however, moves beyond India and takes a quite different direction from that of R K Narayan or Mulk Anand, to the point where it seems right to ask whether it has become in some sense world literature. To bring this question into a manageable form I will ask it in relation to The Serpent and the Rope (Rao, 1960) and The Cat and Shakespeare? (Rao, 1965), with some reference in the last section also to The Chessmaster and his Moves (Rao, 1988). Defining the term world literature is itself not a simple task, and I will therefore focus my argument through two contrasting definitions drawn from David Damroschís stimulating book, What is World Literature (Damrosch, 2003).