Böcker av Raja Rao

The Sacred Wordsmith compiles the best of Raja Rao's writings, including his autobiographical Prefaces and Introductions. The volume puts together several of his noted acceptance speeches, including those for the Sahitya Akademi Award and Neustadt International Prize, and other famous pieces, such as 'The World is Sound', 'The Word', 'Why Do You Write?', 'The West Discovers Sanskrit', 'The English Language and Us', and 'The Story Round, Around Kanthapura', a fascinating, unpublished account of the makings of his famous first novel.

With a new introduction by Makarand R. ParanjapeThe life of Mahatma Gandhi is the story of a legend. In Mahatma Gandhi: The Great Indian Way, Raja Rao upends the genre of the literary biography with inventive non-linear chronology, through dialogue and anecdote, situating the physical within the metaphysical, and with a text that is both retrospective and contemporary at the same time. By mapping genealogies and distilling them, Rao focuses on Gandhi's years in South Africa, the birth of non-violent resistance, and then moves into the epic freedom struggle in India, which brought Gandhi to worldwide renown in his own lifetime.With an emphasis on the idea of dharma as a framework for Gandhism, both in South Africa and India, this is the story of the man as much as the Mahatma.

First published in 1996 when he was eighty-eight years old, this selection of nearly six decades of Raja Rao's non-fiction is an audacious contemplation on the deeper significance of India. A combination of fables, journeys, discussions and meditations, The Meaning of India advances the view that India is not just a geographical entity, or even a civilization-state. India is, above all, a metaphysic, a way of being and regarding the self and the world.Drawing on a wide range of sources-including the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Gita, the Buddha, Sankara, Bhartrihari, Kalidasa, Dostoevsky, Valéry, Rilke, Mann and Mallarmé-as also meetings with Gandhi, Nehru, Forster and Malraux, Rao teases out the implications of Advaita or non-dualism, which he regards as India's unique contribution to the world.

Kanthapura is the story of how Gandhi's struggle for independence from the British came to a typical village, Kanthapura, in South India. Young Moorthy, back from the city with "new ideas," cuts across the ancient barriers of caste to unite the villagers in non-violent action--which is met with violence by landlords and police. The dramatic tale unfolds in a poetic, almost mythical style which conveys as never before the rich textures of Indian rural life. The narrator is an old woman, imbued with the legendary history of the region, who knows the past of all the characters and comments on their actions with sharp-eyed wisdom. Her narrative, and the way she tells it, evokes the spirit of India's traditional folk-epics. This edition includes extensive notes on Indian myths, religion, social customs, and the Independence movement (given at the end of the book) which fill out the background for the American reader's more complete understanding and enjoyment.