ABSTRACT

This anthology demonstrates the significance of Raja Rao’s writing in the broader spectrum of anti-colonial, postcolonial, and diasporic writing in the 20th century. In addition to highlighting Rao’s significant presence in Indian writing, the volume presents a range of previously unpublished material which contextualises Rao’s work within 20th-century modernist, postmodernist, and postcolonial trends. Exploring both his fictional and non-fictional works, Reading India in a Transnational Era engages with issues of subaltern agency and national belonging, authenticity, subjectivity, internationalism, multicultural politics, postcolonialism, and literary and cultural representation through language and translation.

A literary volume that discusses gender and identity on both socio-political grounds, apart from dealing with Rao’s linguistic experimentations in a transnational era, will be of interest among scholars and researchers of English, postcolonial and world literature, cultural theory, and Asian studies.

chapter |17 pages

Introduction

part I|68 pages

Re-routing Raja Rao's politics, national identity, and postcolonial criticism

chapter 1|14 pages

The lure of monarchy in the pursuit of truth

Raja Rao's royalism in The Serpent and the Rope

chapter 2|15 pages

From national to metaphysical

Raja Rao's idea of India in a transnational era

chapter 3|9 pages

Resisting the British empire

Raja Rao's two political anthologies Changing India and Whither India?

chapter 4|15 pages

Threads of identity

Caste, clothing, and community in Raja Rao's Kanthapura

part II|68 pages

Philosophy, aesthetics, gender, and the novel

chapter 6|13 pages

Comrade Kirillov

‘A New Novel’ newly understood

chapter 8|14 pages

Posthumanism in Raja Rao's The Cat and Shakespeare

Redrawing the boundaries

chapter 9|15 pages

The cat and the chessmaster

Deconstructing ‘Play’ in two novels by Raja Rao

chapter 10|11 pages

The unknown quantity

Mathematics and metaphysics in Raja Rao's The Chessmaster and His Moves

part III|49 pages

Multicultural politics, habitat, and translation

chapter 11|14 pages

‘I Am Not Gandhi’

Kanthapura and the problem of allegory

chapter 12|10 pages

Nature and landscape

An evolutionary psychological analysis of Raja Rao's writing

chapter 13|15 pages

Search in confusion

Reading transnational friendships in Raja Rao's Kanthapura and Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi

part IV|25 pages

Reminiscences

chapter |3 pages

Raja Rao at his bed table

chapter |14 pages

Raja Rao

The untold story

chapter |2 pages

Krishna

(for Raja Rao)

chapter |4 pages

Afterword