ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Raja Rao’s interesting and ambitious inclusion of specific mathematical concepts within a larger metaphysical frame in his novel The Chessmaster and His Moves, which marks an advance on Rao’s earlier novels in this particular respect. Rao’s protagonist, a Ramanujan-like figure, is engaged with the nature of reality and the individual’s existential location within it. Sivarama Sastri calls mathematics ‘the ultimate metaphysique’ and as ‘being nothing else but philosophy construed in numbers’. ‘Zero’ is a blanket metaphor and its symbolism can be stretched to signify several metaphysical aspects.
The 20th century converted philosophic terms into mathematical symbols, with language, metaphysics, and mathematics combining to contribute to a more concentrated search for essential meanings. In The Chessmaster and His Moves, Rao makes a heroic attempt to incorporate them within the body of a novel. This chapter interprets these various aspects of a novel commonly dismissed as repetitive and creatively dysfunctional in the corpus of a writer unique for his philosophic enquiry into human existence.
