ABSTRACT
Fashions changed, but Raja Rao remained a transcendentalist throughout his long life. It may be noted that at the high point of French surrealism, Raja Rao saw in it not so much a reaction to classical forms but a philosophical extension of debates about the real and the unreal, the world of phenomena and the world of dreams, the idea of a self other than that understood by the senses. Raja Rao wrote not to claim a special space for himself but to show how culturally sensitive he in fact was when it came to aesthetic matters. Indeed Raja Rao, like no other writer and thinker, would have said what more could one write when faced with Drona’s words to Yudhisthira when the latter, at the end of the Krishna–Arjuna dialogue in the Gita, goes to his teacher, Drona, to seek not only his permission to fight but also to ask how he could be killed.
