ABSTRACT
This chapter covers Raja Rao’s shift from the political circumstances of the 1930s and 1940s to metaphysics in order to better understand his insistence on a fundamental Hindu tradition in a period of internal dislocation following India’s independence in 1947, which also serves as an anchor for his personal dilemmas as an expatriate craving for a guru figure. Through a brief internal study of his post-independence novels, I argue that it is possible for the metaphysical to be seen as an extreme dimension of the nationalistic, a sentiment witnessed even more aggressively in the last several decades with the resurgence of the Hindu right wing. The content of this chapter is ideological and speculative since it intends to raise questions related to the body of Rao’s later fiction and speculate on the development of his vision and its inherent contradictions.
