foreward by raja rao

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Monday, October 30, 2006

Foreword by Raja Rao

Some books have wonderful forewords. Here is one of them.

Foreword to Raja Rao's Kanthapura by Raja Rao

My publishers have asked me to say a word of explanation.

There is no village in India, however mean, that has not a rich sthala-purana,

or legendary history, of its own. Some god or godlike hero has passed by the

village – Rama might have rested under this papal-tree, Sita might have dried

her clothes, after her bath, on this yellow-stone, or the Mahatma himself, on

one of his many pilgrimages through the country, might have slept in this

hut, the low one, by the village gate. In this way the past mingles with the

present, and the gods mingle with men to make the repertory of yourgrandmother always bright. One such story from the contemporary annals of

my village I have tried to tell.

The telling has not been easy. One has to convey in a language that is not

one’s own; the spirit that is one’s own. One has to convey the various shades

and omissions of a certain thought-movement that looks maltreated in an

alien language. I use the word ‘alien’, yet English is not really an alien

language to us. It is the language of our intellectual make-up, like Sanskrit or

Persian was before, but not of our emotional make-up. We are all instinctivelybilingual, many of us writing in our own language and in English. We cannot

write like the English. We should not. We cannot write only as Indians. We

have grown to look at the large world as part of us. Our method of expression

therefore has to be a dialect which will some day prove to be as distinctive

and colorful as the Irish or the American. Time alone will justify it.



After language the next problem is that of style. The tempo of Indian life must

be infused into our English expression, even as the tempo of American or

Irish life has gone into the making of theirs. We, in India, think quickly, we

talk quickly, and when we move we move quickly. There must be something

in the sun of India that makes us rush and tumble and run on. And our paths

are paths interminable. The Mahabharatha has 214778 verses and theRamayana 48000. Puranas there are endless and innumerable. We have

neither punctuation nor the treacherous ‘ats’ and ‘ons’ to bother us – we tell

one interminable tale. Episode follows episode, and when our thoughts stop

our breath stops, and we move on to another thought. This was and still is

the ordinary style of our story-telling. I have tried to follow it myself in this

story.

It may have been told of an evening, when as the dusk falls and through the

sudden quiet, lights leap up in house after house, and stretching her beddingon the veranda, a grandmother might have told you, newcomer, the sad tale

of her village.

Posted by Shencottah at 11:17 AM

Labels: Book, Raja Rao

4 comments:

Guru said...

Dear Shencottah

That is my most favourite forward too; in fact, apart from a few math texts, I

have not yet found a forward that is as good as this!

Guru

October 30, 2006 11:51 AM



kovaiputhalvan said...

Apart from being an amazing foreword, this is perhaps the best piece I have

read on Indian writers writing in English.

Neat++ :)

October 31, 2006 10:57 AM

Anonymous said...

Namaste,

You may be interested in this link

http://yabaluri.org/TRIVENI/CDWEB/rajaraojan68.htm

November 29, 2010 10:00 PM

Shencottah said...

Thanks for sharing the link.

December 16, 2010 11:53 AM

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