Raja Rao, an internationally renowned novelist who was among the first major Indian writers to cajole the English language into conveying the distinctive cadences of his native country, died July 8 at his home in Austin, Texas. He was 97.
At his death, he was emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin, where he began teaching 40 years ago.
Well before India’s independence from Britain in 1947, Mr. Rao, along with writers like R.K. Narayan, commandeered the language of the colonizer to represent the experience of the colonized. By evoking the sights, sounds, pleasures and hardships of Indian village life, these writers forged the English literature of 20th Century India.
His best-known novels include his first, “Kanthapura,” published in England in 1938 and in the United States in 1963. Narrated in the voice of an elderly woman, the novel explores the turbulence in a south Indian village caused by the arrival of a Gandhi-like figure who preaches non-violent resistance to British rule.
Written when he was just 21 and published only years later, “Kanthapura” reveals his characteristic style–lyrical, fluid, colloquial–already firmly in place.
Mr. Rao was born Nov. 8, 1908, in the town of Hassan in what was then the state of Mysore and is today Karnataka. Like many south Indians of the period, he had no surname; he added Mr. Rao as an adult, to obtain a passport.
In 1929 he earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Madras, where he studied English. He continued his studies in France, including at the Sorbonne, and lived in France for much of the next three decades.
In 1966 he joined the faculty at Texas, where he taught Indian philosophy, concentrating in particular on Buddhism and Vedantism. He retired in 1980.
