Appreciating Raja Rao’s Nationalist Imagination:A Review of Raja Rao:The Master and his Moves

In this collection of eighteen scholarly essays, we encounter multifarious exegeses of the works of foremost Indian novelist Raja Rao;and more importantly the novelist and his arresting nationalism. The somewhat theatrical title of the book anticipates the bustling philosophy that is the man Rao as ingrained in the distinctness of his fiction. From the preface of the book to the last chapter, the consistent rhythm is that Rao is an Indian writer worth celebrating because of his romanticisation of the Indian culture and genetic wisdom that naturally positions him as an iconoclast in his perception of the Western world. Interestingly, not only the Western readers and critics that find his works too unconventionally experimental, but also his Westernised Indian brothers. In her contribution titled “Raja Rao’s Fiction: Cultural Reassertions in the Context of Globalisation,” D. Maya hits this point when she, juxtaposing Rao’s fiction with other Western immigrant writers’ works, draws a distinction that “[Rao’s] novels assume special significance against the horde of immigrant writing that adapts itself to the discourse of the Western writers, merging identities, and diluting cultural specificities in the process of winning acceptance”.