University of Oklahoma

Toward Expanding the English Canon: Raja Rao's 1938 Credo for Creativity
Author(s): Braj B. Kachru
Source: World Literature Today, Vol. 62, No. 4, Raja Rao: 1988 Neustadt Laureate (Autumn,
1988), pp. 582-586
Published by: University of Oklahoma
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40144514
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 582 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY
Choudhary, Satya Dev, Essays on Indian Poetics, Delhi, Vasudev
Prakashan, 1965.
Joshi, Shivram D., ed., The Sphotanirnayana ofKaundda Bhatta,
Poona, University of Poona, i967.
Kane, P. V., History of Sanskrit Poetics, Delhi, Banarsidas, 1961.
Rao, Raja, Kanthapura, New York, New Directions, 1963.
, The Serpent and the Rope, New York, Overlook, 1986.
, The Cat and Shakespeare, New York, Macmillan, 1965.
Toward Expanding the English Canon: Raja Rao's 1938
Credo for Creativity
By BRAJ B. KACHRU That 1988 should be the
year for Raja Rao's selec-
tion as laureate of the
Neustadt International Prize for Literature is signifi-
cant for more than one reason. It was exactly half a
century ago, in 1938, that Rao published his first
novel, Kanthapura. In the "Author's Foreword" to
that volume he wrote what has turned out to be the
credo of his creativity in English.1 This foreword of
less than five hundred words is one of the most
frequently quoted statements from a creative writer.
It is quoted and discussed not only in Rao's native
India but also in all the regions of the Outer Circle of
English (e.g., West Africa, East Africa, Southeast
Asia),2 where English has a long tradition of use as a
language of creativity in various literary genres. In
1938 this trailblazing statement was both provocative
and controversial. Now, five decades later, it is per-
haps appropriate to go back to Rao's much-discussed
credo and see to what extent it has given shape and
form to his own creative processes and to the content
of his work.
The Sadhaka's Barriers. Before I come to Rao's
credo, however, it is worth mentioning here that in
order to understand Rao's creativity in English in a
proper perspective, one has to cross the initial bar-
riers: first, the barrier of a "mystique"associated with
his process of creativity; and second, the barrier of a
new paradigm of structure and linguistic innovations
which he introduced and pragmatically justified for
writers of English in the Outer Circle. The mystique
is particularly daunting to a reader not familiar with
the underlying sociocultural, linguistic, and philo-
sophical traditions which form the backbone of Rao's
writing. Rao repeatedly emphasizes that for him cre-
ativity is a sddhand or spiritual discipline and that he
is a very serious sddhaka (devotee) of literature. "I
write," he says. "I cannot not write. Yet, he who
writes does not know that which writes. So, does one
write?"3
This metaphysical view of creativity does not make
it easy for a reader to understand Rao. There is no
quick and easy rapport between him and his reader.
The expectations from the reader are immense, even
from a reader who shares with him his native socio-
, "Books Which Have Influenced Me," in Aspects of Indian
Writing in English, M. K. Naik, ed., Delhi, Macmillan, 1979,
pp. 45-49.
Renou, Louis, Religions of Ancient India, New York, Shocken,
1953/1968.
Whorf, Benjamin Lee, "Language, Mind, and Reality," in Lan-
guage, Thought, and Reality, John B. Carroll, ed., Cambridge,
Ma., MIT Press, 1956, pp. 246-70.
cultural, philosophical, and literary traditions. A
reader is invited to partake in a metaphysical vision in
which, as K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar points out, "the
silence is more important than the spoken word, the
vacant space in the book more significant than the
printed page! This is seeing, not what is seen, but
what is to be seen. Upanishadic illumination is a
matter of flashes, not the steady light of the day."4
Added to this is Rao's new paradigm, which empha-
sizes the nativization of English and its new identi-
ties. Rao's foreword provided a conceptual framework
for understanding the creativity in English of non-
native writers such as Chinua Achebe (b. 1930), Mulk
Raj Anand (b. 1905), G. V. Desani (b. 1909), and
Amos Tutuola (b. 1920), to name just four writers
from the Outer Circle.
What Rao articulated in his credo he has accom-
plished very well indeed during the last fifty years.
This time span is wide, but Rao's oeuvre is rather
small. His half-dozen publications have been written
with long interludes between each new work and the
next. However, each book has revealed yet another
dimension of the bilingual's creativity: it is within the
context of such creativity, the multilingual's cre-
ativity, that Rao's contribution must be seen. His
1938 credo is a blueprint for such writing. Now, five
decades later, we see that Rao has not only adhered
to the credo, but that with each work he has further
strengthened his commitment to it.
The Trailblazing Credo. Now the credo. It has
essentially four parts. The first refers to the bilin-
gual's repertoire and to the dilemma of writing in
English. No one has presented this dilemma and its
complexity so succinctly as Rao.
The telling has not been easy. One has to convey in a
languagethat is not one's own the spirit that is one's
own. One has to convey the variousshades and omis-
sionsof a certainthought-movement thatlooksmaltreat-
ed in an alien language. I use the word "alien,"yet
English is not really an alien languageto us. It is the
languageof our intellectualmake-up.We are all instinc-
tively bilingual,manyof us writingin our own language
and in English.
The second section speaks of the acculturation of
English and its multicultural identities, particularly
 KACHRU 583

in those regions of the world where it is used as an In 1966, almost three decades after Rao's credo, an
institutionalized additional language. important writer from another continent, Chinua
We cannotwrite like the English. We should not. We Achebe of Nigeria, gives us some idea of "how I
cannotwrite only as Indians.We have grownto look at approach the use of English."6 Achebe contrasts the
the largeworldas partof us. Our methodof expression Africanized version of English with "another way," a
thereforehasto be a dialectwhichwill somedayproveto nonnativized version. In the short passage that fol-
be distinctiveand colorfulas the Irishor the American. lows, the Chief Priest is explaining to one of his sons
Time alone will justify it. the importance of sending him to church. The Afri-
canized version reads:
Next Rao refers to stylistic transcreation, in which-
as is well recognized- he has excelled. I want one of my sons to join these people and be my
eyes there. If there is nothingin it you will come back.
After languagethe next problem is that of style. The But if there is somethingthen you will bring back my
tempo of Indianlife must be infused into our English share.The worldis like a mask,dancing.If you wantto
expression,even as the tempo of Americanor Irish life see it well, you do not standin one place. My spirittells
has gone into the makingof theirs. me that those who do not befriendthe white mantoday
will be saying "hadwe known",tomorrow.
Finally he considers the cultural conventions of nar-
rative, those culture-specific discourse strategies The other version, the nonnativized version, is dis-
which are not part of the traditional stylistic reper- tinctively different from the above. Achebe rightly
toire of English. asks, "Supposing I had put it another way. Like this
And our paths are interminable.The Mahabharatahas for instance":
214,778verses and the Ramayana48,000. The Puranas I am sending you as my representativeamong these
are endlessand innumerable.We have neitherpunctua- people- just to be on the safe side in case the new
tion nor the treacherous"ats"and "ons"to botherus- religion develops. One has to move with the times or
we tell one interminabletale. Episode followsepisode, else one is left behind. I havea hunchthatthosewho fail
and when our thoughtsstop our breath stops, and we to come to terms with the white man may well regret
move to another thought. This was and still is the their lack of foresight.
ordinarystyle of our storytelling.
I do not believe that before Rao the questions of Achebe, of course, is correct in his conclusion that
"the material is the same. But the form of the one is
linguistic innovations and new identities of English in character and the other is not. It is largely a matter
had been addressed with this precision and convic-
of instinct but judgment comes into it too." The first
tion. In articulation of these issues Rao provided a
new paradigm for understanding the bilingual's cre- version is closer to the African "thought-pattern,"
and, to use Rao's words, in Achebe's preferred ver-
ativity, a paradigm which has a pragmatic basis and sion "thought-movement" does not look "maltreated
sociocultural and linguistic foundations. In addition,
the credo also contains a confession. It is a confessionin an alien language." It is pragmatically a very
in the sense that it says how a bilingual's creativity insightful observation on contextual appropriateness
works. A linguist could not have expressed it better. of cultural conventions in discourse. This historical
Whenever I mention this to Rao, his response is aside is important to understand the context of Rao's
always that this is the only way he could have written writing in the Outer Circle and to underscore the
in English. vital role Rao's credo has played in legitimiz-
Before Rao, in a somewhat muffled manner, we ing- culturally, stylistically, and pragmatically- the
find an expression of the need for indigenization of innovations and nativization of English.
In the 1930s, when Rao published Kanthapura, an
English in, for example, Lai Behari Day of Bengal. In
1874 Day expressed the stylistic dilemma of a nonna- important novel in English by a nonnative user of
tive writer of English to his "gentle readers." His English in the Outer Circle had yet to be written.
concern was about the lack of a stylistic range in his Rao did it, and in doing so he became the precursor
novel in English. The result of this deficiency, ac- of the most important and productive era of creativity
in English in the Outer Circle. This productive era
cording to Day, is that his Bengali peasants speak started around 1940, and in my view it has not abated
better English than most uneducated English peas-
ants." He elaborates his predicament as follows: as yet. Rao's credo was not a political statement, as
was, for example, that of his compatriot writer Mulk
Gentle reader,allowme here to makeone remark.You RajAnand in King Emperor's English (1948). Rao was
must perceive that Badanand Alangaspeakbetter En- essentially seeking an extension of his own multi-
glishthanmostuneducatedEnglishpeasants;they speak Indian identity, to bring into English the
almostlike educatedladiesand gentlemen,withoutany lingual
Sanskritic tradition. (Hasn't Rao often reminded us
provincialisms.But how couldI have avoidedthis defect that he wanted to write in Sanskrit or Kannada?That
in my history?If I had translatedtheir talk into the - -
Somersetor the Yorkshiredialect, I shouldhave turned he cannot or does not write in Sanskrit is a sore
them into English, and not Bengalipeasants.You will, point with him.) Rao's vision of Indian writing in
therefore,pleaseoverlookthis gravethoughunavoidable English encompasses what multilingual creative writ-
fault in this authenticnarrative.5 ers have done for centuries in Rao's part of Asia with
584 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY
Sanskrit, with Persian, and with a variety of other
languages.
The Credo as Blueprint. In retrospect, after
half a century, one might ask: in what ways did Rao's
credo provide a blueprint for his creativity? In Kan-
thapura Rao did not demonstrate his total range of
innovations. Perhaps he did not mean to, since the
scope of the book was limited. The intended goals of
the credo slowly unfolded in The Serpent and the
Rope (1960), The Cat and Shakespeare (1965), and
Comrade Kirillov (1976), and one sees all the dimen-
sions of the credo fully blossomed in The Chessmas-
ter and His Moves (1988). In this gradual unfolding of
Rao's vision of an "Indian" novel in English, he
worked, as it were, with a chisel. He was refining his
technique, experimenting linguistically, synthesizing
the cultural and philosophical ingredients, and above
all molding the English language to give it an Indian
identity. He was also Indianizing the English lan-
guage beyond the surface level.
What Rao envisioned in his credo, he has delivered
during the past five decades. It is not possible to
discuss all the aspects in detail here. However, let
me mention the major innovations. These are: expan-
sion of the stylistic range, contextual acculturation,
and use of the Puranic structure in his major works
(e.g., The Serpent and the Rope and The Chessmas-
ter and His Moves). I shall briefly elaborate.
First, how does Rao expand the stylistic range of
English so that "the tempo of Indian life must be
infused into our English expression" (vii)? He goes
back to native tradition. In linguistic terms, Rao has
extended the "meaning potential" of English (to use
M. A. K. Halliday's designation) by various linguistic
devices: an extensive use of native similes and meta-
phors (from e.g. Kannada, Sanskrit, Hindi); the trans-
fer of rhetorical devices; the transcreation of prov-
erbs, idioms, and speech acts; the use of various
syntactic devices (consider, say, the style of the Hari-
kathamanor the grandmother in Kanthapura);and an
extensive employment of code-mixing- i.e., the use
of lexical items or larger units from another language
or a dialect in the stream of discourse- and code-
switching, shifting from one language to another. The
following examples from The Chessmaster and His
Moves are illustrative of code-mixing and code-
switching.
'Qava?'answersJayalakshmi, adjustingher necklace.
'Est-cequ'onva le trouveraujourd'hui,'he continues,
the last word said with such heaviness.
'Si le Seigneurle veut.'
'Maisquel seigneur?'
'Lui,'she saidwith a mischievoussmile, as if thinking
of someone far away, very far away.
'Qui done?'
'SonAltessele lion.' Of courseshe was speakinga lie.
'Le tigre?'
'Non,'she said, and turnedto her father,askingif the
mail had come.7
Now consider this example of switching to Hindi:
"Maji kahan gaye hain?- Achha. Suno. Vo kab arahi
hai?- Agaye? Kapada badalke arahi hai? Achha,
Padu. Bye-bye" (175). Rao makes no concessions to
monolinguals. No clues are given to those who do not
know French or Hindi or Sanskrit, and thus linguistic
and cultural interpretation of sentences such as the
following demand much of the reader: "Our alaya,
the true home, is forever the Himalaya"(46); "It is all
"
prarabdha, it's written on our foreheads (49); "For
either you touch suffering, and so suffer, or reach to
the other side, and be it. One is kashta and the
duhkha" (84); "I bhago- I run" (130); "A brahmin
should not touch jhoota, especially, my jhoota" (130);
"And so you and your beads, and the sorrow. Duhkh
me duhkh milaja" (108).
Rao's stylistic excellence results from his skill at
"transcreating"the native stylistic and discoursal de-
vices (not mere lexical transfer) into English. He
skillfully exploits the typical diglossic situation pres-
ent in major Indian languages. In Kanthapura the
style is that of colloquial Kannada, Rao's mother
tongue, and the result is the vernacularization of the
English language with Kannada discoursal features.
On the other hand, in The Serpent and the Rope
there is what may be termed the "learned" style,
appropriate to philosophical discourse: one might call
it the Sanskritization of English. The Sanskritization
(in stylistic terms) again shows in The Chessmaster
and His Moves. I might mention here as an aside that
Rao is perhaps the only writer in India who has
granted the English language a status equal to that of
Sanskrit. This he does with his usual elegance.
Truth, said a great Indiansage, is not the monopolyof
the Sanskritlanguage.Truthcan use any language,and
the more universal,the better it is. If metaphysicsis
India'sprimarycontributionto worldcivilization,as we
believe it is, then must she use the most universal
languagefor her to be universal.. . . And so long as the
English language is universal, it will always remain
Indian.... It wouldthen be correctto sayas long as we
are Indian- that is, not nationalists,but trulyIndiansof
the Indianpsyche- we shallhave the Englishlanguage
with us andamongstus, andnot as a guest or friend,but
as one of our own, of our caste, our creed, our sect and
our tradition.8
In terms of stylistic experimentation in The Chess-
master and His Moves, Rao does more than what he
has done in his earlier works. He brings together
over half a dozen languages and dialects. That, of
course, includes a significant part of Rao's total lin-
guistic repertoire: English, French, Sanskrit, Tamil,
and a sprinkling of Greek, Hindi, Hindustani, and
Urdu. The effect of such discoursal strategies and
context-specific lexicalization is a "poetical meta-
physical" style. The aphoristic use of language further
contributes to the "metaphysical"style. Consider, for
example, the following passages from The Chessmas-
ter and His Moves: "To be is to is-to-be nowhere"
(48); "To be is to know, but to know is rarely to be"

(63); "Going is non-going" (55); "Not to be is truly to
be" (95); "Death's death is what death seeks" (104);
"Tobelong you must be lost" (143); and "The essence
essences essence" (162).
A random look at the two appendices of The
Chessmaster and His Moves is revealing in other
ways too. There are nine pages devoted to selected
translations(711-19) of Sanskritand other passages in
the main text, followed by a fifteen-page glossary
(720-35). In the main text there is no indication that
translations of the Sanskrit text have been provided.
The glossary includes over 336 words from languages
such as Sanskrit, Hindi, Hindustani, Kannada, Urdu,
and French.
In the lexical and other types of mixing, French
and Sanskrit are dominant. The mixing with French
has created an interesting texture in discourse, as the
above passage illustrates. However, it is the Sanskrit
lexical items which provide the metaphysical and
Vedantic fiber for conceptualizing the discourse. The
tone of the discourse is set by semantic sets such as
the following: Adi Sesha, "The Primal Serpent"; ad-
vaita, "nondual";"ahamkara, "I-ness";ahanta, "em-
phasis on personal I"; agnana, "ignorance";anaman,
"nameless"; bhavati, "becoming"; dhih, "intellect";
ka, "light";prana, "life-breath";samsara, "cyclic be-
Raja Rao and Braj Kachru, 4 June 1988
KACHRU 585
coming or existence"; satvic, "pure";tapas, "austeri-
ty"; yoga chakra, "the subtle nervous systems." The
use of such devices is much more extensive in The
Chessmaster and His Moves than in The Serpent and
the Rope, in which there is a glossary of only twenty-
seven words. However, as the Prague School critics
would say, it is by the "foregrounding"of such de-
vices that Rao's novel (if one can characterize The
Chessmaster and His Moves as a novel) is Indian. The
term Indian needs an explanation here, and Rao
provides one: "There are no indians [sic], Madame.
. . . India is no country, I told you. India is a meta-
phor. Wheresoever one dissolves is India- every
thought when purely understood is India. When
Camus knows he is Camus, that is, there is no
Camus, Camus becomes an indian" (37).
The second aspect takes us to the acculturation of
English. As I have discussed elsewhere, Rao's texts
are overloaded with contextual nativization and cross-
cultural presuppositions: Greek, Semitic, Vedantic,
Perso-Arabic, as well as contemporary political and
religious.9 All these acquire a meaning in the Indian
context, however. At the same time the attempt is
toward universalization. After all, the themes Rao
treats are human ones, philosophical and metaphysi-
cal.
The third point is that of structure. One wonders:
is it appropriate to consider Rao's major works "nov-
"
els in the sense in which the concept is understood
in the Western literary tradition? In recent years
several studies have been published which insight-
fully discuss this and related aspects of Rao's work.10
The structure of Rao's novels has to be seen in terms
of the native literary context: in Kanthapura his goal
was to write a sthala purana, a "legendary history,"
and in the major works which have followed Kanth-
apura he has not abandoned that structure. The
Puranic form seems to dominate.
It is not only the ancient Puranas and the Indian
epics which suggest a structural framework to Rao.
He is also well aware of the conventions of Bana's
novel Kddambari (eighth century), written in San-
skrit, and Bhavabhuti's Sanskritplay Uttarardmacha-
rita (eighth century). One wonders if there is a
symbolic meaning in what Rao says in the opening
paragraph on the first page of The Chessmaster and
His Moves.
You remember,J., you said to me: Tell me you need
me, and I'll come.
I need you now, you knowwhatI mean. I do not truly
need you. Yet I need you. Wouldyou thereforecome?
Would you returnas parrot,betel vine or bodhisattva.
SometimesI dreamof you and call you Kadambari.(3)
In his latest work Rao has not strictly adhered to the
conventions of English punctuation, capitalization,
and sentence construction. In fact, there are sen-
tences of one page (264-65) and one-and-a-half pages
in length (501-2). In his experimentation with the
language Rao treats English as if it were an Indian
586 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY
medium. He shows conscious indifference to the past
history of the language, its canonical connotations, its
conventions of creativity, and its Judeo-Christian as-
sociations. No, he did not seek a divorce from the
earlier traditions of the language; far from it. He
actually expanded the scope of the medium and its
message. He reincarnated English within India's
multilingual and multicultural contexts; he gave it an
Indian form- just as India had done earlier to Per-
sian. That is Rao's strength, and that was the goal of
his credo.
In his credo Rao said, "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." What was
said rather wistfully at that time has now become a
reality in nonnative writing in English, and in recent
years, slowly but surely, this experimentation and
recognition is gaining acceptance. What Rao said in
1938 was linguistically revolutionary for an Indian. In
1988 not only does Rao have many followers, but his
suggested paradigm has become the dominant one.
In the 1938 credo and in the work that followed it Rao
not only outlined a goal for himself as a writer, but
more important, he provided a paradigm within
which the bilingual's creativity must be understood
and described. What was intended as a personal
manifesto actually applies not only to Indian English
but to creativity in nonnative literatures in general.
Conclusion. And now, half a century later, in
1988, what is the status of English in Rao's native
India? Has it proved to be, as Rao desired, "as
distinctive and colorful as the Irish or the American"?
In The Chessmaster and His Moves Rao returns to
this question.
Todayof coursewhatone speaksin Indiacalled English
is a vernacular,and will somedaygrow like Urdu, and
takingits own rhythmand structure.We in Indiawel-
come everythingoutlandishandofferit to the gods, who
taste it, masticateit, and give it backto us as prasadam
["offeringsto the gods returned to man sanctified"].
When our English will have come to that maturityit
mightstillachieveits own nationhood.Tillthen it will be
like Anglo-Norman,neither French nor English, an
historicalincidentin the growthof culture.Afterall, and
we forget so easily, sister, India is hallowedwith wis-
dom, antiquity,and history. (189)
It seems to me that in 1988 Indian English has
achieved its "own nationhood." Rao's aspiration of
1938 has come true. In 1982, at my first meeting with
Rao in Delhi, I mentioned the significance and the
revolutionary nature of his 1938 foreword to him, and
he responded in his characteristic way. He said, "But
it was not intended. As I say, I do not write. It is
written."
University of Illinois, Urbana
1 I have used the 1963 edition of the book
published by New
Directions in New York. The "Author's Foreword" was actually
written in 1937.
2 The global spread of English can be viewed in terms of three
concentric circles: an "inner" circle, an "outer" or "extended"
circle, and an "expanding" circle. The Inner Circle refers to the
traditional sociolinguistic bases of English (the USA, Canada, the
U.K., Australia, and New Zealand). The Outer Circle refers to
regions formally colonized by the Inner Circle countries where
English is an additional language. The Expanding Circle refers to
regions where English is essentially a foreign language (e.g.,
Egypt, Indonesia, Japan). See Braj B. Kachru, "Standards, Cod-
ification and Sociolinguistic Realism: The English Language in the
Outer Circle," in English in the World, Randolph Quirk and
Henry Widdowson, eds., Cambridge, Eng., Cambridge Universi-
ty Press, 1985.
3 See Rao's statement in
Pourquoi ecrivez-vous?, Jean-Frangois
Fogel and Daniel Rondau, eds., Paris, Livres de Poche, 1988, p.
222.
4 K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar, Indian
Writing in English, Bombay,
1973, pp. 409-10.
5 Quoted in Govinda Prasad Sarma, Nationalism in Indo-An-
glian Fiction, New Delhi, Sterling, 1978, p. 332.
6 Chinua Achebe, Things Fall
Apart, London, Heinemann,
1966, d. 20.
7 Raja Rao, The Chessmaster and His Moves, Delhi, Vision
Books, 1988, p. 95. Subsequent references are to this edition and,
where needed for clarity, include the abbreviation CM.
8 Raja Rao, "The Caste of English," in Awakened Conscience:
Studies in Commonwealth Literature, C. D. Narasimhaiah, ed.,
Delhi, Sterling, 1978, p. 421.
9 See e.g. Braj B. Kachru, The Indianization
of English: The
English Language in India, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1983;
and The Alchemy of English: The Spread, Functions and Models of
Non-Native Englishes, Oxford, Pergamon, 1986, esp. pp. 159-73.
10 See e.g. C. D. Narasimhaiah,
Raja Rao, New Delhi, Arnold-
Heinemann, 1973; M. K. Naik, Raja Rao, Delhi, Blackie & Son,
1982 (rev. ed.). See also S. Nagarajan, "An Indian Novel," Sewa-
nee Review, 22:3 (1964), pp. 512-17. For an overview of literary
creativity in the Outer Circle, see Edwin Thumboo, "The Literary
Dimension of the Spread of English: Creativity in a Second
Language," in GURT 1987-Language Spread and Language Poli-
cy: Issues, Implications, and Case Studies, Peter H. Lowenberg,
ed., Washington, D.C., Georgetown University Press, 1988, pp.
361-401.