The Serpent and the Rope by Raja Rao

First published: 1960

Type of work: Philosophical romance

Time of work: The early 1950’s, ending about one year after the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II

Locale: Aix-en-Provence, Paris, India, and London

Principal Characters:

• Rama, the narrator, a young Indian Brahmin and scholar writing his doctoral thesis
• Madeleine, his French wife, a professor of history
• Savithrl, a young Indian woman engaged to a friend of Rama, with whom Rama discovers the meaning of love

The Novel

Every incident or conversation that Rama describes in this semi-autobiographical story is presented as it furthers or hampers his search for “Truth” and self-knowledge—a quest which is the very heart of the book. “I was born a Brahmin,” says Rama, “that is, devoted to Truth and all that.” Rama is a gentle young student, somewhat frail because of tubercular lungs, who has been living in France for some years. Married to a Frenchwoman, Madeleine, Rama plans, after finishing his thesis on the Albigensian heresy, to accept a teaching post in India and then move there with Madeleine. Yet from Rama’s first reference to his wife, there is a sense that something is not right with the marriage.

Their first child, a son, has died when only seven months old. It is after this tragedy that Rama must return to India, for his father is dying. After presiding over his father’s cremation at Benares, Rama accompanies his stepmother—“Little Mother”—on a pilgrimage to the city’s holy places before returning home. For Rama, this is a trip which intensifies his sense of searching and incompleteness. It is also during this visit home that Rama meets Savithri, a Cambridge student who is betrothed to a friend of his, though she is not in love with the young man she is to marry. At first Rama does not care for Savithri—she is too “modern” for him. Nevertheless, something about her has struck a responsive chord deep within Rama, and he returns to France feeling even more estranged from Madeleine. At their first dinner together, Madeleine, sensing the change, asks Rama if she has failed his gods. “No,” he answers, “You’ve failed me.” Little Mother gave Rama a gift of toe-rings, to be presented to Madeleine as a gift, but Rama cannot bring himself to give them to her. They remain in his case.

Rama and Madeleine manage a temporary renewal of intimacy, but Savithri reenters Rama’s life, first as a guest in France, and then in England, where Rama accompanies her in order to continue his research for his thesis. While in London, Rama sees Savithri frequently, and he becomes aware of his deep love for her, more profound than his feelings for Madeleine. It is a discovery which brings him closer to that Truth he seeks for himself, and in a climactic symbolic marriage ritual, Rama gives Little Mother’s toe-rings to Savithri.

Rama returns for a time to France and to Madeleine, who is pregnant, before traveling back to India for his sister’s marriage. Later, while in Bangalore for his health, he learns of the premature delivery and death of his second son. Soon after that, he receives word of Savithri’s marriage. Rama then returns to France to find that Madeleine, who began studying Buddhism in an effort to be closer to her husband, has now begun withdrawing into Buddhist ritual and asceticism. After a stay of some months, Rama is once again back in London, in time for the new queen’s coronation. While in a hospital for lung surgery, he is visited by Savithri, in London with her father. In a moving farewell, both Rama and Savithri accept the inevitability of their physical separation as well as the spiritual transcendence of their love. As Rama says, “Love is the rejoicing in the rejoicing of the other.”

A year later, in France and divorced from Madeleine, Rama gradually moves toward joy as he realizes that the final answer to his search for inner Truth lies in going to Travancore and seeking out his Guru. It is to this that his other paths—his studies and his loves—have finally led him.

The Characters

Rama, as he stresses throughout his story, is a Brahmin, that is, a member of the Hindu caste of priests, teachers, and scholars. Indeed, Rama the scholar steadily pursues not only his doctoral studies but also his study of the Truth, wherever it might lead him. He is striking for his gentleness and kindness, as well as for the nameless unhappiness burdening his life. “Something had just missed me in life,” he says, “some deep absence grew in me, like a coconut on a young tree, that no love or learning could fulfil.” Rama embodies the universal search for meaning and self-knowledge, a quest which has a particular urgency for him, since the need to approach self-awareness is fundamental to Hindu belief.

Rama’s conviction that woman can only find her God through man, however, is a belief likely to exasperate the Western woman reader, and it is symptomatic of Rama’s problems with Madeleine. She is, simply, too Western. Beautiful and golden-haired, she seems to be a prototypical Western female, even to her slightly comical fear of bacteria in the Ganges River. She is a college lecturer and a lapsed Catholic who, at the time she meets Rama, is also an avowed atheist. Her studies of Buddhism, meant initially to bring her closer to Rama, ironically drive them further apart. Though Madeleine eventually becomes a practicing Buddhist, Rama points out that “one can never be converted to Hinduism.” Her independent conversion, in fact, represents two kinds of failure: She has not been true to her own cultural identity, and she has not sought God through her husband.

Savithri, on the other hand, offers to Rama all that Madeleine cannot. Savithri is Indian; she is Hindu; she seems to have an instinctive understanding of all that Rama, who often speaks quite cryptically, wants to impart to her. She is not beautiful, unlike Madeleine, but her bespectacled face and roly-poly figure merely serve to sharpen the spiritual distinction between her and Madeleine, which is the important distinction. Through her, Rama can understand himself better, which helps him to approach more closely the Truth he seeks. Because of their deep spiritual bond, therefore, Savithri is the only one to whom Rama feels he can give his stepmother’s toe-rings. Savithri’s marriage to Rama’s friend Pratap is a pragmatic affair: If one must have a husband, Savithri tells Rama, Pratap is “the very best.” Rama, however, will be her true soulmate, as she will be his. Since their love does not demand sexual intimacy or even physical proximity, their inevitable separation does not grieve them.

Critical Context

Raja Rao has not been a prolific writer, but his short stories and novels are important both for the Indian point of view he brings to his works in English and for his experiments with form, The Serpent and the Rope, written in twenty-nine days in Paris, is particularly notable for Rao’s stylistic innovations, for which he has been criticized as well as praised. Rao himself explained the novel’s unusual style as an attempt “to capture in English the rhythms of the Sanskrit language.” It won the Indian Sahitya Akademi Award in 1964.

Rao’s other works show the influence of both the East and the West that is so clearly evident in this novel’s language and form. Whether Rao is writing about Indian rustics and rebellion, however, as in Kanthapura (1938), or a cross-cultural marriage, as in The Serpent and the Rope, clearly, as the critic M. K. Naik has written, “Indian philosophical and religious thought has deeply influenced all Raja Rao’s works.”

Bibliography

Derrett, M. E. The Modern Indian Novel in English: A Comparative Approach, 1966.

Iyengar, K. R. Srinivasa. Indian Writing in English, 1962.

Naik, M. K. Raja Rao, 1972.

Sykes, Gerald. Review in The New York Times Book Review. XLVIII (April 14, 1963), p. 53.

Time. Review. LXXXI (February 22, 1963), p. 96.