Absent Women, Speaking Silences: Narrative Authority and Gendered Erasure in Raja Rao’s Select Novels

Abstract

Raja Rao’s position within the domain of Indian English literature is pivotal, as a novelist passionately engaged with the metaphysics of spirituality, the nationalist ideologies of Mahatma Gandhi, and the metaphysically grounded culture of Indian tradition. The critical engagement with his narratives has, in general, lauded the novelist's efforts to ‘Indianise’ the British/English language and to promote a unitary, spiritually conceived notion of the nation. The celebrated discourse, however, remains remarkably silent on issues related to the narrative configuration of gender. Women in Raja Rao's fictional narratives have generally emerged either as personifications of devotion, purity, and cultural traditions or as lacking substantial status as ‘narrating’ agents. The proposed investigation examines the novels Kanthapura and The Serpent and the Rope from the above-mentioned perspective. Through the application of a methodology grounded in the theoretical fields of feminist narratology and the critical projects proposed within the realm of ‘postcolonial’ genders, the proposed investigation proposes to characterize the hovering, silenced, and strategic presences of women’s narratives in Raja Rao’s nationalist/spiritual project, hence challenging the now celebrated, but differentiable, narratives on the celebrative discourses of his prose.