Indian · 1908–2006
Raja Rao was born in Hassan, Karnataka, into a Kannada-speaking Brahmin family, studied at Aligarh and Nizam College, and then spent most of his adult life in France and the United States, teaching philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin for two decades. He wrote in English and spent his career arguing that Indians had to break the language to make it carry Indian thought. His foreword to Kanthapura, in which he says the tempo of Indian life must be infused into English, became the founding statement of the Indian novel in English. His fiction moved from village nationalism in Kanthapura to Vedantic metaphysics in The Serpent and the Rope, a novel about a marriage that is also an argument about Advaita philosophy. He won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1964 and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1988. With R.K. Narayan and Mulk Raj Anand, he formed the trio that established Indian fiction in English.