Unhomed in the world: The work and world of the recently rediscovered writer, Rajalakshmi N Rao

Contemporary Indian literature, in the last two centuries, has mainly kept to the realist tradition, where the exploration has been of our social contexts and realities. The recently rediscovered writer, Rajalakshmi Rao, stands apart from this tradition. Perhaps one of the very few women writing here in the 1950s, she stands at a tangent to the serious mainstream, in the way of the 20th-century novelists, the Brazilian Clarice Lispector, and the Chilean María Luisa Bombal, whose magic reality was a precursor to later writers far more well known.

Rao is a significant and necessary rediscovery. We must be grateful to scholar and writer Chandan Gowda for retrieving her stories from various places, collecting them, as well as translating them. In his newly edited book, Sangama-Pastorale, Gowda offers us a selection of Rao’s Kannada and English stories. It is a rare writer who has the ability to write both in English and in their mother tongue.

The void at the centre

Rao’s English stories are built around the relationships between men and women, within marriage or outside it. Yet they are not centred on these things. Through the dialogues and small events that happen, there is a certain drawing out of the space between a man and an educated, intellectual, philosophical woman in those times. There is no arrival towards which a story moves. The space between the man and woman is often a disturbing one, or empty and melancholy, and always ambiguous. But where she is most singular is in the way she creates a void at their centre, or gaps and cracks through which the reader falls and must find her own way. It is as if Rao has not specifically created the void; she has rather allowed it to emerge and grow.

As a woman living in the ’50s, she would have felt unhomed in the world and unable to free her intellectual and visionary self from her surroundings. Her work reflects the feminine condition but goes much further. The sharpness of her gaze sees that once the walls break, there can only be an endless horizon. It is remarkable, but not surprising, that she abandoned family life when she was quite young, leaving behind her husband and a child.

In his preface, Gowda says, “She threw away all the notes and sketches and drafts she had readied for a projected novel and a play and abandoned writing altogether. Over the next 40 years, she did half-yearly sojourns in Uttar Kashi and Machilipatnam.” Today, she lives in an ashram near Mysore, where Gowda went to meet her and eventually drew her out for a public discussion of her work.

Often, at a certain point, Rao’s gaze moves away from the characters to the dregs in a teacup – lingering over it through several lines – or the constellations in the sky. She looks at inanimate things as closely as she does the animate. This draws me to her very profoundly, as I have been working with this in my own work for a long time. I compose holding the human and the non-human equally, without hierarchy. I don’t believe in foreground or background. This is not craft, it is a certain way of looking.

“Darkness quivered in the room like a hungry bear. She closed her eyes upon its suffering.” The first sentence here seems like a metaphor. But by taking it further, to the second sentence, she creates a relationship between the human being and the darkness. The non-human in Rao’s work is never an instrument. It simply is, very organically present, living its own existence adjacent to the human. One sometimes casts a shadow on the other. And sometimes the two merge and meet.

“All the roar of city streets, all the roar of waterfalls, night seas, hurricanes, aeroplanes, machine guns, printing presses, railway junctions, bus and tram terminuses, popular coffee houses, election meetings, cinemas, all of this runs in my blood. Instead of red corpuscles, I have these roars.

“But,” his eyes widened, “all the silence of suburbs, forests, pools in deserted places, moonlit skies, love-lit nights, of winter, of proud sorrow, of exquisite grace, of small pale flowers – all this is in my blood too. Instead of white corpuscles, I have these silences.”

These are all stories of Rao’s youth, her twenties. Had she continued working, she may have found an even more confident, original voice. Her search through the sentient and insentient may have acquired more breadth and depth. What we have now is the beginning of such a vision.

“With its neck deliberately snapped, the lamp let out a piercing oil-soaked cry. Darkness rushed over and squeezed the lamp’s throat to prevent anyone from hearing it.”

The Kannada stories

It is significant that her Kannada stories seem stronger than her English ones. Perhaps in her writer self somewhere, there was more assurance in a mother tongue. The two Kannada stories in Pastorale, “August 15” and “An Ordinary Story”, are remarkable in their exploration, as is a third story, “Ave Maria” (that is not in this collection). In “Ave Maria”, the lead character, a Catholic man, is looking at the emptiness of marriage all around him. He is in love with a woman but feels he should end the relationship. One evening, entering a church, he listens to the music and the hymns, the Ave Maria, and it brings him an unexpected understanding that makes him change his mind.

“The unrest that had cost him his peace of mind for three weeks, the solution he had thought of, all seemed wrong and unnecessary. The song with which Melba had enthralled her neighbours before she left her home, the music that rose out of the strings of Menuhin’s violin, and attracted men, reduced his decision to nothing.”

Again, Rao uses something far outside human psychology and motivation to create the story’s epiphany. In “August 15”, through a meandering eight pages, she unravels the emptiness of India’s “independence,” through train tracks, shanties, the night sky,

One of her characters, a woman, says, “You can’t sculpt with a rose petal, you need to use a chisel.” Beneath all her work, this spine is very apparent. Had she continued to write, perhaps the chisel would have grown stronger and more mature.

In the brief preface to the English section of Pastorale, she says, “…although I had a sense of authorship and fulfilment back then, they soon made way for the question ‘Who am I?’ What is the truth behind the I which forms the foundation of everyone’s lives? The pursuit of this question took over my mind completely, leaving little space for any other activity or thought.”

Sharmistha Mohanty is a writer, poet, and translator. She is also the Founder Editor of the online literature journal Almost Island.