BOOK REVIEW

"If I WERE TO look over the whole world to find out the country most richly endowed with all the wealth, power and beauty that nature can bestow - in some ways a very paradise on earth - I should point to India,' so wrote Max Müller in his famous essay on India. 'If I were asked under what sky the human mind has developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered on the greatest problems of life, and had found solutions to some of them, I should point to India. And if I were to ask myself from what literature we, in Europe, may draw that corrective which is most wanted in order to make our life more perfect, more comprehensive, more universal, in fact more truly human, a life not for this life only, but transfigured and eternal life - again I should point to India.'

"This exaltation of India, which we Indians ourselves share with others objectively, historically, spiritually, is not an indication of the truth of India, but of the need for an India" - I am now citing Raja Rao's comment on Müller.

And he goes on, "If there were no India, with the Seven Seas to the south and the white-swan Himalaya to the north, if India did not have the holy Ganga and the cape of the Virgin Goddess (Kanya Kumari), if India were not the land of the elephant and the monkey-world, of parakeets and peacocks, and of the saintly cobra - if India did not have the diamonds of Golconda and the pearls of Coromandel, if India did not possess muslin fine as a cloud' or spice holy, rich as sandal, with cardamom, cinnamon, aloes, musk - if India were not the land of sadhus and suttee, of Thugs, pariahs, devadasis and unbloody famines - if India were not the country of Asoka Bhoja Raja, ofVikramaditya or of Akbar Badishah - India would still be. India is not a country but a perspective; it is not a climate but a mood in the play of the Absolute."

The desire to reach this India is a powerful current in our time. A whole generation in the West sees India, as the eighteenth century saw Italy, as the land of the grand tour, and few are unchanged by what they find; but to reach the "India" Raja Rao has in mind (and which emerges in this collection of essays written for various occasions over his long lifetime as India's renowned novelist philosopher) is harder to discover.

Another of his sayings, that has remained with me since our first meeting at a conference in Delhi some twenty years ago, was, "India begins beyond sorrow." To put "the meaning of India" in one word, that word is yajna - sacrifice. The true meaning of sacrifice is the renunciation of the ego to the higher, universal Self. And that universal Self, which is to be found in our own deepest nature, is being, consciousness and joy. In total sacrifice lies total freedom. Yajna means giving up greed, taking from the earth only enough to meet our basic needs and returning as sacrifice what earth and nature so freely give. This eternal wisdom of India is so much needed in our time when materialism is dominating our culture.

Raja Rao, from the outset, is set upon exploring the many ways to truth. He studied at the Muslim university of Aligarh, and at the age of nineteen left India for the International University of Montpelier where he gave himself to a study of Christian theology - jumping into Western civilization at the deep end. At that time French culture was under the rule of Valéry and Gide, and Raja Rao's first stories were written in French. Then he turned to English, but with the proviso "I will not write like the English, I can only write like an Indian."

Raja Rao is exceptional in the depth of his understanding of both Eastern and Western civilizations - a major theme in all his works, from The Serpent and the Rope (1960 - awarded India's highest literary award) to his most recent novel The Chessmaster and his Moves (1988 - awarded the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literature). But throughout his life "literature" as such has been in the service of a deeper spiritual quest for truth.

THESE ESSAYS RANGE from accounts of meetings with Nehru, Malraux, E. M. Forster and a little boy in the Jardin de Luxembourg in Paris, a penetrating analysis of Gandhi's experiments with truth, to philosophical essays on the nature of poetry and the meaning of "the Word". But perhaps the most significant paper is a lecture delivered in Washington D.C. in 1972 on Wisdom and Power. All human beings are engaged in "the pursuit of happiness" but Raja Rao carries the meaning of those words far beyond the common understanding of the words as they stand in the American constitution. Politicians promise this and that - better housing, primary schools for all, cheap food or some other things - but with the best will in the world, such material reforms are beside the point. The wise ruler, Raja Rao argues, promises nothing at all, for he is ego less and his very presence bestows that happiness which is always already there for the wise.

Blake wrote: "More, more, is the cry of a mistaken soul. Less than All will not satisfy man;" and that "all" is the wisdom of the ego less Self. Rao quotes Plato who said that "either the philosophers must become kings in our states or else the people who are now called kings and potentates must take genuinely and thoroughly to philosophy" - Philosophy, that is, in its old sense, as the love of wisdom. The Lord Krishna himself must guide the chariot of the warrior-king Arjuna. But the civitas dei will come about and a true democracy be realized only when "we all realize the sagehood within us where of course democracy is no more democracy for there is none other than oneself. "Love your neighbour as yourself makes everyone, everything, yourself You don't have to love. You love because you cannot do anything else. Gandhi's non-violence is released here from the trammels of political self- sufficiency. Love has no geography. Only politics."

Simple but difficult, yajna, of which, for Raja Rao, the Christian Cross is the supreme symbol - the sacrifice of the ego to the ego less Being within all, who alone bestows the freedom of the one and universal Self. The French revolution proclaimed Liberty, Equality and Fraternity which are not attainable on the emotional level on which they were conceived, but are in the nature only of "the Kingdom of God" which is to be found within all - at the price of a reversal of the values of our civilization with its greed for "more, more ,we discover through yajna that we have everything already. Such is "the meaning of India".

Kathleen Raine is a poet and Blake scholar and founder of the Temenos Academy.