Truth & All That

THE SERPENT AND THE ROPE (407 pp.) --Raja Rao--Pantheon ($5.95).

No philosophical thicket seems denser to the Western eye than Hinduism, and no country more confusing than India. In this long, densely packed novel of the intellectual and emotional odyssey of a high-caste Brahman, Indian Author Raja Rao offers an intimate look at Indian family life seen from the inside, and a sometimes illuminating, sometimes bewildering tour of the strange-blooming intricacies of Hindu thought as his hero grapples with the mundane practicalities of the West. With a novelist's illusionist skill, Rao makes it all as fascinating as a basketful of talking cobras.

Author Rao's credentials are impressive. Andre Malraux sought him out as a cicerone for a tour of India; Lawrence Durrell has pronounced The Serpent a work "by which an age can measure itself"; and E. M. Forster, whose Passage to India remains the classic of Anglo-Indian intellectual commerce, has praised Rao's Kan-thapura (not yet published in the U.S.) as perhaps the best novel in English to come out of India.

Barbarous Tribes. Rao's hero Rama is an orphan, but life for a rich Indian orphan is very crowded. He inherits, besides Little Mother (his stepmother), numerous stepsisters, cousins, aunts, ancestors, household gods, pets, servants, and a system of ceremonial obligations that would burden a Byzantine bishop. Even Grandfather's horse has to be given a religious funeral (Muslim, since the horse came from Arabia), with an annual pilgrimage to the grave to add to the multitudinous ceremonies of daily life. Despite the wealth of Rama's family (they own dozens of villages), private life is all so public. Amid the sprawling infants and servants and in-laws, Uncle retires to his bedroom some five times a day and shouts loudly for Auntie.

When eventually Rama takes off for Europe to become a "holy vagabond," he has difficulty explaining himself to Europeans, let alone the Europeans to himself. But Rama does his best to embrace and smother with love the barbarous tribes of Paris, and records an impulse to lead a cow up to the altar at Notre Dame. Before long he is studying for his doctorate in southern France (Author Rao attended the University of Montpellier) and married to Madeleine, a bluestocking blonde who smells wonderfully--of thyme mostly. Soon they have a son, symbolically called Krishna, who symbolically dies.

Lecherous Eunuch. The honeymoon of East and West is over, and Rama's intellectual career runs into a terrible occident. Logic seems to be the trouble (Hindus have a system of their own, a very non-Aristotelian affair). To the Western reader, Rama--whether in conflict with a Catholic, a Communist or a Freudian-- appears, in the female manner, to counter an argument with a story about something else. Rama's efforts to Orientalize Europe's recent social and intellectual history are puzzling. He may be "devoted to Truth and all that," but what are Westerners to make of his theory of Naziism and Communism, which has Hitler representing the male principle and Stalin the female? What would Freud himself make of Rama's explanation of psychoanalysis in terms of the Indian rope trick? Or Madeleine's gallant effort to see origins of the myth of the Holy Grail in the begging bowl of an Indian holy man?

The female majority of novel readers may enjoy being told that "to worship woman is to redeem the world." The Western male, however, may feel as mixed up as the lady who called Rama a "lecherous eunuch," and wonder about the Eastern profundities that sprinkle the book like sacred coconut in the curry. Example: "What is holiness but the assurance man has of himself?" Nor is there much help from the book's epigraph which quotes from the guru: "Waves are nothing but water. So is the sea." While conceding that it probably sounds better in Sanskrit, the bemused Westerner can only reply: "Sentences are nothing but words. So are novels."

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