The Triad & Other Stories

Even a careful eye would have missed it coz it refused to reveal itself; it was meant only for those eyes which had the patience and the ability to sit down alone and struggle with the writer, for the best way to know what a book contains is by reading it. Oblivious of its co-habitation with some of the greatest names in English Literature, it lay lambent, confident of its existence amongst such talismanic works of art. It was an old book redolent with the smell of antiquity and every time I opened it, the spine cracked, putting its health in jeopardy! I believe I was the first person to take it out of the library! And I had a tough time reading it, not because of its theme or manner of presentation but due to the constant feeding to the brain to handle the book “carefully”! Every turning of a leaf seemed like a requiem, almost as if it were accusing me of killing it!

It isn’t a classic (not in all senses though) and certainly not a book to be read in present times, and I wonder how many might have read it even in its own times. The book is a paradox, not because of its content, but due to its inappropriate timing. For, what may appear to readers of one generation as winning genius of the author, another generation may discard it as a thing of antiquity, or may seem to the next as a heavy dose of patriotism! Worse luck, Kanthapura would find itself on a sticky wicket in every age!! But, the vogue of an author is directly proportional to the taste of the age, and even classics are exposed to fluctuations in fashion, Kanthapura is no exception to this law!

R K Narayan & Mulk Raj Anand

Now, Raja Rao along with R K Narayan and Mulk Raj Anand formed the ‘Triad’ or the ‘Big Three’ of Indian fiction in English. But, unlike the other two, Raja Rao seems to be a little classic, and I whole-heartedly echo the New York Times Book Review, which says, “It has all the content of an ancient Indian classic, combined with a sharp, satirical wit and a clear understanding of the present…Raja Rao is perhaps the most brilliant and certainly the most interesting writer of modern India.”

If you’ve read the Triad, then you’ll probably acquiesce, when I say that Rao is a little classical in his story telling. As far as, style is concerned, though his graces are not those most in favor at the moment, but the triumphs of his style are clear to all who understand the “art of writing”. It is a very bookish style, a kind of mannered-manner I suppose! He himself says in the foreword that,
“We cannot write like the English. We should not. We cannot write only as Indians. We have grown to look at the large world as part of us. Our method of expression therefore has to be a dialect which will someday prove to be as distinctive and colorful as the Irish or the American…………the tempo of the Indian life must be infused into our English expression, even as the tempo of American or Irish life has gone into the making of theirs. We, in India, think quickly, we talk quickly, and when we move we move quickly. There must be something in the sun of India that makes us rush and tumble and run on……………episode follows episode, and when our thoughts stop our breath stops, and we move on to another thought. This was and still is the ordinary style of our story telling. I have tried to follow it myself in this story.”

And it was actually these lines which made me read the book,
“it may have been told of an evening, when as the dusk falls and through the sudden quiet, lights leap up in house after house, and stretching her bedding on the veranda, a grandmother might have told you, newcomer, the sad tale of her village.”

My Verdict: Incorporation of the oral tradition into modern fiction makes it an excellent read, and I say, it’s a must for all those who wonder about the miracle of India’s struggle to freedom! Happy reading!