The Cat and Shakespeare (3 page)

The philosophical bias is even more pronounced in
The Cat and Shakespeare.
Rao exploits the Advaita Vedantic idea of the world being a play (
lila
) of the Absolute, and the result is an exhilarating comedy. However, it is the Vishishta Advaita (‘qualified monism’) Vedanta of Ramanuja (11th-12th century) that informs the novel. Ramanuja emphasizes the way of devotion (
bhakti-marga
) to God in which the seeker surrenders himself to His grace to achieve salvation. This is seen in the two schools that developed after Ramanuja: the ‘Northern School’ (
Vadagalai
) and the ‘Southern School’ (
Tengalai
). According to the first, salvation is achieved by following the ‘analogy of the monkey’ (
markata-nyaya
). Just as the young one of a monkey feels safe when it holds on to its mother’s body, so does God save those who make an effort to reach Him. According to the second, salvation is achieved by following the ‘analogy of the cat’ (
marjara-nyaya
). Just as a kitten is carried by a cat in its teeth, so does God save those who do not even make an effort to reach Him.

It is Govindan Nair, the protagonist Ramakrishna Pai’s neighbour, who best exemplifies the ‘analogy of the cat’ in the novel. Both Nair and Pai are civil servants in the former princely state of Travancore in south-western India in the early 1940s. The Second World War is on.

The kitten is being carried by the cat. We would all be kittens carried by the cat. Some, who are lucky . . . will one day know it . . . Ah, the kitten when its neck is held by its mother, does it know anything else but the joy of being held by its mother? You see the elongated thin hairy thing dangling, and you think, poor kid, it must suffer to be so held. But I say the kitten is the safest thing in the world, the kitten held in the mouth of the mother cat. Could one have been born without a mother? . . . But a mother—I tell you, without Mother the world is not. So allow her to fondle you and to hold you.
¹⁷

As a clerk in Ration Office No. 66 in Trivandrum, Nair earns forty-five rupees a month. He has little or no prospect of becoming rich. His son, Shridhar, dies from pneumonia, and he has a brush with the law that lands him in prison. But none of this affects Nair. He remains his usual optimistic self, with a firm belief in the mother cat. His faith saves him in the end.

Pai, as a clerk in the Revenue Board, dreams of building a three-storeyed house. A Saraswat Brahmin, he enters into a relationship with a Nair woman, Shantha, a schoolteacher. This is a social custom known as
sambandham
(‘relationship’) that was once prevalent in Kerala among the Nairs. Pai’s wife, Saroja, has no say in the matter. She removes herself to her ancestral home, Kartikura House, in Alwaye with her son, Vithal. ‘What is woman, you may ask. Well, woman is Shantha,’ says Pai, and goes on, ‘Shantha also loves . . . she is so exquisite in her love play. She is shy like a peahen. Her giving is complete.’ (1965: 20-21) But the ‘dearest thing’ in Pai’s life is his five-year-old daughter, Usha. Both Shantha and Usha embody the feminine principle as does the Mother Cat (a symbol for the compassionate Guru). They are the instruments of divine grace (
krpa
).
For, in the
Kulacūḍāmaṇi Nigama
(‘The Crest-Jewel of the Kula Doctrine’), a tantric text in praise of the goddess Shakti, we learn that even Shiva cannot become the supreme Lord unless Shakti unites with Him. And from Their union, all things arise. Shakti in fact says, ‘I manifest Myself as woman which is My own Self and the very essence of creation in order to know You, Shiva, the Guru, who are united with Me.’
¹⁸

Like Govindan Nair, Pai too has his moment of illumination.

I saw truth not as fact but as ignition. I could walk into fire and be cool, I could sing and be silent, I could hold myself and yet not be there . . . I smelled a breath that was of nowhere but rising in my nostrils sank back into me, and found death was at my door. I woke up and found death had passed by, telling me I had no business to be there. Then where was I? Death said it had died. I had killed death. When you see death as death, you kill it. (1965: 113-14)

Again, the British presence in India is inescapable; it is reinforced by the ubiquitous presence of the English language. And what better representative of English can there be than Shakespeare himself? Rao’s coupling of Shakespeare and the cat in the title is ironic. Both Sankara and Ramanuja wrote their influential works in Sanskrit, the
deva-vani,
‘the language of the gods’. Now, English, the new
deva-vani,
has replaced Sanskrit as the lingua franca. And Rao himself, unable to write in Sanskrit, writes in English. The irony is directed at himself. In the novel, Nair revels in Shakespearean locutions. Unable to rid themselves of the British, Indians retreat into the past, finding solace in religion and philosophy. Rao’s ‘Tale of India’ could not have been more timely. It points to India’s impoverishment as an enslaved nation.

The Cat and Shakespeare
exhibits none of the communicative strategies of
Kanthapura
or
The Serpent and the Rope.
Unlike the highly individual and expressive idiolects of the earlier novels, that of
The Cat and Shakespeare
is deliberately ordinary, since the intent is to express traditional lore. In this process, Rao has pitted the symmetry of language against the asymmetry of thought with its indirections and paradoxes. The highly reductive style of
The Cat and Shakespeare
is in strong contrast to the expansiveness of the other novels.

Raja Rao’s short stories reveal him as a master who extended the possibilities of the genre. In his hands, the form becomes an instrument of metaphysical inquiry that transforms the language into true poetry.

First published in 1933 in
Asia
(New York) when Rao was only twenty-five, ‘Javni’ has attained the status of a classic. The epigraph from Kanakadasa, a sixteenth-century Kannada devotional poet, suggests the theme of the story: the relationship between an English-educated boy, Ramu, a Brahmin, and a low-caste servant, Javni, a widow, who works for his married sister, Sita. The story is a plea for woman’s emancipation and the abolition of the caste system. Ramu and Javni share the same religious nature, his at the level of metaphysics, and hers in a belief in spirits and simple devotion to the goddess Talakamma. Ramu sees himself as an instrument of social change that breaks down the barriers of caste. Talking to Javni, Ramu experiences a kind of epiphany in which he sees her as a divine being, a great soul. This mood, of course, does not last, and Ramu accepts the distinctions of caste between them as the family moves away two years later. He accepts the fact that Javni is but a servant who must be left behind. He universalizes her and sees her as one with the sky and the river. His mental act is in keeping with Indian metaphysics: man is seen to be one with nature, his apparent separateness being nothing but an illusion.

Ramu’s initial indignation at Sita’s treatment of Javni is replaced by admiration and later by acceptance of the social demands of caste. Javni’s eating in the byre is the source of conflict between Ramu and Sita. Sita sees the mixing of castes as irreligious, while Ramu sees putting Javni with the cows as inhuman. Sita cannot transcend her caste.

Time and again I had quarrelled with my sister about it all. But she would not argue with me. ‘They are of the lower class, and you cannot ask them to sit and eat with you,’ she would say.
¹⁹

Throughout the story, Javni is identified with the cow; for example, ‘Javni, she is good like a cow’ (1978: 86). Later, the identification between Javni and the cow is complete when we are told that ‘Javni sat in the dark, swallowing mouthfuls of rice that sounded like a cow chewing the cud’ (1978: 88). In her cow-like way, Javni accepts the teaching of the dominant caste and learns to live with the discomfort imposed by caste distinctions. Ramu recognizes in her the greatness that knows no caste and yet accepts the caste system. The cow functions as an expanding symbol that points to India’s survival as a civilization, to Hinduism and its reverence for life (
ahimsa
),
and to the transcendentalism of a world where the sacred is mixed with the profane. Ramu’s awareness at the metaphysical level that there is no caste coexists with his social acceptance that such distinctions do exist. ‘No, Javni. In contact with a heart like yours, who will not bloom into a god?’ (1978: 96)

Tagore’s classic story of village India, ‘The Postmaster’ (1891), ends on a similar note. The orphan Ratan is abandoned by the postmaster, who finds life in the village of Ulapur intolerable and returns home to Calcutta. The postmaster is more than just an employer to her; he is a father figure, someone she respects and admires. He had provided her a home. For one brief period, his illness brings them together. Ratan rises to the occasion and is transformed from a girl into a young woman. So when Ratan asks him: ‘”Dada, will you take me to your home?” The postmaster laughed. “What an idea!” said he; but he did not think it necessary to explain to the girl wherein lay the absurdity.’
²⁰
On leaving the village, the postmaster takes comfort in philosophic reflection: ‘The grief-stricken face of a village girl seemed to represent for him the great unspoken pervading grief of Mother Earth herself.’ (1918:124) Abandoned by their families, the Javnis and Ratans learn to fend for themselves in an inhospitable world. Both stories underscore the resilience of the Indian woman under stress.

‘Nimka’ was first published in
The Illustrated Weekly of India,
Bombay, in 1963. Set in Paris in the first half of the twentieth century, the story reveals the extent of Rao’s immersion in European culture. Himself an exile in France, the narrator, an Indian student at the Sorbonne, is able to sympathize with Nimka’s plight as a White Russian émigré who flees her homeland in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Attracted to Nimka, the narrator goes into raptures over her beauty: ‘Her beauty had certainty, it had a rare equilibrium, and a naughtiness that was feminine and very innocent . . . It was beauty—it always will be, and you cannot take it, and as such you cannot soil yourselves.’ (1978: 99)

Nimka’s interest in India begins with her interest in the narrator. It expands thereafter to include Tolstoy’s admiration of Gandhi, and stories from the epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, especially the story of Nala and Damayanti from ‘The Book of the Forest’ (the
Vanaparvan
) of the Mahabharata. Nimka sees in Damayanti, the princess of Vidarbha, a reflection of her own unhappy life. But then she is no Damayanti, and Count Vergilian Kormaloff, her husband, is no Nala, king of Nishadha. One misfortune after another strikes Nala and Damayanti: Nala loses his kingdom to his brother Pushkara in a game of dice, lives in the forest with Damayanti, whom he later abandons; but in the end he wins his kingdom back, and is reunited with Damayanti. Kormaloff loses his entire fortune betting on horses, abandons Nimka, and their son, Boris, and flees to Monte Carlo. When seventeen years old, Boris goes back to Russia and is never heard of again. Nimka’s dream of returning to the Smolny courtyard in St Petersburg never materializes. She is all alone now. ‘She asked nothing of life.’ (1978: 103)

The identification of the narrator with the swan in the story of Nala and Damayanti is significant. It is the swan that introduces Nala to Damayanti by praising the king’s virtues; Damayanti falls in love with Nala and vows to marry only him.

Nimka knew the Indian saying that the swan knows how to separate milk from water—the good from the bad, and as I knew her to be good, she recognized me a swan. The swan sailed in and out and India became the land where all that is wrong everywhere goes right there. (1978: 100)

The swan or bar-headed goose (
hamsa, Anser indicus
)
is, in Indian iconography, a symbol of enlightenment, of those able to discern between the Self and the non-Self. The title
paramahamsa
(‘supreme soul’; an ascetic of utmost sanctity) is often bestowed upon those who have become fully enlightened, such as Ramakrishna Paramahamsa (1836-86).
Haṃsa
is also one of the names of Vishnu. Sankara writes: ‘The Lord is called
Haṃsa
as He dispels (
hanti
)
the fear of transmigration for those who meditate upon the oneness of “I am He” (
aham sah
).’
²¹
The statement ‘I am He’ sums up the essential teaching of the Upanishads: the
atman
and
Brahman
are one and the same. Again, the bird features prominently in classical Sanskrit poetry. In Kalidasa’s
Meghadūta
(‘The Cloud Messenger’), the Yaksha, an exile in the Vindhya Mountains, tells the cloud that on its journey to Lake Manasa, carrying his message to his wife in their home in Alaka in the Himalaya, it will be accompanied by a flock of wild geese.

Eager to fly to Lake Manasa, a flock of wild geese, with shoots of lotus stalks to sustain them on the journey, will be your companions in the sky as far as Mount Kailasa.
²²

Rich in symbolism, the swan (wild goose) weaves the stories of Nala and Damayanti, and the Yaksha and his wife into the very fabric of ‘Nimka’, deepening its resonance, and making the reader aware of its metaphysical significance. Time and space do not seem to matter as we uncover the many layers of this unforgettable story.

The reunions of Nala and Damayanti, and of the Yaksha and his wife, make Nimka’s situation all the more poignant. Is India then the ‘land where all that is wrong everywhere goes right there’?

Though the narrator is involved in the story, he also stands outside it. Perhaps he realizes that Nimka is after all an illusion (maya). As Michel reminds us: ‘The object exists because of its name. Remove the name, and the object is space. Remove the space, and the object is the Reality’ (1978: 101-02). Is Nimka real or unreal? She is a shadowy figure, a fantasy of the narrator’s imagination, someone ethereal who flits in and out of the story. In ‘Nimka’, Rao transcends the limits of the short story to explore states of consciousness that are not usually accessible to language by drawing upon, on the one hand, myths and folklore, and on the other, metaphysics, to try to express the inexpressible. By all accounts ‘Nimka’ is a triumph.