"Raja Rao: An Indian Writer Using Mysticism to Explore the Spiritual Unity between East and West"

In 1929, the promising young Indian writer Raja Rao received an invitation to study at Montpellier University. From then on his life took a different turn, leading to long periods in France, England, Italy and Texas - though India remained the place he always returned to. By the time of his death at the age of 97, his dozen or so novels and short-story collections had reflected in the profoundest way on some of the 20th-century's most significant events and cultural divisions.Rao is mainly known in Europe as the author of Kanthapura (1938), his account of an Indian village's response to the Gandhian non-violent civil disobedience movement of the time. It has become a classic text in Indian schools, hailed as the first literary manifesto to point to an Indian way of appropriating the English language.