Unhomed in the world: The work and world of the recently rediscovered writer, Rajlakshmi N Rao
· Scroll
Contemporary Indian literature, in the last two centuries, has mainly kept to the realist tradition, where the exploration has been of our social contexts and realities. The recently rediscovered writer, Rajlakshmi Rao, stands apart from this tradition. Perhaps one of the very few women writing here in the 1950s, she stands at a tangent to the serious mainstream, in the way of the 20th-century novelists, the Brazilian Clarice Lispector, and the Chilean María Luisa Bombal, whose magic reality was a precursor to later writers far more well known.
Visit asg-reflektory.pl for more information.
Rao is a significant and necessary rediscovery. We must be grateful to scholar and writer Chandan Gowda for retrieving her stories from various places, collecting them, as well as translating them. In his newly edited book, Sangama-Pastorale, Gowda offers us a selection of Rao’s Kannada and English stories. It is a rare writer who has the ability to write both in English and in their mother tongue.
The void at the centre
Rao’s English stories are built around the relationships between men and women, within marriage or outside it. Yet they are not centred on these things. Through the dialogues and small events that happen, there is a certain drawing out of the space between a man and an...