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| Harper & Brothers first US edition, 1956 |
I had been moved by her conversation, but didn't yet realize that my feelings about love could be undermined by some quality, some toughness in the fibre of her thoughts. It's all very well for her, I thought; she is an old woman, her life is over, she'll die soon. I hadn't yet allowed the idea that it might also be best for me, that something incontrovertible in my blood or earliest upbringing responded to her attitudes and convictions. It took Krishnan himself to complete the circle, to show me that the story that began with the Nichols and their effect on me would never reach an ending that they could approve of, that the exoticism they represented, their strange approach to life, their unfamiliar concept of personal relationships, would eventually be overruled by the timbre of love in an old woman's voice and the off-hand common sense of an ordinary young man. In other words my preoccupation with romance began, in my mind, to seem cheap. Or perhaps it was simply that I came to the end of a delayed and fanciful adolescence.
The Novel: The idea of Indian 'exoticism' is irresistibly appealing to many Westerners, many of whom fail to realise that Indian people often find what, to them, is the equally 'exotic' culture of the West every bit as alluring and difficult to resist. This mutual fascination with the concept of 'the other' has only intensified in the twenty-first century, with the blending of Indian and Western cultures becoming increasingly common thanks to digital media and its unprecedented ability to break down what were previously assumed to be rigidly defined cultural and linguistic barriers.
But this was far from being the case in the dying days of the British Raj when India — a vast, densely populated nation comprised of many different ethnic groups speaking dozens of different languages — stood poised to obtain its long-sought independence from the Empire of Great Britain. There was a sense of elation in the air in the early months of 1947, accompanied by a sense of uncertainty among the country's native-born ruling elite as to what the future might hold and what, more significantly, what it might change or, even more alarmingly, forever eradicate from Indian life. As Santha Rama Rau so tellingly puts it in the opening paragraph of her compelling debut novel:
'Indian independence, only months away, was felt by most of us first as a sort of wariness about our pleasures, later as a political achievement.'
This observation is made by twenty year old Indira, known as Baba to her friends and family, and it is her story the novel tells — or rather, a specific year of her story which coincides with India's transformation from long-held colonial possession to fully self-governing nation. Like India itself, Baba is facing potentially momentous change, triggered in her case by her short but revealing friendship with Alix, the pretty, vivacious (and sometimes culturally insensitive) wife of Nicky Nichols, a newly arrived North American business attaché. It is Baba's interactions with these newcomers — their strangeness intensified by the fact that they're not English and not at all like the people she encountered while being educated in England — that serves as the catalyst for her unconsciously delayed transition from adolescence to adulthood.
Baba is attending a New Year's Eve party held at the home of her wealthy friend Jay when the novel opens. It's a bittersweet gathering, also attended by her similarly privileged best friend Pria and Pria's polo-playing fiancée Karan, convened as much to mark the passing of a soon-to-be vanished era in Indian life as to celebrate the passing of another calendar year. Jay, the younger brother of the Maharajah of Kalipur — a feudal state which, come independence, will no longer be ruled by the family which has successively ruled it for hundreds of years — is all too aware that the way of life he and his forebears have enjoyed for so long is now in danger of vanishing forever. Sad though this realisation makes Jay, he remains philosophical about the future, becoming progressively drunker as the evening progresses while making the usual jokes about his 'disapproving' wife (he has a reputation as a playboy) having fled their marital home in disgust at his behaviour so many years before. The party is also attended by Hari, the young man, a native of Poona, that everyone including Baba expects will soon propose to her.
But Baba has mixed emotions about becoming engaged to Hari, just as she does about so many things in her life since her relatively recent return from boarding school in England. While capable of being honest enough with herself to admit she doesn't love Hari, she can also understand why marrying him makes a certain amount of sense according to the traditions she was raised to follow and perpetuate.
Jay's party also marks Baba's first encounter with Alix and Nicky, nervous young expatriates whom no one seems willing to make the effort to include in the festivities. Pria is unsympathetic to their plight, snootily dismissing Jay's decision to invite them to his party as one of his typically silly whims, but Baba finds herself fascinated by the Americans, partly because she's become entranced by the unusually striking beauty of the blonde, deeply tanned Alix. At Jay's urging she introduces herself to the couple, initiating what quickly develops into a close friendship between herself and Alix that sees them regularly shop, eat, socialise and even select the decorations for Alix's new Bombay (now known as Mumbai) apartment together.
This exciting new friendship stands in stark contrast to the circumscribed life Baba leads in the house of her father, a place where she's regularly pestered by her sycophantic sister-in-law Shalini and gently bullied by Shalini's ayah, or maid. It
is further contrasted with Baba's memories of her girlhood in
Jalnabad, the northern home of her mother's family where her grandmother served as the dominant influence on her own and everybody else's lives.
Inseparable from these memories is the more
painful memory of her mother's decision to move to the southern city of Chenur to study with a guru and seek
spiritual enlightenment, leaving her lawyer father to fend for himself
in Bombay while he continued to play his assigned role in the ongoing struggle for Indian independence. It is the disparity between these prosaic facts and the romantic lives she has convinced herself that Alix and Nicky must lead — lives that seem as magical to her as those depicted in the
Hollywood films that Hari and others occasionally take her to see — that causes her to question the expectations that have been placed on her as an educated Indian girl from a prosperous, well-connected family.
Another party, this time less formal, at Jay's beach house — a party to which the Nichols have again been invited along with the usual set of friends — brings Baba's questions about life and her place in it into sharper focus. She has her first taste of champagne at this party, only to find herself quickly becoming drunk because she's unused to drinking alcohol. While drunk she goes for a swim with Nicky, a delightfully sensuous experience that culminates in the just as intoxicated Nicky secretly kissing her after they leave the water when nobody else is watching. While exciting in one sense, the kiss also disturbs and confuses Baba, leading her to wonder what might have motivated it and if the marriage of Nicky and Alix is truly as 'perfect' as she imagines it to be. Baba's uncharacteristically voluble behaviour at the beach also seems to intensify Hari's interest in her, warning her that his proposal of marriage may come sooner than expected.
A few days later Baba attends a cocktail party thrown by Alix and Nicky in their apartment where, after taking her into another room for privacy, Nicky dismisses his kiss as the product of drunkenness combined with loneliness resulting from an argument he'd had with his wife earlier that day. Further confused by his casual dismissal of the incident, Baba soon leaves the party without saying goodbye to either of her hosts, only to succumb to guilt which sees her return to the apartment the following day to apologise to Alix whom she finds pottering about in her dressing gown, very unglamorously suffering from a hangover. They talk, with Baba's unresolved guilt soon pressing her to confess that Nicky kissed her — a slip that Alix writes off as having been meaningless from her point of view. 'Neither of us looked at the other,' Baba observes. 'Alix lay back on the bed and gazed at the ceiling. There wasn't even the movement of a fan to catch her eye; the bedroom was air conditioned. "It's India, you see. It betrays you," she said. She couldn't have found a better way of wounding me…'
Baba doesn't have long to dwell on this injury because Hari proposes to her shortly after this encounter. To his considerable surprise, and her own, Baba refuses his offer of marriage. "I still think there should be more to life," she tells him, "than just settling down… I'm so sorry," she adds, afraid that she's hurt him despite his outwardly calm demeanour. "I mean if I gave you the wrong impression. I wish I knew how to explain it." But Baba can't explain it — not to herself and not to Pria, who calls her a fool when she hears the news and accuses her of having become 'infected by these American friends of yours.' Pria's accusation comes back to haunt Baba when they run into Alix in the restaurant of the Taj Mahal Hotel, formerly the foreign woman's favourite spot to lunch with Baba after they had spent the morning shopping. Alix is dining with a fellow expatriate and politely suggests that Baba call her when she returns from a visit to Kashmir so they can arrange to meet again for lunch some day. Baba promises to do this, knowing she won't keep the promise and that her friendship with Alix, slight though it was, has permanently ended.
And her relationship with Pria, while far from being over, also changes following Pria's long-planned marriage to Karan — a ceremony that fills Baba with a 'sense of desertion, of something precious lost' which drives her to flee Bombay for the home of her mother in the southern city of Chenur in the hope of discovering what it is she truly wants from life. Baba spends a lot of time with her grandmother while in Chenur, enduring the old woman's occasional memory lapses and finding herself, as always, more than a little bewildered by her mother's remoteness, a state of being inspired and supported by her mother's ongoing quest for spiritual enlightenment.
But the visit is not without its compensations. Spending much of her time reading romantic English novels, Baba soon manages to convince herself that she's fallen in love with Krishnan, a teacher at the local school who has high hopes for the future of post-colonial India and his own small place in it.
Krishnan becomes a frequent visitor to the house — a visitor Baba's grandmother encourages by insisting on serving him different homemade foods each time he's invited to tea — and, as her mother prepares to sing at an end of year concert he has organised at his school, Baba begins to suspect that her feelings of love may be reciprocated. Is becoming the wife of a poor but dedicated teacher what she wants? Will the so-called 'sacrifice' of marrying a humble man like Krishnan give her life the sense of purpose and contentment it apparently seems to lack?
Her grandmother surprisingly does not oppose the marriage, even offering to approach Krishnan's family until Baba protests, insisting that Krishnan must propose to her, should he truly wish to do so, of his own accord — a notion her grandmother dismisses as a product of her time in England where her head was filled with all sorts of unrealistic nonsense. Love, she explains to her flustered grandchild, is the product of excitement, impatience and imagination — hardly the sorts of qualities, she insists, for anyone to build a life never mind a solid lasting marriage upon. Nevertheless, Baba remains determined that the proposal, if it comes, should come from Krishnan himself and not be the result of some closely supervised family negotiation.
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| Victor Gollancz first UK edition, 1956 |
But, as they have in the past, Baba's dreams of finding 'true love' quickly lose their lustre. After the school concert — a semi-farcical affair during which her mother performed as planned — Krishnan bids her a polite farewell, explaining that he's leaving Chenur to marry a Madrasi girl whose family has known his family for years. Inwardly crushed by this news but unwilling to share her feelings of regret with Krishnan, Baba returns once more to her mother's house to take stock of her situation. 'I searched my mind,' she confesses to herself, 'for sadness and discovered that it was not for the loss of Krishnan but for some other loss which I tried only cautiously to define… Then, more clearly than any remembered conversations, I thought (without summoning it) of my grandmother's voice saying, "A little excitement, a little impatience, much imagination — is that enough?… " At last I felt the burn of tears in my eyes and knew what I was crying for.'
Baba soon returns to Bombay where she learns that her father has suffered a heart attack in her absence due to overwork. Along with her mother, she devotes herself to caring for him, ironically getting to know him better than she ever did when he was healthy but generally far too busy to spend much time with her. He survives long enough to see India gain its independence, dying as predicted toward the end of the monsoon season, a gloomy time of year made that much gloomier by his passing. It is during the mourning period — a prolonged event according to Indian custom that Baba finds smothering — that she receives a call from her old friend Jay who, he says, has exchanged his ancestral home in Kalipur for a simpler, less sumptuous life in his Bombay beach house.
Intrigued by this change in Jay's living arrangements, Baba accepts his invitation to dinner, only to find him much altered from the witty, happy-go-lucky individual she knew in former times. Jay also has somebody staying with him — a young peasant woman named Sundribai who turns out to be the lover she and his other friends have long suspected him of maintaining on the sly since his extravagant lifestyle drove away his deeply conservative wife. Now that his family know of his relationship with Sundribai, Jay can no longer show his face in the house of his elder brother the Maharajah, telling Baba that he intends to spend the rest of his days sopping up the whisky that, as she can see for herself, is never too far from his hand. Jay falls asleep to the sound of his lover singing a traditional Indian song, leaving Baba to creep out of the house without disturbing him. And if this was not scandalous enough, it is soon revealed that Jay's spoiled sister-in-law the Maharani has fled abroad with the family's ancestral jewels, heirlooms she has sold, the newspapers report, to fund her luxurious exile in New York. An era, it seems, has definitely ended, taking with it any last vestige of dignity or tradition that Jay and his brother the Maharajah had hoped to retain.
But what of Baba? With Pria returned from her honeymoon and already pregnant with her first child, Baba's life remains as unsettled and uncertain as ever. Her mother, disliking the bustle of Bombay and missing the reflective atmosphere of Chenur, plans to return there in the New Year, taking her not entirely reluctant daughter with her. But precisely how Baba will occupy her time in the south she has no idea. Get a job? Study? And then she's visited one day by Hari which, far from clearing things up, only plunges her back into same dilemma she was struggling to resolve a year ago.
Santha Rama Rau once inscribed a copy of Remember the House she gave to a friend with the words 'This is my favourite of my books and I'm so delighted to share it with you.' It's not hard to see why she held the book in such high esteem. It's a mature and memorable novel, filled with interesting characters and well-observed descriptions of Indian life that underscore rather than intrude upon the social and psychological aspects of the tale she has to tell. While it could be categorised as a 'coming of age' novel, it's also an engaging exploration of the conflict between tradition and modernity, illusion and pragmatism, set against the backdrop of what, for all Indians, would prove to be an exciting if often difficult and controversial struggle for self-determination.
It's a pity that the only other novel Santha Rama Rau wrote, titled The Adventuress and published in 1971, trod such different thematic ground, substituting realism for the kind of jet-setting fantasy reminiscent of the fabulously successful Harold Robbins. (Not that this should be held against her. She probably needed the money. Most writers do.) I'm sure that many readers, myself among them, would have loved to see her revisit the issues — political, social and personal — that underpin the plot of Remember the House and serve to make it such a convincing and entertaining work of fiction.
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| SANTHA RAMA RAU and her father, c 1947 |
The Writer: Vasanthi (shortened to Santha) Rama Rau was born in what was then the southeastern city of Madras (now known as Chennai) in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu on 24 January 1923. Her father Benegal Rama Rau was a distinguished diplomat, civil servant and independence advocate who would become his country's first ambassador to Japan and the longest serving Governor of its Reserve Bank while her mother Dhanvanthi Rama Rau was a pioneering campaigner for women's rights and family planning who would go on to serve as President of the International Planned Parenting Foundation. Rama Rau's paternal relatives included doctors, lawyers and a Member of Parliament.
Rama Rau spent the first six years of her life living under British rule in India, after which she accompanied her father to England where she was enrolled as a pupil at the St Paul's Girls' School in West London. She would spend the next ten years at this school, visiting her family during vacations in the various countries her father was posted to as a diplomat. She was visiting her family in South Africa when World War Two began in September 1939, obliging her to return immediately to India with her mother and sisters.
After exploring India and publishing several articles about her travels in various magazines, Rama Rau applied to study for a Bachelor of Arts degree at Wellesley College in the North American state of Massachusetts, becoming the first-ever student from the sub-continent to be accepted by that institution. She entered Wellesley in 1941 and graduated, with honours, three years later, having spent her summer vacations writing propaganda pieces for the Office of War Information. Her first book, a work of travel-based nonfiction titled Home To India, was published by the US firm of Harper & Brothers in 1945 and by the British firm of Victor Gollancz later that same year.
Rama Rau returned to India at the end of World War Two where she again wrote freelance articles for magazines and also worked as an editor prior to the country gaining independence from British rule on 15 August 1947. Her father was soon appointed India's first ambassador to Japan and left for Tokyo, his daughter accompanying him there to serve as his official hostess.
While in Japan — a country Rama Rau enjoyed despite being bored by the formalities of diplomatic life — she worked briefly as a teacher of English at a Japanese girls' school and met her future husband, the North American academic and writer Faubion Bowers who was employed at the time as translator for General Douglas MacArthur, the country's occupying military governor. (It was largely due to Bowers' efforts that kabuki, the ancient form of Japanese theatre, was not banned during the US Occupation and lost as an artform. He wrote about and lectured widely on the subject and also published a biography of Russian composer Aleksandr Scriabin among his many other accomplishments as an academic, journalist and highly gifted linguist.) With a female North American journalist and an English companion, the couple travelled extensively through China, Indochina, Indonesia and what is now Thailand, experiences which served as the basis for Rama Rau's second book of nonfiction, titled East of Home, published in 1950.
Rama Rau married Faubion Bowers in October 1951 and continued to travel with him, her experiences inspiring further well received works of nonfiction including This Is India (1954), View to the Southeast (1957) and My Russian Journey (1959). They also produced one child together, a son named Jai Peter Bowers, who was born in 1952 and lived, according to his parents, the life of an 'affluent vagabond.' Rama Rau published Remember the House, her first work of fiction, in 1956 and a second novel, titled The Adventuress, in 1971, the same year she joined the English department of Sarah Lawrence College in New York. She had by this time divorced Bowers (in 1966) and married former naval officer, lawyer and United Nations functionary Gurdon Wallace Wattles Jr, son of the Nebraska businessman and banker responsible for funding much of the early Californian real estate development that came to be known as Hollywood.
Rama Rau also wrote an authorized stage adaptation of EM Forster's 1924 novel A Passage to India which debuted in London's West End in 1960 and transferred to Broadway the following year, running for a combined total of 370 performances. (Her memoir Gifts of Passage which, like her previous work, is largely concerned with her travels in her native land and elsewhere, appeared in 1961.) Following the success of her stage adaptation, she wrote a screen version of Forster's novel that was subsequently rejected by British director David Lean, although she receives screen credit in his award-winning 1984 film because he did use some of her dialogue. Her final book, titled A Princess Remembers: The Memoirs of the Maharani of Jaipur, appeared in 1976 and was co-authored with its subject, the Indian politician (and style icon) Gayatri Devi.
Santha Rama Rau died in the town of Amenia, in upstate New York, on 21 April 2009.
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| SANTHA RAMA RAU, 1961 |
Use the link below to read more about the life and work (including an extract from one of her many travel books) of Indian-North American writer, journalist and academic SANTHA RAMA RAU:
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