Rao is a novelist and short-story writer who had graduated from Nizam College, Hyderabad in 1928. Thereafter he proceeded to France on a scholarship and studied there. On his return to India, he came into contact of Sri Aurobindo, Pandit Taranath and Ramana Maharishi. He won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1964; and he was conferred the Padma Shri in 1969. Though his first novel was in Kannada, he soon turned to writing in English and got universal acclaim. He wrote his short stories between the 1930s and early 1940s.
(a) Novels
1. Kanthapura (1938):
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This was his first novel in English which established him as a unique stylist in fiction-writing. The story of the novel based on the theme of eternal struggle between good and evil is narrated by a widow. The good and evil spirits are personified by Gandhi and the Gandhi and on the one hand and the British rule in India on the other.
The educated of the Kanthapura village respond to the call of non-cooperation and Harijan upliftment given Gandhiji, and they suffer on account of the age-old traditions bound society.
Moorthy, then violent hero, is put behind the bars and all the Gandhians are driven out of the village, writer is successful in portraying the extreme poverty the working class lives in the villages well as the essential nobility of human beings under stress. The poetic articulation of the novel is praiseworthy.
2. The Serpent and the Rope (1960):
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This novel was universally hailed as a masterpiece of Raja Rao with French sketch and autobiographical framework. It is about Rama, a Brahmin from Mysore, his research, love-affair and spiritual quest. It depicts the life of Indian intellectual caught between the past and the present, and the east and the west. The novelist won the Sahitya Akademi Award for it.
3. The Cat and Shakespeare (1965):
This novel presents the story of a revenue office clerk and his extra-marital affair. It also describes vividly the uphill task one has to face in the acquisition of a ration-card.
Some of his famous short stories are:
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Jauni (1930) & The Cow of the Barricades (1947).