Word: rama
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Barbarous Tribes. Rao's hero Rama is an orphan, but life for a rich Indian orphan is very crowded. He inherits, besides Little Mother (his stepmother), numerous stepsisters, cousins, aunts, ancestors, household gods, pets, servants, and a system of ceremonial obligations that would burden a Byzantine bishop. Even Grandfather's horse has to be given a religious funeral (Muslim, since the horse came from Arabia), with an annual pilgrimage to the grave to add to the multitudinous ceremonies of daily life. Despite the wealth of Rama's family (they own dozens of villages), private life...
When eventually Rama takes off for Europe to become a "holy vagabond," he has difficulty explaining himself to Europeans, let alone the Europeans to himself. But Rama does his best to embrace and smother with love the barbarous tribes of Paris, and records an impulse to lead a cow up to the altar at Notre Dame. Before long he is studying for his doctorate in southern France (Author Rao attended the University of Montpellier) and married to Madeleine, a bluestocking blonde who smells wonderfully-of thyme mostly. Soon they have a son, symbolically called Krishna, who symbolically dies...
Lecherous Eunuch. The honeymoon of East and West is over, and Rama's intellectual career runs into a terrible occident. Logic seems to be the trouble (Hindus have a system of their own, a very non-Aristotelian affair). To the Western reader, Rama-whether in conflict with a Catholic, a Communist or a Freudian- appears, in the female manner, to counter an argument with a story about something else. Rama's efforts to Orientalize Europe's recent social and intellectual history are puzzling. He may be "devoted to Truth and all that," but what are Westerners...
...Passage to India attempts to translate into three acts the astringencies of E. M. Forster's renowned novel. Santha Rama Rau has done her adaptation with intelligence, and the acting-notably that of Eric Portman-is excellent. But the play is not entirely successful. The reduction in scale is true to the shape of the novel, but less broad, less deep...
...Santha Rama Rau and the play's director, Donald McWhinnie, deserve the highest praise for A Passage to India, and I wish its American production the best of luck. E. M. Forster explained the novel's popularity here during the '20's by saying that Americans liked it because it showed what a botch the British made of India. Perhaps now we shall understand Forster's book better. It talks about India, and blames the British for acting like gods; they were not big enough-and who is?-to rule another people. But it also enters a plea for tolerance...