Word: rao
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Chinese (nationalist, to be sure) invited to hear the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Like all visitors to America, they were asked by their hosts which part they liked best. "Oh," they replied, "we liked the part in the beginning without the conductor." Last night the situation was reversed, as Shanta Rao won over her audience by the swagger and delight with which she boldly took her bows, first swinging her arms high to either side of her body, then bowing low in that most graceful of Eastern gestures, touching her folded hands to her forehead...
...must confess I liked best the simplest of the dances, performed not by Shanta Rao herself but by her assistants, Chandramati and Padma. Imagine if you can an Indian Sophia Loren, as my companion in the audience suggested, and a lovely doll-like Oriental performing a dance of intense flirtation with the audience, whispering silently to them, looking them in the eye. One was sultry, pouting; the other prim and coquettish; yet both were dancing the same steps. When one glared out of the corner of her eye, the other peeked; yet both moved their eyes at the same time...
...Author Rao's credentials are impressive. André Malraux sought him out as a cicerone for a tour of India; Lawrence Durrell has pronounced The Serpent a work "by which an age can measure itself"; and E. M. Forster, whose Passage to India remains the classic of Anglo-Indian intellectual commerce, has praised Rao's Kan-thapura (not yet published in the U.S.) as perhaps the best novel in English to come out of India...
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...
...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...