Brarahman Analysis

The theme intends to be the ‘history’ of a Brahmin who is however ‘never contemporary’ and thus starts on the principle of paradox. Ramaswamy, conscious of his privileged position as a Brahmin in the Hindu social hierarchy, constantly aspires to realize the full metaphysical connotation of true Brahminhood – ‘a Brahmin is he who knows Brahman’ – with which his quest starts and also ends. Ramaswamy, supposed to be a pilgrim of eternity, is ironically a historian, his identity thus split between the two opposing modes of time and eternity, of history and tradition, ‘the former always representing to him the modern Western existence, the latter the Indian ethos.’ (Dey: 65) So here is a Brahmin whose life story starts with a sage as ancestor, and
The former identifies the Absolute Consciousness (Self/ Brahman/ Atman) as the Ultimate Reality and the empirical world as only an appearance, an imposition on the Reality. The opposite is the Western ‘materialistic’ view which culminates in Marxism, and states that the empirical world is the only reality. Ramaswamy believes that there can be no compromise between these two opposite views. All other philosophies and ideologies are ‘poetic’, placed in-between these two mutually exclusive views. As a consequence, it is obvious that the main artistic problem of the novel lies in finding an adequate correlative in form to structure the interaction between a concrete situation in human life and an intellectual, abstract thesis. The narrative structure of the novel has therefore necessarily to be mixed one, as a combination of realism in the form of a flowing, continuous, interior monologue; and a discursive mode of intellectual speculation. No doubt Raja Rao takes full advantage of this instrument of psychological realism in a direct introduction to the reader into the interior life of the character, without any interventions in the way of explanation or commentary on the part of the author. The success of this highly valuable technique lies, however, in the author’s power of objectivity, a clear distance from the subject of analysis which alone enables him
She provides many examples from the text to develop her arguments about the profuse use of these words. ‘The incessant repetition of self – 360 times in the novel – is so pervasive that it really forms the stylistic essence of the whole novel.’ (Dey: 108) It seems that Raja Rao is obsessed with the word self. There are two kinds of references for the word. The English meaning of the word self is ‘personality’, ‘ego’, ‘what one is’ etc., whereas the second meaning stands as an English equivalent for the Sanskrit Atman as the Absolute. But she is doubtful, whether the English term self perform the same function as the Sanskrit Atman. Here she also quotes the longest sentence of the novel, the repetitive expressions, and the poetic rhythm found in some paragraphs of the novel. She beautifully analyses a paragraph which has (8+21+8+21+8…) words in each sentence. That shows an obvious tendency to form a rhythmic pattern. As a result, one may say, Raja Rao adroitly manipulates the poetic dimension of English to arrive at the Truth-that-is-metaphysical with grand