‘India – A Fable’ by Indian author and professor Raja Rao belongs to Rao’s 1978 collected prose titled ‘The Policeman and the Rose’. It works in the meditative and philosophical mode that Raja Rao developed at length in his other fiction pieces like ‘The Serpent and the Rope’ and ‘The Cat and Shakespeare’. Being one of his later pieces, ‘India – A Fable’ is more philosophical and set in a cosmopolitan city—Paris, at that—rather than somewhere in rural or urban India. ‘India – A Fable’ is brief, to the point, sparse, dialogue-based, and almost essayistic when it comes to the metaphysical aspects of the text. The narrative is slender compared with the more famous ‘Kanthapura’ by Raja Rao. The latter is a novel published by the author in 1938, in which the narrative is dense and set in rural Karnataka, with its deep-rooted metaphysical elements. The novel, however, is not as rich in literary worth as Raja Rao’s ‘India – A Fable’, in which he masters the art of presenting nuanced metaphysical elements with an intermingling of philosophical inquiry that does not seem forced at all, making the whole exploration of ‘India – A Fable’ seem layered with various meanings and symbolism.

Notice that in ‘India – A Fable’ the author calls the short story set in Paris a ‘fable’, not an essay, a sketch, or even a short story. This indicates to the reader the fable form, which dictates that the piece will be brief, with an animal or a child interlocutor whose innocence gives direct instruction throughout the text, and that it will have an underlying moral or mystical element. Raja Rao thereby allows us to read ‘India – A Fable’ not as a psychological piece of realism but as a philosophical proposition. The story, if studied closely, reminds the reader of the writings of La Fontaine in particular, with an Aesopian bent, at least if one looks at it from the perspective of the Western canon. However, Raja Rao manages to complicate that canon further in this story with an ontological claim about what India is about. The non-dualism of Adi Shankara’s Advaita Vedanta is evident in this text of ‘India – A Fable’ by Raja Rao, and it is indeed what his collection ‘The Policeman and the Rose’ is all about.

‘India – A Fable’ tries to work out, as I mentioned earlier, the ontological question of what India is—is it a piece of cartography or a piece of geography with a history attached to it by boundaries drawn only on a map, or, in the Advaita Vedanta sense of Adi Shankara, something one has to deconstruct from the various illusions of ‘maya’ to reach the heart of what India is, or ‘Brahman’, or pure consciousness? In this story, one realizes that to Raja Rao, ‘India’ is not merely a physical reality but a deeper spiritual entity that has to be felt beyond the scope of one’s senses and basic gross consciousness, and that thereby directs a person toward the true India, which is invariably pure consciousness. This is because to seek ‘India’, as it were, is in itself to ‘seek the Divine’ in oneself.

Thus, we see in ‘India – A Fable’ that Raja Rao has managed to transpose, as it were, the epistemology of Advaita philosophy into English literature. This makes him unique among the other stellar Indian writers in English of his time, such as Mulk Raj Anand and R. K. Narayan. Where Mulk Raj Anand focuses in his literature on Marxism and social realism and R. K. Narayan focuses on the comical side of provincial life with their many eccentricities with an almost colonial-minded South Indian texture to it, Raja Rao stands out in English literature by mingling philosophy with the metaphysical and, toward his later years, by integrating the Advaita philosophy of Adi Shankaracharya into his work, giving an unusual aesthetic color to his fictional pieces.

Summary of ‘India – A Fable’ by Raja Rao

The story, or rather fable, titled ‘India – A Fable’ takes place in Paris, France, in the famous Jardin du Luxembourg, also known as the Luxembourg Garden and colloquially as the Jardin du Sénat. Various individuals in the text are taking in the luxuries of the garden, including an expatriate Indian narrator. An expatriate Indian narrator would indicate a storyteller or author who lives outside India while still capturing in his writings the cultural duality, displacement, and nostalgia of the Indian diaspora. This Indian expatriate encounters a young French boy who is allowed to mingle with the probably middle-aged expatriate because his young French nanny is having a private rendezvous with her young male lover. The French child is a dreamer and interested in play-acting any foreign setting that seems magical, oriental, and very colorful. He first describes to the Indian expatriate how he was trying to travel with his toy camel to an Arabian oasis when the narrator directs him to the wonder of a place called India. The French boy instantly forgets his Arabian oasis, even drowns his toy camel, and, going along with the vague and abstract descriptions of the expatriate narrator, starts pretending that he is traveling through India. The French boy enjoys and delights in the sights, smells, and sounds of India while the descriptions of the expatriate seem almost deeply nostalgic and sorrowful—depicting a land gone away, as it were, from his own grasp but still living somewhere within his mind’s eye. This goes on until the nanny’s lover is done with her and she returns to take her ward away from the Indian stranger. She is greatly perturbed about where the child lost his toy camel and searches for it frantically, and the Indian narrator or expatriate does not inform her of what became of the toy camel. The boy is taken away from the garden, and in the following days the narrator looks for the boy but does not see him. One fine day, he sees the French boy in the garden again, this time with an elderly and much more capable and disciplined nanny, and the boy is dressed in a sailor suit typically worn by boys of America in those days. The boy simply goes up to the expatriate and states plainly, in the form of a highly symbolic anticlimax, that from now on he was the maharaja of India, and he rode the elephant, and the imaginary wedding of the Indian prince was over.

Short Story Analysis

We can see right at the beginning of Raja Rao’s ‘India – A Fable’, in the Luxembourg Garden itself, a very European space in Paris, and this brings to the forefront the displacement that is the story’s structural engine. This is possible because India can become the subject of a fable only from outside it, through the eyes of a little French boy encountering an Indian speaker. The French child is totally unaware of India and asks the Indian expatriate to name and give a location to his country, intensifying that sense of displacement in the mind of the Indian expatriate narrator. Geographical distance then produces conceptual clarity for the child. We also notice that the European Parisian garden, with its Renaissance structures, clipped hedges, and Western symmetry, will be set against the Indian geographical setting that the Indian expatriate will give the French child. We thereby see India—or the Indian Self, as it were—refracted through the European gaze, and it is a wonder to see through Raja Rao’s elegant prose and mystical but slim narration.

But here is where ‘India – A Fable’ becomes a fable because the person to whom this India is being described is neither a philosopher nor a European colonizer but a child. This child did not even know that there was a place called India, and so he is not conditioned by earlier white colonial narratives or dispositions toward the country and is free of the typical colonial imperial condescension that even today (sad to say) one experiences while conversing with Europeans or Westerners about India. They tend to speak very condescendingly or even with some kind of imperial benevolence about India as an entity, especially if they are British individuals themselves. That is not evident with this child; his innocence, good faith, and sweet nature touch the heart of the Indian narrator or speaker, and he feels at ease describing to this European child the wonder that is India in the light of pure consciousness or Brahman.

The child is more candid and to the point without any pretensions and earlier conditioning, which makes it easier to come to the point about what he wants to know about India. If the Indian expatriate had been conversing with an adult, there would probably have been a great deal of time wasted on formalities until the European speaker came to the basic and candid questions wanted in this short story. But that is easily avoided because the other speaker is a child—thus bringing the La Fontaine angle to the core in terms of comparative literature. This is therefore another reason why Raja Rao calls this story a fable.

But fable convention aside, the French child does indeed allow Rao to bypass the elaborate protocols of adult argumentation such as one would see in the short fiction of Anton Chekhov or Leo Tolstoy, of Russian literary fame, and thereby the child is able to speak directly, whereas an essay with the same theme would need page after page of qualification before approaching such candid topics about elephants, magic carpet lore, princes of India and their relationships with the terrain and region, and so on. To illustrate a few examples, the French child first asks the Indian narrator where India is, and we realize that the story’s answer, or Raja Rao’s answer, is that ‘India is not’ in the deepest sense a ‘where’ per se at all! India is a ‘way of seeing’ or ‘a state of consciousness’ and even a ‘wisdom’. This is something similar to the way the eternal Jerusalem or Israel was depicted in the Holy Bible in the Old Testament, especially in the Wisdom Books and certain writings of the Prophets like Isaiah, Hosea, Amos, Micah, Obadiah, and Habakkuk. It has that same lyrical and elusive quality to it, but where the Eternal or New Jerusalem is more positively evocative and less abstract in moralistic ideals, India seems more haunting and open to interpretation through the pen of Raja Rao.

This, in short, is the Advaita Vedanta philosophy of Raja Rao, as it were, where the true country of India is the ‘country of the Self’, which indeed is also the ‘Atman’ as well as the ‘Brahman’, and India is the very epitome of what this metaphysical truth is. India, as a country with its own unique geography, history, and culture, has managed to imbibe this aspect of Adi Shankara’s Advaita philosophy into its own system. One cannot think of India as an essence without thinking about this aspect of it. One cannot do the same for any country in the West, unless perhaps one looked at the Americas from the eyes of the dreams of the shamans of the Native Americans or one looked at Australia from the ‘Dreamings’ of the Aboriginal peoples living there in reserves still. This indicates that ‘India’ is more than merely what the British made it to be, but something more and beyond that, which remains eternal and immortal, beyond the reach of any kind of imperial condescension and toxic conditioning.

Whether one accepts or contests this claim in ‘India – A Fable’ by Raja Rao philosophically, one must recognize how tightly Rao has managed to fuse form and thesis. A fable told to a child in a Paris garden is the only shape I think this argument could have taken without turning into polemic. This idea is similar to that of another short story, ‘The Destination’, written in 1981 by the Chinese author Wang Anyi, which won her a lot of awards and accolades in China. In ‘The Destination’ by Wang Anyi also, the male protagonist’s idea of his childhood Shanghai resides only in his memories. This he realizes after his return to it. He returns to the geographical Shanghai, as it were, but has along the way lost forever the spiritual Shanghai of his fond childhood memories and so mourns the same, thus making ‘The Destination’ by Wang Anyi part of the Scar Literature of China and also part of the urban retrospective philosophical short stories. But whereas alienation and disillusionment are evident in ‘The Destination’, in ‘India – A Fable’ we see the Indian diaspora just reflecting on their situation and merely being retrospective in a haunting manner and imitating the retelling narrative of their country of old in the vein of the writings of Aurobindo Ghosh and even Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, but with the dialogue-based prose and lyricism of Rabindranath Tagore’s short fiction.

Coming to the topic of this Indian spirituality, we see Western reality as very pale in comparison in ‘India – A Fable’ by Raja Rao through the plight of the French boy and his laid-back parents, not to mention his wayward and sensory satisfying nanny. We see parental neglect driving this French boy called Pierrot into his own world or inner imaginary world or mind. Even though he interacts with the Indian expatriate, Pierrot seems completely lost and isolated in his own mind and romantic visions of places he would like to be in other than his own bleak reality. His nanny is neglectful and adores fulfilling the desires of her senses, which is indicative of the ‘maya’ or ‘illusions’ given in to easily by Western society and its morality underlying its so-called emancipation of society and culture, which Raja Rao does not find fulfilling at all.

But since the nanny is giving in freely and irresponsibly to her amorous partner and desires or ‘maya’, the French boy Pierrot is able to encounter a spiritual transformation through his interaction with the Indian narrator, who initiates the French boy not only into India as a geographical entity but into Adi Shankara’s Advaita Vedantic philosophy itself. In the Christian sense, concerning the Gospel of John, it was as if the boy did not choose India, but India or Brahman chose him.

Notice the young French nanny gives in to her lover under a statue of Queen Anne of Austria, which indicates the illusion of the ‘happiness’ indicated and propagated by Western imperialism. We know this because after her encounter with her lover, neither is she satisfied nor happy and then is even frightened, mortified, and anxious about what the French boy had done with his toy camel and hurries off to look frantically for it. Even now, her priority should have been Pierrot, but instead she chooses to fret over ‘maya’ or ‘illusion’ more, that is, the materialistic toy camel. She should have merely been thankful that the boy was still safe and in good hands.

When the nanny disappears and is replaced by a much more mature, middle-aged nanny, one realizes that now the boy is more in control of his faculties and more mature himself. He no longer lives in a fantasy world and has had a dramatic spiritual transformation that has made him more self-realized and rational, and yet able to distinguish between the real and the unreal or what is worthy of one’s attention and what is not. The young nanny, on the other hand, after her lovemaking, feels ‘cold’ and disillusioned, which is what the urban modernity of Western liberalism ultimately leaves one with if not coupled with the Advaita philosophy of Adi Shankara of India.

…oh, it’s so cold,’ said Jeanne, as though to the wind. She was looking at the gate of the garden, the one near the Medici fountain. The young man was gone, and the path had gone with him. The leaves were black against that grey sky.
-‘India – A Fable’ by Raja Rao

One notices from the text in the Christian Advaita sense taught by the Raja Yoga of Jesus through the Gospel that the ‘maya’ of the ‘goal’, that is, ‘materialism or desires’, or in this case ‘the young man’, goes away and with him ‘the way’ as well or the direction to one’s goal. The way or ‘the direction’ was an illusion, because the goal was an illusion itself. Jesus, however, especially in the Gospel of John, stated that if one knew him, one knew God his Father and the way to heaven—because he was the Way, the Truth, and the Life—a teaching wholly similar to Adi Shankara’s Advaita Vedanta philosophy.

Lord, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?’ Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me. If you had known me, you would have known my Father, also; henceforth, you know him and have seen him.
-John 14:5–7

Through the Gospel of Matthew, we can also analyze this situation of the ‘goal’ of the ‘young man’ like the broad gate that leads to destruction but which many take; few, however, take the narrow gate, though it leads to eternal life and clarity of mind in the case of the French boy Pierrot.

Enter by the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is easy, that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard, that leads to life, and those who find it are few.
-Matthew 7:13–14

However, in the case of the French boy, he has been gaining insight from the Indian expatriate or Indian narrator about Advaita, something like an initiation into the philosophy of the ages by a guru. The Indian fable created for the boy’s amusement by the Indian narrator is the wedding of the prince to the two goddesses, one by the light of the sun and one by the light of the moon. In Vedantic philosophy, two such weddings indicate the wedding or union of the individual soul to the cosmic absolute. When the French boy returns after a month with a new middle-aged nanny, he is now fully self-realized and so wears golden buttons and has completely imbibed the non-dualism of the Vedanta in his system and being. That is why he can easily state that he is now the maharaja and that he rides the elephant and now the wedding per se is over—that is, he is one with the maker of the cosmos. This is not an ending but only the beginning for Pierrot in his self-realization process.

The ‘maya’ earlier was represented by the toy camel while ‘the elephant’ represents the vast and fertile spiritual reality of India. A camel is symbolic of aridness, bleakness, deserts, and isolation of the Atman or individual soul from the Brahman because of ‘maya’ or ‘false illusions’ or broad gates leading to destruction in the Christian sense as indicated by Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, which many esoteric and New Age religious movement masters state is the epitome of Jesus’s Advaita Vedanta philosophy in the New Testament. It too focuses on non-dualism and the union of the individual soul with the Brahman and the eternal wisdom that is better as a foundation stone for true success per se than baseless illusions.

Every one then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house upon the rock; and the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And every one who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house upon the sand; and the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell; and great was the fall of it.
-Matthew 7:24–27

Earlier, the French boy defined himself by his colonial Western and toxically dualistic past and present represented by his toy camel and his father’s job in Morocco. The link is shown well and subtly by Raja Rao as it is described that Pierrot’s father is away in Morocco serving the military. Pierrot hardly knows his father because he is a neglected child, and so he fantasizes about his father and what his father’s world in Morocco is like by playing with a toy camel, searching for an oasis, imagining himself traversing deserts and so on. The new golden suit with buttons worn at the end of the text by Pierrot is his new garment of self-awareness; or, as Catholic theology would put it, his image and likeness to God was restored, and now he was draped with grace and truth and had re-entered the once forbidden Garden of Eden or the Realm of Eternity to reside in union with the ‘Father’ who ‘never neglects his son’ as Pierrot’s father neglected Pierrot.

Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you. Behold, I have graven you on the palms of my hands.
-Isaiah 49:15–16

Karāgre vasate lakṣmīḥ karamadhye sarasvatī |
Karamūle tu govindaḥ prabhāte karadarśanam ||

At the tips of the fingers Goddess Lakshmi (wealth, prosperity, and grace) resides. In the center of the palm Goddess Saraswati (knowledge, wisdom, and memory) resides. At the base of the palm/wrist Lord Govinda (Vishnu, the Divine Protector) resides. Therefore, one should gaze upon their palms first thing in the morning.
-Prabhati Karadarshanam Shloka

Pierrot thereby has shed his Western Eurocentric illusions and now sees things as they should be seen and not through previous conditioning. Speaking of Morocco: in 1978, when Raja Rao penned this fable or short story titled ‘India – A Fable’, Morocco was embroiled in a fierce and highly volatile regional conflict known as the Western Sahara War, which lasted from 1975 to 1991. It is a harsh postcolonial irony on the part of Raja Rao to pick Morocco as a country to put Pierrot’s father in this fable. This is because while the French boy is happy in a luxurious Western garden fantasizing about the wonders that oriental and highly romantic Morocco could be, his poor father was facing a very violent, brutal, and devastating war where many were being butchered. It was nothing but yet another colonial conquest, and Raja Rao very skillfully thereby uses Morocco as the realistic, aggressive, and dominating side of Western imperialism, showing dramatically that the West’s very romanticized ideas about the Orient are in stark contrast to the brutal and harsh reality of what colonial conquest entails and means.

To me, Raja Rao’s ‘India – A Fable’ from the historical contextual point of view functions as a powerful critique of the deceptive mythologies underpinning European imperialism. This is especially true concerning the history of the entire continent of Africa during the colonial period. Historically, Western metropolitan powers used enticing advertising as propaganda to lure European citizens to Africa as colonizers, depicting a very exotic and romanticized Africa, whether in Kenya, Uganda, or even Morocco, where these so-called European colonizers, now called ‘settlers’, would be able to live a luxurious life compared to their middle-class lives in their original European countries and to gain cheap domestic labor to better their prospects and rise to the top of the elite crowd very fast. But all these notions were shattered in the minds of at least the more humane settlers in Africa when they saw the harsh reality of what it meant to be a settler or European colonizer in Africa. Historians note that many third- and fourth-generation members of settler families today even state publicly that their predecessors were deceived into coming to Africa with an exotic proposition and way of life, which was actually more fictional than actual reality; plus, it did not mention the unethical side to this whole bargain where the African was dispossessed of his own land by a mere white settler who had nothing to do with the land but owned most of it while the actual owners lived in reserves—that is, the actual Africans. French colonial powers and policies, especially in Morocco, painted the North African frontier as a place of adventure and conquest. This is very similar to what Pierrot was imagining about his father’s Morocco while he played with his toy camel, because his father had told him about the same deceptive advertisement he himself was fed by his superiors to lure him to work in Morocco.

However, the reality lived by these European settlers was fractured and disillusioned. Instead of living in, as it were, effortless luxury, these settlers were critically undercapitalized, entirely inexperienced, left to grapple with hostile environments, severe agricultural failures, and structural isolation. Guerrilla warfare in Morocco eventually dashed their peaceful existence, and the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya proved to these settlers and even to us readers of Raja Rao’s story ‘India – A Fable’ that the luxury lifestyle advertised for a European settler or colonizer was merely an unsustainable ‘maya’ or illusion built upon nothing but systemic exploitation, violent displacement, and constant geopolitical conflicts. Plus, they realized eventually that their subjugation of actual Africans of the continent for selfish colonial purposes was toxic and dehumanizing, not to mention the worst kind of racial abuse meted out to an entire continent of people. One might easily gloss over the ‘Morocco’ angle to this story by Raja Rao, but I would dwell greatly on this because along with the metaphysical and philosophical side, it paints a realistic image of colonialism in a few subtle words and hints given by Raja Rao that, if one wishes to dwell on them, can easily bring forth an even more in-depth analysis of this otherwise metaphysical fable.

Conclusion

In the end, Raja Rao’s ‘India – A Fable’ to me indicates the ontological reality of what India is—that is, wherever the Indian is, there in him or her or them is India. The Indian narrator of this story does not live in a tragic diasporic exile from his homeland as the Jews did before they returned to Israel and Judea after the Babylonian Exile before the birth of Christ, nor like James Joyce or T. S. Eliot is this narrator living in a modernist profound existential dislocation. Because India is not a patch of soil but an ontological reality, the narrator carries India within him and with him wherever he goes while in Paris. The Luxembourg Garden of Paris does not negate India but envelops India once a person is able to see beyond its transient empirical forms.

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