The Serpent And The Rope Scope Analysis

The Serpent and the Rope is a diffuse and garrulous book, and Ramaswamy’s parade of learning, his intellectual arrogance and his bouts of self-pity can be irritating, while Rao’s tremendous linguistic resource can occasionally turn into sheer verbal jugglery, which brings diminishing returns with every new metaphysical hair meticulously split as in ‘Meaning is meaningful to meaning’. But with all its limitations, The Serpent and the Rope is a dazzling performance, … Few Indian English novels have expressed the Indian sensibility with as much authenticity and power as The Serpent and the Rope has. (Naik in History: 170)
In a nutshell, the philosophical profundity and symbolic richness, with its lyrical beauty and descriptive power go hand in …show more content…
A second reading and even a third one only confirmed my first impressions, though with successive readings I naturally came to register several reservations especially in regard to the considerable chunks of metaphysical disquisition scattered throughout the work, which fortunately are such that one can cut them out without injuring the organic structure of the work. (Narasimhaiah in Raja Rao: …show more content…
To speak precisely, The Serpent and the Rope has all the conventional ingredients, there is ‘plot’, ‘character’, ‘situation’, and abundant ‘life’ – as it is actually lived in India, in Paris, in Southern France, in London and Cambridge. There are numerous beautiful ‘stories’ within the central story in the style of the Mahabharata – of Iswara Bhatta and his family; of Radha, Krishna and Durvasa; of Tristan and Iseult; of Buddha and Vassita with her dead son in her arms; of Kabir and Ramananda; of Yajnyavalkya and Maitreyi; and many more – each of the stories delightful, poignant, and elevating, but having a value and a significance seen against the main theme of the serpent and the rope, itself a popular myth but most artistically elucidated in the course of the