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6 - Meaningful Gurus: The Meaning of India and The Great Indian Way

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 March 2012

Letizia Alterno
Letizia Alterno
Affiliation:
Editor-in-Chief, The Raja Rao Publication Project, University of Texas
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Summary

[…] “love, knowledge and freedom are one,

and the surest path to liberation

the lotus feet of the Sat Guru,

the true Guru: the search for the Guru,

the only path to the truth.”

(Raja Rao, The Great Indian Way: A Life of Mahatma Gandhi: 242)

The Great Indian Way: A Life of Mahatma Gandhi (1998) and The Meaning of India (1996) constitute Rao's most theoretical inquiry on the subject of the guru. Chronologically following Rao's The Chessmaster and His Moves by a decade,1 both works also explore the main tenets of Advaita Vedanta philosophy which have permeated the author's work throughout the years.

Rao's attention to Gandhi, whom he saw as a national and spiritual leader for India (and for the world), has been long-lasting. Apart from his earliest discussion of Gandhi's ideology in Kanthapura, some of the ideas he explores in The Great Indian Way were also anticipated in the form of an essay he had published for the UNESCO Courier publication in 1969. The article presented in a nutshell an account of Gandhi's life and thought against the backdrop of Indian mythology, and was accompanied by a detailed biography by the distinguished Sorbonne Indologist Olivier Lacombe.

Type
Chapter
Information
Raja Rao
An Introduction
 , pp. 107 - 125
Publisher: Foundation Books
Print publication year: 2011

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