Raja Rao is one of the greatest Indian novelists writing in the English language. Only two others Mulk Raj Anand and RKNarayan could come close to him as Uma Parameswaran suggests in her rigorous study titled A Study of Representative Indo-English Novelists, “Among the novelists one could narrow the choice to Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao.. .. Yet, ultimately, Raja Rao comes out several steps ahead of Anand” (141). He came from a traditional South Indian Brahmin family and after matriculating from Hyderabad, he went to Aligarh for higher education and graduated. Thereafter he went to France on a government scholarship and studied at the universities of Montpellier and Sorborne. Due to a spiritual recluse streak in him, he returned to India and visited the Asharam of Sri Aurobindo, Pandit Taranath and Ramana Maharshi. Raja Rao was a prolific writer, though not in the sense that he wrote a lot but whatever he wrote was a result of his slow and earnest creative effort. He wrote slowly, revised frequently and published his works at great intervals because he wanted to achieve perfection in his creative works: he wrote his first novel Kanthapura in 1938 and a collection of short stories. But he was unable to produce any other pieces of fiction straight away because he was going through a profound spiritual crisis at the time, he emerged a changed man, and a religion and a philosophy now have claims on him. After this spiritual metamorphosis, he wrote The Serpent and the Rope (1960), The Cat and Shakespeare (1965) and Comrade Kirillove (1976), The Chess Master and His Moves (1988) and in them he appears more as a religious philosopher . . . . . (370)Th...... middle of paper...... Rao: An Anthology of Recent Criticism. Ed. Ragini Ramchandra. Delhi: PencraftInternational, 2000. Narasimhaiah, C. D. Raja Rao. Delhi: Doaba Publications, 2002.Parameswaran, Uma. A study of representative Indo-English novelists. New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1976. Ranchan, Som P. “Ramawamy's Delemma: An Analytical Interpretation of the Snake and the Rope.” Exploration in Modern Indo-English Fiction. Ed. RK Dhawan. Intro. Vasant A. Shahane. New Delhi: Bahri Publication, 1982.Rao, K.R. The Fiction of Raja Roa. Aurangabad: Parimal Prakashan, 1980. Rao, Raja. The snake and the rope. London: John Murry, 1960.Raziada, Harish. “Literature as Sadhna”. Classic Commonwealth fiction. Ed. RK Dhawan.New Delhi: Publishing Company, 1988.Wellek, Rene and Austin Warren. Theory of literature. New York: Penguin Books Ltd., 1973.