First published in 1996 when he was eighty-eight years old, this selection of nearly six decades of Raja Rao's non-fiction is an audacious contemplation on the deeper significance of India. A combination of fables, journeys, discussions and meditations, The Meaning of India advances the view that India is not just a geographical entity, or even a civilization-state. India is, above all, a metaphysic, a way of being and regarding the self and the world.Drawing on a wide range of sources-including the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Gita, the Buddha, Sankara, Bhartrihari, Kalidasa, Dostoevsky, Valéry, Rilke, Mann and Mallarmé-as also meetings with Gandhi, Nehru, Forster and Malraux, Rao teases out the implications of Advaita or non-dualism, which he regards as India's unique contribution to the world.

With a new introduction by Makarand R. ParanjapeThe life of Mahatma Gandhi is the story of a legend. In Mahatma Gandhi: The Great Indian Way, Raja Rao upends the genre of the literary biography with inventive non-linear chronology, through dialogue and anecdote, situating the physical within the metaphysical, and with a text that is both retrospective and contemporary at the same time. By mapping genealogies and distilling them, Rao focuses on Gandhi's years in South Africa, the birth of non-violent resistance, and then moves into the epic freedom struggle in India, which brought Gandhi to worldwide renown in his own lifetime.With an emphasis on the idea of dharma as a framework for Gandhism, both in South Africa and India, this is the story of the man as much as the Mahatma.