Raja Rao

Raja Rao was born to a historically influential Brahmin family in the South Indian state of Mysore (now Karnataka), where Kanthapura is also set. Rao’s father taught Kannada (the local language that the book’s characters presumably speak) and his mother died when Rao was four years old. Rao was the only Hindu student at his Muslim public school before he went to study English at the University of Madras and graduated in 1929, the same year he originally finished writing Kanthapura. He soon moved to France, where he studied French history and literature, and spent the next thirty years living between there and India. During the 1940s, he was active in the Indian independence movement. Rao moved to the United States in 1966, where he taught philosophy at the University of Texas until his retirement in 1986. He married three times: to the French teacher Camille Mouly in 1931, to the American actress Katherine Jones in 1965, and to the American Susan Vaught in 1986. From the 1960s onward, he won a number of prominent literary prizes, including the Indian Padma Bhushan in 1969 and the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1988.