Myth in/as Biography: A Study of the Ramayana Framework in Raja Rao's The Great Indian Way: A Life of Mahatma Gandhi

Ishal Paithrkam, Peer-Reviewed, Issue-44, December 2025 160 E-ISSN:2582-550X Myth in/as Biography: A Study of the Ramayana Framework in Raja Rao’s The Great Indian Way: A Life of Mahatma Gandhi Dr. Preeti Kumar In his literary biography of Gandhi, The Great Indian Way: A Life of Mahatma Gandhi, Raja Rao employs the mythical technique, overlaying the modern biography with ancient epic form, and thematically and semantically reformulating Gandhi as Rama. Though rooted in the documented evidence of Gandhi’s life, Rao’s text eschews the conventions of traditional Western biography and presents Gandhi as a modern-day Rama, who fights colonial rule with the weapon of non-violence, thus transforming the anti-colonial struggle into the archetypal heroic quest for dharma. The structure of the biographical text parallels the kandas of the Ramayana and thematically mirror the eternal values embodied by Rama. The mythic technique is foregrounded in the semiotic choices, the thematic and symbolic motifs, and in the narrative and structural framework of the Ramayana. This paper studies how Rao aligns Gandhi’s life with the mythic template of the Ramayana, thus repositioning the biography from the discipline of historical document to the realm of sacred storytelling which calls for a reading that moves beyond political history or life-writing into the domains of myth theory, narrative emplotment and postcolonial cultural politics. The paper argues that by using the Ramayana as a moral and structural frame, Rao’s biography shifts Gandhi from a national leader to the archetypal hero of epic proportions Ishal PaithrkamIshal Paithrkam Ishal PaithrkamIshal Paithrkam Ishal Paithrkam journal home page: https://ojs.ishalpaithrkam.info Issue-44, December 2025 E-ISSN:2582-550X 161 Ishal Paithrkam, Peer-Reviewed, Issue-44, December 2025 and repositions him into India’s sacred narrative traditions as a response to the cultural politics of the period. Key words: Raja Rao, Gandhi, Life writing, Ramayana, Myth, Historiography. Introduction Life-writing has become, in contemporary times, one of the most marketable genres of popular culture in all media, whether comics, literature, or cinema. ‘Life-writing’ is a literal translation of the medieval Greek term “biographia”, and it was John Dryden who defined ‘biography’ as “the history of particular men’s lives” in his Life of Plutarch. Biographies have been written to fulfil a variety of purposes – commemoration, denigration, ethical instruction, documentation, revisionism, self-understanding, national propaganda, etc. – and in a wide variety of forms, such as ‘autobiografiction’, ‘auto/biographic metafiction’, thematic biographies, group biographies, graphic biographies (which combine cartoons, history, and life-writing), microbiographies, medical biographies, anti-biographies, etc. As the plethora, purposes, and kinds of biographies on the same subject demonstrate, biography does not offer a singular ‘truth’ but becomes a potent means of ideological and historical representation, a means to reconstruct or deconstruct identities, and reformulate the past. There are narratives and counter-narratives created when the subject is reconstructed in every generation on the basis of different mythologies and ideologies. Therefore, the idea of a ‘more authoritative’ biography has been debunked, and postmodern theorists of biography question the ‘truth’ claims of biography, asserting that every biography has its subjective underpinnings in the selection and interpretation of historical material. Though biography is commonly presumed to be an inherently Western genre and was not considered to be dominant in India until its contact with the West, recent scholarship has uncovered a line of life-writing in India, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. Significantly, these biographical writings do not follow the narrative pattern of Western biographies, since they are largely fictionalized, allegorical, and epic. Sandhyakaranandin’s Ramacharitam (circa 11th-12th CE), for instance, was an allegorical biography: it could be read as the Ishal Paithrkam, Peer-Reviewed, Issue-44, December 2025 162 E-ISSN:2582-550X biographical details of Lord Rama as well as the hagiography of King Ramapala of the Pala dynasty of Bengal. Life histories, termed carita, incorporated both history and legend, were written in prose and verse, and followed the common biographical aim of being commemorative and didactic. When these Indian biographers praised their subjects, they placed their narrative in a mythical framework that was part of the structure of the biography and not meant to be ‘ornamental’. Even when the early hagiographical traditions of biography gave way to the modern conceptions of life writing in the colonial era, modernity did not completely replace the traditional patterns. The eighteenth-century biography of the South Indian, Ananda Ranga Pillai, written in Sanskrit, contains both pre-modern and modern features. It was with the nationalist movement that biography in the modern form received a momentous impetus, with biographies of prominent leaders being penned, one of the most famous being B. R. Nanda’s biography of Gandhi (1957). Biographies of Gandhi abounded from the early 20th century on – appraisals of his life and methods – beginning with Joseph Doke’s M. K. Gandhi: An Indian Patriot in South Africa (1909) to Let’s Kill Gandhi: A Chronicle of his Last Days, the Conspiracy, Murder Investigation, Trials and the Kapur Commission (2025). They range from the eulogizing Mahatma Gandhi: The Man who Became One with the Universal Being by Romain Rolland (1925) and Louis Fischer’s Life of Mahatma Gandhi (1950) to the denigrating Gandhi: Naked Ambition (2010) by Jad Adams and Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and his Struggle with India (2011) by Joseph Lelyveld. In India, the biographies follow a mixed critical response, beginning with the hagiographical observations of his associates such as Pyarelal Nanda (1956), the diaries of Mahadev Desai, the eight-volume biography by D. G. Tendulkar (1951), to the more critically appraising historical biography by B. R. Nanda (1958), the critical biography by his grandson, Rajmohan Gandhi (1994), and the assessment of his early experiences abroad by Ramachandra Guha (2013), to the openly hostile works like Arundhati Roy’s The Doctor and the Saint (2017). Raja Rao’s literary biography on Gandhi, The Great Indian Way: A Life of Mahatma Gandhi, was published in 1998, in which Rao E-ISSN:2582-550X 163 Ishal Paithrkam, Peer-Reviewed, Issue-44, December 2025 deploys the mythic method and configures Gandhi in the archetypal image of Rama. With multiple Sanskrit, folk, and regional versions, the Ramayana is one of India’s most enduring epics, as attested in the pan-Indian ratings of its televised retelling in the 1987. By inscribing Gandhi’s life through the cultural iconography of the Ramayana, Rao uses the mythology which is part of the collective unconscious of Indians to glorify Gandhi and his tenets of non-violence in the Puranic manner. This paper argues that Raja Rao’s literary hagiography of Gandhi, The Great Indian Way: A Life of Mahatma Gandhi, follows the pattern of the earlier conception of Indian biography, by prefiguring Gandhi as Rama, and in the very structure of the biography, which follows the organizational arrangement of the Sanskrit Ramayana, thus, transforming the anti-colonial struggle into the archetypal heroic quest for dharma. Literature Review While Raja Rao’s mythical method has been extensively analyzed, few studies have explored how his biography on Gandhi adheres to the framework of the mythology. The only substantial scholarly engagement with Rao’s The Great Indian Way appears in the chapter “Meaningful Gurus,” by Letizia Alterno (2011), in which the critic discusses the novel’s Gandhian ideological framework. The chapter argues that several of the Gandhian ideas explored in the novel were already anticipated in an essay Rao wrote and published in 1969 in an essay that offered a concise account of Gandhi’s life and thought set against the backdrop of Indian mythology. Biographers have frequently adopted a mythic narrative by incorporating archetypal structures of heroism such as the rise-fall-redemption pattern or the ideal of providential design, a tendency largely noticed in biopics. Sue Clayton’s (2007) work on mythic structures in screenwriting illustrates how mythic themes – including the hero’s journey – inform not only narrative and character but also image, landscape, and music, thereby exerting a significant influence on the critical study of biographical form. Similarly, Fazlalizadeh and Ghassemi’s (2019) article “Biopic and Myth Making” contends that biopics mythologize historical figures through selective retelling, showing how filmic representations, such Ishal Paithrkam, Peer-Reviewed, Issue-44, December 2025 164 E-ISSN:2582-550X as those seen in cinematic portrayals of Gandhi, construct culturally resonant modern heroes. Research on myth and history further underscores the persistence of archetypes such as the hero and martyr, noting that cyclical patterns of exile, trial, and return have become organizing principles in both traditional and contemporary biography. Oshlen (1997) highlights how Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections merges autobiography with myth, and comparisons with Jesus, Buddha, and Faust generates an “automythography” that aligns the trajectory of his personal development with mythic symbols. Similarly, Rowland (2003), discusses Laura Marcus’s work on “Autobiographical Discourse,” and demonstrates that autobiographies often rely on personal myths to connect individual protagonists to broader collective narratives, thus framing private experience within culturally recognisable symbolic patterns. Building on this notion of myth as a structuring force, Shastina’s (2014) reading of Elias Canetti illustrates how myth functions as a mode of self-interpretation, demonstrating how “biographical mythmaking” creates an idealised version of reality. Beyond Western contexts, Fong (1989) and Afejuku (2001) discuss how Chinese and African autobiographical writing draw on indigenous cosmologies and folk legends. Roesler (2006) provides a methodological framework to these literary analyses, and his narratological framework identifies recurring archetypal structures – especially the hero’s journey – as organising principles in autobiographical narratives. Taken together, this body of scholarship establishes the deep entanglement between biography and mythic structures. Methodology This paper attempts to decipher how the thematic, symbolic, and structural boundaries of the Ramayana are recreated in Rao’s biography. It incorporates an integrated theoretical framework combining myth theory, archetypal criticism, and historiographical analysis. The paper analyses the text in two stages: first, a historiographical reading – analysing the relevance of precolonial cultural symbols to modern historical discourse; and secondly, a structural mapping and mythic-thematic analysis – identifying the E-ISSN:2582-550X 165 Ishal Paithrkam, Peer-Reviewed, Issue-44, December 2025 correspondences between incidents in Gandhi’s biography and the narrative arc of the Ramayana and applying Eliade and Campbell to interpret Gandhi as a dharmic hero. The text chosen for comparison for studying the structure and thematic content of the Ramayana is Srimad Valmiki Ramayana published by the Gita Press of Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh. The spiritual/religious texts published by the Gita Press are traditionally enormously popular, primarily because of their cheap and easy accessibility, and have thus become a primary force in shaping modern Hindu identity and politics. The study demonstrates that Rao’s biography of Gandhi transforms the political and personal life into a national epic by fusing it with India’s enduring spiritual/ religious narrative. Conceptual framework The concept of the ‘mythic method’ in literature was articulated by Eliot in his essay “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” (1923) in which he praised Joyce’s novel for using Homer’s epic as a structural and symbolic framework giving coherence to the fragmentation of modern society. He famously defined it as a means of “controlling, ordering, of giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.” It refers to the deliberate incorporation of mythical patterns, archetypes, themes, symbols, and narratives into contemporary works both to achieve a universal significance and a sense of timelessness, and to suggest that the fundamental patterns of human experience remain constant despite superficial differences and historical change. This broad articulation of mythic integration finds systematic theorization in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), where he traced the universal mythic structures, such as the monomyth or the hero’s journey, through the rites of passage represented in the formulaic pattern of separation – initiation – return. In Campbell’s hero myth pattern, the hero ventures into a formidable region where he encounters supernatural and redoubtable forces, wins decisive victories, and returns to bestow gifts on his fellow men (Segal, 2004, p. 104), a pattern also seen in the Ramayana. Similarly, in his Anatomy of Criticism (1957), Northop Frye theorizes that “all genres of literature derive from myths – specifically the myth of the life of the hero” Ishal Paithrkam, Peer-Reviewed, Issue-44, December 2025 166 E-ISSN:2582-550X (Segal, 2004, p. 81). Further, Mircea Eliade, in his Myth and Reality (1963), conceives of myth as a narrative that provides an exemplar for human behaviour, and the retelling of the myth offers the listeners and participants an opportunity to transcend historical time and reconnect with timeless truths. Another theoretician of myth was Roland Barthes, whose Mythologies (1972) posits that myth is a form of signification, and ideologies are concealed by the cultural myths prevalent in societies. Taken together, these theoreticians of myth, thus, claim that the mythic method is not merely an ornamental use of myth, but rather a literary strategy to reframe the present in the universalizing patterns of the past. Rao’s mythic method is his incorporation of mythical, folkloric, Vedantic, and metaphysical elements in his writing by way of allegory and symbolism to explore philosophical and spiritual ideas. By foregrounding Indian mythical material as the structural and thematic resources in his texts, Rao negotiates tradition and modernity and conveys socio-political, nationalistic, cultural, and metaphysical concepts. In his novel, Kanthapura, he embeds the story of India’s freedom struggle within the structure of the Indian epics, the sthalapuranas and oral storytelling techniques. In his biography of Gandhi, likewise, Rao employs the method to describe a political life and ideology, allegorizing Gandhi’s life through mythical and historical parallels with the Ram narrative. Ramachandra Guha (2013) also highlights the parallel between Gandhi and Rama in his biography of Gandhi – both travel long distances, spend years in exile, have loyal spouses who are not always well treated, have powerful and charismatic adversaries, and are men of high moral character who have their dark sides (p. 7). The difference, according to Guha, is that the morals the Ramayana sought to establish were “cultural and familial,” while the morals in Gandhi’s narrative are “more explicitly social and political” (p. 7, italics mine). Rao’s biography of Gandhi fuses the personal and the political, and the biography metonymically identifies Gandhian principles of non-violence with those of Rama. Historiographical analysis Historiography, the study of how history is written, examines the ways in which the historian’s intellectual, political, social, and cultural E-ISSN:2582-550X 167 Ishal Paithrkam, Peer-Reviewed, Issue-44, December 2025 contexts influence what he emphasises, omits, or interprets. Similarly, critics of biography note how in the narrativization of raw facts into a coherent narrative, meaning is mediated through the politico-socialcultural concerns of the author, his milieu, and moment. A historiographical analysis of a biography reveals how historical writing is not merely a record of events, but a constructed narrative shaped by changing perspectives over time. In Rao’s biography, the moral imperatives of non-violence and truth serve as the biography’s central thematic concerns, and these values are symbolically encoded through the representational motifs of traditional Indian mythology. The biography was published in 1998, when Hindutva nationalism was resurgent in India in the aftermath of political realignments and economic changes. The call for armed masculinity had become strident in reasserting Hindu pride and in wresting Hindu religious and political rights, and Gandhi’s ideal of non-violence was disparaged as cowardly and humiliating. On the other end of the political spectrum, the Maoists, who had become politically active in the mid to late-1990s, advocated the violent overthrow of the state and vehemently rejected Gandhian non-violence. The employment of the a myth in Rao’s text is doubly effective, written as it was during the rise of right wing nationalism during the midand late-nineteen nineties, not only because Gandhi’s ishtadevata was Rama and his utopia was iterated as a Rama Rajya, but also because Rao’s text subverts the aggressive image of Rama as the Hindutva movement’s iconic hero. Hindu nationalism had produced a form of militant masculinity where violence and virility had become virtually synonymous (Alter, 2011, p. 16). The iconography of posters during the agitation for the Ram-temple transformed Rama to reflect the ideals of masculine Hinduism. While traditional artistic impressions of Rama displayed him in the company of Sita, Lakshmana, and Hanuman, smiling in benediction, the posters of the Ram temple agitation depicted him alone and armed, symbolic of a militant crusade (Basu et al. 1993, p. 62). Rao subverts this combative image to make virility synonymous with heroic suffering, though the suffering he highlights is not that of physical endurance and muscular strength as in the West, but that of hardship countenanced with faith and forgiveness. He quotes Gandhi’s Ishal Paithrkam, Peer-Reviewed, Issue-44, December 2025 168 E-ISSN:2582-550X view that the highest morality was love, and the “one invariable condition of love [was] the enduring of injuries, insults and violence of all kinds without resisting evil by evil” (Rao, 1998, p. 325). Employing metaphors of struggle and combat, Rao represents Gandhi as a leader who could move masses to heights of courage and self-sacrifice: “The battle of Kurukshetra is ready, brothers, Gandhi-swami the father calls us. Shall we fight?” (Rao, 1998, p. 383). Gandhi is shown as being a “soldier of satyagraha,” not a weakling who could not fight back (Rao, 1998, p. 303). In this, Gandhi resembles the monomythic hero of Campbell – he undergoes trials in the ‘realm of chaos’ represented by the imperial oppression of the South African government and emerges with a gift of renewal for his country and community – the boon of satyagraha. Structural-thematic Mapping The formal parallels between Rao’s biography and the Ramayana manifest in the shared narrative structure and the deployment of similar character archetypes. Interestingly, while Rao has followed the mythic method in the corpus of his fiction, the structure of the biography on Gandhi goes further in that it closely approximates the textual arrangement of the Ramayana. The chapters in Rao’s text approximate the kandas in the Ramayana, following the life stages of the protagonist and are narrated by an omniscient narrator. The events unfold linearly, with a marked similarity in content and theme, and with the conclusion showing a manifest parallel in both texts. In the The Great Indian Way, Rao focuses only on the early life and South African part of Gandhi’s career, and the return to India and the freedom struggle are encapsulated in the single chapter constituting the epilogue. The Ramayana too focuses on the childhood of Rama, his growth and the fourteen years of his exile, his triumphant return to Ayodhya, while condensing his 11,000 years as king to the final chapter. The chapter “Fabled India,” where Rao chronicles Gandhi’s ancestry and early days, corresponds to the ‘Bala Kanda,’ which encompasses the description of Ayodhya, the story of Dasaratha, and Rama’s childhood and marriage. Rao (1998) begins by describing Kathiawar and Rajasthan, which are “the home of heraldic bards who sing of their heroes” (p.17), just as Valmiki describes how Kusa E-ISSN:2582-550X 175 Ishal Paithrkam, Peer-Reviewed, Issue-44, December 2025 Alterno, L. 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Gita Press. Dr. Preeti Kumar Associate Professor Department of English St. Teresa’s College (Autonomous), Ernakulam Pin: 682011 India Ph: +91 9847060565 Email: [email protected] ORCiD: 0009-0000-6762-3315