ABSTRACT:
Essay on the contribution of the late David McCutchion to the ongoing history of Raja Rao criticism
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EXTRACT
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David McCutchion (1930-1972), English-born scholar, Indophile and early critic of Raja Rao,
was an authentic pioneer: in his short lifetime, he not only made a major contribution to the
study of Bengali temples, but became one of the first scholars to write on the now much commented
subject of Indian Writing in English (IWE), a field in which his work is still
regularly read and quoted today. Born in Coventry, David attended that city's King Henry
VIII Grammar School. He made it to Cambridge University the hard way, on intellectual
merit alone. He read Modern Languages (French and German) at Jesus College. After
graduating in 1953, he taught English for two years in southern France. He went to India in
1957. He worked there first as an English teacher at Visva-Bharati University, Shantiniketan,
and later, as Professor and then Reader in Comparative Literature at Jadavpur University,
Calcutta. He developed a keen interest in Indian literature in English, notably through his
friendship with P. Lal, the Calcutta scholar best known for founding the - still very much alive
- Writers Workshop, an institution combining the roles of publishing house and literary
cénacle and dedicated to the furthering of IWE (as testimony to this friendship, we may cite
the volume of David's letters to P. Lal published posthumously in 1972). Another of his
friends was none other than Satyajit Ray, for a goodly number of whose films David - having
become sufficiently conversant in Bengali - provided the subtitles.
1972 saw David's tragic and enormously premature death in Calcutta, from a sudden attack of
polio. His work, however, lived and lives on. His collection of 1969, Indian Writing in
English: Critical Essays, remains in print in India: it offers both general (and still highly
valuable) considerations on the IWE phenomenon and close readings of such writers as
Nissim Ezekiel, Balachandra Rajan and, crucially for our purposes, Raja Rao. A tribute
volume, David McCutchion: Shraddhanjali, edited by P. Lal and consisting of testimonies
from the most varied Indian and Western hands, Satyajit Ray included, was published in
1972. David's ground-breaking study of Bengali brick temples, The Temples of Bankura
District, was published by Writers Workshop in 1972. 2000 of his temple photos are kept in a
Calcutta archive, and his collection of Bengali scrolls was bequeathed to Coventry's Herbert
Art Gallery. His name is still cited in literary circles with great respect, as befits one who
helped open up key areas of subcontinental studies to the West.
We shall consider David McCutchion's critical work on Raja Rao - confining the
discussion to Rao's three novels published during McCutchion's lifetime, namely Kanthapura
(1938), The Serpent and the Rope (1960) and The Cat and Shakespeare (1971), plus his essay
collection The Meaning of India (1996). It was on The Serpent and the Rope that David
produced a full-length essay, "The Novel as Sastra" (written in 1962 and republished in his
collection of 1969, Indian Writing in English)- giving that novel a more extended treatment
in his book than any other work of Indian literature.
