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

Abstract

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aligns Gandhi’s life with the mythic template of the Ramayana, thus repositioning the biography from the discipline of historical document to the realm of sacred storytelling which calls for a reading that moves beyond political history or life-writing into the domains of myth theory, narrative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 and repositions him into India’s sacred narrative traditions as a response to the cultural politics of the period.