When UNESCO officials asked Raja Rao to write a book on India, he replied that India did not exist. As the central figure in his novel The Serpent and the Rope says, "Anybody can have the geographic—even the political—India; it matters little.... India is not a country like France is, or like England; India is an idea, a metaphysic." Strangely enough, this concept, which ultimately questions India's material existence, helped shape the Indian Revolution. It lies, too, at the heart of Raja Rao's fiction, and his devotion to it has helped him create out of an adopted language one of the few truly unique styles in Third World literature.

Third World writers often accuse each other of being imitative, tame. They bicker about cultural imperialism, and not without reason. Much Third World literature is written not in native languages, but in Western languages and after Western literary forms; and most Third World writers, even the brilliant ones, have indeed developed literary sensibilities and approaches to language and form that are heavily Westernized. But is Spanish or French or English supple enough to reproduce the ambience of, say, Igbo or Malayalam speech? Do Western form and native sensibility clash? If, for example, a writer comes from a Third World culture which views man as having little personal history and standing essentially outside time, will there not be a problem in conveying that view if he uses the Western novel form, which, at least traditionally, assumes and focuses on personal identity developing in time? Surely, synthesis is the problem, for it is too simplistic to assume, as many militant Third World writers seem to do, that colonialism is really a lesser historical phenomenon whose cultural influences can someday be completely neutralized. Still, it is true that too many writers, too much seduced by Western form and language, have unconsciously given up, or made quite secondary, the sensitive rendering of their own culture's vision.