The pen behind the politician
He held office for about ten years of his life and wrote for more than fifty. In Tamil Nadu, a great many people who could not name a single one of his policies grew up reading his retellings of the epics.
Two audiences, two languages
Rajaji wrote for two publics at once. In Tamil he wrote for a general readership: serials in popular magazines, short fiction, essays on conduct and belief, and the epic retellings that made his name in Tamil homes. In English he wrote political argument for a national readership — and, from 1956, edited the weekly Swarajya, which became the principal vehicle for his case against economic controls.
Prison supplied some of the time. Like many Congress leaders of his generation he used terms of imprisonment for reading and writing, and kept a jail diary during his confinement in the early 1920s.
The prose is plain to the point of severity: short sentences, few adjectives, an argument stated and then supported. It is recognisably the same voice in a note on the Gita and in a leader on import licensing.
Four bodies of work
Choose a shelf. The page changes its typography to suit what you are reading about. These panels describe the works; they do not reproduce them.
Ramayana
Rajaji’s Ramayana grew out of a Tamil serial and was published in English by the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan. He worked from Valmiki and from Kamban’s Tamil Ramavataram, and made a decision that shaped everything else about the book: the story would be told straight through, in ordinary modern prose, at the pace of a narrative rather than a scripture.
The Tamil version, Chakravarthi Thirumagan — the emperor’s son — won the Sahitya Akademi Award for Tamil in 1958. What both versions share is an interest in the moral difficulty of the story: Rama’s obligations, Bharata’s refusal of a throne, the questions the epic raises about duty and its cost. Rajaji was drawn to the epics as arguments about conduct, and he retold them accordingly.
Scholars have noted what compression costs: episodes are trimmed, and the poetry of Kamban cannot survive being paraphrased. Rajaji did not claim otherwise. His stated purpose was to put the story into the hands of readers who would otherwise never hold it.
Mahabharata
The Mahabharata retelling followed the same method and was, if anything, the harder task: an epic of enormous length, with a hundred subplots and a moral scheme in which almost no one is wholly right. Rajaji’s version, which also began as a Tamil serial before appearing in English, keeps the main line of the narrative and preserves the ambiguity rather than tidying it away.
He was interested in exactly the passages that make the epic uncomfortable — the gambling match, the treatment of Draupadi, the deaths that follow from small deceptions, the arguments about whether a just war can be fought by unjust means. A retelling that removed those would have had no use for him.
Both epics have been continuously in print for decades and are among the most widely read English renderings by an Indian author.
Political essays and journalism
From 1956 Rajaji edited the English weekly Swarajya, and from its pages conducted the longest argument of his life: against industrial licensing, against state trading in food, against the accumulation of administrative discretion, and in favour of the individual citizen’s right to earn a living without permission.
The journalism has a distinct method. He would take a single government decision — a control order, a licensing rule, a budget provision — and follow it out to the consequence he thought it implied. There is very little rhetoric and almost no abuse of opponents. He had spent twenty years at a district bar, and it shows.
Earlier, in Tamil, he had edited Vimochanam, a journal devoted largely to the case for prohibition. Between them the two journals span nearly forty years of a politician who preferred to argue in print.
Other writings
Beyond the epics and the journalism, Rajaji wrote on Hindu belief and practice for general readers, produced a rendering into English of selected couplets from Tiruvalluvar’s Tirukkural, and published prose versions of and commentaries on classical texts including the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads.
He also wrote Tamil short fiction. Dikkatra Parvathi, a story of a woman left without support, is the best known; it was adapted for the screen after his death.
His jail diary from the early 1920s belongs to a small and valuable genre: the day-to-day record of an educated professional adjusting to imprisonment as a political method.
Chakravarthi Thirumagan
Subject. The Ramayana retold in Tamil prose, drawing on Kamban’s Ramavataram.
Context and significance. Written for a popular Tamil readership and serialised before publication in book form. Its Sahitya Akademi Award in 1958 recognised a former head of state as a working Tamil author, and it remains the work by which he is best known to Tamil readers.
Ramayana
Subject. A continuous prose retelling of the Ramayana for English-language readers.
Context and significance. Published by the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan and continuously in print since. For several generations of Indian and international readers it has been the first complete encounter with the epic.
Mahabharata
Subject. The Mahabharata compressed into a single readable narrative without removing its moral difficulty.
Context and significance. Companion volume to the Ramayana and, like it, long in print. Widely used in schools and by readers approaching the epic for the first time.
Hinduism: Doctrine and Way of Life
Subject. An account of Hindu belief and practice written for the general reader.
Context and significance. Represents the reforming strand of his religious thought — a tradition presented as an ethical way of life, and one whose social exclusions he had spent decades opposing.
Kural: selections from Tiruvalluvar
Subject. Selected couplets of the Tirukkural, the classical Tamil work on ethics and government, rendered into English with commentary.
Context and significance. Part of a lifelong project of carrying Tamil classical literature to readers outside Tamil.
Swarajya
Subject. Weekly political and economic commentary, most of it his own.
Context and significance. The platform from which the Swatantra Party’s case was made, and the reason his economic argument reached readers far beyond the party’s voters.
On texts and copyrightThis page describes Rajaji’s works and their reception. It does not reproduce them: several remain in copyright, and no substantial extract is quoted here. Titles, publishers and dates given above follow standard bibliographies; editions and reprint dates vary between publishers.
Why does a Governor-General spend his old age retelling stories?
Because he thought the stories did work that argument could not. The epics were, for Rajaji, the moral education of a civilisation: available to the unlettered through recitation, and increasingly unavailable to the educated, who had the alphabet but not the Sanskrit, and the leisure but not the occasion.
His retellings were an attempt to close that gap in the plainest possible way — ordinary prose, cheap editions, serialisation in magazines that ordinary households already bought. It is a literary decision with a political shape, and it belongs to the same man who wanted schooling extended to more children on smaller means.
It should be read as literature and not as biography. The politics and the writing are kept in separate chapters on this website for that reason: the arguments belong in The Arguments, and the books stand on their own.