Santha Rama Rau (1923–2009) was a prominent Indian-born American journalist, novelist, and playwright. She is famous for her travel-writing and her inquiry into the conflicts between the Indian and Western traditions.
Rama Rau’s father was a prominent Indian civil servant and diplomat who was educated in England. Her mother was an activist who co-founded the International Planned Parenthood Federation. For much of her early childhood, her family lived abroad.
Rama Rau is renowned as a teller of tales of her journeys in Asia, Africa, and the former Soviet Union for popular American magazines and journals. Her first-person writing was characterized by stylistic simplicity and helped uncover the Indian subcontinent for American readers in the decades after World War II and India’s independence. Her autobiographical stories were compiled into East of Home (1950,) View to the Southeast (1957,) My Russian Journey (1959,) and Gifts of Passage (1961.) Her best-known works include including This Is India (1953,) an exploration of the psyche and landscape of India, and The Cooking of India (1970.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Santha Rama Rau
Really, in the end, the only thing that can make you a writer is the person that you are, the intensity of your feeling, the honesty of your vision, the unsentimental acknowledgment of the endless interest of the life around and within you. Virtually nobody can help you deliberately-many people will help you unintentionally.
—Santha Rama Rau
Topics: Writers, Writing, Authors & Writing
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