BREAKING STEREOTYPES: MALE VIEW OF THE FEMALE PRINCIPLE IN RAJA RAO’S THE CAT AND SHAKESPEARE

In Raja Rao’s novel The Cat and Shakespeare the existential quest of Pai, an Indian male, can be studied as mirroring that of Hamlet. However, Pai's progress consists in his resistance to the stereotyped power-imbued values of both ‘Shakespeare’s’ and his own culture, i. e. those related to colonization, radical authoritarian nationalism, caste, species and gender, the last-mentioned being the focus of this paper.