What is the significance of the nove's title the serpent and the rope?

The serpent of the title can be interpreted as the temptations of Western life to which Rama has been attracted at various key moments in his life. All of these temptations lead to problems of one sort or another for the protagonist, illustrating the difficulty of effecting a meaningful reconciliation between the respective cultural values of East and West. The serpent represents the phenomenal world, the material world, the world inhabited by most Westerners, including Rama's French wife, Madeleine.
Yet for the deeply spiritual Rama, this is ultimately an unreal world, a place where he can never achieve fulfillment. It is only by separating from his wife and returning to live in India that he can once more reconnect his spirit to his imminent surroundings, achieving the kind of spiritual enlightenment that he could never find in the West. What for Hindus is the real world, the world behind the painted veil that we wrongly perceive as the sum total of reality, is symbolized by the rope. In Hinduism, a rope is used by the elephant-headed god Ganesh—the Lord of Beginnings—to pull us towards our goal of spiritual realization and fulfillment. And it is only by returning to his spiritual and ancestral homeland after his wanderings in the materialistic West, that Rama is finally able to take the first meaningful steps on the path towards reaching that goal.