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INTRODUCTION
One of the few novels I have gone back to is Kanthapura.
I will here attempt to analyse it in the hope of offering
an elucidation o: certain important facts in and about the
novel. a ee
There are at least three strands of experience in the
novel: the political, the religious and the social, and all
the three are woven inextricably into the one complex
story of Kanthapura. It isn’t any Indian village, but a
village in the staté of Karnataka, in the valleys of Hima-
vathy: ‘ there it lies curled up like a child on its mother’s
lap’. It has ‘four and twenty houses’ in the Brahmin
quarter, but it has a Pariah quarter too, a Potters’
quarter, a Weavers’ quarter and a Sudra quarter. There
might have been ninety or hundred huts in ail these. Its
multiple structure need not surprise us. It is unfor-
tunate that in this land of villages so few Indian writers
write about the village. Is it because they themselves
live in towns which have so many problems to write on,
problems which absorb all their attention? Or, is it
that life in the villages is eventless and so Indian villages
remain unsung and unknown to the rest of the world?
I can’t think of another authentic account of village life
among novels written in the’ English language. Precisely
these factors may have served as a stimulus to writing in
one like Raja Rao, who knows his village from the inside.
Hence it acquires an unusual complexity—a complexity
of the kind to which readers of fiction in the English
language have not been accustomed to. Observe the
way in which the village comes to life: its Brahmin
quarter, the Sudra quarter and the Pariah quarter. He
has seen the houses and known the inhabitants by their
Vii
names as only one who has lived with them knows:
Postmaster Suryanarayana with his two-storeyed house;
Patwari Nanjundiah who had ‘even put glass panes to
the windows ’; the thoiit house of pock-marked Sidda (the
inner courtyard in a village was a status symbol) which
had a ‘ big veranda, large roof and a granary ’; Waterfall
Venkamma who ‘ roared day and night’; and Zamindar
Bhatta who has gone on adding peasants’ lands to his
own domain; the young, idealistic ‘ Corner-House
Moorthy ’ who is destined to shake the village out of its
complacency and put it on the map of Karnataka and
India; and the ‘nine-beamed house of Patel Range
Gowda ’, the vigorous peasant chief of the village wedded
to the soil from immemoriai generations, a ‘ tiger to the
authorities’. These stand out among the men and
women of Kanthapuia. As for the rest, one could not
say the novelist tells us at the end of the introductions of
his dramaiis personae whether they were rich or poor—
‘they were badly dressed and always paid their taxes
after several reminders’. It is by means of such con-
crete particulars that the inhabitants and their residences
are known to us, and these are helpful in visualizing the
scene of action.
Right in the centre of the village is a temple dedicated
to Kenchamma, Great Goddess, Benign One. A river,
a hill and a temple with the presiding deity of the village
complete the picture. There is a folk song which evokes
in us images and attitudes as to what Kenchamma means
to the people of Kanthapura:
Kenchamma, Kenchamma,
Goddess benign and bounteous,
Mother of Earth, blood of life,
Harvest queen, rain crowned,
Kenchamma, Kenchamma,
Goddess benign and bounteous.
Kenchamma is the centre of the village and makes every-
thing meaningful. A marriage, a funeral, sickness,
Vili
death, ploughing, harvesting, arrests, release—all are
watched over by Kenchamma. There may be small-
pox or influenza around, but you make a ‘ vow to the
goddess, the next morning you wake up and you find the
fever has left you’. ‘ Didn’t she kill the demon who
killed their children and molested their wives?’ And
so she will continue to protect them come wind, come
rain, come any distress. While there is a lot of sympathy
for the peasant’s faith, there is no identification of: the
novelist with it. There is even a tinge of irony in his
description which surprisingly makes for authenticity.
It is true this back-of-beyond village slumbering for
centuries suddenly comes to life thanks to the non-violent
non-cooperation movement of Gandhi in the twenties.
It is in the handling of this theme that the novelist
quickens it to activity and thus gives us an insight into
the appalling social conditions of India’s villages ‘as also
the values that have preserved its people against flood,
fire, famine and exploitation from within and without—
and more than all, that incomparable manner in which
Gandhi tapped the deeply religious and spiritual resources
of people living in the remotest parts of India and built
up a national movement in a life-time.
But Kanthapura is no political novel any more than is
Gandhi’s movement a mere political movement. It
pictures vividly, truthfully and touchingly the story
the resurgence of India under Gandhi’s leadership; it
religious character, its economic and social concerns, hs
political ideals precisely in the way Gandhi tried to
spiritualize politics, the capacity for sacrifice of a people
in response to the call of one like Gandhi—not the spec-
tacular sacrifice of the few chosen ones who later became
India’s rulers, but the officially unchronicled, little,
nameless, unremembered acts of courage and sacrifice
of peasants and farm hands, students and lawyers, women
and old men, thanks to whom Gandhi’s unique experi-
ment gathered momentum and grew’ into a national
ix
movement. For, Kanthapura is India is microcosm:
what happened there is what happened in many places
during India’s fight for freedom.
The impact of Gandhi on our villages was the impact
of a dynamic religion through one of its supreme prac-
titioners; of idealism and a sense of purpose and urgency
on a people who had virtually ceased to live, with resig-
nation writ large on their faces. It was Gandhi's great-
ness that he produced hundreds of little Gandhis through-
out the country. And Corner-House Moorthy, our
Moorthy, as the villagers called him, was cne of them,
He was in college when he felt the impact of Gandhi, and
he walked out of it, a Gandhi man. He is said to have
had not an actual, first-hand experience of Gandhi by
personal contact, but a ‘ vision’ of Gandhi addressing a
public meeting and he himself pushing his way through
the crowd and joining the band of volunteers and receiv-
ing inspiration by a touch of Gandhi’s hand. And that
very evening Moorthy went out alone, and came back to
college and then left it permanently. Indeed the author's
own self is projected in the character of Moorthy; and
considering the circumstances and the temptations, the
identification of the young author (he was then only
twenty-six) with the young Moorthy appears to be in-
escapable. There is a good deal of idealization of
the character he admires. Consider statements like,
‘ Moorthy had gone through life like a noble cow, quiet,
generous, serene, deferent, brahminic, a very prince’;
and later; ‘He is our Gandhi’; ‘ He is the saint of our
village.’ Frém the time we meet him at the beginning
of the novel to the very end of the book, Moorthy is
perched at the top in his ascetic strength, and does not
seem to grow before our eyes very much; his capacity for
action Comes as a surprise in a visionary like Moorthy.
ey the best corrective to the idealization of Moorthy’s
Ccmie comes from Moorthy himself. It required
remarkable courage and honesty to permit this idealized
xX
character to react the way he did in Pariah Rachanna’s
house. He calls Pariah Rachanna, ‘ Brother Rachanna ’,
but will ‘ stand or. the gutter slab’ in front of Rachanna’s
house and talk to him ‘ from outside’. Also, what saves
the character is Moorthy’s passion for action. ‘The
character seems to slip out of the novelist’s hands and go
his own way to fulfil his destiny. The entire novel
bristles with action and all that action is centred round
Moorthy. He represents the confluence of the three
strands of experience that go to make up the action of the
novel—the political, the religious and the social. After
all he received his inspiration from Gandhi to whom all
action has its grounding in religion. Even before Gandhi
is mentioned in the novel there is tremendous religious
activity. Starting from an invocation to ‘ Kenchamma,
goddess benign’ to the end of the novel, religion seems
to sustain the spirits of the people of Kanthapura. The
action begins with the unearthing of a_ half-sunken
lingam by Moorthy and its consecration. And this in
itself is symbolic of the growth of religion frorn pre-historic
times.
It is important to remember that this became the
nucleus of social regeneration in Kanthapura in the true
tradition of India where social reformers have invariably
been profoundly religious men. When Moorthy threw
out a hint that ‘somebody wiil offer a dinner for each
day of the month ’, there was spontaneous response from
everyone and this is not stated by the novelist but comes
home to us through the characters themselves: ‘ Let the
first be mine’, said Bhatta; ‘the second mine’, said
Agent Nanjundiah; ‘ the third must be mine’, insisted
Pandit Venkateshiah. Note the verb ‘ insisted’ which
suggests both a willing co-operation in teamwork and
the issues of social prestige in a small community—for
the individual has no existence apart from the village.
This becomes clearer as the action proceeds, for there is:
insistent disapproval of ‘city boys’, ‘city girls’ and
xi
 city ways” not directly by the novelist, but by the main
characters. with whom he has sympathy. Soon they
observed Sankara Fayanthi, the Rama festival, the Krishna
festival and the Ganesh festival. When Moorthy asks
for a rupee, no one refuses. Everybody says, ‘ Take it,
my son.’ With the money thus collected they have
Harikathas and readings from the epics and the puranas.
‘The novelist captures in the Harikatha-man’s performance
the whole of the Indian tradition brought up-to-date as
he hears it rendered in the villager’s own idiom.
There is considerable resistance to Moorthy from the
conservative, the ignorant and those with vested in-
terests. But he is an earnest and imaginative reformer.
‘He explains the economic implications of his measure in
the most intimately personal terms, and he varies the
bait from person to person, quite shrewdly. To one set
of women he Says, ‘she cannot buy the peacock blue
sari for her daughter Lakshmi—and Lakshmi is to be
married’, Another is lured to spin and save money to
Spend on a pregnant second daughter’s seventh-month
«ceremony. Men are more resistant. Moorthy goes to
Patel Rangé Gowda and enlists his sympathy and active
‘support for the cause. Rangé Gowda speaks with the
voice of authority. He says, ‘ If you are the sons of your
father, do what this learned boy says.’ And Rangé
‘Gowda himself proposes Moorthy for the presidentship
of the village panchayat. Seenu is enlisted as a member,
as also Rachanna because he is a harijan. And Rangamma
jeins as a woman representative. Next, Moorthy
organizes the women. They start talking about Rani
Lakshmi Bai, Kamala Devi, Sarojini Naidu and Annie
Besant, and they feel challenged by the high standards
set by them. Moorthy so sensitizes them to their social
obligations that they say, ‘ and we think of nothing but
the blow-pipe and the broomstick and the milking of the
many cows’,

xii
 Both the religious bhajans and the national movement
have helped the novelist penetrate into the deeper layers
of human nature and observe the pettiness, greed,
jealousy and, in some cases, callousness and inhumanity
of the so-called spiritually-bent Indian. This novel
reveals how a village offers such opportunities for obser-
ving human nature in all its diversity. The village which
has nurtured a Moorthy, a Seenu, an Advocate Sankar
(a character full of scope for the novelist’s exercises of
irony and humour), Rangamma and Ratna, has also
sheltered Venkamma, Bhatta and his friend, Advocate
Seenappa. Venkamma is an ignorant woman and in-
dulges in scandal against Moorthy and Ratna, and
Rangamma, born partly at least of a frustration from not
winning over Moorthy for a son-in-law. Bhatta seems
to walk out of the novelist’s pages into the larger world
with his ‘ oily calendar’ and ‘ learned calculations on his
agile fingers’. He-‘ began life with a loin cloth at his
‘waist, and a copper pot in his hand ’ and went on adding
“several acres of the peasants’ lands to his own domain’.
He turns usurer and charges ten per cent interest. He
later raises this to twenty per cent. The novelist who
has a higher conception of the avocation of the Brahmin,
the type of whom he sees in men like Ramakrishnayya
of the older generation and Moorthy of the coming
generation, now witnesses his degradation in Bhatta—
and yet he is the ‘ first Brahmin of Kanthapura’. For,
‘with increasing prosperity Bhatta loses interest in his
‘priesthood. ‘It was so difficult to get him for an
obsequial dinner or a marriage ceremony’. And he
goes on to say, ‘ Bhatta is very learned in his art. It
‘would be ali over within the twinkling of an eye. Then
the real obsequial dinner begins with fresh honey and
solid curds and Bhatta’s beloved Bengal gram khir.’ The
children are playing and the older people are waiting
until the ‘holy Brahmins finish their meal’. But the
holy Brahmin—does hé eat to live? No. ‘ Bhatta goes
Xiil
on munching and belching, drinking water and then
munching again—Rama-Rama, Rama-Rama.’ Then
comes the crushing blow: ‘One does not have an
obsequial dinner every day.
At home Bhatta is an inconsiderate husband. On the
days he dines out, his wife has only dal soup and rice.
‘On the nights of obsequail dinner fe eats so little’, and
she doesn’t think of dinner for herself. But Bhatta has
no thought for her. His wife dies, and soon this middle-
aged priest marries a girl twelve and a half years old.
What could he do? ‘ Offers of marriages came from
here and there.’ Bhatta’s other social considerations
hardly go farther. He ‘was the only one who would
have nothing to do with these Gandhi dhajans’. He
owed his business contracts to government patronage.
He was also the election agent and got ‘two thousand
for it’. Again, when Moorthy’s mother, Narasamma,
dies, Rangamma offers to have the obsequial ceremonies
in her house because Moorthy is alone. But Bhatta will
not associate himself with them: ‘ you can offer me a
king’s daughter but never will I sell my soul to a pariah’.
He even actively works against Moorthy by ranging up
with Venkamma and the policeman, Badé Khan, and
hastens the death of Narasamma
by setting afloat rumours
of excommunications. He goes to Kashi to wash away
his sins and earn salvation. But that is not the moment
sympathy flows from us towards Bhatta. It happens
earlier. Hadn’t he sent our Fig-Tree-House Ramu to the
city for studies? He said: ‘ If you will bring a name_ to
Kanthapura—that is my only recompense. And if by
Kenchamma’s grace you get rich and become a Collec-
tor, you will think of this poor Bhatta and send him the
money—with no interest, of course, my son, for I have
given it in the name of God. If not, may the gods keep
you safe and fit...’ The narrator’s own comment,
coming immediately after Bhatta’s, helps to place the
character in correct perspective: ‘I tell you, he was not
a bad man, was Bhatta.’
X1V
 It remains a fact that Bhatta alienated himself gene-
rally from the sympathies of the rest of the village, but.
that he also alienated himself from himself is shown from.
the way he disappeared from Kanthapura into Kashi.
The novelist’s implication is clear: while the others.
participated in the mainstream of life and could have the
satisfaction of preserving themselves from ‘ inner shame ’,
Bhatta and Venkamma had no claim to any sense of
fulfilment. But is there any fulfilment at all in the novel ?
Thanks to police atrocities the entire village is desolate:
* Corner-House was all but fallen; Rangamma’s house:
was tileless; Nanjamma’s house doorless and roofless ’,
and in a word, ‘there’s neither man nor mosquito in
Kanthapura’, their men had been imprisoned, women.
scattered among the neighbouring villages, and Moorthy
gone away, God knows where. It is interesting that
only Rangé Gowda of all should go back to Kanthapura
after his period of imprisonment. But he is a broken
man, ‘lean as an areca-nut tree’, no longer the Tiger
that he was. Only the peasant, who has nowhere else
to go, goes back to his soil—-and stays alone, literally the
only one left to tell the tale of the emptied village. And
the novel ends on the ominous note, ‘ But to tell you the:
truth, Mother, my heart it beat like a drum.’
It is a breathless tale from the beginning to the end and
fascinatingly told in the age-old Indian tradition of
story-telling. But what strikes one here is that for the
first time in contemporary India the novel in Raja Rao’s.
hands has become a mature means of enlarging the
frontiers of human consciousness. It is interesting that:
global consciousness should come to Kanthapura through
the ‘ blue paper’ and the ‘ white paper ’, of course, with.
the novelist’s shattering irony. Rangamma’s sources.
of this global consciousness are the Tainadu, Viswakar-
nataka, Desabandhu and Jayabharata, all of them snobbisly
dismissed by big people during the period in question as
‘three-pice’” rags. It is a tale told by a grandmother
XV
from her rich repertoire. It is precisely because of this
narrow framework within which it must operate that the
novelist’s task is rendered most difficult when called upon
to assimilate seemingly impossible things into a simple
sensibility, The villagers of Kanthapura have not lost
their sense of wonder, of the enchantment of nature and
an intuitive wisdom to perceive natural phenomena in
terms of man’s place in the scheme of things:
Suddenly a shooting star sweeping across the sky
between the house-roof and the byre-roof, and
Ramakrishnayya says, ‘Some good soul has left
tae earth.’
Here is a distinctive Indian sensibility, a peasant sen-
sibility, to be precise, expressed in the English language.
‘The words are English, but the organization is Indian
and the novelist had to organize it himself.
Raja Rao’s contact with the French language must
have shown him how to forge ahead—use the English
Janguage with its essential understatement with the
French form of intensity and precision. Fortunately,
the Sanskrit tradition and the work of the vacanakaras in
modern Kannada literature were both accessible to him.
‘They must have shaped his sensibility so much that given
a theme like that of Kanthapura the expression could only
have been an extension of the Indian mode to the service
of an Indian sensibility. The emotional upheaval that
overtook Kanthapura could only find expression by
breaking the formal English syntax to suit the sudden
changes of mood and sharp contrasts in tone, by estab-
lishing a correspondence between perceptions and the
images he could readily lay his hands on in the life
around
and by a fresh emphasis on oid images and a completely
different, in this case Kannada, intonation to the English
sentence. In other words, it had to be a highly original
style, a technical innovation indistinguishable from
essentia an
l Indian sensibility.
Consider the language of the pariah woman
who comes
to Bhatta for a loan: ‘ Learned Maharaja,
anything you
XV1
deem fit.” To an innocent English or American reader,
‘learned’ and ‘ Maharaja’ would be quite baffling,
like the simple phrase ‘ Learned One has come, the
Learned One’, indicating only the socially or officially
superior one. Sometimes a question hardly elicits any
corresponding response, ‘How are you?’ ‘ Thank
you’ would make no sense and to employ it in conver-
sation is to strike a false note. Here in the novel the
question brings out, ‘ Like this, you see’—so much
remains unsaid in older societies and one has to view it
in that light. “Similarly, it would be absurd for a
peasant to be known by his initials, but names become
descriptive: Bent-legged Chandrayya, .Waterfall Ven-
kamma, Fig-Tree-House people and Nine-beamed House
Rangé Gowda. It would be most disrespectful to call the
First Brahmin anything but Bhattaré or Moorthy any-
thing but Moorthappa, especially when there is a differ-
ence in social or official status, In spite of his status,
Bhatta is in trouble spiritually. The remark ‘ the sinner
may go to the ocean but the water will only touch his
knees ’, bespeaks a distinct Indian sensibility—water as a
time-honoured symbol of. purification and the vivid
image of the insufficiency of an ocean of water to wash
this man’s sins away. Instead of saying, ‘ nip it in the
bud’, Raja Rao, perhaps because of its aesthetically
offensive imagery in the Indian context, uses the Indian
idiom, ‘ crush it in the seed ’, which will not fail to have
its sterling effect in an agricultural community. Note
again his plastic use of the English language to describe
the ever-enlarging spheres of our relationships, for
example, ‘ He is my wife’s elder brother’s wife’s brother-
in-law’, both because the word cousin doesn’t convey
the precise nature of the relationship and because Indian
relationships do not stop with cousins and_ brothers-
and sisters-in-law. But expressed in English it helps one
see the humour implicit in the change slowly coming
over Indian society, of dwindling socral responsibility.
XVil
"The vagueness of these extended relationships is offset
by the terms of endearment used to qualify the near one,
as in ‘our Seetharamu, our Maddur Seetharamu ’—in
both cases, a literal translation of the Indian idiom. A
whole character comes to life in a single phrase, ‘ Iron-
shop Inam Khan, gun in hand and fire in his eyes ’; and
a whole social milieu gets summed up in ‘ kitchen queen ”
for the Indian woman. Even the huge locomotive is
seen as a living, kicking giant : ‘ the train sneezed and
-wheezed and snorted and moved on ’.
When it comes to style, the breath-takingly long
sentences, and repetitions of names and words, while
sometimes necessary to build up the tempo of the com-
motion in Kanthapura, can also sound highly mannered
and they do. But the author has enough stylistic devices
to suit a wide range of emotiona] or mental states. In
fact, an outstanding contribution of Raja Rao to Indian
writing in English is to have struck. new paths for a
sensibility which is essentially Indian. Indian fiction
in English can make headway by continuing the Raja
Rao line, which is to say one must have not merely his
technique, but his amazingly high intellectual equipment
and awareness of the Indian tradition.

C. D. NARASIMHAIAH

XVlli
 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Au, AumepD. ‘Ijusion and Reality——the Art and

Philosophy of Raja Rao’, The Journal of Common-
wealth Literature, V, 1968.
Amur, G.S. “Raja Rao, the Kannada Phase’, The
Journal of Karnatak University, X, 1966.
Ivencar, K.R. Srinivasa. Indian Writing in English.
2nd rev. ed. Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1973.
KRISHNAMURTHY, M.G. ‘Indian Fiction in English ’,
Humanist Review, I, 4, 1969.
MUKHERJEE, MEENAKSHI. ‘ Raja Rao’s Shorter Fiction ’,
Indian Literature, X, 3, 1967.
——The Twice-born Fiction: Themes and Techniques of the
Indian Novel in Englishe New Delhi: Arnold-Heine-
mann, 1971.
Naik, M.K. ‘ Kanthapura: The Indo-Anglian Novel
as Legendary History’, The journal of Karnatak
University, X, 1966.
—‘ The Achievement of Raja Rao’, Banasthali Patrika,
XII, 1969.
Raja Rao. New York: Twayne, 1973.
NARASIMHAIAH, C.D. ‘* National Identity in Literature
and Language: Its Range and Depth in the Novels
of Raja Rao’, National Identity, ed. K.L. Goodwin.
London: Heinemann, 1970.
—‘ Raja Rao: The Metaphysical Novel (The Serpent
and the Rope) and its Significance ‘for Our Age ’,
X1X
 Readings in Commonwealth Literature, ed. William
Walsh. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973.
Raa Rao. New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemana, 1973.
Rao, Raya. ‘The Writer and the Word’, The Literary
Criterion, VII, 1, 1965.
WatsH, WILLIAM. Commonwealth Literature. London:
Oxford University Press, 1973.

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