RAJA RAO’S

KANTHAPURA
Author Introduction

 Raja Rao is considered to be one of the pioneers

of modern Indian English Writing along with
Mulk Raj Anand and R.K. Narayan
 Indo-Anglian novels as we know them today are
influenced mainly by these three novelists
 Raja Rao was born in 1909 in the village of
Hassana, in Mysore in a South Indian Brahmin
family.
 Left for France in 1928 at the age of 19 – to
pursue his studies in History and Philosophy at
the Sarbonne University – remained in France till
1939.
RAJA RAO (1908-2006)
Cont…

 Returned to India on the outbreak of World War II in 1940 and again went to France in
1946 and lived there till 1956
 It was in France that he wrote his first novel, Kanthapura published in 1938.
 Themes in his writings - human greed and brutality due to ignorance
Anglophone novel and its preoccupations

 Anglophone novel was and still is the most prominent and recognized genre and not poetry
or even drama – even though the Anglophone Indian novel was a late entrant
 Has no tradition to call its own, no literary-historical genealogy or movement that is
inherent to its development or sense of itself - A.K. Mehrotra famously described Indian
Literature as “piece-meal and ragged” - the Anglophone Indian novel is part of a
heterogeneous corpus in which certain dominant trends, shared concerns, and recurrent
themes are, nevertheless, discernible
 most Anglophone novels in the 19th century were intimately tied to the project of British
imperialism and native responses to it – examples are Early Anglophone novels such as
The Republic of Orissa: A Page from the Annals of the 20th Century by Soshee Chunder
Dutt; Kylas Chunder Dutt’s A Journal of Forty-Eight Hours of the Year 1945; Govinda
Samanta by Lal Behari Day
Cont…

 The first Anglophone Indian novel – Rajmohan’s Wife (1864) by Bankim Chandra
Chattopadhyaya – Important figure in the Bengal renaissance –Rajmohan’s Wife depicts the
realism of contemporary social and familial situations – it is also considered by many to be
an allegory on Nationalism
 His later Bengali novel Anandamath (1882) is considered to be much more significant and
perhaps even dangerous in the present context – theme on Indian Nationalism is dealt with
directly - “a presumed indigenous ‘Aryan’ and Hindu heritage as the true, hoary spirit of
the Indian nation, now degraded and overlaid by centuries of Islamic rule”
 Raja Rao’s Kanthapura also presents an idea of India (a nation or imagined community)
more than anything else – also present are the themes of Indian Nationalism (like the two
novels mentioned above it too addresses an exclusively Hindu community; neglects the
multi-religious nature of India)
Foreword to the novel

 Defined what we call modern Indian English Literature – many of the critics undermined
Kanthapura as a seminal text of Anglophone Indian Literature. They scoffed at the idea of
using Indian idiom (the way that language was used in Kanthapura) in writing an English
novel. it was only after a few decades through the writings of such critics as C.D.
Narasimhaiah and M.K. Naik that the language and writing style of Kanthapura was fully
appreciated and finally normalized
 the challenge, according to Raja Rao, was to ‘convey in a language that is not one’s own
the spirit that is one’s own.’ Going on, however, to claim that English was ‘not really an
alien language’, Rao describes the writer’s challenge as one of infusing ‘the tempo of
Indian life . . . into our English expression’. Adopting indigenous techniques of storytelling
in English-language narrative would be one way of achieving this goal.
Cont…

 Native idiom used in order to convey indian sensibility – literal translation of words and
phrases from Kannada – eg. “make our stomachs burn” (instead of the commonly used
English phrase “heart-burn”), using prefixes or suffixes in order to show the class of a
character or intimacy between the characters (Bhatta is called Bhattare, ‘re’ being a
honorific marker in Kannada; Moorthy is called ‘our moorthy’ or ‘moorthappa’); using
expressions like Ayyo Ayyoo or Rama-Rama; he uses names of dishes being served at a
wedding such as pheni, payasam etc.
 Rao is adept at evoking the idiosyncrasies of place and personality. Despite the occasional
awkwardness of attempts to translate Kannada epithets into English (‘Waterfall
Venkamma’, ‘Nose-Scratching Nanjamma’, ‘Beadle Timmiah’) or to find English
equivalents for place names (‘Temple Square’, ‘Devil’s Ravine Bridge’, ‘Chennaya’s
Pond’), Rao’s use of English to evoke the spirit of a South Indian place is largely
successful.
Cont…

 The preface begins with a mention of Sthala-purana – Sthala-purana is a legendary history

of its own that lends meaning to the lives of the people - Myth of kenchamma in the case
of Kanthapura – Kenchamma came to earth in order to slay a demon who had come to ask
their sons as food and women as wives. Kenchamma hill is red because of the battle
between the demon and the goddess.
Setting

 Gandhi repeatedly reminded people that India was a fundamentally agrarian society based
in villages – that is why the novel is set in kanthapura, a village situated in the western
ghats.
 Makes the village come to life through descriptions of the individuals who make up the
village – There is a Postmaster Suryanarayana with his two - storeyed house. Patwari
Nanjundiah who had even put glass - panes to the windows; the thotti - house of pock -
marked Sidda, 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 Mysore and India; and the nine -
beamed house of Patel Range Gowda, the vigorous peasant chief of the village wedded to
the soil from immemorial generations.
Cont…

 Divisions of caste within the village - it is divided into a number of quarters - the Brahmin
Quarter, the Potters Quarters - the Sudra Quarter and the Pariah Quarter. The society is
caste – ridden and the believers of Gandhi especially Moorthy struggles to get rid of his
and the villagers’ prejudices against the pariahs
Characters

 The characters are somewhat quaintly rustic and ‘simple’ from an urban perspective,
susceptible to the workings of what one contemporaneous writer, observing Gandhi’s
impact on the Indian peasantry, described as ‘the mythopoeic imagination of the childlike
peasant’
 Moorthy, described as ‘our Gandhi’, becomes what Amin (1988: 6) calls an ‘authorized
local [interpreter] of [Gandhi’s] will’ to whom the latter’s charisma is transferred. Religion
in this text, unlike in the historical actualities described by Amin, serves to solicit
devotional adherence to Gandhi: ‘It is not for nothing the Mahatma is a Mahatma and he
would not be Mahatma if the gods were not with him’
 Rangamma - She is one of the few educated women in the village. She reads the
newspapers herself and thus keeps herself and others acquainted with the day to day
developments elsewhere. She is of a great help to Moorthy in organizing the Congress work
in the village. She is a lady of enlightened views actively involved in the freedom struggle.
Cont…

 Ratna – she is a young widow. She became a widow when she was hardly fifteen years of
age. Ratna is an young educated woman of progressive views. Though she is a widow she
does not dress and live in a conventional style of a widow. She wears bangles; colored
sarees (and not the white dhoti of a widow) uses the kumkum mark on her forehead and
parts her hair. like a concubine, as Waterfall Venkamma puts it. She is also bold and witty
in conversation and can hold her own against heavy odds. She is much criticized for her
unconventional ways but she does not care for such criticism. She takes keen interest in the
Gandhian movement and is a source of inspiration and help to Moorthy. When
Jayaramachar, the Harikatha man, is arrested, she conducts the Harikathas. After
Rangamma's death, she reads out the newspapers and other publicity material of the
Congress for the benefit of the villagers. When Moorthy is arrested, she carries on his work
and serves as the leader.
Cont…

 Waterfall Venkamma - Like a waterfall, she is always shedding tears and roaring. She
rails against practically everybody in the novel. She is a woman of a petty, jealous nature.
She cannot bear to see others prosperous or successful. There is no end to her spite,
jealousy and vindictiveness.
 Patel Range Gowda - Range Gowda is the Patel of Kanthapura and as such a government
servant. He, too, is a Gandhi man and a staunch supporter of Moorthy. He throws all his
weight and authority in his favor and is of a considerable help to him in organizing the
Congress work in Kanthapura.
 Bhatta - Bhatta, the first Brahmin, is the opposite of Moorthy - the agent of the British
government, in league with the Swami in the city and works ceaselessly to frustrate and
defeat the Gandhi movement. If at all there is any villain in the novel, it is he.
Cont…

 Bade Khan – A Muslim Policeman, with his long beard, is a symbol of the British Raj. He
is the symbol of the British presence in Kanthapura. It is his duty to maintain law and order
and put down the Gandhi movement and it may be said to his credit that he performs his
duty loyally and sincerely. The Gandhites may consider him a villain but judged
impartially, he is a loyal Government servant performing his duty in every circumstance.
He may be an instrument of the foreign Government but it would be wrong to dismiss him
as a heartless monster of wickedness.
Narrative structure and style

 structuring the novel as a grandmother’s tale within which are embedded other stories and
their narrators.
 Breathless tale – infusing the tempo of indian life - cutting across ‘broader loyalties and
imagined communities’ beyond clan and region that existed in precolonial India – this
would later ‘play a subtle role in the construction of Indian nationalism’
 Contemporary significance of Hindu myth - contains within itself a ‘harikatha’ or a ‘story
of Vishnu’ in which Gandhi takes on mythological proportions as an avatar of the deity
himself. Rendering Hindu legend into mildly archaic English gives it biblical resonances
Cont…

 The folding of secular time into the timelessness of the mythological evokes a temporality
that the poet and critic, A. K. Ramanujan (1989: 145), terms ‘Indian Village Time’, figured
as ‘indefinite, continuous - anywhere between a few decades ago and the medieval
centuries’.
 Rao conceivably pays homage to Gandhi’s (1997: 56) own disavowal of the English ‘habit
of writing history’ and those very European conceptions of chronology and historical
progress that Hegel and Mill upheld as civilizational achievements.
The influence of Gandhi

 Gandhi was a shared literary, philosophical, and cultural influence for Raja Rao and many
other writers of his time.
 Gandhi reached across a wide regional, cultural, and linguistic span to turn the freedom
movement into a genuinely ‘all-India’ phenomenon with mass participation.
 The historian, Percival Spear, observes that Gandhi’s great work was to bring together
masses and elite classes in the freedom struggle; thereby ‘the Mahatma gave a nation to the
country’ – emphasis on the idea of a nation – Gandhi united the nation as a whole
Cont…

 Gandhi’s own literary output provided a ready-made resource for writers who felt impelled
—more so perhaps at this time than any preceding era—to engage with the social and
political issues facing the nation that was coming into being.
 Gandhi’s emphatic insistence that freedom ultimately had to come from within resonated
with literary attempts to explore the nature of the self. Colonialism provided an
opportunity, in this view, to cleanse and regenerate Indian self and society.
 The cornerstones of his own programme of cultural regeneration were non-violence,
personal and communal prayer, the elimination of discrimination against ‘Untouchables’
within the Hindu caste system, and the spinning of handloom cloth, symbolizing economic
self-sufficiency.
Gandhian ideology in Kanthapura

 K.R. Srinivasa Iyenger in the Indian Contribution to English Literature - Full of Gandhian
policies but it remains a creative work of fiction, even a work of prose art.
 Kanthapura is an account of a community’s fraught experiments with Gandhian truths and
the project of self-transformation enjoined by Gandhi. The village was Gandhi’s
exemplary social unit, the site where ‘soul-force’ could find regenerative expression away
from the corrupting regimes of technology and modernity. At the same time, these
communities had to reform themselves from within and repair those traditions that had
become self-defeating and ‘diseased’. In some ways, Gandhi’s most significant
contribution to the discourse of Indian independence lay in his insistence that swaraj or
‘self-rule’ would be meaningless, even inimical, without a fundamental transformation of
character; there would be no point in replacing English tyrants and degenerates with
brown-skinned ones
Themes – Cont…

 The terms ‘Indian’ and ‘Hindu’ are interchangeable for him in describing his philosophical interests -
Tabish Khair (2001: 204) points out that while ‘Rao did give speech to subalterned Indian realities in
the colonial and international context, he did so largely by recourse to Sanskritized (at times even high
Brahminical) deWnitions and traditions’, which in turn marginalized those outside those traditions.
 The contentious relationship between city and village is itself also thematized in the novel. Moorthy,
the representative of Gandhi, is described approvingly by the narrator as a man who ‘had been to the
city and . . . knew of things we did not know’
 The religiosity of the framework through which Gandhi and his message were often interpreted is a
running thread through Kanthapura, allowing for a convergence of Rao’s own interest in spiritual
matters and the ways in which Gandhi self-consciously deployed a religious idiom to transmit his
message. Though he was emphatic that he did not mean a specific religion but rather the ‘religion
which underlies all religions’, Gandhi’s idioms drew on Sanskritic Hindu concepts such as ‘Ram-
Rajya’ (the utopian rule of Rama). He also advocated ‘purifying’ Hindu religious practices such as
fasting, vegetarianism, and the singing of bhajans or devotional songs.
Cont…

 Shahid Amin – ‘religiosity overdetermined by an incipient political consciousness’ - He

argues that Gandhi became a kind of polysemic text, enabling marginalized groups in
society to undertake ‘distinctly independent intepretations’ of his message. Often,
Gandhian injunctions were broadened or reworked to include liberatory actions and
subversive programmes not necessarily sanctioned by him—such as refusing to pay high
rents or to work for exploitative landlords, or giving up hereditary callings, on the basis
that Gandhiji’s Swaraj was imminent. Similar rumours circulate in Kanthapura: ‘Like
Harischandra before he finished his vow, the gods will come down and dissolve his vow,
and the Britishers will leave India, and we shall pay less taxes, and there will be no
policemen’
Role of women

 This novel ushers in a fresh - breath of change with the depiction of women who shed the age-
old bars of custom and orthodoxy and assert themselves by having active shares in the fight for
the independence of their nation and awakening a new consciousness among the people. The
enthusiasm of both men and women and their equal participation in the freedom struggle reflects
that women of Kanthapura have taken a great leap from the past to the present.
 an illusion that these women have broken all the patriarchal paradigms of the social order and
are leading a free and unfettered life – beaten up by husbands bear the atrocities thinking that it
is the same as the beatings by their husbands
 Raja Rao selects an elderly Brahmin widow, Achakka, to narrate the story of the novel
Kanthapura. Her name appears only once in the novel, but it is through her eyes and her point of
view that we see everything that happens in it. Achakka, who also participates in the Satyagraha
led by Moorthy, narrates the events of the struggle with a sense of pride and achievement
Cont…

 When Moorthy is in prison, Rangamma organizes the `sevika sangh'. She arranges
newspapers to be delivered from the city so that the villagers remain informed about the
activities of the Congress. When Moorthy is released, she arranges a proper welcome for
him. When Rangamma too is arrested Ratna takes over the leadership of the group. But
these women only perform a supportive duty rather than taking any bold decisions and
therefore the movement virtually slows down in the absence of men. When Moorthy is
released, Satyagrahis become enthusiastic again and it gives them a renewed hope for the
success of their unequal fight against their colonial rulers.
Cont…

 Raja Rao is against excessive subordination of women to men, but is not averse to women
generally playing a subordinate role on the social level and he perceives women's political
participation as an extension of their familial roles as the scriptures sanction it. He urges
upon the women to perform service in the following order: service towards the husband,
the family and the country. In case of any conflict arising between duty towards family and
duty towards country, familial duties are expected to be their prime responsibility.
 have no husbands at home and most of them are elderly and they have almost finished their
duty towards their family. Rangamma is an issueless widow, Ratna became a widow when
she was ten years old, Achakka has only one grown-up grandson. These women of
Kanthapura perform their household duties, a primary occupation for women, first and
foremost and then go out to perform the work as Satyagrahis.
Important questions -

Long –
 Narrative technique
 Kanthapura as Gandhipurana
 Role of women
Short -
 Role of ratna
 Jayaramachar’s Harikatha
 Role of Rangamma