Kanthapura by Raja Rao

With the publication of Raja Rao’s Kanthapura in 1938, Indian English fiction took a different
and distinct turn. Kanthapura was a significant shift not only for what it said but also for the way
it said. Only after mastering modernism and giving it local significance could the new literatures
have joined the modern world (Encyclopaedia 1114). Therefore, Raja Rao in his Kanthapura,
created a form of modernism – ironic, sceptical and innovative technique such as puranic texture
and recurrent use of Hindu myths and legends which is Indian in subject – matter local language
usage, local history, racial or national pride, political independence and demands for social
justice are among the characteristics of the novel, as are concern with national mythology, with
documenting local ways, usually in a realistic literary style.
Raja Rao quite successfully makes use of local style of English language. In fact, he creates an
Indian variety of it and uses it with flexibility, ease and elegance. In Kanthapura, his form of
address, Bhattare from Bhatta, Moorthapa from Moorthy derived from original Kannad is indeed
meaningful expression in English since it catches the original rhythm of Kannada speech. Many
of Indian festivals such as Sankar-Jayanti, Harikatha, Bhajan etc. are expressed directly in the
local language arouse their original emotions. These apart, the novel also uses some Indian
phrase recurrently to evoke native ethos e.g. “To tell the truth,’ ‘he said this and that,’ ‘Going
this way or that way, ‘ ‘For this reason and that reason’ (k:57), these are conscious expression of
the novelist to enrich his Indian English language. It was the first conscious attempt to create an
English dialect which could be adjusted to the Indian emotional make up to suit the Indian soil.
He tries to create an Indian English, which could complete with Irish and American varieties of
English. In the foreword of Kanthapura he says, “we have grown to look at the large world as
part of us, our method of expression therefore has to be a dialect which will someday prove to be
as distinctive and colourful as the Irish and American. Time alone will justify it (k:5). To quote
Salman Rushdie “what seems to be happening is that these people who were once colonized by
the language are rapidly remaking it, domesticating it, becoming more and more relaxed about
the way they use it- assisted by the English languages enormous flexibility as of size, they are
carrying out  large territories for themselves within its frontiers”.
Viewed from new English literatures’ perspective, Kanthapura is a breakthrough indo-Anglian
novel in many senses of the term. It is modern in terms of usage of modern technique, local
language, theme and locale. The words of Meenakshi Mukherjee present a very clear picture:
“The novel in the sense we understand it today is concerned with circumstantial reality with the
concrete and particular that are influenced very largely by time and place. In this sense
Kanthapura is a modern novel and its oral tradition of mythicizing etc. is a well-chosen
technique.” It is new literature also in terms of its relationship to nationalism and nationalist
movement, treatment of issues of national pride, rejection of colonial values, in documenting
local ways in a realistic literary style and of course in the use of national mythology. Protest
which has built into new literatures which reflect a concern with feminism, social change, social
injustice, alienation, exile and decolonization are naturally absent because Kanthapura predates
Indian post-independence writings. Yet underpinning of some of protest tendencies cannot be
ruled out of it.
INDIANNESS

The Indianness of our regional literatures, according to Dr.C.Paul Varghese, is taken for granted
and no one takes the trouble to analyse it or study it in depth. It is assumed that there is “no clash
between the culture and the languages which express it” (Varghese 3). But where Indian writing
in English is concerned, it is supposed that English is ill fitted to express Indian culture in as
much as it is a language alien to the Indian soil and nurtured over the centuries by an alien
culture. In the words of Professor B.Rajan, “The inwardness of Indianness. Can not be captured
by a language essentielly foreign; the sublest and the most vital nuances are accessible only to a
living speech with its roots in the soil and in the organic past” (Mukherjee 3). Indian writing in
English is a part of a great Indian tradition that compromises both pre-Independence and post –
Independence streams. Writers feel as if they are the part of a great Indian tradition, which is
amorphous, diverse and undefined. Indian English literature is “one of the voice in which India
speaks. It is a new voice, no doubt, but it is as much Indian as others” (Iyengar p3). It is an
important body of the ‘new Englishes’, which have developed in different parts of the world.
Indian English novel is now being studied and discussed in the entire English speaking world by
those interested in the subcontinent or in non-native Englishes.

Indianness is the sum-total of the cultural traditions of India. It reflects the deep – seated ideas –
political, economical, cultural and spiritual – that constitude the mind of India. Today there are a
large number of educated Indians who use the English language as a medium for creative
expression. Their writings now form part of a substantial body of literature which is referred to
as IndoAnglian literature. Indo-Anglian writing is a separate genre, as distinguished from
‘Anglo-Indian writing’ and ‘Indo-English writing’.

This has been enriched by such figures as Toru Dutt, Sarojini Naidu, Rabindranath Tagore,
Aurobindo Ghosh, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehre. The Indian writer in English must be
able to use his chosen medium with a fair degree of accuracy both in grammar and idiom. As
Raja Rao in his preface to his novel Kanthapura says, “English is not a ‘foreign tongue’ in India,
but it is the language of our intellectual make – up, if not of our emotional make – up. He rightly
suggests and with the Indian writer in English express. Indian sensibility and with this end in
view, he should learn to write Indian English.

The Indianness of English consists not in the sprinking of Indian words in a writing. Though it
can be there, it really lies in the manner in which writer dislocates the conventional English
syntax to approximate to the patterns and rhythms of punjabi, kannada or Tamil speech in an
attempt to catch the very tone of voice, the gesture of hand and the twinkle in the eyes of men
and women who figure in a work of art. This is certainly a difficult task, but there are a number
of eminent writers who have overcome the difficulties posed by the alien medium of expression,
and they have achieved international recongnition.
The novel, short story and drama were practically non-existent in Indian languages, before the
middle of the century. With the introduction of English in India, there was a spurt of translations
and a number of English classics were translated into various Indian languages. The English
classics became the models for Indians writing in English.

Kanthapura, as a style of its own, reflects the rhythms and sensibilities of the Indian psyche.

Rao explains that every Indian village has a “sthala-purana, or legendary history, of its own.”
Often, a god or hero has passed through the village and left their mark in the memories of its
inhabitants, so that in everyday life “the past mingles with the present, and the gods mingle with
men.” Kanthapura is one such story about a village.

By narrating Kanthapura as a sthala-purana, Rao translates a traditional genre of oral history

grounded in the peculiarities of local religion into the modern medium of the English-language
novel. WHAT IS SO MODERN ABOUT IT? As a story of anticolonial resistance, it is worth
noting that Rao is appropriating the colonialists’ language to tell this story. It suggests that it was
important to him that the British and other westerners be able to read his words.
Active Themes

Rao notes that “the telling has not been easy,” chiefly because translating Indian ways of
thinking and constructing meaning into an “alien” language like English is so difficult. But
English is not truly alien to Indians—it forms their “intellectual make-up.” Indians can write in
English, but they “cannot write like the English”—rather, Indian English must become a
“distinctive and colourful” dialect of the language , which “time alone will justify.” Indian
writing in English must express “the tempo of Indian life,” which is a process of “rush and
tumble and move on.”

Rao justifies his decision to tell Kanthapura's history in Achakka's distinctive style, which breaks
most conventions of narrative voice by following a meandering stream of consciousness rather
than a linear storyline. Thus, even though English is a colonial language, it still offers Indians a
form of expression that subverts the colonial regime. Rao adapts a colonial tool to anticolonial
purposes, writing in a style of English that is not the dry language of education and
recordkeeping but rather the sort of vernacular language in which a sthala-purana would
ordinarily be told.

Rao suggests that this distinctive tempo accounts for the length of important Hindu epics like
the Mahabharatha and Ramayana, which demonstrate the rambling, “ordinary style of our story-
telling” that his narrator adopts. Rao imagines the story told by a grandmother, addressing a
newcomer on her veranda at dusk, recounting her village’s “sad tale.”

Rao sees India as a way of thinking, layered and additive rather than linear and argumentative,
and Achakka's oral style reflects that. He makes explicit her role as a village elder and suggests
that his story of a village responding to colonialism can be read as the story of India's struggle
against colonialism in miniature.
Sthala-Purana:

Kanthapura recounts the rise of a Gandhian nationalist movement in a small South Indian village
of the same name. The story is narrated by Achakka, an elder brahmin woman with an
encyclopedic knowledge about everyone in her village; she tells the story in the meandering,
nonlinear style of a sthala-purana, a traditional “legendary history” of a village, its people, and its
gods.

Raja Rao in his ‘foreword’ to the novel mentions his style as ‘Sthala – Purana’ in which “the past
mingles with the present and the gods mingle with men to make the repertory of your
grandmother always bright” (kan ix).

‘Kanthapura’ is a Gandhian saga which appears more as a ‘sthala-purana’. It is dominated by the

place and not by the people. It is the story of the actions of the entire village. The novel deals
with its topography, its products, its myths and legends, its religion and society and its caste-
ridden people.

Kanthapura is an Indian novel in the true sense of the term. It is written in the style of an Indian
grand-mother telling a story. There are long, meandering sentences and long paragraphs. The
style is gossipy, full of digressions. This is the style of the puranas, the Mahabharata and the
Ramayana. We tell on interminable tale… episode follows and when our thoughts stop our
breath stops, and we move on to another thought. Although the novel is written in English, but
the style of writing is entirely Indian.

Raja Rao seeks to propound in Kanthapura the universal ideals of harmony, unity, oneness and
selflessness. The village is a microcosm of the larger macrocosm of Greater India, rich in its
cultural traditions and an unflinching unity running through the fabric of our society. It is his
vision of oneness which drives the narrative in Kanthapura through the characters be it the evil
Bade Khan or the gently seer Moorthy.

Imagery, drawn from rural life, nature, history and mythology of India, come as a handy material
with which to garb the village and characters.

It floats like a procession of the gods in the month of Kartik, as the procession of gods passes
through the streets. Its revelry is like that of a marriage party.

Indianness as a way of life as a culture, as a socio-political and economic ethos, is too immense
to be accommodated into a concept. Any attempt at conceptualisation of indianness is married by
the immense variety is matters of language, caste, subcastes, creed, sex, superstitions, food,
and dress habits in India. The diversity within the country is much greater than the one that is
found among the various nations of Europe. Yet underneath the surface of diversity there are
certain commonly shared features, emotions, taboos and sentiments that contribute to a unified
vision of Indiannes.

Various sections of Indian society are bound by shared values and beliefs; however, diversity is
intrinsic to its character. A. K. Ramanujan says, “One way of defining diversity for India is to
say what the Irishman is said to have said about trousers. When asked whether trousers were
singular or plural, he said, „Singular at the top and plural at the bottom‟” (qtd. in Guttman 1). In
Kanthapura, the idea of nation carries the mark of Indian unity in diversity. The idea of India or
Indian nation is complex and multi-dimensional. It cannot be correctly expressed through the
essentialist view that Kanthapura is the microcosm of the macrocosm of India. The novel, which
is regional in terms of its setting and characters as graphically represented in figure (A), cannot
reflect the „microcosm‟4 of the „macrocosm‟ of India, a land known for its diversity and
regional peculiarities as graphically shown in figure (B). In other words, the phrase „microcosm
of India‟ tries to view India essentially as a homogeneous place and if carefully observed, the
village Kanthapura is presented as a unique part, with regional flavor and specific socio-political
conditions, of the larger entity known as India.

WHAT LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY ACTUALLY MEANS, WHY IS IT SO IMPORTANT,

HOW THIS NOVEL IS LINGUISTICALLY DIVERSE