*About the Novel
Raja Rae’s novel Kanthapura (1938) is the first major Indian novel in English. It is text of the Civil Disobedience movement of the 1930s that takes for its central concern the participation of a small village of South India in the national struggle called for by Mahatma Gandhi. Imbued with nationalism, the villagers sacrifice all their material possessions in a triumph of the spirit, showing how in the Gandhian movement people shed their narrow prejudices and united in the common cause of the non-violent civil resistance to the British Raj. Paradoxically, given its concerns, Kanthapura was first published in London in 1938 and was written when Rao was in France: “I wrote Kanthapura in a thirteenth century castle in the French Alps belonging to the Dauphins of France and I slept and worked on the novel in the room of the Queen”.
Narrated by Achakka., an old village woman, the plot centres on Kanthapura, a village in South India. This village is a microcosm of the traditional Indian society with its entrenched caste hierarchy. In Kanthapura there are Brahmin quarters, Sudra quarters and Pariah quarters. Despite stratification into castes, however, the villagers are mutually bound in various economic and social functions which maintain social harmony. The enduring quality of the Indian village is represented as ensuring an internal tenacity that resists external crises, its relationship to past contributing a sense of unity and continuity between the present and past generations. Kanthapura may appear isolated and removed from civilization, but it is compensated by an ever-enriching cycle of ceremonies, rituals, and festivals. Rao depicts the regular involvement of the villagers in Sankara-Jayanthi, Kartik Purnima, Ganesh-Jayanthi, Dasara, and the Satyanarayana Puja with the intention of conveying a sense of the natural unity and cohesion of village