Novel
Kanthapura
Raja Rao · 1938
Synopsis
Achakka, an old Brahmin widow, tells the story of Kanthapura, a village in southern India where each caste has its own quarter and which is protected by the goddess Kenchamma. A young Brahmin, Moorthy, returns from the city won over to Gandhi's ideas: he breaks with caste prohibitions, draws in the women and the poor, and the village gradually enters nonviolent resistance to colonial power, facing the police and the landowners.
Context
Written for the most part in France, in a thirteenth-century castle in the Alps that had belonged to the Dauphins, the novel was published in London by Allen and Unwin in 1938. In his preface, the author presents it as a sthala-purana, the legend of a place, and defends the right to express in English a thought that is not English, by bending the language to the rhythm of Kannada speech and of popular tales. Penguin has reissued it in its modern classics, with an introduction by R. Parthasarathy.
Who it is for
A short novel, in English, with a syntax modelled on Kannada and scattered with Indian words, rites and legends.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as one of the founding novels of Indian literature in English, and as the text that bent English to the rhythms of Indian storytelling.
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