Paper-3 : Indian Writing in English

Unit 5(a)

“FOREWORD” TO KANTHAPURA
RAJA RAO
–Nalini Prabhakar

1. Introduction
1.1 About the author: Raja Rao (1908-2006) was born in Hassan, located in the erstwhile
state of Mysore. He did his schooling from Madrasa-e-Aliya (Hyderabad) and later his
graduation from Nizam College (Hyderabad). At the age of 21, he left for Europe and
studied Christian theology and History at the Universities of Montpellier and the
Sorbonne. Rao's early works show the influence of Kafka and Malraux. After a failed
marriage, he returned to India in 1939 and started living in an Ashram. During this
period, he travelled extensively in India in pursuit of his spiritual roots. It was also
during his period that he took part in resistance activities against the British rule. This
involvement in the Nationalist movement finds voice in his novel Kanthapura (1938).
From 1950 onwards Rao spent a major part of his life in America. From 1963-1983,
Rao taught Indian Philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin. He died of a heart
attack at his home in Austin, Texas at the age of 97,
Major Works
Kanthapura -1938
The Serpent & the Rope -1960
The Cat and Shakespeare: A Tale of India -1965
Comrade Kirillov -1976
The Chess Master and his Moves- 1988
Short Stories Collection:
The Cow of the Barricades - 1947
Awards: Padma Vibhushan, Neustadt International Prize of Literature, Sahitya Academy
Award.
1.2 About the Novel: Raja Rao's novel Kanthapura (1938) is a story narrated by an old
woman Achhaka about how Gandhi's struggle for Swaraj came to Kanthapura, a small
village in the Southern part of India. Achhaka begins her story by a description of the
location of her village in the western ghats and then moves on to introduce the all-
powerful village goddess Kenchamma, and the many residents of the village, the
brahmins, the potters, the weavers and the pariahs. Moorthy the protagonist of the novel
invites Jayaramachar, the Hari Katha man, for a religious discourse. He narrates the

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 Hari Katha with Gandhi as the avatar of Siva who will free India from the British rule.
Soon after, Moorthy begins his mission of winning over the people of the village to the
Gandhian cause. From this point on things change dramatically impacting the lives of
all the residents in Kanthapura. This novel holds a special place in the history of Indian
writing in English, primarily because of its narrative style. Raja Rao adapts the ancient
Puranic method of storytelling to the English language to capture a spirit and sensibility
that is wholly Indian. He infuses the English language with Indianisms and changes the
tempo of the English Language to correspond with the tempo of Indian languages and
Indian way of life.
2. Learning Objectives
This lesson enables you to understand:
• The various challenges faced by Indian writers writing in English.
• The need to create an Indian English which can capture the spirit and sensibility of the
Indian way of life.
• Why RajaRao proposes to use in Kanthapura, the SthalaPurana style of telling stories,
and adopt the tempo of speech patterns of Indian languages to the English language.
3. Summary
In the “Foreword” to the novel Kanthapura Raja Rao draws our attention to certain issues that
an Indian writer who is writing in English needs to address in order to retain the “Indianness”
of the story being narrated. Language is a cultural product and hence its use captures the
distinct semantic, emotional nuances peculiar to that culture. How can a writer use English (a
foreign language rooted in a foreign culture) and still be faithful to a narrative that is rooted
in the Indian cultural ethos? This is the question raised and answered in the “Foreword". Raja
Rao briefly gives a foretaste of what is to follow in the novel, i.e., the experimentation with
the language and style to retain the Indianness of the narrative.
The following are the three points he makes in the “Foreword”
1. Sthala-Purana/ Legendary History: Oral narratives from an integral part of our
culture. The most insignificant of villages would still have a rich repository of stories,
mostly legendary in nature. These stories often resolve around a “god or god-like hero”
who has been associated with the village in some way. Raja Raocites a few examples-
“Lord Rama might have rested under the village pipal tree, Sita might have dried her
clothes, after her bath, on this yellow stone, or the Mahatma himself, on one of his
many pilgrimages through thecountry, might have slept in this hut, the low one by the
village gate”(p.v). These stories repeated orally generation after generation, take a life
of their own and form a continuous narrative tradition, where the past and the present,
gods and human beings intermingle.

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 Raja Rao calls these narratives as sthala-puranas. Literally, “sthala” means “place” and
“purana” means “ancient, old". Puranas are an ancient form of story telling and include
a vast array of topics myths, legends, and folk lore. Puranas specific to a place are
sthala- puranas. Unlike the major puranas which are pan Indian, sthala-puranas give us
an insight into the local customs, culture and history peculiar to a specific sthala (place).
The novel Kanthapura is one such sthala- purana of the eponymous village in the
southern part of India. Raja Rao uses the ancient puranic method of telling the story.
2. Telling the story in a “Language that is not one's own the spirit that is one’s own”:
Raja Rao here is referring to a problem that is central to all writing done in an “alien”
(p.v), foreign language. He admits that English in India is not wholly “alien” as it is the
language of our intellectual make-up much like Sanskrit and Persian was in earlier
times. Nonetheless English is a borrowed language and has its roots in a different
culture. If an Indian chooses to write like the English, the cultural, social, religious
nuances along with the local idioms and phrases which are an integral part of Indian
languages, would be lost, making the writing sterile and artificial. Raja Rao therefore
emphatically says that we should not write like the English but write like Indians. Here
he strikes a note of caution; while writing in English like an Indian, one must also learn
to look at the larger world as a part of us and not remain straight jacketed within the
exclusive Indian frame. To achieve this, he hopes that some day we are able to evolve
an English that is our own, as distinctive as the American English or the Irish English.
This English would be Indian in its sensibility and overcome the handicap of an “alien”
language tag.
3. Narrative Style: Each language has a tempo corresponding to the way of life of the
people using it. The tempo of the American way of life has gone into the making of the
American English. Similar is the case with of Irish English. With reference to India,
Raja Rao says that here we “think quickly, we talk quickly and when we move, we
move quickly”(p.vi). Our paths too are apparently unending. This “quickness” and
apparently unending movement characterizes the many languages and dialects India
has. Our epics Mahabharata (2,14,778 verses) Ramayana (48,000 verses) and the
countless number of Puranas are a testimony to this. Raja Rao writes” we have neither
punctuation nor the treacherous “ats” and “ons” to bother us – we tell one interminable
tale"(p.vi). In the oral narration of stories one episode follows another and only when
our thoughts stop that we pause to breathe and then move on to the next thought. This is
how we tell our stories and Raja Rao submits that he has in Kanthapura tried to remain
faithful to this tradition. The quickness of movement is what constitutes the tempo of
our languages and the absence of any kind of punctuation makes our sentences long,
often the length of a paragraph.

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Check Your Progress:
1. What is a sthala-purana? How is it different from other puranas?
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2. What challenges does an Indian writer writing in englishface?
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3. When writing in english, why should one write like an Indian and not like the
English?
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4. How does Raja Rao describe the tempo of Indian languages?
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4. Concluding remarks: To understand fully the import of what Raja Rao says in the
‘Foreword', it is important to read the novel Kanthapura and see how he fleshes out the
ideas set out by him in the “Foreword”. Although the novel in not prescribed for your
study, let’s take a look at a few features of this novel with examples, to enable a better
comprehension of the ideas contained in the “Foreword”.
1. Kanthapura is a continuous tale without any breaks (chapters) much like the stories told
by old grandmothers in our oral tradition.
2. Use of long sentences to show thoughts in a continuous flow, flitting back and forth
rather than in a linear progression.
Example:
“The day rose into the air and with it rose the dust of the morning, and the carts began to
creak round the bulging rocks and the coppery peaks, and the sun fell into the river and
pierced it to the pebbles, while the carts rolled on and on, fair carts of the Kanthapura fair-fair
carts that came from Maddur and Tippur and Santur and Kuppur, with chillies and coconut,

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rice and ragi, cloth, tamarind, butter and oil, bangles and kumkum, little pictures of Rama and
Krishna and Sankara and the Mahatma, little dolls for the youngest, little kites for the elder,
and little chess pieces for the old- carts rolled by the Sampur knoll and down into the valley
of the Tippur stream, then rose again and groaned round the Kenchamma Hill, and going
straight into the temple grove, one by one, with lolling bells and muffled bells, with horn-
protectors in copper and back-protectors in lace, they all stood there in one moment of fitful
peace; ‘Salutations to Thee, Kenchamma, goddess Supreme,’—and then the yokes began to
shake and the bulls began to shiver and move, and when the yokes touched the earth, men
came out one by one, travellers that had paid a four-anna bit or an eight-anna bit to sleep
upon pungent tamarind and suffocating chillies, travellers who would take the Pappur carts to
go to the Pappur mountains, the Sampur carts to go to the Sampur mountains, and some too
that would tramp down the passes into the villages by the sea, or hurry on to Kanthapura as
our Moorthy did this summer morning, Moorthy with a bundle of khadi on his back and a
bundle of books in his arms”(p.54).
3. Use of various myths of Goddess Kenchamma, Lord Rama, and Lord Krishna and co-
relating them with the various characters in the story.
Swaraj for instance is Sita, but Swaraj like Shiva is also three-eyed–"Self-Purification,
Hindu-Moslem Unity, and Khaddar (p. 14).
Gandhiji is Krishna who will free India from Kansha (British). Gandhiji is also Lord
Rama and Nehru is his brother Bharat.
4. Use of Indian words and expressions in translation.
Examples:
• Hair cutting ceremony (p. 59)
• If rains come not, you fall at her feet and say “Kenchamma, Goddess, you are not
kind to us. Our fields are full of younglings and you have given us no water. Tell us,
Kenchamma, why do you seek to make our stomachs Burn?” (p.2)
Source:
Rao, Raja. Kanthapura. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019.