Raja Rao, Kanthapura

Second Edition
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989 c1938 (first published by George Allen & Unwin,
London)

Foreword (pp. v-vi)

p.v) There is no village in India, however mean, that has not a rich sthala-purana, or
legendary history, of its own. Some god or godlike hero has passed by the village –
Rama might have rested under this 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 the country, might have slept in this hut, the low one by the village gate. In this
way the past mingles with the present, and the gods mingle with men to make the
repertory of your grand-mother always bright. One such story from the contemporary
annals of my village I have tried to tell.
The telling has not been easy. One has to convey in a language that is not one’s
own the spirit that is one’s own. One has to convey the various shades and omissions of
a certain thought-movement that looks maltreated in an alien language. I use the word
‘alien’, yet English is not really an alien language to us. It is the language of our
intellectual make-up. We are all instinctively bilingual, many of us writing in our own
language and in English. We cannot write like the English. We should not. We cannot
write only as Indians. 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 some day prove to be as
distinctive and colourful as the Irish or the American. Time alone will justify it.
After language the next problem is that of style. The tempo of Indian life must be
infused into our English expression, even as the tempo of American or Irish life has gone
into the making of theirs. We, in India, think quickly, we talk quickly, and when we
move we move quickly. There must be something in the sun of India that makes us rush
and tumble and run on. And our paths are paths interminable. The (p. vi) Mahabharata
has 214,778 verses and the Ramayana 48,000. Puranas there are endless and
innumerable. We have neither punctuation nor the treacherous ‘ats’ and ‘ons’ to bother
us – we tell the interminable tale. Episode follows episode, and when our thoughts stop
our breath stops, and we move on to another thought. This was and still is the ordinary
style of our story-telling. I have tried to follow it myself in this story.
It may have been told of an evening, when as the dusk falls, and through the
sudden quiet, lights leap up in house after house, and stretching her bedding on the
veranda, a grandmother might have told you, newcomer, the sad tale of her village.

Raja Rao

Menton,
Nov. 1937

Kanthapura (the name of the village) – the story of how the Gandhian struggle for
independence came to one small Indian village in south India. Narrated by an old woman
inhabitant, it evokes the spirit of India’s traditional epics, the puranas and the nationalist
upsurge fusing with religious faith and conflict.