Myth in Raja Rao

“ There is no village in India, says Raja Rao.however mean,that has not a rich Sthala       Purana or legendry history of its own.some god or god like hero has passed by the village-Rama might have rested under the 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 present and the gods mingle with men to make repertory of your grand mother always bright.”

So this is the legendry tale of a purana, a scripture, a sthala, the locality is the village Kanthapura.

Kantahpura is a novel which represents the freedom –movement in India, in a village divided into two sections:the Brahmins and the pariahs.hence it signifies the Advaita Philosophy of Indian culture. Rao himself states that it is impossible to separate reality from orthodox Advaita Vedanta.

 The goddess of the village people is Kanchamma. The legend holds that she killed a demon who visited the place asking for the young sons as food and the young women as wives. The sages Tripura underwent penances to bring such a goddess down to the place. There was a battle between the demon and the goddess Kenchamma and the hills on which it took place become red with the blood of the victim. The villagers have grate faith in Kanchamma who never lets them down.

The theme of the Kanthapura is the continuity of Indian traditions naturally in the Indian air from the soil just as wild flower from the jungle.Moorthy, Rangagowda, Bhatta,Ratna,Subhha Chetty, Ranganna and many other men and women seem to be rising from soil of Kanthapura.

 Kanthapura is  a spectrum coloured with three hues the social, political and mythological. It is in a sense, a work of realism in fiction and yet it is not purely realistic or naturalistic. This is combined with the strains of myth, of gods and goddess, of blind superstitious belief and uncanny insights. It is an  image of  real life observed in a  visionary state of mind.

 The village has its goddess, its legends, its ploughing season, its epidemic of small pox, its toddy boot etc., its village priest, its village bully and a village money lender. It is a beautiful small village of simple people who still belongs to the  old world of superstition.

The revolution in the sphere of the caste takes place with great determination. “There is neither caste, nor clan, nor family and yet ‘they live like us’, only they say too one should not marry early, one should allow widows to take husbands and Brahmin might marry a pariah and a pariah a Brahmin.” This is what Moorthy is preaching in the village and which further leads to pollution of caste.

                             Moorthy’s defection, however has little effect on the immutable nature of Indian culture represented in Kanthapura. Inspite of  the challenge from socialism, Rao reinstates the sanctity of his Gandhi purana by abandoning Moorthy towards the end pat of the novel, thereby maintain the dharmic inevitability of Gandhism.

       Moorthy was a young man who felt dissatisfied after he suffered a defeat. His faith in Gandhi was snaken for a moment but the novel does project the Mahatma as the chief inspiration. At onetime Nehru was also dissatisfied with Gandhi way of struggle but if Nehru had not been a true Gandhian, India would not have been in the state we are today. At best you can say that Moorthy was a deviating gandhian.

        Apparently, it is Rao’s intention to show Gandhi without flows. Any deviation from gandhi’s polices and ideologies is sidelined to the extent that even Moorthy , the protagonist is given up in the ende in order to keep a competing socialism at bay which has the potential of impairing a cultural nationalist discourse.

     As a heroic character, Moorthy possess all the traits of a Mohatma martyr. Yet his departure is contrary to the expectations. The reader builds of his character and his particular role in history for Rao’s nationalist ideology leads one to expect the underpinning of the novel withen a timeless religious ethos that Raja Rao writes into novel the hero’s defection from its prevailing ideology is a remarkable testimony to his loyality to history in the usual sense of the term. Moorthy ‘s departure thus creates an inconsistency with the cyclical nature of the narrative and even suggests an alternative history.

The Strategic Setting of the Novel:
Rao's choice of this village setting is strategic in view of his Gandhian loyalties. Gandhi locates his politics in the villages of India where the majority of Indian's population resides. Rao maintains the sanctity of the village at an ideological level, but permits mobility and change to heighten the historical significance of the national struggle Gandhi conceptualized.

The time when the action of the novel is set is the 1920s and 1930s, the period when Mahatma Gandhi had become the pivotal figure in India's struggle for freedom. Rao treats the history of the freedom movement at the level of hostility between village folk and the British colonial authority at a time when colonialism had become intensely heavy-handed in its response to the Civil Disobedience Movement.

Kanthapura is an enchanting story of how the independence movement becomes a tragic reality in a tiny and secluded village in South India. The novel has the flavor of an epic as it emerges through the eyes of a delightful old woman who comments with wisdom and humor.
Telling of the Novel:

As far as the form and technique of the novel is concerned Rao makes a deliberate attempt to follow traditional Indian narrative technique and it is Indian sensibility that informs Kanthapura. In fact both the spirit and the narrative technique of Kanthapura are primarily those of the Indian Puranas, which may be described as a popular encyclopaedia of ancient and medieval Hinduism, religious, philosophical, historical and social. Rao at the outset describes his novel as a sthala-purana - legend of a place. The Puranas are a blend of narration, description, philosophical reflection, and religious teaching. The style is usually simple, flowing, and digressive.

Rao makes a highly innovative use of the English language to make it conform to the Kannada rhythm. In keeping with his theme in Kanthapura he experiments with language following the oral rhythms and narrative techniques of traditional models of writing. The emotional upheaval that shook Kanthapura is expressed by breaking the formal English syntax to suit the sudden changes of mood and sharp contrasts in tone. While the intuitive borrowing from language takes place at one level in the novel, at another interconnected level, "real" India is constructed by enshrining the novel in Gandhian ideology. It is a highly original style. The author's "Foreword" to the novel almost spells out the postcolonial cultural agenda:
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-like Sanskrit or Persian was before- but not of our emotional 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.

Rao's novel is significant as a cultural tract which rewrites true history against the "inauthentic" historical accounts compiled by Europeans, and because it effects a cultural revival through the use of indigenous themes and motifs. Rao is also alive to the fact that religion has the potential to move people beyond dormancy - to display active political energy to the extent of sacrificing their lives. Kanthapura evokes a sense of community and freedom, construed as a spiritual quality which overcomes all bounds and crosses all barriers.

In order to allow an easy interchange between the world of men and the world of gods, between contemporaneity and antiquity, Rao thus equips his story with a protagonist whose role it is to enthuse the villagers into joining the political cause of India's struggle for freedom without reservation.

The tension between these two often contradictory levels of writing - the mythic/poetic and the political/prosaic - is the defining characteristic of the novel. As will be seen, this tension is both a strength and a weakness to the narrative; on the one hand enhancing its sheer readability as a story, and on the other hand blurring readers' understanding of the realities of the Indian Independence struggle.


Moorthy and other Characters - Raja Rao's Tools in Telling:

He focuses on two individual leaders and their beliefs; the actual and the mythicized figure of Gandhi, and his transmutation into Moorthy, the saintly hero of the novel. As the movement reaches Kanthapura, young Moorthy, son of a Brahmin woman, Narasamma, takes up the responsibility of spreading Gandhi's message. He brings about cultural awakening among the villages by organizing harikathas ("tales of gods"). By a subtle subversion the harikatha is turned into an allegory of India's struggle for freedom wherein the Gandhian saga is inscribed. Moorthy visits the city, and returns a "Gandhi man". He has become a spokesman for Gandhi, by submitting to his attitudes and beliefs. The villagers describe him as "our own Gandhi", yet interestingly he never has an actual meeting with Gandhi. He has only seen him in a "vision" addressing a public meeting with himself pushing his way through the crowd and joining the band of volunteers and receiving inspiration by a touch of Gandhi's hand. This enables Rao to turn the historical moment into a visionary experience, and opens a space for the possibility of assumed politics.

Moorthy preaches and practices ahimsa (non-violent resistance), the hallmark of Gandhi's appeal to the public, and evokes an overwhelming response among the villagers who unite in common cause, ready to break the British laws, picket toddy shops, and fight against social evils like untouchability.

Moorthy has several sympathetic souls with him: Rangamma, the kind lady and a patron for harikatha celebrations, Ratna, the young widowed daughter of Kamalamma, Rangamma's sister, Patel Range Gowda, the revenue collector, and others. But there are also sceptics, like the foul mouthed Venkamma. His own mother is much concerned about Moorthys mixing with the low caste pariahs. Indeed, when someone spreads the rumour that the Swami - the priest; upholder of dharma - has threatened the villagers with excommunication if Moorthy continues to go around with the pariahs, Naraamma is terribly upset; she sobs and shivers and soon dies.

He has to resist orthodoxy at the social level, and at the political level he has to fight the British authority symbolized by the Skeffington Coffee Estate and the police inspector Bade Khan who is out to suppress any undercurrent of Gandhian movement in Kanthapura. Moorthy's efforts bear fruit and the village changes. Rao is careful to point out that the transformation occurs through a complex dynamism negotiated through tradition and change, as the village affiliates itself to wider nationalistic cause.

The British find their ally in Swami, who supports them as upholders of dharma and is rewarded with "twelve hundred acres of wet land" by the Government. Meanwhile Moorthy's message spreads far and wide and several private temples are thrown open to the untouchables.

Rao does not marginalize the role of women in the freedom movement and highlights their individual contributions. Rangamma and Ratna form women's volunteer groups, despite opposition from the orthodox. Moorthy and his volunteers closely monitor the Mahatma's Dandi march and enact their own satyagraha in Kanthapura. They picket toddy shops, and are joined by more volunteers from the city, and by the coolies from the Skeffington Coffee Estate. Their march is opposed by the police who beat them up mercilessly. The police tell them to be loyal to the British Government, but the people say they know only the Government of the Mahatma. Moorthy and several others are arrested. As a result of the police atrocities the entire village is desolate and, in the end, "there remains neither man nor mosquito in Kanthapura".


Conclusion:

Kanthapura has been described as the most satisfying of all modern Indian novels. Recognized as a major landmark in Indian fiction, it is the story of how the Gandhian struggle for Independence came to one small village in south India.

"There is more to Raja Rao's book than a morality tale. It is written in an elegant style verging on poetry; it has all the content of an ancient Indian classic, combined with a sharp satirical wit and a clear understanding of the present. The author's extensive notes (printed as an appendix) will prove invaluable to the general reader." - New York Times