Analyse the narrative technique in Raja Rao's Kanthapura.

answer - "The correct narrative technique enables a novelist to portray his vision of reality
and communicate to the Reader the meaning and significance of his narrative" opines
Kaushal Sharma which in turn is actually observed in Raja Rao's Kanthapura. Though in
Kanthapura Raja Rao takes up the 18th century novel form to portray his ideas in order to
define Indian nationalism and spirituality, Raja Rao falls back on the deft use of history -
the metanarrative that construct, rebuild and form society. The notion of history presents
itself as a counter discursive process to the west and at the same time produces a connection
with it. The Oriental notion of history is something that has been quite different from its
western counterpart. It is the history which is living and it is this form of history that the
author attempts to propose in a primarily Western form of literature. In the purview of
post colonialist times when the novels were predominated with expressions of containment
and inhibition by the subalterns and the upshot of hegemonic discourse lying under their own
speech, Raja Rao uses the bourgeois' Western form of novel and fuses it with the Indian
expressions and sensibilities which would portray the Indian sense of history and hence a
distinct Indian identity. He even uses certain methods in kanthapura to place his text within
the Indian historical continuum - the 'sthala Purana' and weaves a mythical structure
through which he portrays the current changes in Indian political scenario.
Introducing the mythic element Raja Rao links the quintessence of a place with a legend that
grants it and Epic significance as he himself believes
"The Indian novel can only be Epic in form and metaphysical in nature. It can only have
story within story to show all stories are only parables." [ "India 's speech for Self
Expression " ]
In kanthapura the 'harikathas' narrated by the 'Harikatha-man' Jayanamachar wherein
he deliberately fuses religion and politics with his narrative framework to make superstitious
villagers aware of national politics, the anecdotes of Pariah Siddayya told on a hot
afternoon, the religious readings by old Kamakria and Moorthy's adoption of Gandhian life
- all assume parable like qualities and vision and seen in this light Kanthapura remains a
stack of parables blended with history in the narrative structure of the novel to delineate the
story of the awakening of the masses during the freedom struggle of India, in the process
establishing the innovation and philosophic sensibilities of Raja Rao as a novelist.
Thus, the narrative of Kanthapura delves at the helm of the meeting of the historical with
the mythical came out of a story which acts as a microcosm of a gigantic movement and a
rich cultural past. Also Mahatma Gandhi as the harbinger of a revolution is kept at par
with the mythical characters like Rama, Shiva, Krishna and is defined as a symbol to be
worshipped and followed. At a point in this novel even the 'harikatha-man'
Jayanamachar/Jayaramachar narrates the story of the birth of Gandhi which is nothing less
than a legend as Gandhi is hailed as the incarnation of Shiva and various other stories are
narrated during these sessions which aid in propagating the nationalist issues like Swaraj and
"self-purification, Hindu-Moslem unity, [and] Khaddar." Hence, the 'sthala-puranas'
enable the coming of past with the present and God with ordinary men as Raja Rao himself
claims in the foreword of Kanthapura.
"There is no village in India, however mean, that has not a rich 'sthala Purana' or
legendary history of its own. Some god or god like hero has passed by the village - Rama
might have rested under this Pipal Tree or the Mahatma himself on one of his many
pilgrimages... might have slept in this hut. In this way the past mingles with the present and
the Gods mingle with men... one such story from the contemporary annal of my village I
have tried to tell."
What this co-mingling gives affect to is the deviation from the linear narrative structure
within the precincts of reality as the ordinary is raised to the fantastic to transcend temporal
limits and nationalism is linked with the question of religious faith thereby attaining the
quality of exigency of action and sanctification of the tradition.
Furthermore, the narrative style in the novel closely resembles the Vedantic and Puranic
tradition of story telling where oral performance and memory ensure the continuity of the
tale. Such an act of story telling also acquires a significant function in a community as the
social relations are based on the ability to connect through oral performances. Prof MK
Naik rightly points out -
"The story in Kanthapura is told with the breathless garrulity of the Puranas, where the
style restaurant principally on the spoken word..."
Kanthapura shares a resemblance with the Puranas as just like Puranas, Kanthapura is a
blend of narratives which is imbibed with philosophical and religious teaching. As in The
Serpent and the Rope, where the identity cris is of the narrator Ramaswamy is linked with
the macrocosmic instability at institutional and national levels, the tale of Kanthapura is also
inclusive and there are no serpent of varied narratives but "one interminable take "which is
"not divided into parts or chapters but us a continuous narrative", as aptly observed by
MK Naik. Hence it's style is simple, flowing and diggressive which in turn paves the way
to render to the novel an order of timelessness. This is evident as in Kanthapura the story of
a small village acquires the gravity of a historical event which is further elevated to transcend
the spatial and temporal coordinates to "acquire a timeless mythic dimension of epic
proportions." Besides the village, the hallowed presence of goddess Kenchamma the legend
associated with her all adds on to such effects of timelessness, thereby "surpassing the
dialectics of history" which again is highlighted by the choice of the narrator Achakka.
As the narrative technique of Kanthapura is based on the traditional Puranic style, the
choice of Achakka as the narrator; whose voice merges with the authorial voice of the
'Foreword' is significant. As a matter of fact, Achakka is a narrator who conforms to
the requirements of the novel as Raja Rao, here, uses the traditional as well as colloquial
form of 'story told by grandmother ' which in actual reality accounts for the major source
of folklore knowledge for most Indians.
Achakka is not identified as an individual in search of an identity like Ramaswami In
The Serpent and the Rope. She is not even the chief protagonist but is a simple, old,
marginal village women who is gifted with rare insight profound wisdom, and discrimination
and has seen the transformation of the village from the timeless past to the scope changing
reality of the Satyagraha movement. It is she who like Elliot's Tiresias, in "The
Wasteland" has foresufferred all and so is capable of describing with vividness the
happenings in and around from the temple of Kenchamma to Skeffinton Coffee Estate.
She even knows fully well the characters in the village as she remembers all the legends
associated with Gods and Goddesses. Thus, she narrates in such details that it keeps the
listeners of her story on the edge which in turn makes her position and requirement in the
narrative process of the novel paramount and undeniable. She remains the ideal
grandmother that Raja Rao envisions as the narrator in this tale.
Besides, written from the point of view of 'I' as the witness narrator, it lends a sense
of realistic credibility to the otherwise mythical narrative.
The prolific use of myths in post-modern texts like Elliot's "The Wasteland" and also in
Kanthapura questions the relation between past and present and thus obliterates the
distinction between fact and fiction. However the historic writing process that Achakka
participates in is not based on a personnel narrative but on 'reality' that is drawn from a
perceiving collective and therefore representing a totality. This is evident as Achakka
identifies himself as 'we' collectively with other women of the village who are awakened for
the nationalistic cause, in the process, establishing himself as the symbol of determination
of all women of Kanthapura who drew their strength from Moorthy as well as their
religious faith. She, hereby, represents the voice of the subaltern history in both senses that
it is a female voice coming from the marginal space. Her narrative is part of the residential
culture which, as Raymond Williams defined in his essay, "Dominant, Residual and
Emergent" as that which "... always exists with the dominant culture and comprises of a
tendency to reach back to a past where the meaning can be located..."
And here too in Kanthapura it is Achakka who weaves the past and present, God's and
men in her narrative. Thus, it is through this old woman, Achakka that Raja Rao ensures
authenticity and reliability of the narrative to the readers and finds a way to unify the
multivarious strands of the novel. Meenakshi Mukherjee quite rightly sums up her role -
"Kanthapura is narrated by an old woman to a hypothetical listener... Raja Rao's choice
of the narrator serves several purposes at once. Making this old woman the narrator
enables Raja Rao to mingle facts and myths and in an effective manner ..."
[She knows fully well the characters in the village as she remembers all the legends
associated with gods and goddesses. Thus ]
Considering the linguistic aspects of the novel, it is evident that Raja Rao succeeds in his
attempt to dislocate or at least, reduce the addiction to British English in Indian Literature,
with his innovative use of the language. In this novel, Rao experiments with the language of
the colonized. However, the norms regarding the use of the colonizer's language is
subverted in Kanthapura as the language used in this novel conforms to the ideal that a
novel in English by an Indian author must be essentially 'Indian'. Hence the words used in
the novel are English but the organization of the sentences is in an "Indianised way, with
the syntax of the English language being subverted
"She was a pious old woman, Narsamma, talk and thin."
Further the narration with Indian phrases and proverbs and the literal translation of
Kannada expressions into English like
"If you are the sons of your father."
Besides the inclusion of certain Hindu rituals like the "Satyanarayan Puja", "Harihatta"
windows the work with an authenticity and 'Indianness'.
Possibly to add onto the Oriental sensibility that this novel sets out, the large gallery of
characters has unique epithets added to their names - "corner House Moorthy", "Front
House Akamma", "Nose- scratching Nangamma," "left-handed Madamma",
"waterfall Venkamma", "one-eyed Lingayya". Such constant use of epithets conform to
the Indian traditional class divided society where each has a distinct societal identity. The
Kanthapura society too is separated in traditional structure as there is the Pariah quarter,
the Brahmin quarters and the Sudra quarter; which right at the center of the village is a
temple dedicated to Goddess Kenchamma.
Kenchamma is the centre of the village - the presiding identity of Kanthapura who watched
over everything that the villagers did and went through - marriage, funeral, sickness,
death, harvests, arrests and release are all watched over by her. It is the narrator
Achakka, from where we come to know about the story of Goddess Kenchamma - the
goddess who had been brought down by sage Tripura to fight the demons -
"And she waged such a battle and she fought so many a night that the blood soaked....
Into the earth and that is why Kenchamma hill is red."
The presence of the deity as a supreme force in the lives of the villagers has its parallel in
many Puranic lores. Just like the arrival of the Ganga from the heaven for the purification
of the ancestors of Bhagirath, Goddess Kenchamma has come to the rescue of the people
of Kanthapura "and never has she failed us in our grief." Also the legends about
Kenchamma and the river Himavathy recall the descriptions of the rivers Narmada and
Godavari in the Matsyapurana and Bhagavadpurana respectively and what is achieved is
again a continuous attachment of the present with the past. However, history here is not a
recording of events and the past is not just confined to almanaes, rather such a trope of
historical expression attempts to foreground a particular history and possibly alienate all
other histories in its pretext.
The very choice of Kanthapura as a setting depicting in microcosm an entire Indian nation
serves duly Raja Rao's attempt of homogenising exercise to establish an Indian national
identity. Also the novel needs to be placed into the nationalist discourse of the time as the
novel primarily deals with the process of nation building and the struggle for freedom from
the colonial masters, primarily through the 'Satyagraha', of Gandhi. The choice of
Gandhian struggle is also important as Gandhi, in himself having a hallowed presence -
Gandhi was "like a powerful current of fresh air... Like a beam of light that pierced. The
darkness..." [Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India] allows the novelist to blend the
mythic with the real and so, in order to further his purpose, Raja Rao, in the novel
elevates the Gandhian struggle to a mythological plane, through a marriage between western
nationalism and Indian myths and metaphysics, while Mahatma Gandhi himself is portrayed
as a symbol of both divinity and reality. The iconification of Gandhi in Kanthapura,
primarily takes shape through the Harihatta man, Jayaramachar who reports Gandhi to be
the incarnation of Krishna and would hence fight and free Indians from the yoke of British
rule -
"You remembered how Krishna, when he was but a babe of four had begun to fight
against the demons... So too our Mohandas began to fight against the enemies of the
country."
Despite such glorification, Gandhi in Kanthapura is never brought to the forefront but his
presence is reported factually. Though the main impetus may be said to rest with Gandhi,
in the forefront, it is Moorthy, a simple village boy who struggles against the orthodoxies of
the village and becomes an epitome of Gandhi in the small, ignorant village of Kanthapura.
Receiving his inspiration from Gandhi and carrying out his 'Gandhi business' and 'Gandhi
vagabondage', Moorthy is considered to be "...an idealised character who like Christ takes
all the sins of the people upon himself and undergoes penance for purification, a young
man who conquers physical desire and self interest" [Meenakshi Mukherjee] and it is
Moorthy who told us of the pilgrim path of the Mahatma from day to day. Thus, while the
villagers of the distant and remote Kanthapura consider the invisible legend of the Mahatma
to be "like the Sahyadri Mountain, blue, high, wide... Catch[ing] the light of the setting
sun," they establish Moorthy as a shadow and representative of Gandhi in Kanthapura at
the same time, they referred to Moorthy as "the small mountain" and this again is a
subversion of the mainstream text where Gandhi is kept on the forefront.
As an exercise on nation building the involvement of women becomes paramount in
Kanthapura. The journey of women in the mainstream politics and revolution may be
contrary to the traditional Indian ethos of women being segregated to the inner chambers in
history it is not unknown. The women in Kanthapura besides the enthusiasm of Moorthy
take inspiration from Rani Lakshmi Bai, Kamala Devi, Sarojini Naidu, and Annie Besant
and therefore shedding their inhibitions move from the inner chambers to the forefront of
freedom struggle with a motive to combat colonial aggression and move towards
emancipation. Figures like Ratna, a young widow and her aunt Rangamma undertake an
active role in the movement in Kanthapura. Global consciousness too enters remote
Kanthapura through the hands of Rangamma, a village woman who got papers from the
city and also harboured knowledge "about the stars." Thus, Raja Rao in Kanthapura
brings in the notion of feminist empowerment, a movement predominantly confined in the
west, to shake the time-tested customs to its roots, besides amalgamating scientific
consciousness in mythical terms through the knowledge of airplanes, cars and telescopes.
Kanthapura hence becomes the novelistic space where science and religion, history and
myth, meet with effortless ease and create a unique sensibility. The characters despite
belonging to distinct time and space never appear discordant to the continuum of history
which in Kanthapura is of a unique kind. The easeful blending of past and present, despite
an overbearing hegemonic tendency allow the blending and fusing of discordant elements and
by encompassing this vision of legendary history in the novel, Raja Rao was able to combine
the elements of Indian tradition and history with the issues of modern Western consciousness
a thereby fashioning a new identity and new space where time present and time past are
both perhaps present in time future and all time eternally present.