Spirited Words

Raja Rao8217;s Kanthapura is remarkably fresh almost 80 years later

HE IS THE ORIGINAL. Raja Rao8212;to-gether with R K Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand and G V Desani8212;experi-mented with language and style way back in the 8217;30s, opening up a brave new world for fu-ture generations of Indians wanting to write in English. And yet, the telling was anything but easy, as Rao writes in the foreword to Kan-thapura, the classic tale of a village caught in the throes of revolution. The novel was pub-lished in 1938 when he was 30, and though he would go on to write many memorable sto-ries based out of first France and then the US, where he died last Saturday in Texas, nothing quite matches the freshness of Kanthapura.

As he grappled with what language to write in he was fluent in Kannada and French too, he chose English, 8220;the language of our intellectual make-up8221;. But since Engli-sh isn8217;t the language of our 8220;emotional make-up8221;, he had to 8220;convey in a language that is not one8217;s own but the spirit that is one8217;s own8221;.

As he writes beautifully in the foreword: 8220;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.8221; Especially true of Raja Rao. The South In-dian Brahmin boy8212;he was born in Kar-nataka8212; was sent to study at Madrasa-e-Aliya in Hyderabad, 8220;a school meant mainly for Muslim noblemen, I was the only Hindu in my class8221;. Then, he did a stint at Aligarh Muslim University, moving on to Sir Patrick Geddes8217; institution at Montpellier8212;finding France very much like India. With a window to the world, it8217;s not surprising that when his stories were published, it drew praise from many cor-ners8212; from reclusive writer Stefan Zweig to anti-imperialist E M Forster. Evidently, geog-raphy doesn8217;t matter. For, Kanthapura, that story of a village narrated by Achakka, was mostly written in a 13th-century castle of the Dauphine in the heart of the Alps.

So, what pulls us to Kanthapura? Well, the story of course, which 8220;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 bed-ding on the veranda, a grandmother might have told you, newcomer, the sad tale of her village8221;. As Achakka takes over, so does the rustic rhythm. 8220;Our village8212;I don8217;t think you have ever heard about it8212;Kanthapura is its name, and it is in the province of Kara.8221; Soon enough, the village will be in upheaval, as Mahatma Gandhi8217;s teachings overwhelm a few like Moorthy. 8220;O, lift the flag high/ Lift the flag high/ This is the flag of the Revolution.8221;

In Achakka8217;s words: 8220;We said to ourselves, he is one of the Gandhi-men, who say there is neither caste nor clan nor family, and yet they pray like us and they live like us. Only they say, too, one should not marry early, one should allow widows to take husbands and a brahmin might marry a pariah and a pariah a brahmin. Well, how does it affect us? We shall be dead before the world is polluted.8221; But her world will change, of course, in her lifetime.

His later works, from The Serpent and the Rope to The Cat and Shakespeare to his essays on life and spirituality got rave reviews; he went on to teach philosophy at the University of Texas for years; Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz famously wrote his only English poem to Raja Rao8212;but he will always be remem-bered by Kanthapura.