The translation of an imagined community in Raja Rao’s Kanthapura

Abstract

In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson describes how sacred script languages (Arabic, Chinese, Latin) were usurped in political primacy by languages based on the spoken vernacular (French, English, German). In this article I examine one instance of these complications through Raja Rao’s classic novel of Indian independence, Kanthapura, a novel written in Indian English that works both with and against Anderson’s concept of nationalism’s linguistic underpinnings. Kanthapura not only proposes a model for Indian English speakers and writers, but performs a rhetorical argument about the necessity for Indian English if India is to cohere as a nation. I argue that the residents of Kanthapura are “translated” into citizens of the nation of India. This movement of translation is echoed by the language of the novel: the largely spoken language of Kannada is translated into the largely written (in India) language of English. English in Kanthapura performs a double function, unifying the nation as a script language while also reflecting the idiosyncrasies of local regional vernaculars. Kanthapura demonstrates that a nativized form of Indian English can serve as an invaluable tool for the development of a national consciousness, and that novels written in Indian English will play a role in determining the shape and identity of the nation.

In Imagined Communities (1983), Benedict Anderson describes how sacred script languages (Arabic, Chinese, Latin) were usurped in political primacy by languages based on the spoken vernacular (French, English, German). As Anderson recounts, the vernacular print language was born in Europe; consequently, it is in Europe that his model is most applicable. When one attempts to translate his model to new linguistic terrain, a set of intriguing complications arises. I propose to examine one instance of these complications through Raja Rao’s classic novel of Indian independence, Kanthapura (1963/1938), a novel written in Indian English that works both with and against Anderson’s concept of nationalism’s linguistic underpinnings.

In the Foreword to Kanthapura, which is more widely-read and widely-quoted than the novel it introduces, Raja Rao outlines the scope of his project in compelling, concise prose. The result has become something of an unofficial manifesto for Indian authors writing 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 colorful as the Irish or the American. Time alone will justify it. (1963: vii) ¹

This Foreword sets the stage for an ambitious attempt to create an Indian English that is not merely the mimicry that Bhabha (1994: 128) describes as “Almost the same but not white”, but a form of English that is primarily Indian, that grows out of the lived experience of Indians who speak English. As Ken Downey notes, “Rao is clearly proposing the ‘Indianized’ English of Kanthapura as a functional model for the real, spoken English of India” (2011: 1).

It may strike some readers as paradoxical, then, that for the cast of this literary experiment Rao chooses the inhabitants of a village where everyone clearly communicates not in English, but in Kannada. Far from taking place in a teeming metropolis where English-speaking Indians might be comfortably situated, Kanthapura is set in the eponymous small village of Kanthapura, of which the narrator says: “Our village — I don’t think you have ever heard about it” (1). As Downey points out,

the characters of Kanthapura — rural villagers — do not, for the most part, speak or think in English […] their voices are not transcribed directly, but translated into English from Kannada, the language of the south Indian region in which the story is set. (2011: 6)

If it was Rao’s goal to create a variety of Indian English that reflects the circumstances of English-speaking Indians, as well as Indians who write in English, why was it necessary to set Kanthapura in a village where no one speaks Indian English? Why is Kanthapura a translated narrative?

I would like to suggest that Kanthapura not only proposes a model for Indian English speakers and writers, but in addition performs a rhetorical argument about the necessity for Indian English if India is to cohere as a nation. Over the course of Kanthapura, the residents of a small, relatively isolated town become increasingly aware not only of the colonial government that oppresses them, but also of the new body of resistance that is forming around the figure of Gandhi and the Indian National Congress. While at the beginning of the novel the residents of Kanthapura see themselves primarily as residents of Kanthapura and devotees of the local goddess, as the novel and the revolution progress they come to develop a sense of national consciousness, viewing their acts of resistance as part of a larger struggle that is taking place all over India. The object of their devotion shifts from the goddess Kanthapura to the Mahatma, whom they worship as an incarnation of Siva, a god whose veneration is common across the nation of India. In short, I argue, the residents of Kanthapura are translated from residents of Kanthapura to citizens of the nation of India.

This movement of translation is echoed by the language of the novel: the regional language of Kannada is translated into English, a language that is not regional, but is written and spoken across India, albeit mostly by the educated elite. English unifies the nation in a way that is more analogous to a sacred script language than to the standardized vernacular that Anderson associates with nationalism, and the progression of Kanthapura reflects this: over the course of the novel, regional religious and economic structures are subsumed, and eventually dispersed, by structures that exist on a national scale. Simultaneously, the largely spoken language of Kannada is translated into the largely written (in India) language of English; as Sankaran notes: “Kannada is clearly diglossic, with there not being any traditional way of transcribing the spoken variety, for the written form only transcribes the ‘high’ literary variety” (1998: 172). Rao’s Indian English plays in the spaces between vernacular Kannada and the sacred script language of high literary Kannada. He uses the seemingly infinite malleability of the English language to create a language that is both regionally affiliated and nationally accessible, and that is written but consciously calls attention to itself as speech.

Thus, Kanthapura demonstrates that a nativized form of Indian English can serve as an invaluable tool for the development of an Indian national consciousness, reflecting characteristics of both the sacred script languages and the vernacular print languages examined by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities. Simultaneously, it complicates Anderson’s model, as although English as it appears in Kanthapura is comparable to one of Anderson’s script languages, the sense of community that it produces does not rely on a sacred text and is in many ways comparable to the secular nationalism that Anderson describes.

In Imagined Communities, Anderson links the development of nationalism in Europe to the rise of print languages. Prior to the existence of print languages, Anderson argues, great religious empires — Christian Europe, the Islamic empire, the middle kingdom — “were imaginable largely through the medium of a sacred language and written script” (Anderson, 1991/1983: 13). Two Muslims might not speak the same regional vernacular, but provided they were literate they could read the same sacred script “because the sacred texts they shared existed only in classical Arabic” (1991/1983: 13). Two Christians, Muslims, or Confucians would not recognize each other as members of the same secular nation; rather, they would know each other as followers of the same sacred texts.

When the printing press enabled the mass production of the written word, capitalists seized the opportunity to print in vernacular languages in order to maximize circulation. This required some standardization of various regional dialects into a single print form, and Anderson calls the resulting standardized vernaculars “print languages”. These print languages served the purpose of unifying disparate communities whose members would never have interacted with each other had it not been for the intercession of a standardized print language. The print languages connected far-flung towns on opposite sides of the nation, creating what Anderson terms “imagined communities”. A French man in Paris might never meet or interact with a French woman in Provence, and if they did meet, their dialects would be so distinct that they might not be able to understand each other. However, “these various idiolects were capable of being assembled, within definite limits, into print-languages far fewer in number” (Anderson, 1991/1983: 43). Assuming that the French man and French woman are both literate, they might read the same novels and newspapers. Through these media, literate citizens across the nations of France, England, and other Europeans nations, came to develop a national consciousness, understanding that they were part of an imaginary community of other individuals,

gradually becom[ing] aware of the hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people in their particular language-field, and at the same time that only those hundreds of thousands, or millions, so belonged. These fellow-readers, to whom they were connected through print, formed, in their secular, particular, visible invisibility, the embryo of the nationally imagined community. (Anderson, 1991/1983: 44)

The original model of the nation was one defined by a single language field, which came to define the national consciousness by creating communities of citizens who could communicate in print. Anderson describes how, over time, various dialects drifted towards the dialect that most defined the print language, which became standard — at which point language was, to some extent, standardized throughout the nation.

The situation in India could not be more different. As V. K. Gokak has noted:

The Indians are a composite people […] the Indian speaks more than fourteen national languages […]. He may even be a speaker of one of the numerous dialects and unwritten languages of India and learn at school the national language current in his region. (1978: 21)

Any attempt to fashion India as a European-style nation-state with a common language holding the population together at all socio-economic levels is doomed to failure.

However, one can make a compelling argument for English as the national language of the educated elite. When the British withdrew from India, they left behind the bureaucratic infrastructure of English-speaking officials and a British-educated English-speaking elite. As R. K. Bansal explains:

English may be a second or a foreign language in India, but it is in fact, used by all educated people in the country for various purposes. It is the associate official language of the Union and a link language among different language communities in the country. (1978: 101)

Whether or not the utilitarian value of the English language and its consequently frequent use among Indian academics, poets, journalists, and government officials is beneficial to India is a subject of continuing contention among Indians. Indeed, the issue is by no means limited to India, although a more macrocosmic examination of the issue lies beyond the scope of this paper. However, English’s utility is unquestionable, and it is therefore one of India’s two official languages, along with Hindi.

It is India’s status as a nation patterned from the Western nation-state, its identity as an imagined community in the manner of Anderson, which precipitates the demand that there be a national language linking together the disparate regional languages of India. Due to the Macaulayan educational system imposed by the British that determined to “form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern” (Macaulay, 1835: 8), the language most conveniently suited for the task is English.

English has therefore taken on the role of a unifying language in India, to the extent that a non-indigenous language spoken only by the educated bourgeois and elite classes can. Aijaz Ahmad observes that arguments for English’s unifying utility date back to the colonial period. English and Indian intellectuals alike claimed “that India was so internally fragmented, so heterogenous, such a mosaic of languages and ethnicities” that a single centralized language was necessary “to sustain [India’s] national unity” (1994: 74). Up to this point, Ahmad supports Anderson’s model: a centralized language is a necessary component of the ideology of nationalism. However, Ahmad calls into question whether such a thing as European nationalism can be seamlessly grafted onto the political and cultural topography India: “the civilizational complexity of India simply cannot be lived or thought through in terms of the centralizing imperatives of the nation-state we have inherited from the European bourgeoisie” (1994: 74–5). Anderson, in contrast, describes nationalism as a modular, mobile concept “capable of being transplanted, with varying degrees of self-consciousness, to a great variety of social terrains, to merge and be merged with a correspondingly wide variety of political and ideological constellations” (1991/1983: 4).

Anderson and Ahmad together define the struggle that has played out in the Anglophone world: the model of the postcolonial nation-state is beholden to the European model, yet the nationalism of postcolonial nation-states resists an act of simple direct translation both through indigenous traditions that predate European colonization and through active, conscious resistance to the European model. We might think of it in terms of genre: the ideological “genre” of nationalism is a format that Europe has exported to India, much as it has exported the genre of the novel. I propose Kanthapura as an example of an Indian English novel that is conscious of itself as translated, into both the language of English and the genre of the novel, and that is in some ways resistant to this act of translation, even as it is undeniably complicit. In this way, Kanthapura performs an allegorical argument for how Indian nationalism might remain Indian even while it borrows from the model of the European nation-state.

Kanthapura documents the development of a national consciousness, an imagined community, which comes to require a national language, indigenous or not. As K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar argues, Indian literature written in English carries the unique burden of promoting a national, rather than regional, consciousness:

[We] should expect Indian writing in English — rather than any of the regional literatures — to project a total vision of India […] not before the outside world alone but even before the diverse linguistic regions within the country, thereby insinuating a sense of “national identity”, of oneness with the Mother, Mother India. The Indian writer in English has necessarily to keep in mind a scattered national audience, and what his language lacks in vigorous local idiom and the nuances of regional sentiment and emotion has to be made up in spatial extension and wide human appeal. (1978: 8)

As Iyengar convincingly argues, the implied audience for an Indian work in English — educated Indians living in every region across the subcontinent — ideally situates Indian writing in English as a branch of literature capable of exploring themes related to “national identity”, or what it is that makes Indians Indian, no matter where precisely they are located. The role of Indian writing in English is to “project a total vision of India”, the image of an imagined community. Under Iyengar’s model, English serves the function of a vernacular print language, unifying disparately located Indians under the banner of ideological nationalism.

It would seem that Rao is in agreement with the argument that Indian literature in English is uniquely capable of acting as a national literature and dealing with pan-Indian themes. In his Sahitya Akademi Fellowship acceptance speech in 1997, Rao professed that “to have been born in India and not have written in Sanskrit, or at least in Kannada is […] an acute humiliation” (Rao, 1998: 175). Nevertheless, in his essay “The Caste of English”, he writes:

Truth, said a great Indian sage, is not the monopoly of the Sanskrit language. Truth can use any language, and the more universal, the better it is […]. And so long as the English language is universal, it will always remain Indian […]. It would then be correct to say as long as we are Indian — that is, not nationalists, but truly Indians of the Indian psyche — we shall have the English language with us and amongst us, and not as a guest or friend, but as one of our own, of our caste, our creed, our sect, and our tradition. (Rao, 1978: 421)

In this passage, Rao confirms my assertion that English is a useful tool that Indian authors can use to convey pan-Indian themes to an audience of educated readers across India. However, he simultaneously problematizes my claim through the disavowal of English’s role as a predominantly nationalist one, as he argues that the use of English is necessary for “not nationalists, but truly Indians of the Indian psyche”. While Rao, like Ahmad, gestures towards an ideal of unity for the nation that does not depend upon its identity as a nation-state, I maintain that the national consciousness that arises in Kanthapura is consistent with Anderson’s model of an imagined community. I also show that the novel positions itself as a nationalist novel in which India is treated as a nation-state with a shared history of colonialism and resistance against that colonialism.

Kanthapura depicts the dissolution of a particular community into a nationwide struggle, and uses the language of the colonizer to do so; however, the dissolution is partial at best, and the Indian English in which the story of Kanthapura is told resists the conventions of English much as the Kanthapurans resist their oppressors. While English enables the narrative of Kanthapura to be read by literate Indians no matter their region of origin, the syntax of the novel reflects Kannada specifically, and many words of Kannada are left untranslated in the text, necessitating a glossary at the back of the novel for readers unfamiliar with the language. This universalizing translation is partial; Rao writes “in an English intended to approximate the thought-structures and speech patterns of [his] characters”, so as “not to betray the Indian text and context by an easy assimilation into the linguistic and cultural matrices of British English” (Prasad, 1999: 43). ² Kannada structures and words woven into the text insist on the difference and the particularity of the Indian situation; like English, Anderson’s model of statehood must adapt to preexisting indigenous structures.

Kanthapura opens with a description of the features of the village that are specific to Kanthapura, including its geography, topography, layout, and a description of its position in the global economy. First, Kanthapura is positioned in space in a way that differentiates it from other villages in India: “High on the Ghats is it, high up the steep mountains that face the cool Arabians seas, up the Malabar coast is it” (1). In addition, the layout of the town and the habits of its prominent citizens are described in a way that is unique to Kanthapura. The actions of carts that “groan through the roads of Kanthapura” are described in terms of the streets’ spatial relationships to each other and of the town’s specific economy: “The carts pass through the main street and through the Potters’ lane, and then they turn by Chennayya’s pond, and up they go, up the passes into the morning that will rise over the sea” (1). Kanthapura is laid out for us in its specificity; it is not described in such a way that we may imagine it as any village in India.

In addition, the novel begins with an invocation to the town’s local deity, the goddess Kenchamma:

Kenchamma is our goddess. Great and bounteous is she. She killed a demon ages, ages ago, a demon that had come to demand our young sons as food and our young women as wives. Kenchamma came from the Heavens — it was the sage Tripura who had made penances to bring her down — and she waged such a battle and she fought so many a night that the blood soaked and soaked into the earth, and that is why the Kenchamma hill is all red. (2)

As the above passage demonstrates, Kenchamma is a deity local to the town of Kanthapura, and is tied to the particular features of the town — most prominently, the redness of the Kenchamma hill, which is the result of Kenchamma’s bloody battle with a demon. As Anshuman A. Mondal writes, Kenchamma is a goddess “whose powers it appears have only a limited and locally specific purchase” (1999: 106). As evidence, he cites the passage in which the narrator claims that Kenchamma protects the residents of Kanthapura from smallpox, noting a few exceptions:

Ramappa and Subbanna, you see, they got it in the town and our goddess could do nothing. She is the goddess of Kanthapura, not of Talassana. They ought to have stayed in Talassana and gone to Goddess Talassanamma to offer their prayers. (3)

Kenchamma is a deity tied to the land and features of Kanthapura, and her protection extends only as far as the village. In addition, while it is never explicitly stated in the novel, we can assume that the local goddess Kenchamma is worshipped in the local language, Kannada.

There is one final trait of Kanthapura highlighted right from the novel’s outset that is worth mentioning before we continue: that is, the strict hierarchy of class distinctions. After the invocation to the goddess Kenchamma, this is the first thing our narrator Achakka chooses to discuss. “Till now”, she tells the reader, “I’ve spoken only of the Brahmin quarter. Our village had a Pariah quarter too, a Potters’ quarter, a Weavers’ quarter, and a Sudra quarter […] Of course you wouldn’t expect me to go to the Pariah quarter” (5). In doing so, she implicates the reader in the hierarchy being described. While this hierarchical structure is not specific to Kanthapura, it is an obstacle to the development of a national consciousness. As with the specificity and reliance on the local deity Kenchamma, these class distinctions must dissolve in the face of a coming national consciousness that shall unite India, creating an imagined community. I am not the first critic to note that this dissolving is partial. As Md. Rezaul Haque notes, the novel’s named characters who are allowed to speak through dialogue are disproportionately Brahmin, and the only Muslim representatives allowed in this national narrative are portrayed as antagonists and imperial collaborators (2011: 11). However, this does not negate the fact that the narration largely takes place in the first person plural, and the collective narration of events in Kanthapura becomes “progressively more inclusive”, as Neelam Srivastava argues (2010: 312).

At the novel’s beginning, therefore, Kanthapura is a specific village in terms of its geography and economics, and the predominant form of worship is of a local goddess who is tied to the landmarks of Kanthapura, is worshipped in the local language, and has domain only over that village. In addition, the residents of Kanthapura adhere to a strict, orthodox system of organization that emphasizes caste distinctions, a system which the British incorporated into their bureaucratic structures so that the two systems of power became mutually reinforcing. As Mondal notes, “[t]he colonial and orthodox matrices […] [are] shown to be in collusion with [each] other, [each] using the other’s authority to reinforce its own” (1999: 110). For this reason, the development of a pan-Indian national identity that transcends the caste system is integral to the revolution in consciousness described at the end of Kanthapura.

There are three major factors that lead to the dissolution of the structures that dictate life in Kanthapura in favour of a more inclusive pan-Indian national consciousness. These are, first, Kanthapura’s increased political engagement with the rest of India through its involvement in a nationwide movement of liberation; second, the displacement of the local goddess Kenchamma as the primary object of worship, and her replacement with nationalist icon Gandhi, believed to be an incarnation of Siva, a god who is worshipped throughout India; and, finally, the dissolution of Kanthapura into nearby villages after villagers flee for their lives, and the development of a new sense of community that is based not on location, but on devotion to the Mahatma.

As the novel progresses, the villagers of Kanthapura become increasingly aware of their town’s role in a larger pan-Indian movement, and this awareness stems largely from their participation in the Indian National Congress. Initially, when Moorthy and other young men of the village implore their fellow villagers to accept a spinning wheel that the Karwar Congress Committee is giving away for free, they are met with incredulity: “And why should the Congress give it free?” (16). The villagers initially accept the proffered gift because it comes with no charge. They also agree to receive it because it will benefit them: Moorthy tells Nanjamma that she will have “a bodice-cloth of any color or breadth you like, one bodice-cloth per month, and a sari every six months” (16) if she agrees to spin one hour a day with her free spinning wheel. Even this initial acceptance of a free gift, however, requires trade that is not regulated by the British and breaks the established colonial pattern: raw products shipped overseas and made into goods that are sold back to the colonies for an inflated price. Moorthy explains this exploitative system to Nanjamma in detail: “Our country is being bled to death by foreigners […] foreign yarn is bought with our money, and all this money goes across the oceans” (16). In contradistinction to this colonial structure, a new hub-and-spoke structure is devised wherein the villagers send their spun cotton to the Congress and the Congress sends back the finished products, creating economic relationships within India that are not overseen by the British. Indian spinners and Indian seamstresses are brought into direct relationship with each other. Moreover, Indians develop economic ties to other Indians that are not mediated by a foreign power.

The decision to join the Indian National Congress, however, is not nearly as simple as the decision to accept a free spinning wheel. It is a risk; as Moorthy tells Rangè Gowda, it will “bring [them] into trouble” (69). Nevertheless, the villagers agree to come together and form a Congress. This formation of a village Congress is integral to the development of a national consciousness among residents of Kanthapura, for they are participating in, have sworn oaths to, and are being taxed by, a nationwide organization. In order to persuade Rangè Gowda, an influential villager, to support collective action, Moorthy tells him: “We shall start a Congress group in Kanthapura, and the Congress group of Kanthapura will join the Congress of All India” (69). Every villager is required to swear an oath before the village in order to join the Congress: “My master, I shall spin a hundred yards of yarn per day, and I shall practice ahimsa, and I shall seek truth” (75). Moorthy, a man who has lived in the city and is most familiar with the movement, is elected president, and is able to ensure that the events unfolding in Kanthapura accord with the national movement. Subsequent confrontations with the police take on a tone that is at once nationalist and religious: the villagers, on many occasions, shout “Mahatma Gandhi ki jai!” and allow themselves to be viciously attacked and battered by policemen, in accordance with Moorthy’s instructions to “hurt none” (84; emphasis in original). In accordance with Anderson’s argument about the importance of newspapers, the villagers draw faith in the power of their collective action from the newspapers Rangamma receives from the city. In those papers a picture of Moorthy is printed, recognizing his efforts to create a Congress in Kanthapura, and the villagers are deeply impressed:

And then they all said, “Our Moorthy is a great man, and they speak of him in the city, and we shall work for him”, and from then onward we all began to spin more and more, and more and more. (76)

It bears mentioning that the style of nonviolent resistance practised by the villagers of Kanthapura would be entirely untenable were it practised by only one village — this style of resistance requires a nationwide movement and organization, as any one village resisting nonviolently could simply be destroyed. As the ending of Kanthapura demonstrates, the destruction of a village will not stop a nationwide movement.

The development of a national consciousness in Kanthapura is also visible in the gods that the villagers of Kanthapura choose to worship. As we have seen, at the novel’s beginning, the villagers look to their local goddess Kenchamma, who resides at the centre of village life:

We shall offer you our first rice and our first fruit, and we shall offer you saris and bodice-cloth for every birth and marriage, we shall wake thinking of you, sleep prostrating before you, Kenchamma, and through the harvest night shall we dance before you. (3)

Achakka, our narrator, describes the worship of Kenchamma as being tied to the ritual ceremonies, agricultural cycles, and even sleep cycles of Kanthapura’s residents. But as Esha Dey (1992: 32) notes, “the historical action of the novel […] is not connected in any way with Kenchamma. Kenchamma’s traditional sanction plays no part in the introduction and dissemination of Gandhian thought, nor is it the scene of crucial happenings”. Rather, the temple in which the events of Kanthapura transpire is the newly-built temple to Siva, its existence brought about by Moorthy:

Moorthy […] was going through our backyard one day and, seeing a half-sunk linga, said, “Why not unearth it and wash it and consecrate it?” “Why not!” said we all, and as it was the holidays and all the city boys were in the village, they began to put up a little mud wall and a tile roof to protect the god. (7)

This temple not only provides the reader with an early example of Moorthy’s leadership, but also shifts the focus away from the local goddess Kenchamma towards Siva, a deity worshipped throughout India. In addition, while many of the words interjected throughout the novel are Kannada, necessitating the need for a Kannada glossary at the novel’s end, the word linga is Sanskrit in origin, reflecting the fact that a pan-Indian deity would be worshipped primarily in Sanskrit. As Mondal notes, “it is […] significant that the temple is dedicated to an all-India deity such as Siva rather than to the local deity, Kenchamma […] Such a goddess is clearly an unsuitable figurehead for the nation” (1999: 106). The erection of Siva’s temple lays the foundation for a new spiritual and religious structure for the village, wherein the villagers elect Moorthy as their spiritual leader — “our Mahatma”, as he is called (74) — and begin to privilege the worship of a pan-Indian deity, Siva, over the worship of their local goddess. This event within the novel’s first few pages foreshadows the arrival of nationalism in Kanthapura.

This decision to privilege Siva and his temple becomes even more overtly political when Moorthy decides to raise money to hire a travelling Harikatha-man, Jayaramachar, who tells the story of Gandhi’s birth as an incarnation of Siva, sent to halt the process of colonization and free India from her oppressors: “Siva himself will forthwith go and incarnate himself on the earth and free my beloved daughter from her enforced slavery” (11). H. S. Komalesha argues:

In what appears to be an interpolation into the religious tradition of India, the novel treats Gandhi as a divine reincarnation of Lord Shiva, whose birth in Gujarat is meant to kill the “Red-man” and free Mother India from the clutches of oppression. Through this mythic imagination, Gandhi is apotheosized into Rama, Krishna and Shiva to become an avatar of those gods for the villagers. (2009: 207)

While I am cautious about some of Komalesha’s wording — his assertion that Gandhi was incarnated “to kill the ‘Red-man’” is problematic given Gandhi’s preferred practice of ahimsa and non-violent resistance even against one’s enemies — what I find notable about his observation is that Gandhi’s interpolation into the religious tradition of India requires Indian deities who are worshipped throughout the subcontinent. Harish Trivedi writes that

Gandhi is deified and taken by the simple villagers to be an avatar of Krishna; in fact, the first edition of the novel carried an epigraph on the title-page citing Krishna’s assurance from The Bhagavadgita: “Whenever there is misery and ignorance, I come”. (2006: 9)

He additionally notes that the religious elements of Gandhi’s message were part of “Gandhi’s irresistible and incomparable appeal” (2006: 9). Near the novel’s end, while the villagers are protesting the consumption of toddy-water, it is not Kenchamma to whom they pray for protection but Siva, and they do not gather at Kenchamma’s temple before protests, but at Siva’s. Achakka prays, “[m]ay the three-eyed Siva protect us” (140). The spiritual centre of the village no longer revolves around the worship of the local goddess Kenchamma, but the all-India deity, Siva.

This alteration in religious focus is accompanied by a Gandhian resistance to caste divisions. As with the shift in the religious focus, the village is led by Moorthy, who visits the “pariah” quarter and the Skeffington Coffee Estate to teach the residents “alphabets and grammar and arithmetic and Hindi” (43), and is consequently excommunicated and made an outcast by the Swami. However, some time later, during Kartik (the seventh month of the Hindu calendar), the Advocate Ranganna announces that he has thrown open the temple to the “pariahs”. For this declaration he receives an ovation, and Moorthy’s excommunication loses any credibility in the community when the corruption of Bhatta and the Swami is exposed. As Srivastava notes, the novel is narrated through use of a collective “we”, which is used to break down caste barriers through inclusion:

a collective “we” […] functions as a unifying device for representing the actions and thoughts of the villagers. The boundaries of this “we” become progressively more inclusive as barriers between “untouchables”, lower castes and higher castes of the village are broken down, and by the end of the novel the village is as one. (2010: 312)

Near to the novel’s end, the protesting villagers are seen to identify and commiserate with the “coolies” who have come from the Skeffington Coffee Estate: “[they] had come to live with us and to work with us and to fight with us” (147). The villagers’ empathy is even seen to extend to the soldiers whom they oppose. A volunteer tells the villagers, “sisters, these soldiers, too, are Indians, and men like us, and they, too, have wives and children and stomachs to fill as we” (160). This refrain is picked up again through the collective narration as the villagers say “we are the soldiers of the Mahatma, and this country is ours, and the soldiers are ours and the English they are not ours” (166) — a perfect encapsulation of nationalist sentiment. “Ours” is defined as anything that is Indian; regardless of caste or hostile behaviour, any being that is a part of the imagined community is a part of the nation.

At the novel’s end, the village of Kanthapura is completely dissolved. The Satyanarayana Puja is defined by Rao in the appendix as “[a]doration of the God of Truth, a movable festival in India, celebrated especially as a means of removing obstacles and to obtain success in a difficult enterprise” (240). The puja functions under the circumstances as a protest march against the government, and men from the city come to join the people of Kanthapura in their protest. This heightens awareness among the dissatisfied villagers of the Indian Independence Movement as a national rather than a local movement. In fact, the villagers are persuaded to hold the Satyanarayana Puja because they are reminded that they are not struggling alone. They are told of a successful protest that has already occurred (160), and when they hesitate, knowing that they could be driven from the town, Ratna assures them of the support of the nation:

Oh, don’t you be frightened — the Congress will look after it. Why, the Congress is ours, and much money is there in the Congress, and many a man has sent sacks and sacks of rice, and there are camps in Seethapur and camps in Subbapur. (161)

And indeed, after a confrontation that ends with many killed and many wounded, the villagers flee to Kashipura, where many of them settle down. That said, several villagers, including Seenu, remain in various prisons, and Moorthy, after being freed, does not return to his friends in Kashipura but goes to Bombay and is joined there by Ratna. Rangè Gowda reports that there is “neither man nor mosquito in Kanthapura” (182) and that many of the houses and landmarks are breaking down and falling apart. The town and economy that was so carefully laid out at the novel’s beginning has been completely dismantled.

While the villagers can no longer rely on the original infrastructure that held them together, they find a new community, a national community, in the followers of the Mahatma. Despite Achakka’s assertion that “things here are as in Kanthapura” (179), her other observations belie that claim:

No, sister no, nothing can ever be the same again. You will say we have lost this, you will say we have lost that. Kenchamma forgive us, but there is something that has entered our hearts, an abundance like the Himavathy on Gauri’s night, when lights come floating down the Rampur corner, lights come floating down from Rampur and Maddur and Tippur, lights lit on the betel leaves, and with flower and kumkum and song we let them go, and they will go down to the Ghats to the morning of the sea, the lights on the betel leaves, and the Mahatma will gather it all, he will gather it by the sea, and he will bless us. (180)

At the novel’s end, then, rather than an attempt to specifically define the village’s location in relation to other landmarks, the interconnectedness of Rampur and Maddur and Tippur is affirmed — all are on the Himavathy, and the same water flows through all. As Mondal writes: “Water thus becomes an index of nationalist identity which gives significance to, and promises the end of, the people’s isolation in a new community” (1999: 108). Gauri’s night is a night that celebrates Parvati, Siva’s consort; we have already seen that the villagers revere Gandhi as an incarnation of Siva. The abundance that has entered their hearts may therefore be seen as Parvati, the lights, flowing towards her beloved, Siva, the Mahatma. The villagers overflow with love and devotion for the Mahatma, like a consort for her husband, and they live for the day when their devotion will be “gathered up” and the Mahatma will bless them.

In this devotion the villagers find a new community. Unlike the community that they found in Kenchamma, this community is not bound; like the rivers, their newfound community flows through all of India, a community of those who believe that the nation is flowing inexorably towards freedom:

We are all for the Mahatma. Pariah Rachanna’s wife, Rachi, and Seethamma and Timmamma are all for the Mahatma. They say there are men in Bombay and men in Punjab, and men and women in Bombay and Bengal and Punjab, who are all for the Mahatma. They say the Mahatma will go to the Red-man’s country and get us Swaraj. He will bring us Swaraj, the Mahatma. And we shall all be happy. And Rama will come back from exile, and Sita will be with him, for Ravana will be slain and Sita freed, and he will come back with Sita on his right in a chariot of the air […] And as they enter Ayodhya there will be a rain of flowers. (181)

The villagers believe that the Mahatma, Rama, will free Sita, or the nation, from Ravana, or the British. The mythology of the villagers has shifted to accommodate a new, national consciousness, an imagined community comprised of people they will never meet and rivers they may never travel. And this community, they believe, will be given to them by the Mahatma.

The consciousness and the mythology of the villagers have been translated. Over the course of the novel, they have gone from viewing themselves as villagers in the town of Kanthapura, their social positions determined by the geographical positions of their houses, to viewing themselves as members of a nation that is not yet free, but is coming. Their primary practice of worship has shifted from the location-specific worship of a regional goddess to the worship of a pan-Indian god and his avatar, a nationalist leader. And they have been literally uprooted and set down again in another village, further entrenching their identities as citizens of India and members of the Congress, rather than as residents of Kanthapura.

As well as undergoing translations of geography and identity, the villagers of Kanthapura are translated linguistically. Their speech in the dialogic language of Kannada has been translated into English, a predominantly written language which allows the text a much wider audience than it would have otherwise had in India. As Bhavya Tiwari notes, “this is the case of India where regional languages can be as foreign to Indians as French could be to a Russian” (2012: 6). Writing in a regional dialect would create a region-specific text, and would exclude much of the nation, while Rao is trying to convey the birth of an imagined community whose members identify with fellow citizens that they may never meet, and who may not speak the same language. While English is not neutral, and recalls India’s colonial legacy, it serves as a universal script language in that it is not region-specific. In addition, that the novel is written in a language that recalls India’s colonial legacy raises the stakes of the conflict, allowing the struggle between colonizer and colonized to take place on two fronts, through both the plot and the form of the novel.

This struggle is made evident not only in the particular words, phrases, and structures that Rao refuses to translate fully into “standard” English, but in the very structure of the novel. Sankaran (1998: 172) notes that “Kanthapura in fact has been seen to subvert the very form of the English Novel in that its form is rooted in an indigenous tradition — that of the sthala-purana or legendary history”. In Kanthapura, the European novel is forced to accommodate a pre-existing, indigenous structure for telling stories — the topology of India inserts itself upon the genre of the novel, seeming to speak directly to Anderson’s assertions about the novel’s role in European nation-building. There is also the question of religion: under Anderson’s model, sacred texts written in sacred languages are displaced as vehicles of community by the secular genres of novels and newspapers. In contrast, the nationalism found in Kanthapura is inextricably bound to the sacred; Gandhi links the two genres as both an avatar of Siva and a national political figure. The religious and indigenous elements of the text deliberately avoid several elements of Western generic convention, even as they instrumentalize others.

Aijaz Ahmad writes:

One cannot reject English now, on the basis of its initially colonial insertion, any more than one can boycott the railways for that same reason. […] English is simply one of India’s own languages now, and what is at issue at present is not the possibility of its ejection but the mode of its assimilation into our social fabric. (1994: 77)

With the publication of Kanthapura, Rao proposes an answer: English should be used to express narratives and themes that are universally Indian, and that should not privilege any specific region. At the same time, these narratives should strive to be Indian rather than British, and be rooted in the speech patterns of actual Indians, rather than imitating a British style of literature — hence the inspiration that Rao draws from indigenous narrative forms and the speech patterns of Kannada speakers. Kanthapura is a novel about Indians who speak Kannada, but their experiences are translated into English so as to emphasize that such struggles were occurring not merely in South West India or in Kannada-speaking regions, but across the entire nation of India. In writing Kanthapura, Rao attempts to demonstrate how universally Indian experiences, for instance experiences rooted in a shared history of colonialism and a unified resistance, might best be conveyed through an English that does not merely mimic the British, but expresses the experience of being an Indian person who speaks English. Through Kanthapura, Rao argues that Indian English should be a translational language, one capable of contorting to reflect the rhythms and vocabulary of regional vernaculars even as it allows vernacular speakers access to a national identity. Indian English, as conceived by Rao, is a language large and varied enough to accommodate contradictions: it can be at once local and national, at once colonial in origin and nationalist in its uses.

As the villagers of Kanthapura attempt to gain mastery over the undeniable presence of the English in their lives, Kanthapura attempts to gain mastery over the undeniable presence of the English in its pages. It does so by producing an English that performs a double function, unifying the nation as a script language while also reflecting the idiosyncrasies of local regional vernaculars. The Indian English of Kanthapura performs the act of national unification by translating a regional vernacular into a script language. The result will not satisfy everyone, but Kanthapura stands as a courageous answer to a difficult question that continues to perplex authors and scholars of postcolonial literature, and in all likelihood shall continue to do so for many decades to come.