Champa Bilwakesh
Final Semester
Supervisor: Kevin McIlvoy
MFA Program for Writers
Warren Wilson College
Take Your Characters Out Into the World.
Rao, Raja. Kanthapura. 1939. New Delhi: Orient Paperbacks, 1996
"Take your characters out into the world, let us see and hear what they do.: This is always an important aspect of telling a story but becomes a crucial factor when the novel is set in a time and place far removed from the reader. The physical setting, the world, grounds the character in the time and place, and therefore it becomes important that this world is captured in the texture of the narrative and is transmitted to the reader.
In his forward to the novel Kanthapura, Raja Rao states in reference to writing "in a language that is not one's own the spirit that is one's own" about 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." This is an important part of the world that Raja Rao draws for us, the psyche of the individuals.
Road, narrow, dusty, rut-covered roads, wind through the forests of teak and jack, of sandal and of sal, and hanging over bellowing gorges and leaping over elephant-haunted valleys, they turn now to the left and now to the right and bring you through the Alambe and Champa and Mena and Kola passes into the great granaries of trade. . . .
Cart after cart groans through the roads of Kanthapura, and on many a night, before the eyes are shut, the last lights we see are those of the train of carts, and the last voice we hear is that of the cart-man who sings through the hollows of the night. The carts pass through the Main Street and through the Potter's 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 . . . "Ho," says Subba Chetty, "he-ho,' and the bulls, shiver and start. The slow-moving cart begin to grind and to rumble, and then the long harsh monotony of the carts' axles through the darkness.
We get a clear picture of the physical setting in this first page of the novel. A train of carts that come down the mountain roads and [ass through the streets of the village. Main Street and the Potter's Lane, indicating a trade that not only characterizes the inhabitants of the street, but one that is still important, and thus pegs the time period where the transportation of goods is done by carts, not trucks. Then we get a more particularized detail, a pond named after a person, a name that the inhabitants mark a landmark with. We hear the cart-man's call to the bulls, and then see and her the bulls' shiver, the way animals do, in response; the grind and rumble of the cart's wheels. The "harsh monotony" holds the difficult passage, the labor of both men and beast in carting the goods over the hills, all night, to the sea.
There, on the blue waters, they say, our carted cardamoms and coffee get into the ships the Redmen bring, and so they say, they go across the seven oceans into the countries where our rulers live.
Cardamoms and coffee, precious commodities, grow on hills, in plantations which surround the village of Kanthapura. The voice that is narrating it belongs to this time, and displays the rural savvy as well as the grounding in the folklore of the place, the belief systems, the values and the vision of a person who has not traveled very far over those hills but has her ears open for stories. "They say," it says, the people who tell us the stories, the stories that we pass on, the legends. The voice has the awareness of "our" cardamom and coffee that is shipped off to the countries where the Redmen, "our rulers" live. It is a voice that has lived with the idea of a ruler, with feudalism, but now accommodates the idea of a ruler who lives overseas. The goods that are carted off at night take on the feel of theft. At once the narrative adds another dimension to this pastoral scene, that of the political economics of colonization.
And once they are on the other side of the Tippur Hill the noise suddenly dies into the night and the soft hiss of the Himavathy rises in the air. Sometimes the people say to themselves, Kenchamma is the mother if Himavathy. May the godess bless us!
The carts go over the hill and the village is back in the timeless rhythm of Indian rural life, where folklore mingles with daily life seamlessly. The harsh glimpse of the country's products and labor being shipped off across the sea fades, leaving the village in a still-life where the goddesses of the hill and river play. The irony is thick in the voice asking for the blessing of the goddess. It captures the consciousness of Indians lulled into a passive acceptance of the state of things before the awakening call of the independence movement.
Having an idea of the general geography, "High on the Ghats is it, high up the steep mountains that face the cool Arabian sea . . ." we are now drawn into a close-p of the village of Kanthapura.
Our village had four and twenty houses. Not all were big like Postmaster Suryanayan's double-storied house by the Temple Corner. . . . Our Patwari Nanjundaia had a verandah with two rooms built onto the old house. He had even put glass panes to the windows . . . . Then there were the Kannayya_House people and though I know not how many generations old . . .
Akkamma had people come to visit them. You know, Coffee-Planter Ramayya is a cousin of her sister-in-law, and when he is on his way to Karvar he sometimes drops in to see her––and even spends the night there. He left the Ford on the other side of the river, for the ferry did not ply at night, and he came along.
Double storied house, additions to house, improvements, ancestral inheritance, all of this are related in a breathless rapid narration. We visualize the layout of the streets, the occupation of the owners, Postmaster, Patwari, Coffe-Planter. The voice becomes gossipy and busy-body like, as any good tale-teller's should, and we get a closer look at the characters, their lives, their concerns, their financial status. Later the chapters details the other areas of the villages, "the Pariah quarter, the Weaver quarter, the Potters quarter and a Sudra quarter, in its personal, opinionated way continues and we follow the fate of this tiny village and its inhabitants as it is pulled into the national movement.