Ankit Ramteke
Raja Rao wrote Kanthapura in the 1930s when he was a twenty-one-year-old, living “in a 13th-century old castle in the French Alps belonging to the Dauphins of France” (Naik 60). It was first published in 1938, and since then, starting from E.M. Forster’s famous remark — that it was one of the finest novels to come out of India, heaps of praise have been lavished on this novel. Its famous “foreword” became a manifesto for Indian English writing. Kanthapura acquired the status of ‘The Great Indian Novel,’ and the story of its eponymous village became the symbol of the Indian struggle for independence. Vasant A. Shahane writes that “the theme of Kanthapura is the continuity of Indian tradition in rural India”. He further adds, “Kanthapura is a village of simple, lovable, affectionate, generous, talkative, patriotic, country folks nourished on age-long Indian tradition and deeply stirred and activated by the movement for securing India’s freedom from foreign rule.” As Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe characterized Heart of Darkness in his famous essay “–a permanent literature–” studied in university, “read and taught and constantly evaluated by serious academics”, Kanthapura is also a classic, read and taught in Indian universities and abroad at college level.
“There is no village in India, however, mean, that has not a rich Sthala-Purana, or legendary history, of its own”, is the deceptively simple line of Kanthapura’s famous foreword that has been mentioned in nearly every other study made on Indian English fiction. Elite Indian readers who had consumed a fair amount of Shakespearean and Victorian English in their childhood, till the late 1930s were starting to adjust to the stylistically dense, sometimes impenetrable metaphorical language narrated in the stream-of-consciousness style of modernist giants like Conrad, Eliot, and Joyce. Rao’s indianization of English, where “the tempo of Indian life must be infused into our English expression” (vii, foreword) offered a refreshingly simple yet profoundly ‘Indian’ experience. Probably they were too happy to read something that they understood, without scurrying to the dictionary after every sentence.
However, B.R Ambedkar in his Annihilation of caste (1935), a speech that was never delivered because ironically the organizing committee named ‘Jat-Pat Todak Mandal’ found it objectionable, states “I have no hesitation in saying that if the Mohammedan has been cruel, the Hindu has been mean and meanness is worse than cruelty”. In this light, Kanthapura as a village is a perfect embodiment of the ‘meanness’ that represents a kind of “colonialism” of Hindus designed to exploit the untouchables. In Kanthapura village apart from the Brahmin quarter, there is a potter’s quarter, a weavers’ quarter, a sudra quarter, and a pariah quarter. The last one is where untouchables reside. As the narrator Achakka of “Veda Sastra Pravina Krishna Sastri family”(5) declares, with vehement hostility, “of course you wouldn’t expect me to go to pariah quarter”(5).
The word ‘pariah’ carries the brutal legacy of the caste system. It comes from the Tamil word ‘paraiyar’ where ‘para’ meant ‘a drum’ and according to the description given in the OED, historically “pariahs” were members of indigenous people of Southern India originally functioning as ceremonial drummers but later having low caste”. But it seems that Raja Rao, a so-called modernist, in the pretence of realism still subscribed to centuries-old perpetuated stereotypes. His novel Kanthapura is filled with insults like “carcass eating pariah”, “dirt gobbling curs, Pariah, Pariah!”, but through his clever choice of an old orthodox grandmother as narrator “telling a sad tale of her village”, their effect is humourous and there is no serious objection from his 20th-century readers. Because much like Conrad “he chose his subject well, one which was guaranteed not to put him in conflict with the psychological predisposition of his readers or raise the need for him to contend with resistance. He chose the role of purveyor of comforting myths” (Achebe, 2).
Raja Rao in notes for Kanthapura mentions the expression ‘Cat’s asceticism’. He writes that it is commonly applied to someone who is behaving hypocritically like the figure of the lecherous cat of Indian fables who has through necessity become celibate in old age. Ironically this expression perfectly fits the brahmin characters he so fondly writes about, who out of necessity had to reluctantly relinquish their casteist attitude. Moorthy is the Brahmin protagonist of the Kanthapura who has an abiding crush on Mahatma Gandhi and who blindly follows all his dictums. In the novel, he is called many names, ‘our own Mahatma.’ ‘small mountain,’ ‘our President,’ ‘the learned one, ‘the noble cow,’ ‘the very prince,’ ‘deferent brahmin,’ ‘young prince,’ ‘bhakt,’ and ‘soldier saint.’ and so on. He has “27 acres of wetland and 54 acres of dry land, a cardamom garden and 25 tree mango grove, and a small coffee plantation”(35). Interestingly he has never met Gandhi; his loyalty to Gandhi is rooted in his vision: “everybody knew, one day he had seen a vision, a vision of mahatma”(32). In his vision, Mahatma orders him to help the country “by going and working among the dumb millions of the village”(34). Since then Moorthy ‘the learned one’ has thrown away his “foreign clothes and his foreign books” and much like the burdened white men comes to unload his brahmin’s burden among the ‘dumb millions’. So Moorthy ‘the noble cow’, in his sudden cow vision has found all the answers one day, like Gandhi, for the upliftment of the ‘dumb’ downtrodden. He came back to his village and explained his mission to his mother who was “nearing 65 years of age… and had borne 11 children”(32). She, after some irritation said “You need not be a sub-collector or an assistant commissioner. You can look after your hereditary lands and have two meals a day”(33). The choice between being a sub-collector and a Mahatma figure did not present a dilemma to ‘the very prince’, he was quick to selectively renounce human pleasure for the sake of his mission. He refused to marry 13/14-year-old young girls who came with offers of lavish dowry. He promised his mother, that he will ‘bring no evil to his ancestors”. That’s how Moorthy the cat took vows of asceticism and started his part-time business of ‘pariah- mixing’.
If Moorthy’s hereditary land and privileges diminished the interest of the audience, his comparison with Bhatta ‘the first Brahmin’ was sure to prove his asceticism. Unlike Bhatta who would in an obsequial dinner, perform his ceremony “within the winking of an eye” and gulp down cup after cup of khir, honey and curd before grabbing 2-5 rupees for his service, Moorthy engaged himself in the arduous task of ‘pariah-mixing’ by organizing harikathas and consecrating his accidental discovery of a half-sunk linga, by collecting money for this puja and that puja. The seductive “young prince” with his smooth talk is even able to extort money from the “poor” narrator “Veda Sastra Pravina Krishna Sastri’s family”(5) who has “only seven acres of wetland and twelve acres of dry land”, and who could only pay four rupee revenue and with great difficulty could only afford to have “3 meal a day”(9). But the real taste of his cat’s ability comes when he with his ‘ascetic bowl’ goes to collect money in the Pariah quarters. The poor narrator exclaimed, “I closed my ears when I heard he went to the Pariah quarter” because as explained by ‘Patel of the village’ Range Gowda who has ‘gold-filled coffers’ in his ‘9 beam house’, — “kind words do not help with them, and one can not bow down to every pariah and butcher and instead should give them a nice licking with a lantana switch” (70). But Moorthy who even loved his enemy (that included bearded Bade Khan, a Muslim villain!), sinister Saheb or cruel Redmen (firangi villain) can not give a ‘nice licking’ to pariahs, after all, he loved them. So, he with his Brahmanic insistence on ‘ahimsa’ went into Pariah quarters and somehow was still able to gather in total the amount of 174 rupees [equal to the price of nearly 37 sheep, or 800 Kg rice or 290 Kg butter at that time] in total in his ‘ascetic bowl’. Quite a herculean task, isn’t it?
Then with all this money, these Brahmins “have a grand festival in Ganesh Jayanti”, “reading parties, camphor ceremonies every evening.” It was all based on inane philosophy with no Pariahs involved. Moorthy said, “Let’s celebrate the Rama festival, the Krishna festival, and let’s keep the party going. He made everybody pay a 4 anna a bit so that every evening they can have the finest music, harikatha and gaslight procession”(10). When the spirit of the party dwindled he summoned the famous harikatha artist Jayaramchar, by paying him 10 rupees as cart fare and railway fare because this Jayaramchar had an amazing ability to mythologize every living and dead man. In a single breath, he declared Gandhi and Buddha as incarnations of Shiva.
Once again before readers can raise doubts about this so-called ‘bhakt’, Moorthy ‘the small mountain’ cried how his heart bleeds because his country was being “bled to death by foreigners”(16). He sighs, “Pariahs begin to starve and one day all but Brahmin Bhatta and Brahmin Subba Chetty will have nothing else to eat but the pebbles of Himavathy”(18). Moorthy ‘the learned one’, though his degrees are nowhere to be found, is seen concerned about unequal wealth distribution, exploitative revenue, and taxation tax policies of Britishers, he broods on how the rice “does not go into the stomach of pariah Rangi or Madi but goes to fatten some dissipated Red-men”(17). So sacred Moorthy takes up the mission to free India from the clutches of cruel Redmen with the magic dust of Swaraj and change India into a country where nobody starves and Brahmin and Pariah are equal, and goes to the Karwar Congress Committee. He returns with another quick magical fix — “Free-spinning wheels in the name of Mahatma!”. He explained to ‘dumb’ village inhabitants that the spinning wheel ‘gives work to the workless and work to lazy’(16) and they can have this and that if they just spin one hour a day and that’s how they can save their country from foreigners who “make them poor and pollute them”(16). Moorthy is successful in manipulating the emotions of readers just like he did with the emotions of Pariahs. Though one can not blame them if they were ready to swoon on his tunes because, like a consummate politician, his promises were attractive—“not a pie for this ..they would spin and spin and spin, and if that Brahmin boy was to be believed they would have clothes to wear, blankets and shirts and loincloths”(19).
Meanwhile, the ‘mean’ manuvadi village was haunted by the idea of pollution, and the soul of Manu screamed from Pitra-lok. Bhatre, the waterfall Venkamma, and their centre outside the village – Swami, all were shaken up. They started their dirty tricks and unleashed the age-old ‘fear of ex-communication’, ‘confusion of caste’, and ‘pollution of progeny’. They said, “Gandhi is a good man and simple man, but he is making too much of these carcass-eating pariahs”. In solidarity with them, Achakka-the narrator “of the Veda Sastra Pravina Krishna Sastri’s family”(5) declared, “we will die before the world gets polluted”(9). The clever Bhatta goes crazy as his Brahmanic privilege-a legacy of the caste system, was threatened so he in his Brahmanic apprehension cried,
“Pariah now come to the temple door (after all that loud Harikhathas and evening bhajans attracted them too) and tomorrow they would like to be in the heart of it, they will one day put themselves in the place of the brahmins and begins to teach the Vedas .. why our Beadle Timmayya will come one of these days to ask my daughter in marriage!”(26)
Now hero Moorthy, the young Brahmin who was free to amass wealth like Bhatta with bloody interest rates and “starve many stomachs and kill many children” (153), or to fight against cruel Red men like Gandhi- After all Brahmins like Bhatta, Subba Chetty, and Dore were also ‘Gandhi men’, or he was free to become a British stooge like the old Brahmin men who wore “gold cased Rudrakshi beads” and called Queen Victoria, an incarnation of Krishna (88) and hail George the fifth as protector of Dharma. He was free to do anything but not to touch, talk, mingle, and meet the untouchables unless this ‘mean’ manuvadi village unleashes a hell of drama, which in one way was necessary to sustain readers. However, in this atmosphere of chaos and confusion, clever Rangamma, a constant companion of Moorthy blurted out, “Mahatma always says let the caste exist, let the separate eating exist … Mahatma is not for all this pollution”(27).
This drama proved too much for some characters and, Moorthy’s mother Narasamma becomes hysterical and cries “This is sin, this is sin” and in her antipathy, she spits at Pariah Bedayya, before giving Moorthy a taste of his own medicine “don’t talk like an innocent, go and stand on the steps like a pariah, let, not your shadow fall on me”(40). This only made Moorthy more fearless, he called “Swami -a self-chosen Fool”, and broke the only promise he made to his mother. One day he touched the body of an Untouchable. So he was finally excommunicated, however, his mother died out of shock. More shocking was that no one was ready to officiate for her. Brahmin Bhatta said, “You can offer me a king’s daughter but never will I sell my soul to a pariah”(43). She went (probably to hell) without proper ‘Samskara’. The gravity of this situation in traditional Brahmin literature can be understood by the fact that U.R. Ananthmurthy, another Brahmin writer from Karnataka, who published a whole novel based on this theme called ‘Samskara’ in 1968. Surprisingly Moorthy was not deterred by the death of his mother and his love for the downtrodden outweighed his grief. Moorthy seemed truly to have attained the state of enlightenment where he had no pride in his caste and no prejudice about others’ caste. Whether this enlightenment was like a cat’s enlightenment is not explored in the novel and at this crucial time when the reader’s confidence in Moorthy could have been put to the test, the crafty novelist Raja Rao introduced the motif of a bigger cat.
The sinister firangi sahib- the big ferocious cat entered the novel with a whip in his claws at Skeffington Coffee estate (now referred to as SCE), about which ‘nobody knows how large it is or when it was founded’(44). But suddenly there is a seismic shift in the narratorial skills of the old Brahmin narrator who has since time immemorial monopolized the art of storytelling. She zoomed in on “half-naked, starving, spitting, weeping, vomiting, coughing, shivering, squeaking, shouting, moaning”(44) Telugu or Tamil coolies and delineates the cruelty of this big ferocious firangi cat who has beguiled them with the promise of rice, and “a four anna a bit for man and a two-anna bit for a woman”(45). She then describes in minute detail the inhumane living conditions, harsh weather, and all the proceedings of Skeffington Coffee estate that one wonders if she was also there in the fields working with the coolies, sharing their trials and tribulations but she has no clue about the pathetic conditions of pariah quarters of her own village because of course as she proudly declares, one wouldn’t expect her to go in pariah quarters as for Brahmanic Hindus these quarters were “a ghetto-like a cordon sanitaire to put the impure people inside the barbed wire into a sort of a cage”. How would she then know! In front of this wild Red cat of SCE, Brahmins like Moorthy with their small coffee estate surely appeared enlightened a zen cat to Pariahs.
“Pariah Siddaya who has been in this estate for 10 years’ cynically laughs at young Pariah Rangayya who plans to escape the shithole called ‘Blue Mountain’. Rangayya said, “one who came to blue mountain never left it” as there is “toddy booth” there is “caste dinner”, “death and festivals” “sheep cost 5 rupees”, “Bhatta’s interest charges”, “Rama Chetty sells fine rice at 3 seers and half a rupee” “butter is 12 anna”. “There must be something in the sun of India that makes us rush and tumble and run on”(vii, Foreword) and once Moorthy the cat slipped away from the radar of the reader, he was in a rush to complete his monomaniacal mission of unloading his Brahmanical-burden and becoming a Mahatma. He consistently insisted on non-violence, on loving everyone, and he was ready to conquer the heart of big bully Britisher with the only force of love. Yet everywhere he went, every step he took, there was violence and the untouchables suffered. Because Pariah Rachanna talked with Moorthy he was whipped mercilessly, his family thrown out of SCE and his salaries not paid for months.
So Moorthy resolved to become more and more ascetic. For 3 days he meditated and “such exaltation came over him that he felt blanketed with every pariah and the cur”(65). Then finally he came to the conclusion that ‘he is Shiva, Shiva he is’(63). He, therefore, organized more Bhajans, more Harikatha, and more Satyanarayan Katha where people adorned him with petty titles such as ‘small mountain’ ‘our President’, and ‘our own Mahatma’. He smiled whenever he saw Pariah Rachanna because he perfectly fulfilled the role of a loyal dog, as eloquently carved out by Moorthy’s mentor Gandhi, “Yudhishthira would not enter heaven without his dog, how can then the descendant of that Yudhishthira except to obtain swaraj without untouchables” (Homer 1983;164). The ‘village Patel’, ‘the veritable tiger’ Range Gowda whose words “were law in the village” called Moorthy and lent him his unconditional support, and then they laughed and ideally talked “about rent, and law court and the sloth of peasants”(70) and the whole village was with them. So Moorthy formed Kanthapura Congress Committee, appointing Rangamma and Rachana to other posts for the sake of political correctness. Then there were more bhajans, processions, and sloganeering, and the air of Kanthapura was filled with a spirit of revolution that touched Pariah and Brahmin equally. But after some moments, when the vigour died down, they were back to the same old rut. Nonetheless, pariahs thought that “good days will surely come one day when Brahmins and they will be equal”.
So the fame of Moorthy rose, he appeared in Rangamma’s blue paper and his photo adorned the walls of the neighboring villages. He led his caravan forward and they went picketing this toddy or that toddy booth, where there was an exchange of pleasantries, “you dog, son of a concubine, you pariah log, you pig, lover of your mother ” and “shower of spittle and shoes”(59), etc. Then there were clashes, but everything was handled efficiently by the ‘soldier saint’; he went to prison and refused to accept any help from any lawyer. Nonetheless, with the help of the cat’s magic, he came out of jail and once again started his business of preaching to pariahs with full vigour. So coolies “who came to Boranne’s toddy booth to drink and to beat the drum and to clap hands and sing”(137) found themselves in a tough situation. On one side there was Moorthy-the cat with his army hurling slogans of abstinence on them “Do not drink, Do not drink in the name of Mahatma”(139) and at another side were police with their lathis in hand to make sure that they drink like fish.
These pariahs and coolies “who came like clogged bulls, cluttering down the byre steps, their stomach black and bulging and bamboo legs”(137) are beaten up and whipped badly. This scene summarised the condition of the downtrodden and untouchables who became a sight for the power struggle between Britishers and elite Indian political leaders. Both of them used them as mere commodities and exploited them for material and political gain. Then clever storytellers like Rao used their struggle as a clever ploy to hinge their story on and gain praise. As later these three and thirty or more families of coolies went to the Pariah quarter of Kanthapura in the hope of protection but were brutally marched into the village, openly canned, and beaten. There is a sheer show of naked violence and no one is there to help them, no Moorthy no Mahatma. Children died from brutal beatings, women were raped and houses were burned. Pariah women continuously shrieked and cried for help but so-called “satyagrahi” these Brahmin women of Sevika Sangh who thought that by hymning the name of Mahatma police “lathis will grow as soft as butter and as soft as a silken thread”(107) and vowed to “fight for mother (India)”(106), chickened out once they found a safe place in “temple sanctum” and “forgot the Pariah and the policemen and the Moorthy and Mahatma …and yawned back to sleep”(155).
In the next scene, Kanthapura was being sold out. Again there were clamours, shrill, and shrieks from the Pariah quarter and Sudra quarter as they couldn’t see someone snatching whatever insignificant land, shacks, and shanty they had. Pariah Rachanna cried “Monster Monster” but Brahmins around her said, “only a pariah looks at the teeth of dead cows, what is lost is lost” (166). Now there is a unique juxtaposition, that one will only find in twice-born Brahmin Biased Indian Fiction of shrieks, cries with the blow of conch, of clamour and lamentation, with slogan of satyanarayan ki jay.
“Now no more of this-nobody wants to see a drowning person and we all rushed back to the Satyanarayana procession throne…..last shouts …such a cry again … Now, Ratna, blow the conch!”(167)
Raja Rao tried to give another ‘mean’ Indian village, a legendary history, but in a decisive moment Rachi, wife of Pariah Rachana, who showed quintessential angst of Dalit characters, eluded out of Rao’s nest and burnt that ‘mean’ village down. She screams, “to the ashes, you wretch of the village!”(176). Her character is only an assertive and outspoken Dalit character in the novel, in one scene she interrupts and forces Moorthy to testify to his dogmatic claims by offering him milk with her hand. But like Bertha Mason of Jane Eyre, she couldn’t escape the misery of her life, and at the end of the novel, a new cage awaits her. ‘Mean Kanthapura’ was replaced by ‘Mean Kashipura’. Here Raja Rao was too conscious and clever, not to mention the Pariah quarters, but he couldn’t help putting the misogynist and casteist narrator of the novel in the Brahmin Quarter. She is seen with her monopoly on prayer, privilege, and storytelling enjoying “Pancakes” while Rachi is somewhere at thresholds, living a life of servitude in some Patel’s house, still pounding rice and carrying “Dung Cakes” (181).
Her husband Pariah Rachanna throughout the novel remained a mouthpiece to raise the slogan for Moorthy and get beaten up by police. He tried his best, not letting any ‘chote and bade khan’ or any other policemen hurt the ‘soldier saint’. For the sake of political correctness he was given a position in the Congress Committee of Kanthapura, but not the entry to the temple “here in the temple or there in the courtyard it is the same god you vow before, so go along! Rachanna and Rachanna ‘s wife and Madanna and Madanna ‘s wife swear before the god from the courtyard step”(75). In the end, he is rotting in jail and Moorthy is out, meeting this satyagrahi and that satyagrahi. Moorthy moves up the political ladder, where finally someone tells him that Mahatma’s quick fix won’t work and that unless someone changes things systematically “there will always be pariah and poverty”.
Moorthy who throughout the novel preached about equality, about Brahmin and Pariah being one, could not fight the notion of pollution that was deeply entrenched in him. Moorthy when entered the house of a Pariah for the first time, in his revulsion for them, hallucinates all sorts of nonsense “he looks this side and that and thinks, surely there is a carcass in the backyard, and it is surely being skinned, and he smells the stench of hide and the stench of pickled pigs and the room seems to shake, and all the gods and all the manes of heaven seems to cry out against him”(71). Pariah Rachi who is the only character in the novel showing the quintessential angst of Dalit characters asks him to accept, from her hand a tumbler full of milk and drink it. Moorthy makes excuses but she persists saying, “Touch it, Moorthappa, touch it only as though it were offered to the gods, and we shall be sanctified’; and Moorthy, with many a trembling prayer, touches the tumbler and brings it to his lips, and taking one sip, lays it aside. This incident is so troubling to Brahmin Moorthy that the first thing he does after returning from Pariah’s quarter is to purify himself with a bath. As Moorthy could not purify his mind, for the matter of practicality and politics Rangamma ‘who knew many many things’ suggests “I shall at least give you a little Ganges water and you can take a spoonful of it each time you have touched them, can’t you?”(73). Moorthy ‘the deferent Brahmin’ replies “As you will”, “After all a Brahmin is a Brahmin ”(73). To realize the hypocrisy of the progressive Brahmin mind, one only needs to imagine Moorthy, after each time preaching about Brahmin and Pariah being equal in Pariahs quarters, then stealthily scurrying away somewhere to scoop a handful of Ganga water to purify himself.
Now, if Moorthy’s asceticism is seeped in hypocrisy, then what about Raja Rao, who, according to Harish Trivedi, performed “shuddhi” for “twice-born” fiction and in whose ‘Kanthapura,’ “as a result of the impact of Mahatma Gandhi, the pariahs are no longer treated as untouchables.” According to Raja Rao, the caste system is, after all, not such a bad thing and even has some advantages. In his notes for the Kanthapura on the caste system, he writes:
“The system had its advantages; each sub-caste looked after its own misfortune with a dole for impoverished widows, dowries for brides, who needed them and help for those beset by sickness and disaster. But individual freedom was greatly restricted. Members of the sub-caste could marry only within their sub-caste, could engage only in occupations reserved for their sub-caste, etc. In general, every individual enterprise -social, commercial, conjugal, or whatever- required the approval of the elders. Today, caste is discouraged or at least deemphasized in the official Indian policy, especially with respect to the untouchables; but the system is deeply rooted in the Hindu religious tradition, and the people, particularly villagers, are slow to relinquish it”
Only a th0rough going casteist can declare that the caste system had some advantages and an extremely “crafty writer” can give such an anodyne description of the vicious caste system that even evils like sati-pratha, enforced widowhood, child marriages, slavery, manual scavenging, untouchability, and all other ramification of mean caste system should only be “discouraged” or “at least de-emphasized.” His stance on the caste system is that of an oppressor who does not want to relinquish the system and tradition of comfort. In his fiction, he is adamant to feed the Western audience with a mystic, strange and holy image of India, where superstitions are prevalent. In his fiction, he uses the word ‘Brahmin’ as an adjective denoting superiority. There is a Brahmin look, Brahmin feebleness, Brahmin land, Brahmanic ocean, Brahmin Sir, Brahmin Prime minister. There is a Brahmin way of having sex, there are Brahmin books, and everything has to be specifically done in a Brahmin way. Here if one has to chide someone or look at someone with contempt or disgust, there is a Brahmin way to do it. In The Serpent and the Rope, the Brahmin protagonist writes, “I had looked at Lakshmi with the look of a Brahmin at a bird-catcher or barber. Brahmins don’t need words to say anything.” Brahmins in Raja Rao’s fiction are demi-gods with their own manner of doing things, and supposedly their manners are the best in the universe. The lower caste characters in his fiction are captivated by these demigod brahmins, showing extreme loyalty and servility reminding one of the portrayals of ‘faithful black servant’, and ‘simple Negro’ by American whites. Rao’s whole oeuvre is a testimonial of this, and in his fiction, one hears the most eloquent longing for brahmanical ideals, sees an unfettered exhibition of pride for being Brahmin, and solipsistic blindness towards others. Yet astonishingly casteist writers like Raja Rao are still eulogised, studied and taught in academic spaces that claim to be egalitarian and humanitarian.
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References
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Achebe, Chinua. “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” The Massachusetts Review, vol. 57, no. 1, 2016, pp. 14–27., DOI:10.1353/Mar. 2016.0003.
Ambedkar B.R, “The Essential Writing of B.R Ambedkar” ed. Valerian Rodrigues.India: Oxford University Press,2002. Print.
Ambedkar, Bheem Rao. The Untouchables: Who Were They and Why They Became Untouchables? New Delhi: Amrit Book Company, 1948. 21-22. Print.
Homer, Jack A, The Gandhi Reader: A Source Book of His Life and Writings, Madras Samata Books,1983
Mohan, Gopu. “The Dark History of ‘Pariah.’” The Dark History of “Pariah”, 28 June 2019,
Caravan magazine. in/perspectives/dark-history-pariah-caste-legacy.
Naik, M.K Raja Rao. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1972. PrintLoomba, Ania. “The Violence of Gandhi’s Non-Violence.” India International Centre Quarterly, vol. 41, no. 1, 2014, pp. 19–37. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44733571. Accessed 2 Feb. 2020.
Rao, Raja. Kanthapura.17th ed. New York: New Direction Paperbacks.
Shahane, Vasant A. “Fiction and Reality In Raja Rao.” Journal of South Asian Literature, vol. 22, no. 2, 1987, pp. 34–42. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40872959. Accessed 2 Feb. 2020.
Trivedi, Harish. “Raja Rao: The Twice-Born Novelist.” Indian Literature, vol. 50, no. 5 (235), 2006, pp. 8–12. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23340692. Accessed 2 Feb. 2020.
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Ankit Ramteke is a doctoral student at the School of Literary Studies, English and Foreign Language University, Hyderabad. His teaching and research interests include Dalit Literature, Anti-caste Literature, and Indian English Writings.
