Essay: Problematization of the Representation of the Nation in Raja Rao’s Kanthapura by Hafsa Rahman

In this essay, Hafsa Rahman critically analyses the discourse of the nation and its formation in the novel, Kanthapura by Raja Rao.

In Raja Rao’s Kanthapura, the village Kanthapura represents a microcosm of India in which the past cultural systems are reinvigorated by Gandhian ideology to create a sense of national belonging and collective identity as the foundation for the struggle for independence. In the narrative, Achakka, a grandmother from Kanthapura, recounts “The sad tale of her village” (p. VI). Achakka’s tale is significantly informed by the Indian oral storytelling tradition and depicts the development of a nationalist movement in the village led by Moorthy who is one of the young villagers who has become a Gandhi man and dedicated himself to promoting Gandhian ideology in his village. 

The idea of a nation imagined in Kanthapura is the Gandhian idea of a nation inclined towards the primordial theory of nation which proposes that nations are ancient and natural phenomena. For Gandhi, India was “one undivided land made by nature in which we were one nation before the Britishers came to India.”  In his work Hind Swaraj, he presents two inherent attributes of Indian civilization to prove the existence of the nation in pre-British times- one is its accommodating capacity, and the other is the existence of certain places of pilgrimage scattered throughout India. For him, people calling themselves a nation should have the sense of being a community, despite having differences amongst them as individuals. Here, Gandhi seems to anticipate the essence of Benedict Anderson’s celebrated theory of nation as an ‘imagined community’ – imagined as both inherently sovereign and limited which shares a sense of commonality, where members of the nation do not know most of their compatriots but still shares a communal image; it is based on recognition of commonality and not the commonality itself. This shared sense of identity is what Moorthy tries to develop throughout the novel, by suggesting the villagers spin Khadi and contribute to the larger project of developing national consciousness of fighting the Britishers.