Kanthapura: Section 17 Summary & Analysis

The next morning, the villagers see a “slow-moving procession of coolies” tied together at the hands, marched through Kanthapura by policemen “to show who our true masters were.” The villagers know they must find Moorthy but cannot, and suddenly they hear a shout from the temple. They rush there and see all the pariah women and children trying to stop the coolies’ march with their bodies, singing that Moorthy has been taken away in the night and shall never return.

As the adults clap and cry, the children throw stones at the police—one hits its mark, and the police start to round up the children. They beat Rachanna’s grandson “on the buttocks and head and spine and knee” and throw him down on the grass, and the women rush to him, but he does not speak.

The Gandhians call the police “butchers, butchers, dung-eating curs!” The police begin to chase the villagers, who cannot run fast enough—one beats a woman named Puttamma and tells her, “you know what I would do with you.” The others run away but think of her and feel they have to return, and when they do they see the policeman on top of her and yell for help. But nobody comes and all they can see in Kanthapura are policemen everywhere.

Another policeman threatens a village woman who goes to visit her elderly neighbor and knocks her down just as Achakka and a few of the other women arrive. He then chases them all out of the house.

Achakka and the others hear shrieks from every corner of the village, and “the whole world seems a jungle in battle” as every imaginable animal screeches from the forest. They run from house to house seeking a place to hide, but in each “man after man had been taken away during the night, while we had slept the sleep of asses,” and their women were gagged and tied to pillars. Rangamma has also gone missing.

They decide that there is only one safe place in Kanthapura: the temple sanctum. On Rangamma’s veranda, they see an elephant crouching, wailing, surrounded by a crowd as its driver kicks it to rise. Some policemen see Achakka and the other women and chase them to the edge of town, where they see a police barricade on the Karwar Road and the coolies marching up the Bebbur Mound above the town.

They decide to go to the house of a sick (actually pregnant) woman named Radhamma, but on the way see her running through town from the police. Radhamma sees them and rushes over; they decide to go to Nanjamma’s back yard, but on the way Radhamma falls to the ground and begins to scream. “It’s only seven months,” another older village woman named Timmamma assures her, but Radhamma’s baby comes out and Timmamma cuts its umbilical cord with the fringe of her sari.

They hear a yell in the post office and find Ratna laying on the ground there as a police officer runs off. Ratna tells the women how she fought off the policemen, and it turns out that they came just in time to stop him. They rest in the post office kitchen and Ratna washes up. Ratna tells them that “this is no safe place” and they must find refuge elsewhere, and Achakka hears “the voice of Rangamma in her speech, the voice of Moorthy.” Before they head to the temple, Ratna looks outside and brings the others to watch Bhatta’s house burning down. They hear the pariah women’s shouts grow louder and shriller, and they run toward the temple. They hear Bhatta’s roof fall and Satamma worries that her own house will burn down, but Ratna encourages her to be patient and they take refuge in the temple, where they call Siva to protect them and make offerings to the god.

They hear “another crash from Bhatta’s burning house” and then the elephant spraying water onto it.  But then the elephant runs for the town gates and the fire rises, bringing down the buildings where rice, cattle, and hay are kept. The women cheer, for “it is not for nothing Bhatta lent us money at 18 per cent and 20 per cent interest, and made us bleed.”

They hear another “long cry” across town, this time from the Skeffington Estate coolies, who “raised a clamour to receive the coolies that were being dragged in” and seem to be coming to help the people of Kanthapura, too.

One woman feels feverish, and Ratna offers to fetch a blanket. Although the others protest, a policeman sees her as soon as she leaves the temple. She runs back in and the women barricade the door from inside as the policeman beats on it until he gives up and locks them inside. All afternoon, the women “cry and moan and beg and weep and bang and kick and lament” inside, but nobody comes for them and they hear nobody through the door. In the temple, they light the sacred flame and sing a bhajan for Lord Siva.

When the women can sing no more, Ratna tells the rest stories about women who marched for Gandhi in cities around India. They turned back to chanting and “forgot the pariahs and the policemen and Moorthy and the Mahatma” before dozing off to sleep, but started to see Siva and suddenly awake in terror, waking one another up and banging on the temple door until the morning, when Rachi, Pariah Rachanna’s wife, finally opens it and lets them back out into Kanthapura.

Puttamma, who Achakka and the other women saw the policeman assault in the bushes the previous day, is crying to her child in bed and lamenting that she has sinned. She thinks her husband will throw her into a well, but in fact he has been arrested. Pariah Siddayya had found the policeman with her and brought her to his backyard.

That night, the women do not sleep, “for we knew our men were not far and their eyelids did not shut.”