Kanthapura: Section 2 Summary & Analysis

Badè Khan was a Muslim, and nobody in Kanthapura wanted him to live with them. Patwari Nanjundia sends Khan to Patel Rangè Gowda’s house, where he waits in frustration—Rangè Gowda is busy ordering his sons-in-law around and tells Khan he has no house for him.

But Rangè Gowda is the Government Representative in town, Badè Khan remarks, so finding Khan a house is Gowda’s responsibility. The Patel responds that he just collects taxes and has no such responsibility. Khan accuses the Patel of being a traitor, requests a house again to no avail, and threatens that “the first time I corner you, I shall squash you like a bug.” The Patel says “enough!”

The Khan sulks away, kicking the town’s one-eared dog on his way to the Skeffington Coffee Estate. When Khan arrives, Mr. Skeffington offers him a hut and the butler guides him there. Khan moves in with one of the pariah women, whom he chose from “among the lonely ones.”

Nobody in the village sees Badè Khan for the next few days, and rumors spread about his motives for coming to Kanthapura. Some villagers think he has come to bring the Police Inspector; others think he is just a “passing policeman.” Waterfall Venkamma thinks Khan has come “because of this Moorthy and all this Gandhi affair.” Venkamma hates Moorthy—he rejected her second daughter for marriage and has started assembling Gandhians in Rangamma’s house, bringing books and spinning-wheels from the local Gandhian Karwar Congress Committee.

Moorthy and his boys visit every corner of Kanthapura, recruiting people from all castes to use the free spinning-wheels. Nose-scratching Nanjamma cannot believe that they are truly free—Moorthy explains that “millions and millions of yards of foreign cloth come to this country, and everything foreign makes us poor and pollutes us.” Gandhi thinks wearing one’s own cloth is sacred; the spinning-wheels give work and cloth to those who need it. “Brahmins do not spin,” Nanjamma protests—that is the weavers’ job.

But Moorthy says that the weavers buy foreign cloth, and he explains why this is a problem through an analogy: Nanjamma might sell her rice to foreigners who pay higher prices, but then she is left without her own rice, which has gone “to fatten some dissipated Red-man in his own country.” City-people and foreigners will come to sell their wares, and villagers will buy them, making themselves “poorer and poorer” until they have sold away all their rice and starve.

“I am no learned person,” declares Nanjamma, who then asks whether the Mahatma himself spins. Of course, replies Moorthy—“he says spinning is as purifying as praying” and does it for two hours every morning. Nanjamma finally agrees, but still does not believe that the spinning-wheel truly costs nothing until Moorthy explains the process again.

Moorthy visits the other brahmins and then the pariahs, convincing all the people he meets to start spinning. A crowd follows him to the village gate, where Badè Khan is smoking a cigarette on the village train platform in plain clothes. After they pass, he jumps down and walks over to the brahmin street.