Oral Tradition, Writing, and Political Power Theme Analysis

The village of Kanthapura is a traditional society based in oral culture: few of its inhabitants can read or write, and storytelling ceremonies are a crucial aspect of the town’s collective life. Oral tradition is a source of power in the village, for it allows Kanthapura’s residents to shape their understanding of history, consolidate their identity as a community around shared religious values, and organize politically against the repressive British colonial government. But Kanthapura’s oral traditions are threatened when writing intervenes as a competing source of power: wealthy landowners, the colonial government, and even the Gandhian congress exert their power through written orders from cities that most of Kanthapura’s inhabitants have never visited. Moorthy, the young Gandhian who leads Kanthapura’s campaign of nonviolent resistance against the colonial occupation, realizes that saving traditional culture requires fighting writing with writing. And the novel itself reflects Raja Rao’s desire to preserve oral tradition through the written word.

Traditional, oral forms of knowledge form core of Kanthapura’s collective life, as the townspeople congregate and participate collectively in politics through storytelling and religious discourse. At the beginning of the story, the village’s communal life is structured around the shared myth of the village’s goddess, Kenchamma, who supposedly fought a battle to protect it ages ago and left a hill near the city stained in blood. Religious discourses, including bhajan songs and elaborate theatrical performances called Harikathas, are the main motivations for the village to congregate as a community. And one of these Harikathas, by the famous visiting performer Jayaramchar, first introduces Gandhism in the book. During Jayaramchar’s story, the elderly Venkatalakshamma complains that he is talking “city-nonsense” rather than telling about traditional Hindu gods—she weeps because she sees new myths overtaking traditional ones. But oral discourse is actually Gandhism’s modus operandi: Moorthy becomes a Gandhian after his vision of the Mahatma giving a discourse. In this vision, Moorthy declares himself Gandhi’s slave—the Mahatma orders him to seek Truth and spread his message orally “among the dumb millions” in the villages (who presumably cannot read his writings). Throughout the rest of the novel’s first half, Moorthy persuades the townspeople to join his movement through bhajans and speeches about love, nonviolence, and independence.

In contrast to the oral traditions Moorthy uses to spread his message, written language is associated with Western imperial and economic power—it carries the force of the law from afar. Many of Kanthapura’s villagers are illiterate, so they cannot access the knowledge and power that written documents hold—instead, the wealthy and powerful manipulate such documents to oppress the villagers. Bhatta, the village’s moneylender and landowner, conducts most of his business through papers, including contracts that his borrowers must sign but which few of them can read. (This allows him to arbitrarily change the contracts later in the book, charging peasants extra interest because they support Gandhi.) He takes advantage of the fact that the villagers cannot understand written contracts—while he frequently makes informal agreements with farmers early on in the book, once he realizes that they are fighting against the government that protects him, he starts enforcing the written contracts and calling in debts. Later, the government justifies suppressing the village’s rebellion by presenting their written orders from the British Crown. Whereas oral traditions represent the village’s internal source of power, through which they assert their own identity and politics, written orders and contracts represent an external power, originating in cities and the colonial government, that oppresses the villagers in part because they cannot read the laws to which that government holds them.

But the power of writing also works for the villagers at times, and Moorthy expertly harnesses it to spread nonviolent rebellion. He is “always piling books and books” about Gandhi’s message in the Village Congress’s headquarters, and he later starts a newspaper that convinces many members of the literate brahmin caste to join his cause. One of his main political activities is teaching reading and writing to the illiterate pariahs (Hindus considered beneath the caste system) and coolies (indentured laborers at the Skeffington Coffee Estate). He also holds public readings, which unite written and oral traditions by offering illiterate villagers the revolutionary ideas that his books hold.

Rao’s novel also tries to unite both traditions in this way, overcoming the opposition between the oral traditions that hold the villagers’ identity and the written language that transmits information across geographical space but remains inaccessible to the illiterate. His novel is not a linear narrative in conventional literary prose but rather a meandering, colloquially-written story told by the elder brahmin woman Achakka, who speaks for the village as a whole in the collective “we.” In the foreword, Rao argues that the novel is itself a legendary history, or sthala-purana, of the village—in fact, it not only textualizes the history of Kanthapura but also of the innumerable small-scale struggles for independence that took place in villages across India from the 1920s through the 1940s. By writing down a fictional oral tradition, Rao’s book memorializes a history of resistance that has been erased from India’s landscape—both in the imaginary village of Kanthapura, which is ultimately bought out by wealthy landowners after its inhabitants burn it down, and in other sites of anticolonial resistance across the Indian subcontinent.