Kanthapura Essay Questions

How are women represented in Kanthapura?

Women play a vital role in Kanthapura. Achakka is the narrator of the novel and other significant women characters are Rangamma, Ratna, and Rachanna’s wife. Most of the women characters are portrayed as obedient and dedicated to the cause. Their active participation in the struggle against the British is noteworthy, especially as they remain nonviolent in the face of beatings and rapes and all manner of persecution. However, the women are not able to fully embrace their role as freedom fighters, for this is not Gamndhi's vision and it certainly isn't the women's husbands/fathers' vision either. Rangamma counsels the Sevis that for a woman, her husband and family are of utmost importance. Thus, Kanthapura perfectly shows women’s condition in pre-independence India, when even with so much potential, women are considered subordinate to men and victims of double marginalization from their men and their colonial masters.

How does Ratna change as the novel progresses?

When we first meet Ratna, it is through the eyes of Bhatta, moderated through Achakka. Ratna is a mere fifteen years old but is already a widow, and she does not behave as she ought to. She "went about the streets alone like a boy... even wore her hair to the left like a concubine" (30) and when anyone asked her about her behavior, she told them it was none of their business. She was seen "openly talking to Moorthy in the temple, and alone too" (31), demonstrating a disregard for social norms and public opinion. As time progresses, though, she is drawn into the nationalist movement and begins to alter her behavior. She becomes more deferential, emphasizing her learnedness over her independence. She takes over for Rangamma with the Sevis once her aunt is gone, and the widows marvel that "there's the voice of Rangamma in [Ratna's] speech, the voice of Moorthy, and she was no more the child we had known, nor the slip of a widow we had cursed" (152). Ratna is now more reserved, more like the new woman Gandhi believed India needed—a woman who does not challenge traditional notions of separate spheres and women's virtue, yet is active and committed to the nationalist struggle.

Why do very few villagers find it easy to love Bhatta and Bade Khan, as Moorthy counsels them to?

Bhatta isn't exactly a likeable character from the beginning, but he is one of the villagers, knit by family and land and debt to many of the others. People tolerate him, and Achakka says, "he was not a bad man, was Bhatta" (25). Yet Bhatta is vociferously against Moorthy and Gandhism as a whole, seeing his own fortunes threatened. He allies himself with Bade Khan, turns Venkamma against the other widows, and maintains his economic hold over the villagers. Bade Khan is a complete outsider, an Indian working for the colonial government. He sneaks and skulks, spying on the villagers and undermining the movement the best he can. Moorthy counsels the villagers to love both of these men because Gandhi says this is the only way to create a just society, but his words mostly fall on deaf ears. Achakka comments, "We would do harm to no living creature. But to love Bade Khan—no, that was another thing. We would not insult him. We would not hate him. But we could not love him. How could we?" (65). Near the end of the novel, the women say essentially the same thing about Bhatta, burning down his house and lamenting the promissory notes he held over them. These two men are not easy to love because they directly and negatively affect the women's lives; Moorthy as a city boy may find it easier to espouse the philosophical ideas of Gandhism, but it is not something that is practical or easy for the villagers.

Why is Achakka, the first-person narrator, so thinly drawn?

Most first-person narrators of novels tend to speak their own thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. They are, naturally, selfish in their worldview. The "I" perspective is paramount; their vision of the world governs the reader's. However, Achakka is not like that; the reader gets very little insight into her thoughts and feelings. We don't even know much about the conditions of her life itself, except that she is a daughter-less widow. Rao does this purposefully, however; he has Achakka speak more in the "we" than the "I," letting her be the voice of multiple women. Achakka is more a part of a community than she is an individual, and she sublimates her self to the larger group of women. This allows Rao to account for the effects of Gandhism on a whole village (or at least on the women of the village), and to thus show a broader view of the subject rather than that of just one unique person.

What kind of note does the novel end on?

The tone of the novel's end is somewhat ambiguous, partially due to the fact that the nationalist struggle was not over in 1938 when Rao published his work. The fate of Gandhism was unknown; it was not an ordained fact that India would be independent from British rule. There is mostly stasis here at the end, with the movement continuing on and the main actors doing as they always did. Perhaps nothing much has changed, or maybe everything has. India is still ruled by the British, but the characters are enlightened, no longer cogs in the wheel. They are still subject to the rule of the Government, but they know what needs to be done to affect change. Kanthapura is gone, but perhaps it is saved in the hearts of the people who lived there and continue to struggle—if not for its physical reality then for the idea of it. There's a note of pride in Achakka's narration, yet also a note of the bittersweet. It's complicated, Rao suggests, which is perhaps the fairest way to assess the impact of Gandhism on small villages.