Kanthapura

A major landmark in Indian fiction, this is a story of how the Gandhian struggle for independence came to one small village in South India.Kanthapura is a story that depicts how Gandhi’s struggle for independence in India came to a small South Indian village that follows the caste system. Moorthy has returned from the city and has plenty of ideas to bring about peace in his environment.Moorthy is young and is back from the city where he learnt of the goodness of non-violence. Gandhi’s struggle for independence has now come to a small village where the people experience the harsh reality of the caste system. Moorthy intends to bring in the independence movement to the village and wants to eradicate the caste system. He works towards uniting the people of the village and creating a nonviolent atmosphere. The determined and idealistic Moorthy fights against the conservative forces to create the kind of place that the Father of Our Nation dreamt of and fought for. The story is said from the point of view of an old woman who talks about the variety of people in the village and the complexities of life in the village.

Raja Rao (1909-2006), a path-breaker of Indian writing in English, was born in Hassan, Mysore. After he graduated from Madras University, he went on to the University of Montpellier in France on a scholarship. He moved to the United States in 1966, where he taught at the University of Texas at Austin until 1983, when he retired as emeritus professor. R. Parthasarathy is a poet and translator. The author of the long poem ’Rough Passage’, he edited the influential anthology Ten Twentieth-Century Indian Poets. His translation of the fifth-century Tamil epic, the Cilappatikaram, was awarded the 1995 Sahitya Akademi Award. He is a professor emeritus of English and Asian studies at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. He was Raja Rao’s editor from 1974 to 1998.