Women Character in Kanthapura

The Emergence of the Woman: A Reading of Raja Rao’s Kanthapura

The woman has always been the unacknowledged and indiscernible core of the Indian society, without which its patriarchy would fall apart. Never allowed a voice in the seminal aspects of life, the woman yet defines its traditional and cultural boundaries.
Raja Rao’s Kanthapura (1938) is a subtle study of the immense change that the Gandhian movement of the thirties brought into the life of the Indian woman and yet didn’t let her cross the conventional, the so-called feminine boundaries. The novel traces the material and psychological revolution that accompanied the emergence of the woman from within the twin incarnations of the devi and the dasi that has reigned the imagination of the patriarchy since ages. From the polar images of the all-pervading and all-powerful goddess Kenchamma and the Pariah Rachanna’s wife who would spin only if her husband tells her to, emerge the new women who defy conventions and lead the war of independence — Rangamma and Ratna. Thus we find the Gandhi of Kanthapura, Moorthy, selecting Rangamma as one of the members of the Congress Panchayat Committee, saying “We need a woman for the Committee for the Congress is for the weak and the lowly”.
But Gandhi’s movement was essentially against women’s militancy and their public roles were entirely an extension of their domestic selves in concurrence with the patriarchal conceptions of the family and society. Despite the references to Rani Laxmibai in Kanthapura, the ideal woman is projected in the figure of the ever-obedient and eternally suffering Sita. It was simply a transition “from a traditional child bride into the nationalist ideal of the wife as help-mate and companion” We meet with similar resistance to the Sevika Sangha from the men in Kanthapura. Post office Satamma’s husband forbids her to go to Rangamma’s house and when accosted by the latter says, ‘I am a Gandhi’s man, aunt. But if I cannot have my meals as before, I am not a man to starve’. Rangamma in accordance to the Gandhian ideals tells Satamma not to fail in her timely services to her husband or home.
In Kanthapura, Raja Rao presents women as various forms of Shakti. A typical women is coy, delicate and submissive, she is also firm as rock, but as Satyagrahis, Shakti rises in them and each one of them is enthused. When the police ill treat them, a woman is beaten as a consequence of being a part of this Sangha although she is seven months pregnant, the women think, move and act as one, for they are more distinct and pervasive in the devotional aspect.
One of the most interesting factors that played a role in this sea-change in the lives of the women is the letter or the alphabet in the form of newspapers. Amin discuss how this influence in the district led to the idea of Gandhi to be appropriated by the peasants to validate their own means of addressing local problems, very much as depicted in Kanthapura.
Women’s education has always been a sore point with the Indian patriarchy. Arguments for women’s education in metropolitan as well as colonial contexts, according to Loomba, rely on the logic that educated women would make better wives and mothers. At the same time, they have to be taught to remain in their places. “The widening up of one’s world as a result of education fails to keep the woman shackled within the four walls of her home and it is precisely this spectre of the truly independent woman that haunts the patriarchy.”
The women leaders in Kanthapura are both educated widows, Rangamma and Ratna. Rangamma acts as a source of information, knowledge and inspiration to the village women. Apart from telling them about other galaxies on the one hand and the equal rights that women share with the men in a far-away country on the other, Rangamma is a regular subscriber to newspapers from the city. These papers supply the villagers with the latest developments in the revolutionary struggle in the other parts of the country and later as to the trial and judgment of Moorthy and his fellow satyagrahis. Rangamma is the one who tells the women about Laxmibai and trains them to resist the lathi blows of the police passively. She modulates the deep core religious zeal in the women and adds a nationalist dimension to it.
On the other end there is Ratna. Initially, she is detested by the village women along with the evil Bhatta, for walking about the streets like a boy, wearing her hair to the left “like a concubine”, and wearing her jewellery —and all this being a widow. Ratna’s retort when accosted for this is remarkable, “…when she was asked why she behaved as though she hadn’t lost her husband, she said that that was nobody’s business.
Later, in the absence of Moorthy and Rangamma, it is Ratna who leads the women against the police as the latter launch a violent assault against the village. Another great leap towards liberation is achieved by the women in the novel by their deciding to read and comment on the vedantic texts when Ramakrishnayya dies. The women choose Ratna to read the texts and Rangamma to comment on them, a remarkable decision when one considers the contemporary furore over whether a woman at all has the right to read the Vedas or not!
Through the character of Waterfall Venkamma, Raja Rao brings out the pettiness, the jealousy, the triviality and orthodoxy of women. Venkam ma is jealous of Rangamma because she has large house. She is also against Moorthy as he refused to marry her daughter. She hates Ratna and rails against her.
Rao’s selection of an old grandmother as the narrator in Kanthapura is one of the finest stylistic devices of the novel. We witness the immense change that is gradually brought about in the psyche of the narrow-minded, prejudiced and uneducated widow as she mingles facts with fantasy to describe how the world changed for her and her companions. This is one of the rare instances where history is looked at from a woman’s point of view as opposed to its analytical, power-structured male version that inevitably leaves the women folk out.
History as well as fiction largely ignores the subaltern woman as opposed to her upper or middle class sisters. As Spivak puts it, labouring under a double colonization, she is too deep in the shadow to be generally remembered. Kanthapura records the sexual oppression of the female workers of the Skeffington estate who are subject to the whims and desires of the Sahib.
“He is not a bad man, the new Sahib. He does not beat like his old uncle, nor does he refuse to advance money; but he will have this woman and that woman, this daughter and that wife, and everyday a new one and never the same two within a week.”
Kanthapura is a path breaking work in many ways, as its critics widely agree. But it is Raja Rao’s sensitive and realistic portrayal of the emergence of the modern Indian woman, a part of whom we carry within ourselves even today, which has made the novel worth remembering.