Raja Rao's novel Kanthapura (1938) is the first major Indian novel in English. It is text of the Civil Disobedience movement of the 1930s that takes for its central concern the participation of a small village of South India in the national struggle called for by Mahatma Gandhi. Imbued with nationalism, the villagers sacrifice all their material possessions in a triumph of the spirit, showing how in the Gandhian movement people shed their narrow prejudices and united in the common cause of the non-violent civil resistance to the British Raj. Paradoxically, given its concerns, Kanthapura was first published in London in 1938 and was written when Rao was in France: “I wrote Kanthapura in a thirteenth century castle i…
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Citation: Aikant, Satish. "Kanthapura". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 17 July 2003 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=9435, accessed 22 November 2024.]
