Pockets of Gandhian Resistance in Indian Literature: Reading Indigenous Consciousness through Fanonism and Cabralism within the Ambit of National Culture in Raja Rao’s Kanthapura
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17846/aa-2025-17-1-93-113Abstract
This paper proposes an interdisciplinary exploration of how supposedly the theoretical frameworks of the triadic thinkers —Mahatma Gandhi, Franz Fanon, and Amilcar Cabral— adumbrate a discursive theory/praxis of indigenous consciousness and national culture in Raja Rao's 1938 novel Kanthapura. The present study aims at warranting a nucleus analysis of endogenous counter-colonial resistance contextually grounded in Kanthapura. It argues that, Rao’s novel construes an ineluctable scope of India as it encompasses a collectively political consciousness of the cultural, religious, and socio-political contexts by presenting a meticulous picture of a village, which in turn provides a majoritarian macrocosmic representation of India’s national culture. Through this initial hypothesis, Kanthapura foregrounds a contextualization of a dialectical opposition between imperialistic and colonial domination of the colonizer, and an ontological-existential resistance of the colonized. This paper will, thus, analyze how the premise of the novel buttresses its cultural nationalistic underpinnings by reading it epistemologically as a conduit for Gandhian, Fanonian, and Cabralian polemics and praxis. The overarching goal is to question whether Gandhi’s philosophy, which funnels a dialogical constructionism that substantiates an empirical analysis of a quantifiable praxis to effectuate a political socio-cultural order, is ventriloquized through its characters. By giving enumeration to cultural-civilizational diversity and civilizational memory, the findings of this study will attempt to reveal if Kanthapura is a novel that still bespeaks the urgency of our contemporaneous time.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Haneen Amireh, Razan AlAdwan

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