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

Abstract

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.