Gandhian Women of Kanthapura-An Analysis
RAGHAVENDRA H.M.
Assistant professor of English.
Government First Grade College, Tumkur-572102(India)
Email Id: raghhm@gmail.com
ABSTRACT
The followers of Gandhi and his ideology are often referred as Gandhi - Men or Gandhian man. We come across such references in various books or media. But we rarely hear any woman titled Gandian. Raja Rao presents just rare Gandhian women in his novel Kanthapura. Such two women characters are analysed in this paper. The women, Rangamma and Ratna take individual parts in the drama of Kanthapura. However, the role that the women play in the Gandhian movement, led by Moorthy, is often more active and voluble than that of the men
KEYWORDS: Gandhian, Woman, Movement, Ideology, Cast, Reform, Orthodox.
Gandhian Women of Kanthapura - An Analysis
The women of Kanthapura function mainly as a collective voice, and individual relationships are not accorded the importance they have in Raja Rao's other novels. Only Rangamma and Ratna take individual parts in the drama of Kanthapura. However, the role that the women play in the Gandhian movement, led by Moorthy, is often more active and voluble than that of the men. Their hearts are much more easily won over by the presentation of the Gandhian ideology through the medium of the Harikatha.
Rangamma has already been singled out as one or the most active members of the Congress, and Moorthy's most effective aide. "No village kid", she has the respect of the community. She is a widow with means, having been left a comfortable house, which is the envy of her spiteful sister-in-law, waterfall Venkamma. Since Rangamma has no children, she has obviously spent her time educating herself. She gets all the papers from the city and reads them. So she is in touch with all kinds of recent developments in various fields. She is well informed about natural wonders, like plants that weep, and about the Milky Way. She has heard or telescopes, through which can be glimpsed "another world with sun and moon and stars, all bright and floating in the diamond dust of God" (46). She knows everything about air vehicles that move....and speech that goes across the air (46) and marvellous country where all men are equal.
Soon after the Harikatha, people remark that Rangamma's house "was becoming something of a Congress House" (Kanthapura 28).
She is chosen as the third member in the Congress Committee. When Moorthy is put in prison, Rangamma goes to talk over his affairs with the advocate, the secretary of the Congress Committee, Sankar. He invites her to stay with him and help with his correspondence. The proposal pleases Rangamma:
Though Rangamma was the humblest of women, she liked this, and she said, "If the gods choose me, I will not say "Nay"(137),
Waterfall Venkamma's spiteful tongue lashes out viciously:
Oh! this widow has now begun to live openly with her men, and she spat on the house and said this man had her and that man had her (138) .
But Rangamma is unperturbed, for,
...as everybody knew, Sankar was an ascetic of a man and had refused marriage after he had lost his wife (138).
He fasts regularly, wears only Khadi, never speaks English and is considered a fanatic by his friends. But Rangamma admires him and everything he does. Her happiness in working for him is evident:
Never had Rangamma looked so healthy and serene as she did then. She was nearing forty, but she looked hardly thirty three, and there was not a gray hair on her head (144).
She works hard, and even goes to meetings with Sankar. The first time she speaks in public, she is nervous, but she learns to “speak like a man" (145). She is in the forefront during the picketing of the toddy shops, and is jailed. We see no more of her, though it is said by all that, even when she comes out of prison, she will still be for the Mahatma. Naturally "deferent, soft-voiced and gentle-gestured" (48), Rangamma can always hold her own in any crisis or argument, and has a very persuasive tongue. We have already seen how she could coax the women to learn to fight. She teaches them to be fearless, in case they have to face the policeman beatings:
Rangamma says, 'Send out rays of harmony' and we send out rays of harmony, and we say 'No, it will not be so bad after all (176)
She can win a "word-to-word fight" with Bhatta, for when he tries to dissuade her from joining Moorthy's caste-polluting activities she says:
Has the mahatma approved it? I don't think so. He always says let the castes exist, let the separate eating exist, let not one community marry with the other no, no, Bhattare, the Mahatma is not for all this pollution (44).
Yet, when Moorthy seeks refuge in her house after he has crossed a pariah's threshold, she asks him to wash himself and suggests he change his sacred thread. When he tells her this is impractical, since he has to go to their house every day, she finds a solution:
I shall at least give you a little Ganges water, and you can take a spoonful of it each time you've touched them, can't you? (107)
In spite of being attracted to the Mahatma, she is still poised halfway between the orthodox world of Brahmin ritual and the new, casteless society which Gandhi advocates. Though committed to Moorthy‘s cause says Narasimhaiah,
Even an ardent admirer like Rangamma liked him to change his sacred thread after his visit to the pariah quarters (45),
Considering that there are few women in the novel who have been accorded individual roles, this could well be the significance that Rangamma has, for she maintains a fine balance between the militant enthusiasm of the Gandhi-workers and the codes of a traditional society that holds on to its rights and privileges. The fact that she is more educated than the other village women and more exposed to the world outside through her reading, makes her worthy candidate for the leadership she assumes with such natural ease. She relinquishes this leadership, indeed, only to Ratna, her niece, who is the other woman character singled out in the novel for a special role.
Ratna, Rangamma's sister's daughter is a widow like her aunt. She too becomes actively involved in the Gandhian movement, and is a very willing volunteer, as her situation as a child widow is hateful to her. She is constantly criticised by the villagers for continuing to wear her bangles and nose-ring and ear-rings, and for wearing “her hair to the left like a concubine" (48). To make matters worse, if she was accused for behaving improperly, she would retort:
that that was nobody's business, and that if these sniffing old country hens thought that seeing a man for a day, and this when one is ten years of age, could be called a marriage, they had better eat mud and drown themselves in the river (48-49).
Bhatta, who knew Ratna as a small child, feels uneasy when he sees her "modern ways", though he really does not pay too much attention to rumours that she has been " found openly talking to Moorthy in the temple, and alone too" (49). It is only during Moorthy‘s fast that we discover how absurdly young Ratna is, and how undeserving of the unkind comments levelled at her. For when Moorthy asks her to pray for the sins of others:
She could hardly grasp his idea. She was but fifteen. Praying seemed merely to fall flat before the gods in worship (95).
Moorthy had obviously been attracted to her, but in the state of mind induced by his fasting,
Her smile did not seem to touch his heart with the delicate satisfaction as it did before (94).
He feels differently towards her now:
She seemed something so feminine and soft and distant, and the idea that he could ever think of her other than as a sister shocked him and sent a shiver down his spine (95).
Under Ratna and Rangamma, the women are cleverly assimilated into the Gandhian movement, for these two enlightened women are always available to advise and exhort their sisters.
The women have come a long way and have gained considerably in moral stature, and in their awareness of social and political reality under the circumstances, It is Pariah Rachanna's wife, Rachi, who frees the women, imprisoned in the temple after the policeman locks them in, and in the very last chapter, we see that Rachi is working in Patel Chandrayya's house, and her grand-daughter is going to marry Kotwal Kirita's son. Surely, this spells social progress.
We are not provided with accounts of their personal loves and hates except in so far as they touch the chronicle of events in Kanthapura. The three characters at the novel's centre are all unseen: they are Kenchamma, Gandhi and the spirit of Kanthapura.
Reference
---. Raja Rao. New Delhi: Arnold Heinemann, Indian Writers Series, 1973. Print.