Narrative Techniques in Raja Rao’s Kanthapura

Pages:50-52
Ashok Kumar (Department of English, M.M. P.G. College, Fatehabad, Haryana)

Raja Rao (1908-2006) is one of the triumvirates of the pioneering Indian novelists in English. His contribution to the growth of the English Novel in India is enormous. Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand and R.K. Narayan are known as “The Big Three”, an apithet coined by the noted English critic William Walse. Speaking of The Big Three, Walse Writes, “It is these three writers who defined the area in which the Indian novel was to operate. They established its assumptions; they sketched its main themes, freed the first models of its characters, and elaborated its peculiar logic. Each of them used an easy, natural idiom which was un effected by the opacity of a British inheritance. Their language has been freed of the foggy taste of Britain and transferred of to a wholly new setting of brutal heat and brilliant light.” Kanthapura was Raja Rao’s first novel in English. It was published in 1938. His other famous novels are The Serpent and the Rope (1960), Cat and Shakespeare (1965), Comgrade Kirilone (1976 etc.