Significance of the title Kanthapura

 We are told in the very beginning that Kanthapura is a village in Mysore in the Province of Kara. It is situated in the valley of Himavathy. It has four and twenty houses in the Brahmin quarter; it has a Pariah - quarter, a Weavers' - quarter and a Sudra - quarter. These socio-economic divisions in a village which has in all sixty or hundred houses at once strikes one with its novelty.

In this way, by telling us of the various quarters into which the village is divided, the novelist has highlighted the fact that the Indian villages are caste-ridden and that there is no free mixing of the people even in the small and limited community of a village.

Having described the village, the novelist comes to the people. We are told of the people, their poverty, their ignorance and their petty jealousies. The villagers are depicted in their real colours. Their names are made descriptive in nature - it is a typical rural way.

They have full faith in Goddess Kenchamma, the presiding deity in the village. Kenchamma is the centre of the village, forms the still - centre of their lives and makes everything meaningful. Marriage, funeral, sickness, harvesting, arrests, release - all are watched over by Kenchamma.

It is to this remote South Indian village that there comes the Gandhi movement through Moorthy and other city boys. It is Moorthy, who organizes the Gandhi work in the village. He is indeed the life and spirit behind the movement in Kanthapura just as Gandhi was the life and spirit of the freedom struggle in India.

But very soon the people of Kanthapura as a whole are actively involved and the novel becomes an account of their suffering and their heroic sacrifice. An unequal fight it inevitably proves to be, as the Satyagrahis are maimed and broken and scattered, and a remnant reaches - after soar trials and vicissitudes - another village, Kashipura, beyond the border where they settle down. Some of the Satyagrahis - Rangamma, Ratna, Moorthy - spend an allotted span in jail.

Thus Kanthapura is not a novel dealing with the life and doings of any individual hero. It is certainly not the story of Moorthy but of the masses of the village, of their suffering, of their exile, of their momentary defeat which has in it the seeds of ultimate victory. It ends with an account of their life in Kashipura and gives us a sense of abiding fulfilment which they have attained. Hence if there is any hero in the novel, it is Kanthapura itself and its people.