Raja Rao’s Kanthapura is one of the foundational novels of Indian writing in English.

First published in 1938, the novel takes the Indian independence movement and compresses it into the life of a South Indian village, where Gandhi’s politics arrive insidiously as rumour, religious story, caste conflict, collective excitement and disruption. The village itself speaks to the reader, becoming a breathless communal voice modelled on oral storytelling, allowing myth, gossip, history and politics, all running together.

That formal choice is the real force and epic constellation of the novel. Gandhi begins to inhabit the same imaginative world as gods and epic heroes, while colonial rule is experienced through ordinary social relations—land, labour, religion, gender and caste. Rao was writing in English while deliberately bending it toward Indian rhythms and structures of speech, making Kanthapura an early and still striking experiment in what an Indian English novel could sound like.

New Directions, New York. New Directions Paperback 224; fifteenth printing. Originally published in 1938; first issued as a New Directions paperback in 1967. Moderate shelf wear, rubbing and edge wear to covers, with creasing to front cover and wear to corners, particularly upper right. Pages lightly toned but clean; binding sound. Good condition.