The Foreword to Kanthapura and the Features o...

The Foreword to Kanthapura and the Features of Indian Literature in English

Author Name : Dr. Nilanshu Kumar Agarwal

Meenakshi Mukherjee has outlined the importance of Raja Rao’s Foreword to Kanthpura in the field of Indian English literature thus: “In 1938 a young Indian writer living in France wrote an experimental novel in English which carried a succinct Foreword of three paragraphs. The Foreword seems to have been an early diagnosis of the theoretical issues involved in this bicultural act (166).” Indian writing in English is bicultural, as the author has to pass through the tremors of expressing indigenous Indian sensibility in a foreign language, which can hardly capture the native hue of the civilization. Raja Rao writes in his celebrated foreword: “One has to convey in a language that is not one’s own the spirit that is one’s own. One has to convey the various shades and omissions of a certain thought-movement that looks maltreated in an alien language. I use the word ‘alien’, yet English is not really an alien language to us. It is the language of our intellectual make-up…but not of our emotional make-up. We are all instinctively bilingual, many of us writing in our own language and in English. We can not write like the English. We should not. We cannot write only as Indians. We have grown world as part of us. Our method of expression has to be a dialect which will some day prove to be as distinctive and colourful as the Irish or the American (5).”