The Evils of Colonial Rule in India
In the novel, Rao explains vividly the evils of the Red Man’s administration in India. The exploitation of Indians by the colonialists led to the formation of Gandhi’s freedom movement. In Kanthapura, Moorthy, a strong supporter of Gandhi, moves home to the remote village to mobilize people against the evils of the colonialists in their country and forms a Congress. When villagers demonstrate against the oppression of their masters in the coffee plantations, the government sends its police officers to terrorize the protesters. Many people are killed and wounded, and Moorthy is arrested alongside other freedom fighters. Throughout the novel, the reader witnesses the hardships Indians had to go through before gaining their independence. There are tortures, killings, unlawful arrests, economic oppression, political oppression, unfair working conditions, high taxes, and more—all of which inspire Gandhi and his movement, and, in the novel, the villagers of Kanthapura.
Women's Roles
Women's roles in Kanthapura center on their significance in the nationalist struggle—they march, protest, passively resist, boycott, read newspapers, and more—and how that significance is undermined by the traditional domestic, inferior role they were supposed to occupy. While the widows attain a sense of power and meaning in the movement, their own issues are ignored and they are valued more if they play their gendered role. Ultimately, they adhere to traditional patriarchal gender norms even while they demonstrate their importance to the struggle.
Education as a Powerful Tool to Fight Colonialism
Colonialists often took advantage of the ignorance of Indians to rule them, and at the beginning of the novel the people of Kanthapura are portrayed as ignorant. However, when Moorthy moves back into the village, things take a drastic turn. Moorthy is an educated youth from the city who understands how the evils of the Red Man’s administration can be fought. He educates the villagers on the evils of the colonialists, encourages their economic self-sufficiency, and organizes a Congress in the village. He and his compatriots circulate free materials to further educate the people on the objectives of the freedom movement and the importance of self-rule. It is only through educating themselves that the villagers learn what is at stake and what to do about it.
Anti-Muslim Sentiment
This is a more subtle theme (and one that isn't praiseworthy), but Rao emphasizes Hindus' belief of the inferiority of Muslims multiple times in the text. There is a conflict between Subba Chetty, the shopkeeper, and a Muslim character named Rahman Khan, the latter of whom is innocent of a perceived crime but whose symbolic incarceration, Anshuman Mondal notes, serves to "underline the anxiety in the novel in regard to Muslims." The abstemious and Gandhi-man Advocate Sankar's nearly rabid insistence on Hindu adds to this, as does the "most graphic and horrifying act of violence" in the text being that of "the rape of a Brahmin woman by a Muslim policeman."
Caste
Caste was (and still is, to an extent) a nearly immutable part of Indian society, but its rigidity and legitimacy begin to crack and falter under the teachings of Gandhi and, by extension, those of Moorthy in the novel. Though there are questions over just how far Gandhi believed the dissolution of the hard boundaries of caste should go, it is at least clear that a relaxing of the boundaries—a treating of Pariahs as actual people—was imperative to sloughing off colonial rule. There had to be unity or else the larger nationalist struggle would not succeed, and that is something Moorthy advocates to his skeptical fellow villagers.
Economic Exploitation
The story of the coolies at the Skeffington Coffee Estate is a perfect microcosm of the story of India itself under colonialism. The coolies are exploited in numerous ways: they are lied to, denied fair wages, beaten, forced to work long hours, forced to spend their money on the master's toddy, forbidden from political activism, and more. Their labor is what brings the Estate profit, but they are treated like they are nothing. Through Moorthy's teachings, the Brahmins realize that though their lives are obviously much better than those of the coolies, they still suffer under the colonial economy.
The Collective Experience
Achakka's narration is the first clue that this novel isn't going to be about just one individual and her experience with Ghandism; rather, it seeks to explore multiple voices, multiple experiences. It wants to look at a whole village's grappling with the changes sweeping the nation, because the villages are the soul of the nation, a microcosm of the nation. The only way change will happen is if people band together and see themselves collectively; one person cannot change much, but dozens, thousands, millions can.
