Kandan The Patriot

Description

Patriot meant a lot to patriotic Indians in south India, voicing as it did their feelings in the midst of striving for independence. Freedom movements need powerful literature—songs and stories both—to help people envision what liberty means, and what it costs in terms of self-sacrifice. Literature can hold up an inspiring image of beauty toward which people may grope and strive to realize. As epics inspired devotion for many centuries, a modern novel such as Kandan could dramatize ideals and set standards toward which people could strive in the political arena. Kandan is dedicated to “the unknown volunteers in India’s fight for freedom,” the patriots of local life. It has been called a manifesto of the Indian nationalist cause in the form of a story. As K. S. Venkataramani writes in Kandan, “Freedom riding on the crest of widespread poverty has ever been the most potent cause of political cyclones.” Kandan grew out of the experiences of Indians reaching for independence, and it was one of the works which helped the cause go forward and succeed. Kandan provided needed impetus for certain people to become more seriously involved in India’s Freedom movement, just as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin gave a push to the fervency of the anti-slavery movement in America. A novel portraying familiar characters enthusiastically engaged in a noble cause can often make a greater impact for activist movements than pamphlets and poems of reveries. Venkataramani offered readers a rural nationalist English-style novel about Indian people of his times, engaged by their highest hopes, temptations, struggles and comraderies. While Subramania Bharati (1882-1921) the great Tamil poet of the age, with his poignant lyrical call to nationalism and Indian culture wrote poems and songs which could stir Tamil pride and patriotism, Venkataramani was a storyteller whose novel unfolded an inspiring vision of how people, both rich and poor, could work together for a high aim.