Archetypal Village Grandmother Analysis

native aesthetic, morality, social values and systems. Rituals such as worshipping with kumkum and camphor, fasting, offering betel leaves and coconuts – these abound throughout the novel, thus highlighting the ethical sense and the human values of the villagers’ world outlook.

Then, Mercanti comments on the narrative technique used in the novel. Achakka stands up as ‘an archetypal village grandmother’ (S M: 73) to whom Rao has given a serious task of communicating the sad tale of her village. It is a unique mode of narration which weaves the facts, myths, and the political events of the village. That ultimately results into a matrix which focuses on social, cultural, and political transformation of the villagers. And the political is two-sided, with the outsider ‘colonizers’ and the internal social corruption of the village – the problems of marriage,

Due to that opportunity, Rao lived for a considerable period of time in several parts of Europe, first in France, then in England, and ultimately in USA. That itself is a propellant aspect for his creative output. Alterno believes that Raja Rao’s direct experience and assimilation of the cultures of France, England, and America are obviously visible in his works; further she says that these are “not only detectable in all his works but contribute to the enrichment and stimulation of the intellectual experience of the literary scholar who scrutinises his writing”. (L A: 1) In the course of her critical analysis of the novels of Rao, she allocates two phases of Rao’s life ‘before the meeting of guru’ and ‘after the meeting of guru’; she arguably puts that Kanthapura and Comrade Kirillov are the products of the first phase in which his existential wavering was not over. Whereas the remaining three novels are came after his meeting with his guru Sri Atmananda in 1943 when his metaphysical queries were all