THE ‘WISE OLD MAN’ OF KANTHAPURA: GANDHI AS AN ARCHETYPE

ABSTRACT In the annals of social science scholarship, there is a common tendency to perceive fiction as something belonging to a surreal world, something that has nothing to do with man's more mundane, prosaic efforts of making ends meet and surviving in everyday life. As a counterpoise to such a perception, the primary thrust of this paper will be that as a product of our intellectual and imaginative engagement, fiction tries to encapsulate the anxieties and aspirations at the core of a community's existence. It serves as an inventive terrain on which the apprehensions of an emergent nation could be voiced and contested. Identifying the interface of literature, psychology and politics, this paper explores the archetypal projection of M. K. Gandhi as the ‘wise old man' in Raja Rao's maiden novel, ‘Kanthapura' (1938). This archetype of the ‘wise old man' will be identified within the framework of Analytical Psychology as expounded by Carl Jung. The assertion here is that fictional narrative, read through the glasses of analytical psychology, can help us to discover how fiction writers conveyed their message to a society undergoing transformation - in our case an India grappling with contesting political occurrences.