Whether writing of sophisticates or peasants, Raja Rao has a style that is slow-moving and difficult, and his texts require, for the ordinary reader, many notes of explication. Nevertheless, there are passages of immense beauty in his novels, and his notes are often delightful brief essays on Indian customs, history, philosophy and religion.

Raja Rao's Kanthapura, written almost 35 years ago, has been belatedly published in the United States…. [Kanthapura] must be recommended to all interested in a sensitive and compassionate story of an Indian village during the Gandhi movement for independence, and in fact to all who have any interest in India.

The narrator is an Indian woman of the village of Kanthapura, in South India. Raja Rao sustains superbly the viewpoint, the mannerisms, the ways of thought and speech of this villager so different from himself. At the beginning of the events there are rumors of the...