Reclaiming Indigenous Epistemologies: Indian Knowledge Systems and Decolonial Thought in Raja Rao’s Kanthapura

Abstract

This paper explores the depiction of indigenous epistemologies in Raja Rao's Kanthapura (1938) and asserts that the novel is a groundbreaking literary act that serves as a beginning in decolonial thinking and the assertion of Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) in Indian writing in English. Based on the decolonial theories of Aníbal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Gauri Viswanathan, as well as the framework of IKS which is highlighted in India's National Education Policy 2020, the study investigates the novel's narrative form, linguistic experimentation, Gandhian philosophy, mythology, ritual practices and communal knowledge production by doing a close study of the text. It argues that Achakka's oral, digressive and devotional narration offers a critique of the linear conventions of the Western narrative and legitimizes stories, memory, embodied ritual and spiritual experience as kinds of knowledge. The study also shows how English is Indianized by Rao with vernacular rhythms, idiomatic structures, and culturally embedded expressions, which turns the colonial language into one of epistemic resistance. The use of the concepts of satyagraha, ahimsa, swaraj and swadeshi in the novel is read as an indigenous ethical-political system that combines spirituality, social responsibility and anticolonial struggle. It also explores the issues of subalternization of indigenous traditions, especially those that incorporate a caste hierarchy, gender inequality and limited subaltern voices. The novel, then, continues to be relevant in the contemporary debates on epistemic justice, curriculum decolonization, and embedding of IKS in higher education.