Politics of language use: A postcolonial study of raja Rao’s Kanthapura and Chinua Achebe’s things fall apart

Abstract

Language and empires have always gone hand in hand. The impact of language on a culture or community has been immense since time immemorial. So this paper is an attempt to look at the politics of language in literature and also a postcolonial study of Raja Rao’s Kanthapura and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Kanthapura is a novel by an Indian writer, Raja Rao. He sets his novel in the contemporary Indian society itself. We get a clear depiction of the socio political condition of India in 1938, the year in which the novel was written. While on the other hand, Things Fall Apart is a novel by a Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe written in the year 1958. He never refers to the contemporary situation of the Igbo community directly but sets his plot in the time when missionaries were arriving in different small towns of these communities to spread their own religion, Christianity.