Kanthapura: Section 5 Summary & Analysis

Achakka describes the vast Skeffington Coffee Estate, which snakes through the Western Ghats’ landscape and is steeped in local rumor; “nobody knows how large it is or when it was founded,” but there are tales about both, and it has continued to grow for years as “more and more coolies” came to farm there, “till it touched all the hills around our village.” Decrepit, miserable, starving coolies were regularly marched through Kanthapura, past the Kenchamma Temple to the Estate, by the maistri who recruited them from their dried-up, foodless villages.

At the estate, the maistri “banged the gate behind them” and brought them to the Sahib, “a tall, fat man with golden hair.” The Sahib touched seven-year-old Chenna “with the butt of his whip” and started laughing at the crying child, who cried harder and harder as the Sahib laughed harder and harder—until he suddenly brought Chenna a peppermint and explained that “everybody would get a beating when they deserved one and sweets when they worked well,” which the maistri repeated in their native language. The coolies begin worshipping the Sahib as a Maharaja, and the maistri spits in one worker’s face when she asks for pay. The maistri orders them to their huts and the Sahib offers the children candy. The women follow their children, and the maistri beats the men when they follow, too, instead driving them down to their huts at the bottom of the hill.

The coolies spend the night repairing their huts and begin cleaning their environs in the morning, but the maistri runs down and shouts at them to work. One coolie named Papamma begins to read from the Ramayana but hears a “crunch of feet;” the coolies return to work and another coolie yells that there is a snake, and the rest rush to look. Pariah Siddayya says not to worry about cobras, who are harmless unless attacked, and sits to tell the story of a snake he calls the Maharaja, which hid in the Sahib’s drawer and slithered away when the Sahib fetched his pistol.

Water snakes are harmless, Pariah Siddayya explains, but green snakes often blend in with bamboo leaves. A coolie named Sankamma once reached out and grabbed one while collecting cow-dung, but luckily it slithered away and “left a palm’s-width of poison on the ground.” The flying snakes are “another monster,” although they prefer cardamom to coffee and have killed many a “cardamom-garden coolie.” Just the other day, coolie Ramayya was delivering the maistri’s bicycle via a mountain road and ran over a cobra by mistake—he fled, and so did the cobra. “Never,” Siddayya assures the coolies, “has a cobra bitten an innocent man.”

“Chennayya’s Dasappa” is the only one who has died by cobra bite—six months after he overconfidently “poked and poked” his stick into a cobra’s hole, one slithered into his hut and bit him, but spared his family. Siddayya continues telling stories and watching out for the maistri as the coolies chew tobacco and betel leaves. Suddenly, without a sound, “the maistri’s cane has touched” three of them. Everyone goes back to work until nightfall, and then again in the morning.

The coolies perspire endlessly in the heavy afternoon sun, and suddenly “a gurgle and grunt” emanates from the trees, growing to “swallow up the whole sky” and startle animals throughout the valley. “The earth itself seems to heave up and cheep in the monsoon rains,” soaking the coolies and surprising those who are new to the mountains.

“Three nights and four days” later, when the rain stops, everyone returns to work beside three children and two women who get a high fever that goes down the next morning, but they still feel dizzy and nauseated. Siddayya remarks that this fever is common, and people can even work with it—but they could not, and the Sahib gives them pills that Siddayya says not to take, for they work in the Sahib’s country “but he does not know our country, does he?”

One of the ill asks who the local goddess is and then makes a small charm to Kenchamma; she wakes up without fever, but one of the children gets worse and worse despite the offering. Madanna, the child’s father, worries that if he uses the pills then “Kenchamma would not forgive him.” The child becomes delirious, the coolies call the Sahib, and the child dies in the Sahib’s arms. The Sahib whips Madanna and makes everyone take six pills a day. Some agree, but others throw them away. The southwest rain goes and the northeast wind comes, “whilst the fevers still came and went” and many more coolies, including Madanna’s second child, pass away.

Pariah Rangayya wants them to make off with their money and start their own farms down the valley, but Siddayya laughs him off, for “he knew that when one came to the Blue Mountain one never left it.” In part, this is because they drink much of their money away with the “white frothy toddy” and spend the rest on “marriages and deaths and festivals and caste-dinners” and finer food and fuel and livestock.

In ten years nobody has gone back; the old Sahib died and was been replaced by his nephew, the new Sahib, who has brought more coolies but treats them kindly—except that the women “know they have to go away” to spend their nights with him, and know that their husbands and fathers will lose their salaries if they refuse to send their female family members. As a brahmin, Seetharam refuses to send his daughter, and the new Sahib shoots him in the stomach. The court orders the Sahib to pay Seetharam’s family, which he never does, and then “the Red-Man’s Court forgave him.” But the coolies now know that “he’ll never touch a brahmin girl” and he barely uses violence to coerce any of them anymore.

When Badè Khan came to the Estate, the new Sahib figured he would be useful. In fact, the brahmin clerks Gangadhar and Vasudev ignore the policeman and the rest of the coolies follow suit—they decide to help the pariahs learn to read and write, and there is nothing Badè Khan can do about it, for “what is a policeman before a Gandhi’s man?”