In 1938, Raja Rao (1908–2006) published his short story “The Cow of the Barricades,” a revisiting of the themes taken up in his most famous novel, Kanthapura (1938), where Rao describes the effects of Gandhian politics on a small village in Uttar Kanara. Rao had for a long time been a commentator and writer on contemporary developments in India for English language audiences, and the story was picked up in the New York-based journal, Asia and the Americas. In the short, imagistic and fabular narrative, life in an unnamed village is made difficult by the violent repression of Indian National Congress-led boycott activities by Indian soldiers “from Peshawar and Pindi” who are working for “the red man's Government” (Rao 1947, 177). When workers at a nearby mill decide to help, they immediately come into conflict with the president of the local Congress committee, a Gandhian named “the Master,” who characteristically recommends a nonviolent strategy for resistance. The workers want to build a barricade in order to fend off the coming attack: