Before embarking on writing novels, Raja Rao explored the short story genre through a few short stories, written between 1933 and 1944. The Cow of the Barricades, a collection of a wide range of stories published by OUP Madras in 1947, gathers Rao's very first writing attempts, some of which preceding – and most importantly anticipating – the writing of his first novel Kanthapura (1938). In the Publishers' jacket of the Champak Library edition the claim that “the short stories collected, for the first time, in this volume belong to the same period of 1919- 1926” associates the collection with the time of the narrated events in Kanthapura. Exception made for A Client, which sprang out from the author's mind in his native Kannada, all stories in the collection were written in English.

The Cow of the Barricades contains nine stories: ‘Javni,’ ‘The Little Gram Shop,’ ‘The True Story of Kanakapala, Protector of Gold,’ ‘Akkayya,’ ‘Narsiga,’ ‘A Client,’ ‘In Khandesh,’ ‘Companions,’ and the eponymous ‘The Cow of the Barricades.’ All of them were previously published in various literary journals such as the American-edited Asia (‘Javni’ in 1933, ‘The True Story of Kanakapala, Protector of Gold’ in 1935, and ‘The Cow of the Barricades’ in 1938), the London-based Adelphi (‘In Khandesh’ in 1934), and the Bombay review Horizon (‘Narsiga’ in 1944).