The Oriya Renaissance, ‘authentic and truthful’

The Oriya writer Jagannath Prasad Das is an extremely versatile figure, known for his poetry, plays and short stories. In 2006, he received the prestigious Saraswati Samman, an annual literary award for works published in any Indian language, for his book of verse, Parikrama. But for many, Das's opus is the voluminous prose work Desa Kala Patra (Place, time, identity), published to critical acclaim in 1992. Since then, and including in this new English-language translation, the book is being revered as a novel – a work of fiction. In the opinion of this reviewer, this is not an accurate representation of the merit of Das's work as a whole..In literary matters, the British critic Terry Eagleton once said, 'Breeding in this respect may count for a good deal more than birth.' Even if a particular work is not considered literature at the outset, it can come to acquire such an identity through a process of critical grooming. A quick look at the history of the novel aptly illustrates this point. Works such as Tom Jones and Robinson Crusoe, which have significant historical aspects, have tended to be regarded as pure fiction – that is, aesthetic artefacts – by critics troubled with the historical aspects of these complex pieces of writing. At play here is a dominant critical practice that insists on literary 'purity'..The same can certainly be said of Desa Kala Patra, a retelling of the history of mid-19th-century Orissa under colonial rule, often using recycled material: historical records, journalistic writings and fragments of autobiographies of Oriya writers. Since its publication, the work has seen a slow transmutation into fiction. The early reviews of the book engaged the author in a debate on the veracity of the accounts – often of a negative and scandalous nature – about the book's historical personages. Treating it as fiction thus came in handy, helping to soften the harsh glare of facts. This process was facilitated by the absence of bibliographic citations, which admittedly the book cries out for, steeped as it is in historical records and documents. With the publication of this translation, that process is perhaps now complete, the work is emphatically termed a novel. Unfortunately, this label will now be retrospectively applied to the original, which in fact was manifestly a work of cultural history, having been billed (in Oriya) on the dust jacket as 'an authentic and truthful record of a crucial period in the history of Orissa'..It is true that history, with its narratives and plots, has a structure very similar to fictional works. If the historian Hayden White is to be believed, the writing of history is regulated at a fundamental level by the tropes of literature, such as tragedy, comedy, romance and satire. The distinguishing point, however, is that a historical work is grounded in facts in a way that a novel is not, even if a work of fiction draws heavily from recorded events. Interestingly, A Time Elsewhere and Those Days (1997) – the latter the English translation of the Bangla novel Sei Samay (1981) by Sunil Gangopadhyay – illustrate these opposite trends, although both recount the colonial encounter in their respective societies (Orissa and Bengal) during the 19th century..Both works are concerned with chronicling periods of social ferment and intellectual renaissance. But Gangopadhyay casts events in the form of stories, peopled with characters with whom he takes the fiction-writer's liberties. Thus, Those Days fictionalises history, using, as the book's blurb puts it, 'lovingly reconstructed details' and looking for an appropriate symbolisation of the transition from purana (old) to nutan (new). Nabin, the main character, is without a historical counterpart, unlike numerous other characters in the book. But it is into Nabin rather than the historical figures (such as Michael Madhusudan Dutta or Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar or David Hare) that the distilled essence of the period is packed..A Time Elsewhere, on the other hand, in trying to chronicle a period of 50 years starting from 1866, stays close to the facts and empirical data. The book starts from where Gangopadhyay's book leaves off, it being historically acknowledged that the so-called Bengal Renaissance preceded a similar awakening in Orissa. With no consensus on an Oriya Renaissance, however, A Time Elsewhere chooses a documentary-style presentation, giving the reader well-known instances of the Oriya nationalist awakening, particularly the rise of print literacy and an Oriya middle class; thereafter, Das leaves the reader to put two and two together. There is very little in A Time Elsewhere that cannot be traced back to recorded history and, hence, nothing much in the nature of a symbolic or mythic resonance. Indeed, there are only a few significant fictitious insertions in Das's narrative – and even these derive, by the author's own admission, from Bengal Peasant Life (1874) Lal Behari Day's English-language novel about a quintessential Bengal village..History as newspaperTo approach A Time Elsewhere as a novel is to undermine its specific strength. Indeed, the book should be hailed as Oriya literature's debut work of narrative non-fiction. Das presents his rich material through a series of suggestive narrative links and nudges, thus blending reportage and narrative in a restrained manner, giving a newspaper-like feel of a half-century of Orissa's history. Interspersed in the narrative are reports and anecdotes about events such as the cataclysmic Orissa famine of 1866, as well as about the personalities who were involved in the scripting of Oriya nationalism. The two main narrative strands are the 1866 famine and the fate of the kingdom of Puri (the seat of the Oriya deity of Jagannath), especially the question of succession to the throne. These two narratives provide the framework for numerous other episodes culled from the history of mid-19th-century Orissa. Das exploits the storytelling potential of news, reports, letters and petitions to the fullest, as if in confirmation of Karl Marx's dictum that the 19th century instructed us in perceiving the world like a newspaper..The colonial encounter in Orissa was not as dramatic as one would expect, with the Oriya surrendering fairly uneventfully to the British in 1803. It is difficult to forget the Oriya novelist Phakirmohan Senapati's jibe at the larger event of the East India Company's takeover of India in his novel Chhamana Athaguntha (published in English as Six Acres and a Third): 'Historians say that it took Clive less time to get the Bengal Subedari [which included Orissa] from the emperor of Delhi than it takes one to buy and sell a donkey.' This seems to point to a story of collusion rather than resistance. Yet Das's book sketches a picture of the growing strength and mobility of the Oriya people within the accepted supremacy of the colonial rulers..This is not to say that the encounter was not traumatic for the people of Orissa. The famine of 1866, a tragedy resulting directly from the British administration's gross apathy and mismanagement, decimated a third of Orissa's population. Das's reportage style reinforces this reality, with the famine occupying centre stage for much of his book. A Time Elsewhere also shows – again through a combination of reportage, anecdote and narrative – how Oriya society fought back, using literacy, logical argument and technology, all tools acquired from the English themselves. As aptly summarised by the translator, Jatindra K Nayak, in his introductory note:.For its survival, the traditional social order of Orissa had to adapt painfully to the harsh reality of colonial rule, and to forge new techniques of survival and resistance. A newly emergent Oriya intelligentsia, themselves a product of the education system introduced by the colonial rulers, now took it upon themselves to apply these new techniques. It is not without significance that in the famine year the first printed Oriya weekly, the Utkal Dipika (Lamp of Orissa) was launched by Gourishankar Ray … What the magazine offered to the devitalized Oriya society in 1866 was the possibility of cultural resistance to British rule. .The book scrupulously documents the multifaceted nature of this resistance. This includes, for instance, Phakirmohan Senapati's use of the vernacular in his prose fiction; Madhusudan Das's legal skills as manifested in his winning, on behalf of the queen of Puri, the custody battle over the Jagannath temple in the colonial court; Radhanath Ray's modernisation of the idiom of poetry through cross-fertilisation of the Eastern and the Western literary traditions; Pathani Samanta's indigenous route into astronomy; and Pyari Mohan Acharya's writing of a history of Orissa. Perhaps Das's most important contribution is in contextualising these achievements, so that we also have a sense of what they were like as private individuals. For instance, we learn of Senapati behaving like a stooge by misrepresenting the natives before the British administrator; Radhanath Ray's forays into commerce (prescribing his poetical writings as textbooks) and into the slough of adultery, and Pathani Samanta clinging to bizarre notions of purity and pollution by insisting on washing himself clean after the English commissioner shakes his hand..By the same token, the British administrators are given credit where it is due, as when the debauched king of Puri, Dibyasingh Dev, is sentenced to deportation for life for ordering the brutal murder of a holy man. A Time Elsewhere, then, catches mid-19th-century Orissa whole and on an epic scale, matching the original in translation – and bringing the past closer to home..~ Himansu S Mohapatra is a professor of English at Utkal University, Bhubaneswar.