Fuelled by the nationalist movement in India, collaboration and team work emerged as the new zeitgeist of literature in the 1920s. The charged climate of the decade made writers conscious of the political nature of art. As writers explored ways – often jointly – in which given cultural thresholds could be crossed, several existing ideas about literary production were questioned, chief among which was the idea of individual ownership of a literary work. An experimental enterprise of 'collaborative writing' caught the fancy of young writers from both Bengal and Odisha around this point of time in history. The period witnessed a string of collaborative novels like Baroyari (12 authors), Bhager Puja (16 authors) and Chatuskona (4 authors), which initiated a new artistic practice of collective imagining in Bangla literature. However, Odia writers of the time carried the experiment of collaborative writing further. In Basanti (1931), written by nine young Odia authors, two progressive currents, of collective composition and an agenda of reform, were made operative within a single narrative.
Literary experimentation in the 1920s was bound up with serial publication in journals. Journals such as Utkala Dipika (1866) and Utkala Sahitya (1897) provided a platform for Odia writers and were instrumental in bringing about a "Renaissance of Odia letters", as is stated in the introduction to the English translation of Basanti. It was in Utkala Sahitya that Fakir Mohan Senapati's masterpiece of social realism and satire Chha Mana Atha Guntha (Six Acres and a Third) was serialised from 1897 to 1899, before being published as a book in 1902. The same goes for the proto-feminist Basanti, which was first serialised in monthly installments in Utkala Sahitya between May 1924 and November 1926.