Salty Oriya: The price of a plot

Chha Mana Atha Guntha (Six Acres and a Third) by Fakir Mohan Senapati, Penguin Modern Classics 2006

The 19th century Oriya novelist Fakir Mohan Senapati was, at least in his fiction, a most oblique writer — he hardly said or meant anything in a straightforward way. Much of his work is ironical and satirical, and of course irony and satire work through indirection, by way of the meaningful glance rather than the plainspoken word. Irony can often be applied too thickly, too predictably, and then it becomes as unsubtle as the more homespun narrative mode it disdains. Thankfully, this is not the case with Senapati: he always worked with a light and delicate hand.

At one point in Senapati's newly translated novel Chha Mana Atha Guntha (Six Acres and a Third), the narrator, in one of many instances in which he directly addresses the reader, notes that "unpleasant truths are better left unspoken; in other words, we are forced to forget half the truth and tell you the other half." This might serve as a loose definition of satire, which tells the truth by denying the truth. When Senapati describes the greedy ways of his hero, the venal zamindar Ramachandra Mangaraj, defending him all the while by saying that he is really a "kind and pious man" who is slandered by his subjects, Mangaraj is exposed more effectively than a simple and uninflected chronicle of his evils could have managed. The narrator is, in effect, repaying Mangaraj with the same duplicity that Mangaraj himself practices on those around him — he has a friendly hand on Mangaraj's shoulder, even while simultaneously winking at the reader, confident that "for intelligent people, hints usually suffice". This jaunty line of attack is Senapati's way of pointing to unpleasant truths in a way that also gives the reader pleasure.

Chha Mana Atha Ghunta was written in 1902; at this point, the novel in India was about four decades old. The novel form was a legacy of colonial rule, and most of its initial practitioners belonged to the new class of Indians who had, after the implementation of Lord Thomas Macaulay's Minute on Indian Education, received an education in English and gained exposure to Western art forms. (In 1864, the young Bankimchandra Chatterjee, as a district magistrate in Khulna in Bengal, wrote his first novel, Rajmohan's Wife, in English.)

Senapati, like Bankimchandra and many other early Indian novelists, had some connection with the business of government, and therefore to British rule. He was born Braja Mohan Senapati, but when a mysterious illness threatened to take his life when still a child, his grandmother took him to a dargah and promised to offer him as a fakir if he lived. The boy recovered, but the grandmother was loath to give him up, and instead he was renamed Fakir Mohan and made a mendicant for eight days every Mohurrum. Later, Senapati worked as a schoolteacher and a dewan, or administrator, on feudatory estates. Set in a feudal setting and concerning a land dispute, Six Acres and a Third obviously has its roots in the author's own experiences. While the work is recognisably a novel, it is less a copy of the classic Victorian novel than one that has been 'Indianised'. Its plot is not linear, its methods of characterisation are fruitfully eccentric, and its storyteller's tone seems to fuse the form of traditional novelistic narrative with older Indian narrative traditions.

The plot revolves around Ramachandra Mangaraj's attempt to appropriate a village peasant's verdant smallholding, six-and-a-third acres in area. Senapati's is a moral tale: Mangaraj's devious stratagems are successful, but soon his deeds return to haunt him, and he falls spectacularly from grace, losing every piece of his wealth. This plot outline makes the novel sound unsophisticated, but its richness comes from the subtlety of Senapati's prose and also the fact that he was a happily digressive writer. In Six Acres and a Third, the reader will find long sections on the place of the temple and the pond in village life, extended character portraits such as the one of Mangaraj's shrewish maid Champa, and meditations upon human nature and Indian history. The narrative works simultaneously on multiple levels. "What do these six acres and a third represent?" the narrator asks towards the end of the book. It is mostly a rhetorical question, for we already know how much such a plot of land can represent. Senapati prods and pokes at the injustices of the zamindari system, as well as the depredations of British colonialism, the suffocating hierarchies and prejudices of caste, and, more generally, at man's capacity for inhumanity to other men.

But the truth is — and this is what is most charming about Senapati — the author was really an incorrigible ironist. If his novel persuades us about anything, it is about the ubiquity of human vanity and frailty. The tone of narrative is that of the village gossip — sly, garrulous, conspiratorial, and full of hints, winks and insinuations. At one point, while describing the representations of some mythological scenes in Mangaraj's courtyard, the narrator remarks, "Somewhere in Rajasthan, on seeing the image of a nude woman, Tod Sahib came to the conclusion that all women in ancient India went about naked." ('Tod Sahib' referred to Colonel James Tod, the author of a widely-read book called Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, often mined by Indian novelists for historical material.) On another occasion, we are told about the village priest, a greatly respected man who runs the shrine of the village goddess, Budhi Mangala. "The priest was very highly regarded in the village, particularly by the women," the narrator notes. "The goddess frequently appeared to him in his dreams and talked to him about everything." That 'about everything' — as if the goddess personally reports to the priest — is a damning phrase.

Cranes and kingfishers

One strand of thought in Six Acres and a Third that is particularly striking from our 21st century point of view is Senapati's response to the British — their reshaping of Indian civilisation, the adoption of new systems of government and jurisprudence, the discourse of Western rationalism and scientific progress, and the missionary zeal of Christianity. Senapati's reading of these matters is quite complex. On the one hand, he makes fun of the assumptions of racial superiority held by the British. "Today, in the 19th century, the sciences enjoy great prestige, for they form the basis of all progress," he declares. "See, the British are white-skinned, whereas Oriyas are dark in complexion. This is because the former have studied the sciences, whereas the latter have no knowledge of these." And so, once the Oriyas learn science, they too will become white-skinned, and then the British will have neither an intellectual nor racial basis for lording over them.

But elsewhere the author chastises his own countrymen for the weakness of their opposition to the outsiders. "Historians say it took Clive less time to get the Bengal Subedari from the emperor of Delhi" the author remarks, "than it takes one to buy and sell a donkey." He also worries about the manner in which the new class of English-educated Indians had uncritically adopted Western assumptions: "Ask a new babu his grandfather's father's name," he sniffs, "and he will hem and haw, but the names of the ancestors of England's Charles the Third will readily roll off his tongue."

Senapati's prose is strongly metaphorical. Indeed, his metaphors are often striking not just for their vividness and specificity — water lilies fold themselves up and hide during the day "like young Hindu daughters-in-law", while cows chew their cud "like baishnavas, moving their mouths as if they were repeating the divine name". But his narrative is also notable for the ways in which small details suddenly take on grand meanings. At one point, speaking of the birds found near the village pond, the narrator notes how the cranes churn the mud "like lowly farmhands" looking for fish all day long, while kingfishers appear suddenly, conduct swift raids, and gorge themselves on the stolen pickings. "Oh, stupid Hindu cranes," he cries, "look at these English kingfishers…"

The great virtue of this new translation (carried out jointly by Rabi Shankar Mishra, Satya P Mohanty, Jatindra K Nayak and Paul St-Pierre) is that it recaptures the music of Senapati's wonderfully salty and colloquial Oriya in a limber and mellifluous English. Nayak has already translated sections of Senapati's autobiography, and perhaps the entire book will be widely available in an English translation soon. In the meantime, we have this piquant, clever and gossipy book to savour.