A signature novel
HIMANSU S. MOHAPATRA
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Its iconic status as the first modern Oriya novel rests not on the plot, but on the manner of its telling.
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Six Acres and a Third (Chha Mana Atha Guntha); Fakir Mohan Senapati; Translated from the Oriya by Rabi Shankar Mishra, Satya P. Mohanty, Jatindra K. Nayak and Paul St-Pierre; Introduced by Satya P. Mohanty; Penguin Books India, 2006, pp. 222, Price. Rs. 250.
RAMACHANDRA MANGARAJ, a wily village zamindar, eyes a small plot of land belonging to a weaver couple. Conspiring together with his concubine, the priest and the barber, he exploits their simple trust in the village goddess's power to bless them with children if they would build her a temple. He defrauds them of their six acres and a third, ruining them in the process. Barely six months later he is himself ruined through a concatenation of events, losing his estate to his lawyer Ram Ram Lala and eventually his life. This is the simple tale told in Senapati's novel, published in 1902. Its iconic status as the first modern Oriya novel rests not on this plot, however, but on the manner of its telling.
The realism of Chha Mana Atha Guntha constitutes something of a paradigm shift in Orissa, having more to do with linguistic nationalism than with social documentation. New facts did, of course, emerge into literary visibility as the focus shifted to the prosaic aspects of colonial Oriya society such as land, revenue, rent, money and law. But the engine of this profound transformation, as graphically illustrated by Senapati's novel, was a beleaguered sense of Oriya identity seeking expression through a resurgent Oriya language.
The relative slightness of the story drew commentaries from the start, although not always in the right spirit. The author's son, Mohini Mohan Senapati, in his 1928 introduction to the novel, questioned the moral overtones surrounding the story of crime and divinely ordained punishment. He endorsed the social Darwinism of the text as represented by the wily Mangaraj and Lala. He did not, however, recognise the fundamental role played by the garrulous and crafty narrator who continually undercuts such colonial imports as social Darwinism and capitalistic individualism and such native practices as racism and casteism which colonialism reinforces.
To read the novel is to engage with the narrator's shifting roles as advocate, as tout and as trickster, with this multi-voiced discourse, which lies at the metaphorical heart of the novel. Here, for example, is the narrator reporting from the court room:
The Sessions Court in Cuttack was very crowded. ... The judge Sahib was hurriedly writing a letter, which began, "My dear Lady." Whenever a criminal case was scheduled to be heard, the Sahib would open an English newspaper and read it, or leisurely write a letter, leaving everything else to the peshkar. ...
But today the Sahib was doing everything himself, because today's main witness was an Englishman; he would also have to write out the judgment in English. It was as if everything in the court today was Englished.
But we are Oriyas, and so are our readers, and the printing presses here have only Oriya type. Thus, we have translated everything into Oriya.
The passage offers a taste of how realism and Oriya identity are so compacted as to make Six Acres and a Third a signature novel for Orissa, as also a prime candidate for an India-centric postcolonial project. The good news is, the present translation, the latest in a line of four, has seen to it that this `Oriyanising' is not lost in the process of translating things back into English.
The writer is a Professor of English, Utkal University, Orissa
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