FICTION
Historical romance
HIMANSU S. MOHAPATRA
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A highly readable translation of a story from early Oriya fiction.
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Padmamali; Umesh Chandra Sarkar; Translated from Oriya by Snehaprava Das and Paul St-Pierre, Indian Writers Series, Grassroots, 2005.
THE English translation of this first fruit from the late flowering tree of Oriya prose allows a peek into Oriya novel's Darwinian past. In an opening that is strikingly unusual for its time, a wealthy young man with raging hormones sees an exquisitely beautiful 16-year-old maiden, the novel's eponymous heroine, at the popular Jagara festival at Mantri.
Besotted with her, he abducts her. Another young man, alerted to his evil intention, overpowers the abductor in a tough fight and rescues the girl.
Reminiscent of the contest between Agamemnon and Achilles over Brisei at the start of The Illiad, this scene enacts for the nth time the oldest ritual relating to human mating behaviour.
There is here a thin veneer between the lust that motivates the abductor, Duryodhana, de facto chief of Nilgiri, and the love professed by Parikhsita Singh, the king of Kaptipada. Be it the sneaky fornicator or romantic lover, each is inclined to mate with this most desirable of females. The female, in turn, plays her cards astutely, choosing to bond with the male who will best secure for her offspring a head start in life. No wonder that the king comes out as a clear winner in the end.
Element of desire
Is this the stuff of romance or of novel? The question is pertinent and justifiably engages the attention of Jatindra Nayak in the foreword and Paul St-Pierre in the introduction to the book. But they neglect to explore the novelistic in their overriding concern with realism and history. For it is neither history nor the romantic happy ending that sets Padmamali, published in 1889, on the road to being a novel. It is the unleashing of the element of desire that does this.
As is to be expected, Duryodhana attempts a second abduction of Padmamali, but only to face eventual defeat and annihilation. This final confrontation between the adversaries, taking place within the larger historical frame of the invasion of Nilgiri by the King of Kaptipada, does, of course, give Padmamali the trappings of a historical romance.
The source of the novel, however, lies in the physicality of desire that the novel mobilises.
Physicality is of the essence of Duryodhana. But the love between the leading pair, though embroidered with a high-flown romantic rhetoric, is no less redolent of physical passion.
The basis of love in sexual congress is tantalisingly suggested through erotic imagery drawn from the indigenous literary traditions. Scenes abound of lovers kissing and of bodies touching and yearning to unite. Even the otherworldly Mahanta explains Duryodhana's derring-do as the pardonable error of a young man who found Padmamali's charms irresistible.
Rewriting history
Along with this shift from the soul of romance to the body of the novel, there is a rewriting of the idea of history as happening in the present and as involving flesh and blood people. Thus the novel evinces an intense interest — in a chapter titled "The News Spreads", for instance — in the way people are constituted as story-making, gossip-mongering creatures. It also alludes to the British colonial presence in Orissa in the mid-19th century, revealing it as the source of hectic transition in society, and, therefore, of a dubious modernity.
Printed by a local publisher, the highly readable English rendering shows to advantage this early Orissan twist to the Darwinian tale.
The writer is a Professor of English, Utkal University, Orissa.
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