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Literary Review
TRANSLATION
Connecting states
HIMANSU S. MOHAPATRA,
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The book is a key to a nuanced understanding of a chapter in 19th century Orissa’s social history.
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Sketches of Orissa; Jatindra Mohan Singh, Translated from Bengali by Himansu Sekhar Sarkar, Rupantar, Rs. 180.
This competent English rendering of the book, first published in 1902, is indeed very welcome. It gives a non-Bengali, especially Oriya readership, access to a human document that was genuinely conceived as a bridge-building measure. In addition, it is a key to a nuanced understanding of a chapter in the social history of Orissa in the 19th century.
The book’s method is a blend of still photography and motion picture. The sketches of facts, people and places are like the stills. A whole portrait gallery is on offer here. Character types ranging from the ryot at the bottom of the social pyramid through the money lender and the zemindar in the middle to the king at the top are drawn with a fair amount of accuracy.
In his/her station
Each character is given within its particularising social and cultural matrix and in terms of the objects that metonymically attach to it. Thus the ryot is shown with his ploughshare and bullocks, the moneylender with his writing instruments and gomasta (accountant), the zemindar in his gar (country house) and the king in his killa (palace).
The womenfolk, depending upon their stations in life, have been sketched in either with the bare markers of their womanhood, bangles, or with extras such as the maid, the pan and the “palanquin” thrown in for good measure. A seemingly otherworldly touch to the proceedings is imparted by the picture of maths and mahants.
Fairy-tale end
The book portrays two such disadvantaged social groups, the ordinary ryot (Mani Nayak) and the woman (the zemindar’s noble and hapless daughter, Shobhabati). The narrative movement is generated by their being brought almost to the point of disaster through the machination of the moneylender and the unwelcome suitor. While this has roots in reality, as the contemporaneous Oriya novel Chha Mana Atha Guntha graphically reveals, the fairy tale-like ending in which the son of a king, English-educated and fair-minded, steps in to marry Shobhabati and to save Mani Nayak is clearly a wish-fulfilling fantasy.
The book can be said to be an implicit refutation of the infamous thesis advanced in 19th century by some Bengali intellectuals that Oriya lacked an identity of its own. By providing portraiture in place of caricature, Sketches of Orissa ranks among the significant early attempts to connect the two contiguous states that were locked in conflict.
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