J. P. Das: A Life in Literature

Sailen Routray

“Looking for myself/ I know I‟ll meet you some day,/” (page - 28)

The writing of this review is, in some sense, a hopeless exercise. Reviewing any omnibus is
fraught with problems these days, with the shrinking space available for book reviews in most
periodicals. But this is especially true if one is reviewing the work of someone like J. P. Das in the form of an omnibus.

There are very few areas of modern Odia literature that Das has not contributed to, and there are very few genres that he has not experimented with. He is one of the most critically acclaimed poets of his generation, and his output is prodigious. His collected poems (in two volumes and titled 'Purbapara', published in 1995 and 1996) run to more than eight hundred pages. 

The quantity of this poetic output only marginally surpasses the startling beauty of the ways in which his poetry stretches the Odia language and makes it dance. His output in terms of short stories is only slightly less voluminous. His contributions to this genre in Odia literature are likely to prove more enduring than his explorations in poetry.

He has written plays and non-sense verse for children; he authored one of the most well-regarded 'novels' in the language –– Desa Kala Patra (DKP). He continues to translate Odia texts into English on a regular basis, and is one of the most accomplished historians of Orissan art. 

Although he has done most of his art historical work in English rather than in Odia, his monographs on pata paintings and on chitra pothi (illustrated palm leaf manuscripts) still define the state of the art in the field. In a career spanning around sixty years (albeit with a short break in between) his work has carved out an enviable niche for itself in Odia literature.

All the genres that Das so deliciously bends to his own purposes are the high modernist ones; prose poems, short stories, plays suited for the proscenium theatre, a 'novel' based on meticulous research, monographs on Odia art forms (in English), and nonsense verse for children that is strangely British (although resonant with and evocative of Odia folk songs and riddles) and relatively easy to translate into English. 

Therefore, the entire oeuvre of Das can be seen as the culmination, the 'almost arrival,' of the process of adoption by Odia writers of the habitus of literary modernity – a process that started in the last quarter of 19th century. But this 'homemaking' is not yet complete; perhaps it can never find completion.

One finds a strange (on second thoughts, perhaps not so strange) resonance of this process in the stories by Das. A large number of his short stories, including the few included in the omnibus, are about home; the lack of one, the journeys involved in the attempts at finding one, and the ultimate ambiguities of arrival at a place that one thought was home and yet does not turn out to be even the obverse of a home – not even an exile. 

The poems of J.P. Das are encounters in serendipity, but this is a serendipity that carries with it a light stench of inevitability (e.g. – “In my flight/ to the future,/if you trap me/in the memories/of our past,/ from which/ there is no escape,/who shall I pledge/my present to?” - page 33).

But stories by Das are about the inverse of inevitability. In many ways his stories remind one of the stories in the volume 'Dubliners' by James Joyce. One feels that one is led by one's nose towards some climax as in an O. Henry story. But there is no climax towards the end; in fact there is no anti-climax either. 

But the stories are not unsatisfactory. In fact they are deeply soothing. They challenge our received ideas about 'proper' narrative structure, and help us interrogate the homes that we make in stories and the homes stories make for us.

Derek in the story titled 'Renunciation' goes back to his home in some American small town after a series of disappointments and a very inconsequential accident in small town India. In 'The Pukka Sahib' Tripathy Sahib slowly slips into dementia and incorrigible rural habits after a lifetime of self-enforced Anglophilic sophistication. The story 'Our Daughter's Happiness' ends with Amaresh's sleeplessness, after his daughter finally leaves for the US to join her husband after marriage. But considering all the anxieties prior to the event, this departure and the sleeplessness are non-events.

Nothing much happens in the stories; but in their slightly awry descriptions of our muddled lives, these narratives end up functioning as a cartographic exercise of our everyday existence. These stories are, therefore, about the contingent nature of the human exercises of home-making, and the disappointments that are inherent in such fabrications.

Apart from a being an accomplished poet and story-teller for adults, Das is one of the very few popular poets of his generation who has also written verses/poetry for children. The translations included in this volume are extremely well-crafted, are able to recreate the playfulness of the Odia originals, and are well-selected. But the same statement cannot be made about the translations of the poems and their selection without some reservations.

This volume is an important addition to the growing, albeit slowly, volume of Odia literature available in English translations. Paul St-Pierre must be congratulated for editing a comprehensive volume. As must be evident by now, my chief and perhaps the only problem with this book is its size. It should have been at least twice its present length.

In a similar vein it must be observed that only ten pages from Das's book 'A Time Elsewhere' (ATE) - English translation by Jatindra K. Nayak of the Odia text 'Desa Kala Patra' by J.P. Das, and published by Penguin India in 2010 -  have been included in this omnibus. 

ATE covers five decades (the period from 1859 to 1907), and narrates the first stirrings and the subsequent attempts at creating Odia nationhood from a debris of wanton destruction perpetrated by marauding Marathas and the subsequent British negligence and mis-governance. 

The book has an epic sweep. It is almost a textbook illustration of how to go about producing hybrid texts of history and fiction that are neither historical fictions nor fictionalized histories but straddle the thin borderlands between the two. After Surendra Mohanty‟s fictionalized, and somewhat controversial, two-volume biography of the Odia nationalist leader Madhusudan Das, DKP remains unsurpassed as a 'documentary fiction' text. 

It occupies an iconic position in the history of Odia 'fiction,' and ATE is an engaged piece of translation of this text. The ten-page extract from ATE included in the Omnibus is not adequate. This is not a criticism of the particular ten pages reproduced in the omnibus. This is true of any ten-page extract from ATE. One needs a much longer extract to be able get a flavor of the canvas of the multiple narratives as well as of the masterful strokes that Das uses to create this painting of 'those days.'

The book deserved a better cover design. The omnibus does not have a bibliography of works by Das. This is urgently needed. Also, the original dates of publications of most of the pieces and extracts from the various books are not mentioned. The inclusion of the first publications dates and details about the original volumes from which individual pieces and extracts have been taken would have made this volume much more attractive to students of literature, especially those of comparative literature. The introduction to the omnibus is very short (six pages), and does not provide us with the relevant details about the life and times of the author. 

Despite these reservations, the volume under review brings together the diverse strands of the works of one of the most important living writers in Odia. One cannot thank the editor and the publisher enough for making this possible.

“Your house is all I have/movable or immovable,/and I know I am destined,/like an accursed
soul,/to circle it round and round/now and for ever./” (page 49). 

Bibliographic Details: J. P. Das. J. P. Das Omnibus (Edited by Paul St-Pierre). New Delhi: Har-Anand Publications Pvt. Ltd. 347 pages. Price Rs 695.

Note: A slightlly different version of this piece was first published in 2012 in the magazine Indian Literature.