Kalikata as Stage and School

Odia Lives in a Colonial Metropolis

Sailen Routray

A Map of Kalikata Published in the Year 1842
Photo Credit - Wikimedia Commons

Like a large number of Odias, I too have a personal connection with Kalikata. Odias have pronounced and continue to pronounce Calcutta/Kolkata as Kalikata, and since Kalikata is as much an Odia city as it is a Bengali, Bihari or a Marwari one, I’ll continue to refer to it by the name given to it by generations of Odias, migrant or otherwise. 

My great-grandfather, Balakursna Routray, from the village Balabhadrapur in Cuttack district, was a petty trader, and had a grocery shop somewhere in Kalikata; where exactly in the metropolis I have no idea, since my grandfather passed away when I was very young, and my grandmother who was nearly a hundred years old when I became curious in such affairs had very little recollection of this connection. But around the time of independence the business suffered a decline, and my family reverted back to being a purely farming one.

My family is not unique; in the same way that these days almost every middleclass Odia family has a family member working in a metropolitan Indian city such as Delhi, Bambei (the Odia name for Mumbai), Bangalore or Mandraj (this is how Odias choose to call Chennai), for at least six generations of Odias across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Kalikata was the place to go try one’s fortunes – to seek a livelihood or an education – and to escape from the apparent placid and hidebound villages and towns of Orissa. 

Kalikata was the prototypical colonial metropolis – the capital of British India till 1911, and the second city of the empire where the sun never set. For most Odias, the ‘contagion’ of modernity, for the longest possible time, owed its origins to the hothouse of Kalikata. The creation of modern selfhood, thus, for Orissa, often came with a Bengali impress.

In this context, the book under review, A world elsewhere: images of Kolkata in Oriya autobiographies, an edited volume of English translations of extracts from Odia autobiographies that provide images of Kalikata, assumes importance. The book is an outcome of a workshop conducted under the aegis of the project titled Translating Orissa of Utkal University, Bhubaneswar. 

This volume contains translations of fifteen extracts from Odia autobiographies that provide us with a panorama of images of/from Kalikata, mostly from the twentieth century. These autobiographies have been carefully chosen, and their writers range from politicians and students to a theatre person and a bibliophile. As a result, we get a range of impressions of Odia migrants in the city.

One of the most interesting extracts is from the autobiography of the legendary Odia theatre person Baisnaba Pani, and has been ably translated by Jyotirmayee Mishra. Here we get a vignette of the city as stage; Pani meets another legend of theatre from Eastern India, Gopal Dash, and gets into a competitive performance with him. Soon after, Dash dies. But what sticks to the mind after reading the extract is the image of the city as stage, where reputations are made and unmade daily. 

The tropes of ‘putting on an act’ occur in extracts from other autobiographies as well. Freedom fighter Gobinda Chandra Mishra escapes from Odisha to Bengal to evade arrest by the authorities, and dons the garb of a student to normalise his presence in Kalikata. Another important figure from the national movement, Pabitra Mohan Pradhan, has an even more radical transformation; he becomes a domestic servant in Kalikata for similar reasons, and very nearly pulls off the feat of the performance as a domestic successfully.

We also get a sense of Kalikata as a pedagogic site for a large number of Odia migrants. This is transparently so for someone like Gobind Das for whom admission into Presidency College of the city meant admission into training in the cultural and pedagogic habitus of the elite. 

In other extracts, what emerges is the centrality of certain institutions such as hostel and the ‘mess’. Renowned freedom fighter and educationist Godabarish Mishra provides us with glimpses into the training in community living and national life that many Odias obtained by staying in the mess in house number 9, ‘in a deserted alley of the city of Calcutta’ (p. 17). 

But obtaining access to such educational institutions and places of residence was not easy. Medical scientist and littérateur Bikram Das narrates his travails of obtaining seats in both a college and in a hostel. The stories that one encounters are essentially stories of self-fashioning. 

Odia artist Asim Basu narrates his experiences involved in becoming an illustrator for the magazine Taranga, and how this helps him in fashioning his artistic self. Kanduri Charan Das shows us his slow, halting growth from a child migrant in Kalikataa into an editor and writer of popular fiction.

A world elsewhere has a perceptive introduction by the editor, Jatindra Kumar Nayak, who discusses the importance of Kalikata for the social and cultural life of Odias and Orissa. He also points out the contributions Odias have made to the city, albeit in not as detailed a manner as one might desire. The volume has an afterword by the writer and translator K. K. Mohapatra, who very ably and engagingly frames the translations of the volume. 

The note on the authors is generally very brief. Many of the authors whose autobiographies have been translated have played important roles in the polity and society of Orissa. For readers not familiar with Orissa's socio-cultural milieu, extensive biographical notes would have been useful. Despite this reservation, this volume has been lovingly and beautifully edited and produced, and deserves to be widely read and discussed.

Volumes such as A world elsewhere provide us with the habitats in which modern Odia as a language found its architecture in the last couple of centuries in cities outside the traditional Odia speaking areas. But we do not have analytical, or for that matter even descriptive, accounts of the ways in which the language and lives of Odia speaking people has morphed and flowered over the last two centuries in urban geographies as diverse as Bangalore, Dilli, Surat, Mandraj, Bambei, and, of course, Kalikata. 

We urgently need to decouple our linguistic imaginary from a geographical one, and recapture the many avatars that the Odia language and the lives of Odia speaking peoples have taken around the country and the globe, outside the Odia speaking regions. The book under review is one of the first steps of such a possible project. If this volume could lead to a refocusing on the (auto)/biographical literature in Odia, then the labour that has gone into its production will find just recompense.

Details About the Book:  Jatindra Kumar Nayak (editor). 2010. A world elsewhere: images of Kolkata in Oriya autobiographies. Bhubaneswar: Utkal University and Grassroots. Rs 395. 186 pages.

Note About the Review: A slightly different version of this review was first published in the journal margASIA 2(1) in the year 2014.