Are These the Greatest Odia Stories Ever Told?

Sailen Routray

The book under review is an edited volume of translations of twenty four Odia short stories written over the last 121 years by twenty three authors; the only writer who has two stories (including the first Odia short story ‘Rebati’ published in 1898 in the magazine ‘Utkala Sahitya’) is Phakir Mohan Senapati (1843-1918). 

If this reviewer’s guesses about their jati backgrounds are not widely off the mark, then all the twenty three belong to three castes at the apex of Orissan caste hierarchy – Brahmins, Karanas (a scribal jati corresponding to kayasths of North India) and Khandayats (a landowning warrior caste). 

But this is not the fault of the editors and translators of this volume, as this is a problem that plagues Odia literature per se. The Odia literary field had been dominated by the so-called upper castes (especially the men) for the longest time and literary modernism arguably only helped consolidate this stranglehold.

While the margin does not speak in this volume, many of its stories like ‘Savara’ by Chaudhury Hemakanta Misra, ‘The Tale of the Snake Charmer’ by Chandrasekhar Rath and ‘Ghania Celebrates Ganesh Chaturthi’ by Surendra Mohanty, place the lives of dalits and other downtrodden folk at the centre of their narratives. But at the same time, ‘A River Called Democracy’ by Akhil Mohan Pattnaik portrays the dalit protagonist in a distinctly casteist, unsympathetic and politically naive manner. 

If one leaves aside political and thematic concerns, stories like ‘News of the Day’ by Kanheilal Das draw the reader in and hold her interest by innovations in the formal aspects of storytelling. If the aim of the volume were not to overwhelmingly focus on works of celebrated writers of short fiction, but to bring in ‘great’ short stories, then those by marginalised writers like Bijaya Prasad Mohapatra, Basanta Satpathy and Phaturananda would have merited inclusion. 

Despite these reservations, this volume is a valuable addition to the growing corpus of Indian short fiction available in translation. Some like ‘Mother India’ by Mohapatra Nilamoni Sahoo and ‘The Tale of the Snake Charmer’ invert many stereotypes on their head and promise to become classics. 

Taken together, these stories also help us draw the contours of the particularity of the regional, vernacular Odia social universe. The translation is smooth without any rough edges and makes for smooth reading. This is a book that deserves to be widely read and discussed.

Details About the Book: Leelawati Mohapatra, Paul St-Pierre and K. K. Mohapatra (Translators and Editors). 2019. The Greatest Odia Stories Ever Told. New Delhi: Aleph Book Company. [ 230+xvii pages; Hardbound; Priced at 699 rupees]

Note: This review was first published on 12^th January 2020 in The Hindu Magazine.