Death is the common thread that runs through this collection that’s suffused with despair and gloom. The few stories in a comic vein provide some relief. Written between 1898 and 1945, many of these pieces explore the theme of hunger, with Kalindi Charan Panigrahi’s Victory Celebration (1945) being the most evocative.
The titular Maguni’s Bullock Cart (1939) by Godavarish Mohapatra will be especially interesting for contemporary readers as some might see parallels with the emergence of AI and the dilemma it presents in India, where there is no dearth of human resources. The story is set in a time when a bus is introduced to a village that had until then relied on Maguni and his bullock cart. Maguni regaled his clients with stories as they travelled; they knew him. All this is lost as the villagers start taking the cheaper, faster bus leaving Maguni to slowly starve to death. The villagers come together to organise his last rites and you wonder why they couldn’t have chosen to take his cart in the first place and sustained him. .
The social messaging in these stories is clear. There is no room for moral ambiguity, except perhaps in Australia (1945) by Surendra Mohanty, where the impoverished protagonist carries a counterfeit coin, drinks tea on credit, and dreams of migrating to Australia. Interestingly, in Harishchandra Badal’s The Tiger (1938), the husband is vilified for his lack of understanding or empathy for his fasting wife but the woman who is fasting for religious reasons is not questioned at all. Perhaps most readers of that era would have understood that these fasts were kept for the welfare of the husband and children.
Lakshmikanta Mahapatra’s The Old Bangle-Seller (1914) recalls Tagore’s Kabuliwala (1892) in the way a connection blossoms between a hawker and a young girl though the progression of both stories is very different. Biswanath Rath’s The Witch (1935), Gopinath Mohanty’s Da (1936) and Kanhu Charan Mohanty’s The Gnarled Sahada Tree (1937) all explore the theme of witch-hunting and how women were branded witches or ill-omened to isolate and dispossess them.
Marital discord is the subject of many stories with a few like Fakir Mohan Senapati’s Patent Medicine (1913) treating it with humour. Others, as mentioned earlier, are tonally tragic. After a point, the reader might feel desensitized as this reviewer did while reading Rajkishore Ray’s Bauli (1945), which has a certain Premchandesqueness. The translators state that this story and Victory Celebration ‘offer subtle critiques of government policies’ and that the political protest had to be muted because they were written during the colonial period. Has much changed?
Rajkishore Pattnaik’s A House to Let (1945) has an air of romance but again, ends in death and the abandonment of the titular house. A tonal balance might have helped though the introduction does prepare you by stating that ‘Writers became increasingly preoccupied with giving voice to the anxiety of coping with a rapidly fluctuating world, which often appeared hostile and incomprehensible’.
The introduction is a rewarding read not just because it effectively presents the context of the collection but also for its humour. Sample this: Due to constraints of space, we include only his [Fakir Mohan Senapati] Patent Medicine here for its takeaway: when all else fails, the broom prevails.
It also touches upon the importance of literary magazines: ‘The proliferation of literary monthlies, bimonthlies and quarterlies, to say nothing of the weekly literary supplements of leading dailies, since the 1910s, inspired a whole generation of writers. These publications, driven by limited space and a desire for variety, encouraged writers to dip into unexplored aspects of the panorama of Odia life.’
Though the influence of the English short fiction is evident, these Odia stories are told in a range of unique styles. Most are based in villages but do not romanticize rural life. Hunger, the viciousness of rumour-mongering, tight spaces, and apathy are all depicted. Then, there is the ambiguity that occasionally makes the reader pause: in Victory Celebration, despite being famished, nobody steals the dead hero’s sack of rice, and in Satchidananda Routray’s Flower of Evil, despite the promise of material benefit, Jagu Tiadi empathizes with the dead sinner and not the rest of the villagers. In sum, a collection that makes you reflect on how much things have changed and also on how they haven’t.
Priyanka Sarkar is a writer and translator.
