Celebrated British cultural critic Raymond Williams has made an interesting and somewhat cryptic remark about the best-kept secret of English literary studies: “There are six hundred years of English literature, but only two hundred years of English literacy.” By this he wanted us to reflect on the contradictory relationship between reading and the condition of being read, which is literature, and the means by which to achieve that condition, namely literacy.
That England has had Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton did not mean that the average English person of the pre-literacy era had access to them or was schooled in constructing their cultural and social worth in the same way as happened in the post-literacy era. What made such schooling possible was the access to higher education on the part of the average British person from the lower and middle income families due to the rapid spread of literacy from the mid-19th century onwards. This, coupled with the anti-Germanic sentiments whipped up in the aftermath of the First World War, meant that the Germanic philology was thrown overboard and a nationalistic curriculum of English literature was embraced.
This anecdote from a materialist retelling of English literary history provides in my opinion a fine analogue for how Sumanyu Satpathy sets out to explain the construction of modern Odia literature during a momentous period of half century beginning 1866, which saw the publication of Utkal Dipika (The Utkal Lamp), the first weekly newspaper of Odisha.
Image of the front page of ‘Utkal Dipika’ on July 19, 1930. Photo: Paperboyshashanka, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
As deftly delineated in his book Modernity, Print and Sahitya: The Making of a Modern Literary Culture, 1866-1919, the training ground of Odisha was the newly risen public sphere, consisting of periodicals, debating societies and discussion circles, not to mention schools in a literal sense, in the wake of the arrival of print.
A language and region-based nationalism was the fuel that drove this print-public sphere. Given Odisha’s dismembered body politic that was meant to serve the administrative convenience of the colonial British government, the Odia elite tried to define and assert itself mainly against Bengali supremacy, but also against Telugu supremacy in the south and Hindi supremacy in the west. Interestingly enough, these identitarian ideological battles were fought in the arena of culture, with sahitya – the Indian and Odia word for literature – as the nuclear tool in the cultural armoury.
The path was thus paved not only for the carving of Utkal sahitya but also for its adhunikikarana, or modernization. As a matter of fact, the two entities of cultural-linguistic nationalism and modernity, or adhunikata, were so deeply interfused that modernity minus Odianess, or Utkaliyata, to use the coinage in currency at the time, came to be seen as blind while Odianess minus a modern mind-set was thought lame. The bridge between the two was, of course, the Utkal bhasa, or Odia. That naturally put a premium on literature, the verbal art that glories in the manifold blisses of language.
Fakir Mohan Senapati (1843-1918), one of the architects of modern Odia literature, especially in its new prose avatar, was intensely involved in the save Odia’ movement which peaked during 1868-1870. This led, in tune with the indigenous owning of the printing presses dating from 1865, to the production of Odia textbooks as a replacement for the hitherto prevalent and dominant Bengali textbooks. As the book convincingly argues, sahitya first became a recognisable category in Odisha thanks to this curricular requirement, although it included diverse genres such as history and miscellaneous prose writings, not to mention poetry, under its rubric. Fakir Mohan was himself an avid writer of textbooks meant for use in schools.
A commemorative stamp to mark the 150th birth anniversary of Fakir Mohan Senapati, a leading architect of modern Odia literature, was issued by India Post on January 14, 1993.
Although Fakir Mohan’s prose fiction came to be written more than two decades later, the sense of the overwhelming importance of Odia not only as a marker of Odia identity but as the only viable pathway to a cognitive mapping left its strong imprint in his fictional writings. It is graphically inscribed, for instance, in chapter seven of his last novel Prayaschita – The Penance – (1915), revealingly titled ‘Utkalabhasabardhini Sabha’ (Society for the Advancement of Utkal Bhasa). Though in a later edition of the novel the overt nationalistic fervour of the chapter title was toned down with a neutral expression such as ‘Alochana Sabha’, meaning a debating/discussion society, the content remained unchanged.
In the opening of the chapter Fakir Mohan holds forth on the absolute requirement for intellectual discourse to be conducted in the medium of Odia rather than of a foreign tongue. The author has in mind Bengali here, although it could — depending upon which ‘Utkaliya’ was reading it and where — be Telugu or Hindi or English as well. Using the suggestive metaphors of oil and ghee, Fakir Mohan waxes eloquent about the advantages and pleasures of a two-way communication in Odia as opposed to the perils of a one-way traffic in the foreign tongue (read Bengali/Telugu/Hindi/English). He also seeks to bolster Odia pride by saying that the expressive and ornamental endowments of Utkal bhasa are in no way inferior to those of Bangla.
In this sense the story of the evolution of modern Odia literature, as the book shows, was different from that in Bengal and in other parts of India. For example, Odia literature at the turn of the century is seen to prominently feature a jeremiad, or lament, a literate performance of a folk form of ‘kandana’ (weeping), over the fall of Utkal and Utkal bhasa from the great heights they had scaled earlier. This lamentation is notably absent in Bengali literature of the time obviously because of the absence of any perceived threat to the Bangla language in the then eco-system.
Likewise, as the book points out, the discourse of adhunikata, or modernity, has no parallel in Hindi literature where the break with the traditional sahitya, instead of leading to an entity called adhunik, or modern, splinters into a plethora of trends such as ‘pragativad’ (progressivism) and ‘prayogvad’ (experimentalism), albeit with an avowed modern thrust.
Modernity, Print and Sahitya: The Making of a New Literary Culture, 1866-1919, Sumanyu Satpathy, Routledge, 2024.
Modernity, Print and Sahitya: The Making of a Modern Literary Culture, 1866-1919 locates the precise moment when the word adhunik enters the Odia lexicon, compiled by the Christian missionary Amos Sutton around 1845, and how it takes over from words such as nutan, navya, naba, abhinav – all meaning new – sampratik (contemporary) and bartaman (present-day), finally stabilizing towards the closing decades of the 19th century. So, what was literary modernity in the context of Odisha? It was, the book says, ‘a new kind of newness’ (p. 8, P. 169, p. 171) for which the existing words were felt to be inadequate.
The central thesis of Modernity, Print and Sahitya, insofar as it can be distilled from its five detailed and elaborate chapters, is that it was a form of ‘hybrid modernity.’ It drew upon mutually conflicting models of traditional aesthetics and the newly imported values of Euromodernity such as scientific temper, rationality and, tied to these, a realist apprehension of time (thanks to the increased sway of clock-time) and space (the shrinking of physical distance due to modern forms of transport such as the train). Satpathy sums this up in two beautifully compressed statements: “In order to augment and strengthen the new Utkal sahitya, they drew on European models even while following traditional practices so as to be able to take cognizance of and accommodate the adhunik. In the process, words like navya, nutana were subsumed and superseded by the new term, adhunik, as a qualifier for a number of nouns: sikhya, chikitsa, sabhyata, sanskruti, yug, and also eventually, for sahitya.”(p. 167). The book registers this hybridity in its title where the English words ‘modernity’ and ‘print’ sit cheek by jowl with the Odia word ‘sahitya’, transliterated in English and rendered in italics.
This core thesis does, of course, have to be read in the context of the fine-grained analysis the book offers about the rise of new literary forms such as the historical novel (Umesh Chandra Sarkar’s Padmamali, Ram Sankar Ray’s Bibasini, and Fakir Mohan’s Lacchama), the social realist novel (Fakir Mohan Senapati’s Chha Mana Atha Guntha, Mamu), the reform-oriented Odia play (Jagan Mohan Lala’s Babaji), the historical play (Ramshankar Ray’s Kanchi Kaveri), and the travelogue, not to mention the secular kavya of Radhanath Ray and the deeply religious and intensely place-specific kavya of Gangadhar Meher. The new sahitya, always in the service of the Utkal land, was forged in a process that fused the ancient and the modern into a new unity.
The covers of ‘Padmamali, a historical novel by Umesh Chandra Sarkar, the reform-oriented play ‘Babaji Natak’ by Jagan Mohan Lala, and the historical play ‘Kanchi Kaveri’ (translated into English as ‘The Conquest of Kanchi’ by Ramshankar Ray.
So far reaching was this culture war that it percolated down to the everyday life, manifesting itself in the nitty-gritty texture of commerce and business. One of the great delights of the book is the close attention it pays to the adverts appearing in Utkal Dipika, and especially to the ‘advertisement-war of words’ (p. 172) between bideshi (foreign) and swadeshi (indigenous) advertorials, with ‘Desi Salsa’ and ‘Hukumi Oil’ pitted against bideshi ‘Electro Salsa’ on the grounds that ‘the money of the desh ought to circulate within the desh and not be sent out to Calcutta or the USA’ (p. 172). The adverts also ushered in modernity by giving to the Odia idiom ‘an enriched lexicon of business words’ (p. 173) which, according to the book, was a forerunner of the Odia version of business English. Modernity in Odia letters was thus a many-sided affair and its impact was long lasting.
On the whole, Modernity, Print and Sahitya is an excellently written archive-based study of the inaugural moment of Odia literary modernity. Those who have long wanted to read a definitive, delightful and in-depth account of the Odia Renaissance will find the book extremely rewarding.
Himansu S. Mohapatra is a former Professor and Head, Department of English, Utkal University. He translates from Odia to English. Published translations include The Life and Times of Banka Harichandan (Yoda-Simon & Schuster, 2023) and, with Paul St-Pierre, Basanti: Writing the New Woman (OUP, 2019) and Battles of Our Own (Penguin, 2022).
