100+years, 200+pages

The Greatest Odia Stories Ever Told is an anthology of twenty four short stories, and it has collected under its umbrella, the first modern Odia short story to experimental contemporary stories, written by multiple generations of authors. Rich in voices, subjects, themes and techniques, the collection depicts both the historical development and transformation in the art of short story writing, particularly in Odia language, but also in wider context, by establishing socio-political influence taking human characteristics on the main ground. About the stories, like said in the introduction by one of the translators in the trio – …Their tone varies from pathos to irony to satire to humour to righteous and indignant condemnation. They take aim at social conventions, political corruption, religious insincerity, caste restrictions, abuse of power, and hypocrisy in all its forms…

             

The first story by Fakir Mohan Senapati (the father of modern Odia prose fiction) Ananta, The Widower’s Boy is about a boy, quite troublesome among the villagers, from the family of bravest and strongest parents, who turns into the village savior. As we move on, we come across the stories that feature characters from all branches of life and settings – from rural villages to towns. Few glimpses is like: A bullock cart rider’s vibrant days end when modernism takes away his customers and makes his life difficult; A frustrated staff, as a revolt, lets his pet goat eat the important files in his office; A Banyan tree in the village becomes the centre of politics, power and bloody clash until it is poisoned; Village watchman and storyteller draws his inspiration and understanding of politics, peace and independence from the Indian mythologies; The tale of a snake charmer who transforms into a snake for penance. It’s hard to write few words that define all these stories, nonetheless they certainly open up a new space-time and its tangles to the readers, like: In a primitive Indian village, a western anthropologist and his interpreter get to hear the chronicle of an old woman who returned again to the village after living ten years as a crocodile; Amidst the strike lurking in a mining town, an innocent man is locked up and tortured brutally by the police, and his wife has to pay the horrible price for his release; A married off girl taking refuse in her father’s house leaves one night, and returns again after three years with a child and faces off the villagers; After getting a letter that his reclusive father in the village has gone insane, the son brings his father to the town to take care of him, only to find out that his father has turned into a greater and sensitive human being. And the two stories forming the appendix in the collection are the pioneering work of prose fiction in the Odia language. Like Rebati (1898), in which the outbreak of cholera brings down the well-to-do family in a village and along a burgeoning love between an orphan boy and Rebati, the daughter of the family, who wanted to learn to read, and The Sanyasi (1899) in which a man, who after the death of his wife, turns into a sanyasi.

Most often we find smaller details, running along the main narrative, that add liveliness to the stories and are marked with the interactions and intricacies found in the setting. Therefore, we can hear speak not only the intention but also the intensity and grandeur of the formation¹. Since the anthology is composed of varieties of themes, some are profoundly rich in emotions while others describe the passage of time that is heavy and tension that are identifiable. We take chute-the-chute: leaping from political satire to primordial human pathos, magic to social realism and likewise.

1.       Five years went by, with days good and bad, all ultimately drowned in the boundless depths of Time. Many, dragged out of dark despair, reached the blinding illumination of happiness, while others, deprived of joy, were submerged in a bottomless ocean of grief. Who could count the number of human beings Time sent, against their wishes, to their deaths, just as it showered blessings on a grieving world by bringing forth a bountiful crop of babies, as lovely as fresh flowers?

The mere detailing² is enough to qualify the stories’ brilliance and expressiveness. The stories have not only brought together the oddities, troubles and sentiments rooted in the timelines of the Odia region but also the collective experience of people that has surpassed regional boundaries and resembles & reflects the underlying realism that comes in cultural and traditional disguise but are crude and common to all human experience: conventions that hinders love, power and politics that backfires the commoners, hypocrisy that reigns the conscience, and complexities that are accidental, inscrutable and inescapable. The stories in the collection are crafty but simple and we find multiple layers of larger picture as we re-read these stories. Also visible are the caste-based discrimination and women experience and position in the society, though not always weak but at the same time ever in the margins of power and head-on with struggle.

2.       The first time he came to our village he was with a bright-built woman–Malli, the bamboo-queen. She’d climb to the top of a bamboo pole and spin on her belly, like a wheel. Savara would cut her into pieces and then make her whole again. He’d hypnotize her and ask her what he’d hidden in the pockets of the people in the crowd. She always came up with the right answers… The applause that followed would be thunderous and coins would rain onto Savara’s plate, some falling on the ground… Then, bowing low to the audience, he’d announce, ‘That’s all for today, sirs and masters.’

We have to thank the translators-trio, Leelawati Mohapatra, Paul St-Pierre, and K. K. Mohapatra, for these hand-picked stories and of course for this prolific translation of finest Odia short stories that’ll certainly find its way to the readers searching for some magical and palpable concoction.

Selected and Translated by: Leelawati Mohapatra, Paul St-Pierre, and K. K. Mohapatra

Publisher: Aleph Book Company

Page Count: 230pp

Price: $30.12

Translator Photo Credit: 

1)http://www.alephbookcompany.com/authors/paul-st-pierre/; 2)http://www.alephbookcompany.com/authors/leelawati-mohapatra/; 3)http://www.alephbookcompany.com/authors/k-k-mohapatra/

Review Copy Courtesy: Aleph Book Company