Introduction

The Annual Report (1881–1882) of the Joint Inspector of Schools under the
Calcutta Presidency noted that the “use of paper and slates is a decided
improvement on the old system of writing on palm-leaf and with hard
chalks.” It also observed that printed books, especially in prose, were until
then unknown in the pathasalas, but had now been introduced as textbooks
in most of the schools.1 These comments are—mutatis mutandis—equally
applicable to many other languages in the region and show how even two
centuries after Francis Bacon made that axiomatic statement about the
impact of print on literature,2 many languages remained strangers to print. It
was only six decades subsequent to the introduction of European education
(which was well after the British occupation of the Odia-speaking tracts) that
the full impact of print on Utkal sahitya (Odia literature) was to manifest
itself.3 It is well-known that the advent of print heralded a significant chapter
in the history of global modernity in multicultural South Asia. But it is in
respect of only a few modern Indian languages, where print played an impor-
tant role, that the formation and development of public and literary spheres
leading to identitarian and nationalist aspirations has been documented and
subjected to rigorous analytical studies. Similarly, post-print developments in
terms of the modernisation of these languages and literature have generally
been seen in terms of the crucial roles they played in consolidating linguis-
tic-territorial formations across the region. But the story of the evolution of
the Odia literary and public spheres has not been told with the kind of close
attention and rigour it richly deserves.
Recent research has shown that indigenous systems of education, oral cul-
tures and reading practices had ensured the formation of robust pre-print
literate communities.4 But as print culture struck deeper roots in Odisha’s
predominantly oral and scribal cultural practices, it led to a growing sense of
community and language-based identity which, in turn, fuelled nationalist
aspirations among the Odia elite. In the early decades of their struggle, edu-
cated Odias, unlike their Bangla and Hindi counterparts, were not concerned
so much about the larger pan Bharatvarshara/Indian, anticolonial agendas as
they were with their local problems, particularly the marginalisation of the

DOI: 10.4324/9781003431220-1
2 Introduction

Odia language, literature and territory. This book is an attempt to document

the creation and development of Odia public and literary spheres that shaped
the adhunik Odia bhasa, sahitya and the sense of Odia jati during the late
colonial period of Odisha history. Natabara Samantaray, in his several
path-breaking studies spread over three decades, has cogently argued how
the foundations of adhunik Odia sahitya were laid through the introduction
of the disciplines of sahitya as a curricular requirement in European schools
and, therefore, the need for producing textbooks to teach it. While not disa-
greeing with Samantaray’s broad theses, this monograph endeavours to
explore the imbrication of the public and literary spheres, and whether and
in what ways the Odia public sphere generated discourses that defined the
new and redefined the old cultural expressions. It traces how the spread of
education, together with the setting up of town halls and debating societies,
resulted in the demand for print material that broadened the scope of sahitya,
making it inclusive of “non-literary” disciplines and forms as well. The sub-
ject of the development of new aesthetic concerns in the predominantly Odia-
speaking regions has been somewhat under-researched. This study is an
attempt to rectify the situation, and, by clarifying some key concepts running
through the book, I lay out below a framework within which the argument
of the monograph will unfold.

Print: “Effect and Consequences”

Print-capitalism created languages of power …. Certain dialects inevitably were
“closer” to each print language and dominated their final forms. Their disad-
vantaged cousins, still assimilable to the emerging print-language, lost caste
above all because they were unsuccessful (or only relatively successful) in insist-
ing on their own print-form.5
Benedict Anderson

In an important essay, Bernard Cohn argues that it was the scholarship of

English linguists and philologists that gave the British command over native
languages and literary traditions.6 The processes were not as simple as this
formulation might suggest. It was not as if colonial standards went unchal-
lenged without setting in motion counter-discourses and complications, a
subject we shall briefly outline in this section. Elsewhere in the book, I shall
also take up and discuss in greater detail the challenges that the British faced
from time to time in formulating their language policies. Meanwhile, I sug-
gest that Smith’s report, quoted above, bears testimony to the colonial gov-
ernment’s belief that print was indispensable to the running of their newly
introduced school system. Thus, the agenda of making print widely available
figured prominently among their top priorities. Though commercial printing
of Odia literary texts did not follow immediately,7 the relative power (or the
lack of it) of languages was already inscribed in the printing and aggressive
promotion of textbooks. Not all languages reaped equitable benefits from
 Introduction 3

print technology and the consequences of the early or late access to print
were reflected in the fortunes of many South Asian linguistic cultures.
Between 1835 and 1857, the balance of power of vernacular languages
kept changing for various socio-political reasons, no doubt; but the relative
richness or poverty of print contributed no less to the fluctuating fortunes of
the languages. The rapid rise of Bangla print in Eastern India, the marginali-
sation of Maithili, Assamese and Odia, the development of Nagari print, the
growing command of Hindi and the decline of Persian in the Northern
Provinces are all cases in point in the larger context of vernacular print. The
generic linkage between the late arrival of print in certain linguistic cultures,
and the consequent downgrading of their pre-print status, can be seen in
many South Asian languages. One finds overwhelming evidence of this in the
case of Maithili, which was subsumed, like some other languages (dubbed
“dialects” by the new breed of philologists and linguists), by a now ascend-
ant Hindi, increasingly projected as a “national” language and wielded as a
language of power. According to Suniti Chatterji, the “fact that till recently
Maithili types were never cast and no books were ever printed from Maithili
types is partly responsible for the language itself being in the shade.”8 Suniti
Chatterji’s observation highlights the then peculiar distinction between
Maithili writing and print. For writing the “script of Maithili was used,
whereas in print, Devanagari was preferred.”9
With the development of print technology, publication of books and peri-
odicals made rapid strides across the subcontinent. Graham Shaw says,
“What had taken Europe three centuries to achieve, the rise of a full-fledged
book culture, was compressed into a single century.”10 But, precisely because
of the rapid spread of print, the complications and conflicts that arose in
multi-lingual regions far surpassed those that had taken place in Europe. For,
in the post-print decades, when the ability to devise print types determined
the relative status of scripts and languages—as was the case with languages
like Maithili—many linguistic communities in South Asia felt threatened by
others in the region with dominant scripts and languages. Bangla print, for
example, had arrived in 1777,11 almost a century earlier than did the Odia
print type in 1864. Assamese, another language threatened by Bengali domi-
nance, had to contend with the imposition of Bangla on the Assamese speak-
ers for more than 30 years. William Robinson, the Inspector of Schools in
Assam, maintained that though there were some differences between spoken
Assamese and Bangla the two were, in fact, quite similar. He argued success-
fully in favour of Bangla as the medium of instruction instead of Assamese. It
was not until 1872 that Assamese was restored as the official medium in the
region.12 But, with a public sphere going from strength to strength in the late
nineteenth century, the elite could press for the restoration of Odia as the
primary language of instruction in their regions. In the process, much of the
intellectual energy of the newly educated Odias was devoted to safeguarding
their linguistic and cultural autonomy. A similar sense of linguistic insecurity
gave rise to several other regional linguistic conflicts in Eastern India.
4 Introduction

Thus, when these languages encountered print technology, “the appear-

ance and state of” (to reiterate Bacon’s phrase) their respective worlds under-
went drastic but uneven changes. Just as the Naval Kishore Press in Lucknow
and the Battala press in Calcutta played crucial roles in the evolution of
modern Urdu, Bangla and Hindi literature, printing presses in Odisha gave
rise to an attempt on the part of the newly educated Odias to refashion the
traditional expressive modes in their own language-literature. In the process,
however, the relationship among the languages in Eastern India13 changed
from non-conflictual and transactional to the conflictual; from cultural col-
laboration to mutual rivalry; and from coexistence to contestation.14
Another dimension worth keeping in view is that in the aftermath of the
1857 revolt, the colonial power’s increased surveillance prompted them to
keep an eye on the public sphere and following the vernacular press allowed
them to easily gauge the pulse of the public. Therefore, local administrators
patronised vernacular print cultures through advertisements and notices.
Fakir Mohan has astutely remarked in his autobiography: “To tell the truth,
Banga bhasa’s improvement and spread began after the 1857 revolt.”15
However, around the time that Macaulay’s Minute on English education was
being implemented by Bentick in 1835, a pseudonymous author published a
pamphlet pleading for the use of Bangla as the court language in “Bangadesha”16
and colonial officials obliged almost immediately.
Bharatendu Harischandra, commenting on the Naval Kishore Press, said
that it was started in 1858, but by 1871 it had established itself as a major
commercial hub in Lucknow of the Northern Province.17 Government adver-
tisements and notifications meant to keep the public informed of government
policies indirectly subsidised the printing cost, and in the process, the number
of magazines and newspapers in circulation rose considerably. Further,
because the colonial administration found the complex multilingualism and
caste-script links incomprehensible and a serious hindrance to smooth admin-
istration,18 it sponsored intensive and extensive philological research, result-
ing in the proliferation of linguistic taxonomies and the easy availability of
linguistic data and statistics. But this also fuelled internecine conflicts among
the speakers of these languages. Even indigenous scholars such as Rajendralal
Mitra used European research technology to perpetuate ways of dominance
and discrimination.19 Working in tandem with the logic of print capitalism
and the European education system, these research studies soon proved to be
a threat to the livelihood of the speakers of the subjugated languages and
their variants. The linguistic squabbles were complicated further by the tradi-
tional linkage between script and language with the prevailing caste system.
Little wonder, therefore, that print languages and literatures served as “ vital
instruments for crafting social identities in colonial India.”20 For example,
Bangla, Odia, Bhojpuri and Magahi had become, to a great extent, caste-com-
munity neutral languages; but “Maithili, both the script and the language,
was largely associated with ‘upper caste’ Brahmans and Kayasthas.”21 Many
 Introduction 5

linguistic cultures looked to ward off the danger of being subjugated by the
dominant languages and fought their battles with the help of the technology
of print. In the process, the new technology helped create a public sphere that
derived much energy and vitality from the simultaneous rise of a print-public
and helped each of the Assamese, Maithili and Odia peoples to imagine them-
selves as a discreet jati. The emphasis on and valorisation of print also made
the newly educated classes self-conscious about their respective cultural
heritages.22
The shift from the Orientalist preoccupation with ancient India and
Sanskrit to the languages “as they exist at the present moment” had already
begun when George Grierson undertook his monumentally decisive linguistic
survey. As Javed Majeed says, Grierson was keen to “stress that [his]
Linguistic Survey of India would be useful to the colonial state.”23
Besides Calcutta being the virtual capital of print industry, the administra-
tive opportunism it provided this metropolis with made Bangla the language
of command in the entire region.24 Though the three Presidency cities
(Bombay, Madras and Calcutta) continued to dominate in the second half of
the nineteenth century—the period this book is largely concerned with—a
host of other centres of printing began to create their own ecosystems of
production and consumption. Language debates in the burgeoning public
sphere could not have left sahitya or literary and aesthetic questions unad-
dressed, as they became the handmaiden of various ideologies, such as jati or
nation, identity, religion, etc. It is no coincidence that the modernisation of a
majority of Indian vernacular literatures had to wait until after the middle of
the nineteenth century.
The present book is an attempt to tell the story of the crucial role that
print technology played to alter the course of nearly 400 years of Odia sah-
itya. It also argues that the link between print and sahitya was much more
complex than “a matter of enhanced demand and circulation of texts.”25
However, my contention in this book is that the technology of print was not
the only aspect of modernity that contributed to the development of adhunik
sahitya, as I also attempt to understand the various conflicting pressures—
colonial–indigenous, modern–traditional, secular–religious—which irreversi-
bly changed the course of a literature that had grown and evolved in
comprehensible ways over 400 years. Two discursive strands, therefore, criss-
cross my larger argument: the advent and gradual evolution of the periodical
press as part of the evolving public sphere and the materialisation of a paral-
lel and overlapping literary sphere, shifting from the-then prevalent cognitive
category of sahitya, with European notions of the literary impacting newly
educated Odia intellectuals. These two strands are explored together to
understand the shaping of the Odia “literary field,” using periodical press,
advertising, reviews and discussion of various forms and practices of the “lit-
erary,” and also the interconnectedness between the “literary” and the
“political.”
6 Introduction

Concept Notes
While undertaking studies in the area, scholars tend to deploy several non-
indigenous terms and concepts, such as, literature, modern/modernity, and
the public/public sphere. Each of these terms brings an ideological baggage of
its own, which again has European provenance. Anglophone scholars tend to
transfer that baggage uncritically while using them in their vernacular con-
texts, ignoring the fact that each of their local equivalents: sahitya, adhunik/
adhunikata, jansadharan or sarvajanik has a pre-history of their own.
Conversely, a few expressions in the vernacular are loosely translated into
English: jati, for example, becomes “nation” and rasa and bhava become
emotion and sentiment. Before we proceed, therefore, a few of these terms
and concepts that are supposedly universal in their signification and are
therefore often taken for granted, need to be relocated and historicised in the
local context of Odisha. As we shall see, over a period of time they undergo
a process of subtle vernacularisation and provincialisation, a process that
warrants ample caution on our part when we deploy them.

Modernity in the Vernacular

Admittedly, print alone could not have bequeathed the changes in the given
literary cultures as it did, yet it was the most decisive of all the attendant
advantages of modernity which came to South Asia mainly through colonisa-
tion.26 In Odisha, this ushered in a radical kind of newness in the field of
sahitya, a newness that attracted the appellation adhunik Odia sahitya.
Almost a century later, when the modernism in Western Literature that had
been pioneered by the French Symbolists, Imagists, Dadaists and Surrealists
etc., acquired canonical status, Odia literature also, though belatedly, came
under their influence and the new trends that appeared in it began to be
called adhunik. The large number of articles and books that the leading Odia
critic Natabara Samantaray and his colleagues wrote appending or prefixing
the epithet, adhunik to their titles, seldom made any distinction between the
two terms, the adhunikata of, say a Radhanath and that of a Sachi Rautray.
Histories of Odia literature written up to the 1970s used the term indiscrim-
inately, making no effort to deal with its definitional aspects. An anthology
of adhunik Odia poetry began with the poems of Gopabandhu Das, ignoring
Radhanath and Madhusudan under the pretext of bulk, but included the
poems of Sachi Rautray and Ramakanta Rath too.27 Be that as it may.
By the time Odia writers caught up with the idea of the modern, European
and American modernism in the arts had been defined and analysed thread-
bare, its history was written in academic circles in great depth and with crit-
ical rigour. In Odisha, one of the earliest attempts was made by Brajamohan
Mohanty in his Odia Sahityare Adhunikatara Darshan (1967).28 Focusing
mostly on the formal aspects of modern poetry, Brajamohan highlighted
imagist and symbolist methods in representing the “modern” man. Another
 Introduction 7

significant attempt was made by Dasarathi Das in 1974 when he analysed

extensively and in-depth many aspects of Odia “modernism.”29 The signifi-
cance of the study lay in its methodology of comparative aesthetics, as he
made use of his wide-ranging knowledge of European as well as traditional
Indian aesthetics. But he made no attempt to explain why both sets of writ-
ers, of the late nineteenth as well as mid-twentieth centuries, were designated
adhunik. For purposes of this book, I do not feel the need to discuss the lat-
ter-day use of the term which was largely derivative; rather, I would like to
examine the way the term adhunik came into vogue and the processes through
which it effected a break from the centuries-old aesthetic tradition of Odia
literature.30
In recent decades, the English term, modern and its lexical inflections have
been subjected to rigorous philosophical, philological and linguistic inquiries
by scholars.31 The same, however, cannot be said of their vernacular counter-
parts in India, where it is simply taken for granted. Many scholars have, of
late, been engaged in the subject of “vernacular modernity.” Many of them
are tracing it back to the seventeenth century. In fact this is justifiably an
exciting field of inquiry. However, I am more interested in exploring moder-
nity (adhunikata) in the vernacular rather than vernacular modernity per se.
Odia scholars, especially literary historians, seldom ask how and when
exactly the term adhunik, a common equivalent for “modern” in most Indian
languages, lands in the Odia vernacular consciousness and whether it is a
kind of ascribed category or if it evolved over time. Equally overlooked in
this context is the linguistic truism that new words and expressions are
formed in a language when users of the language feel the need for a cognate
word/term to describe a new experience or phenomenon. If such an expres-
sion did not exist in a given linguistic culture up to a point, it can only mean
that its users had not felt the need for it. As a test case, we can briefly explore
when and how the Odia terms adhunik/adhunikata were first deployed as
equivalents of modern/modernity while simultaneously tracing the vernacu-
lar reception of the cosmopolitan phenomenon of modernity. We begin by
looking for usages of the word in Sanskrit—one of the main etymological
sources of Odia words—but find none. What we do come across, instead, are
terms like navya, as in Kalidasa’s play, Malabikagnimitram: “puranamityeba
na sadhu sarbe na chapi kavyam nabamityabadyam…” [not all that is ancient
is good; nor all that is new is bad.”32 Navya, however, here means just new
and does not carry any of the meanings we associate with its latter-day syno-
nym, adhunik. Sheldon Pollock discusses the special case of navya closer to
our time. By citing from his seventeenth-century Sanskrit sources, he argues
that the word then meant not only “new” but signified “a different way of
thinking,” and “not just a different relationship with the past.”33 Pollock,
therefore, associates this use with the English word in question, modernity.
In the absence of an adequate explanation, however, this use of navya cannot
be seen as an equivalent of the latter-day signification of modernity. Rather,
semantically, it looks like a superimposition with all the advantages of
8 Introduction

hindsight. The argument for the absence of the adjective in Sanskrit texts can
further be reinforced by consulting Amarasingha’s Sanskrit thesaurus,
Amarkosh, the oldest extant work of its kind (circa 560 CE), in which too it
is conspicuous by its absence.
Dipesh Chakrabarty dubs the definitional confusion over the term as
“The Muddle of Modernity.”34 The situation apropos of the use of the
adjective, adhunik, in Odia is equally, if not more, muddled. When we
look at pre-colonial Odia texts, we notice that, once again, the term is
conspicuous by its absence. However, the word prachin was used earlier,
but not in conjunction with any temporal contrariety, such as adhuna or
navya.35 This older non-relativistic use of prachin in the nineteenth century
is matched by its capacious signification by writers from the fifteenth cen-
tury right up to the eighteenth century. For a long time, it is worth noting
that prose writers of the nineteenth century did not find the need for a term
like madhya yug (medieval era) to account for the period between prachin
and adhunik.
The first Odia translation of the Sanskrit Amarkosh by Amos Sutton
appears in 1845, and we perforce turn to it for a possible entry of adhunik.36
Again, we draw a blank, though it includes five synonyms for the adjective
nutan (new) such as pratyagra, abhinav, navya, naba and nyunta. However,
adhunik does feature only in the new Odia dictionary that Sutton himself
compiled around the same time. His Utkal Bhasarthabhidhana carries an
entry for adhunik, albeit spelt with a long u (as opposed to its current short
u).37 The word is an adjective derived from the word adhuna, an indeclinable,
with the derivational suffix, “–ika,” not an inflexional suffix. The neologism’s
visibility, if at all, is minimal in the extant prose of the time. Indologists had,
by then, coined many new Sanskrit words. Adhunik starts appearing in the
new Sanskrit lexicons as late as the latter half of the nineteenth century.38
However, adhunikata or adhunikikarana (modernization) are still a far cry
and cannot be found even in Vaman Shivram Apte’s dictionary.

New Kind of Newness

The newly established “field” of vernacular publishing and the consolidation
of print culture led to the spread of print literacy through Odia newspapers;
and literary periodicals sprang up in Cuttack, Bamanda, Balasore and
Mayurbhanj. Soon, debates ensued around prachin versus navya/ adhunik,
that is, the ancient versus the modern and they began to dominate the public
sphere. The workaday world of writing struggled to find adequate expressions
for unfamiliar everyday experiences, as can be seen in the words of a pseudon-
ymous writer, “Sri”: “the Europeans in various unseen and unheard
of ways have facilitated our travel and communication.”39 It has been well
said well of Euromodernity that the process of transformation that moder-
nity ushered in was “not just another instance of [the] usual historical change;
 Introduction 9

it was a new kind of newness.”40 In fact, one rarely comes across the adjecti-
val use of adhunik in the pages of the first secular weekly newspaper, Utkal
Dipika,41 not at least in its inaugural year (1866). One has to wait for seven
more years, when contributors to Utkal Darpan (1873), the first literary peri-
odical, begin using it as a synonym for whatever is contemporary, for exam-
ple, adhunik pandits.42 Older synonyms for the new, such as navya, bartaman,
naba, samprati, nua, etc., continued to be used, but only in the temporal
sense of “now.” Occasionally, prachin or ancient was pitted against adhunik,
such as prachin Greece, Rome and Bharatavarsha and adhunik England,
Germany, France and America.43 The editor of the first issue of Utkal Prabha
says, the “[o]lden history of the Hindus is the three-thousand-year long his-
tory of education and development of the human race.” This history is
divided in such a way that its “prachin age alone is longer than that of the
entire history of many adhunik jatis [modern civilisations].”44 Pyari Mohan
Acharya in his history of Odisha does not use the word adhunik to designate
the contemporary phase of Odisha’s history, though it appears in passim in
the book.45 Later, in 1906, Mrutyunjay Rath periodises his history of centu-
ries-old Odia literature under different captions, but does not use adhunik for
the contemporary period, calling it barttaman yug instead. However, his con-
temporary, Praharaj uses adhunik in the titles of his essays: “Utkal Sahityara
Adhunik Gati” (1906) and “Hindusamajara Adhunik Gati” (1907) in a more
specific sense of modern, a subject I shall return to below. Meanwhile, it is
worth noting that the word gati (movement) indicates the modernising pro-
cess both for the cultural and sociological fields. Though, by now, there is a
heightened awareness and self-recognition in terms of the contemporary era
marking a break with the past, there is no consensus on the designation of the
epoch as adhunik.
I am belabouring the point over adhunik because this is taken to be the
exact equivalent of the original English term, modern, as adhunikata is of
modernity, the latter taking a much longer time to appear in the print-public
sphere. These terms took some time to stabilise and have been in use in this
sense ever since. None of the other synonyms (navya, nutan, etc.) are used
in this sense for modern or modernity. This is the only term around which
a cluster of signifieds have gathered just as they have around their English
counterparts. When these terms first began to be used, they could have
been substituted by any of the others already mentioned. But, because
adhunik acquired specific associations with such concepts as progress,
development, industrialisation, reason, notions of freedom and equality as
well as national identity, no other term seemed to serve the purpose as
well. In a word, adhunik/adhunikata came to signify that new kind of
newness of which we have spoken. We will keep returning to the subject in
different contexts throughout the subsequent chapters to highlight the
aspects of Odia literary modernity in the late nineteenth and early twenti-
eth centuries.
10 Introduction

Sahitya
Bhamaha, the seventh-century poet, defined sahitya in his Kavyalankara, as
an integration of sabda and artha marked by vakraokti and with alankar as
the beautifying principle.46 This is said to be the earliest known usage of the
term, sahitya. Interestingly, Bhamaha distinguishes between kavya/sahitya
and varta. Rajasekhara47 has said that, the “discipline that studied the co-ex-
tension of words and meanings was called sahitya-vidya”. This shows that,
ages ago, the term may have been used to refer to what we now call aesthet-
ics/criticism.48 Sometimes, the term kavya was used as a synonym for sahitya.
Sudarsana Acharya is of the view that “while the term kavya was used for
diverse purposes, the expression, sahitya could be seen employed in the same
sense [of kavya].”49 The Odia aesthetician, Visvanatha Kaviraj Mohapatra, in
the fourteenth century, summarises many of the older texts on Indian aesthet-
ics in his Sanskrit treatise, Sahitya Darpana. Here, too, he reiteratively defines
sahitya in terms of the interrelationship between shabda and artha, stressing
the meaning-making function of shabda: “Bakyanmrasatmakakavyam / sab-
darthausahitwekavyamatahsahityamuchyate.” Vishvanatha’s is the most
complete poetics by an Odia scholar up to his time. Possibly, “this compre-
hensiveness … led him to use the seemingly more capacious term ‘literary art,’
sahitya, and this is the first extant treatise in which it appears.”50 To quote
Vishvantha Kaviraj again: “What, then, is literature? Here is our answer:
Literature is discourse, whose soul is rasa.” But rasa is not the sole ingredient
he insists upon; bhava too is required,51 since rasa in traditional aesthetics is
based on bhava. Bharat had ordained that, “bibhavanubhavsamcharisam-
jogaadrasanishpatih, that is, rasa is predicated on the union of bibhav, anub-
hav and sanchari bhava.”52 This formulation alone inspired many subsequent
alankariks to elaborate on the subject of rasa. We might recall that Bharat
Muni, basing his analysis on Sanskrit plays, had earlier formulated the eight
sthai bhavas and eight rasas.53 The sthai bhavas for him were rati, haas, shok,
krodh, utsah, bhay, jugupsa and vismay and the effects in terms of rasa were,
respectively, sringar, hasya, karun, roudra, veer, bhayanak, and advut. Bharat
also states categorically that though “the rasas are known to be generated by
the bhavas, bhavas are not known to be produced by the rasas as some would
have us believe.” He further explains that in abhinaya, sthayi bhavas combine
with different kinds of acting to produce the rasas, just as different vegetables
and diverse masalas (condiments) combine to produce curry.
Thus, traditional indigenous aesthetics assigned supreme complexity and
sophistication to literary and dramatic art. Rosinka Chaudhuri points out
how the words,

sahitya and kabi were reformulated and reinvented [in the nineteenth
century] to come to mean what they mean to us today…, we are con-
stantly reminded that such words meant something else in the past and
signify something quite different now in the nineteenth century.54
 Introduction 11

However, the primary focus of her study in the context of nineteenth-century

Bangla literature, does not give her any scope to pursue the gradual shifts in
these conceptual terms of reference. Nonetheless, she ignores the fact that
even in Europe, the equivalent term, “literature,” was undergoing changes in
its signification. This “keyword” had itself been mutating, as Raymond
Williams has convincingly argued, in the context of English culture under
diverse social pressures.

The Proto-Public Sphere

The Odia public and literary spheres act directly or indirectly as fulcrums
around which my arguments revolve throughout the book. Yet, while there is
no gainsaying that the rise of the Odia public sphere was coeval with the
arrival of European modernity, one cannot deny that some forms of public
space were already available within which the new ones were accommodated
and flourished. But what was the traditional sense of the “public”? Was the
“private” space as clearly cut off from the “public” as it eventually became?
These are important questions, but they fall beyond the scope of the book.
This section will, however, explore some aspects of the idea with the help of
a few examples, all of which have a bearing on our discussion regarding the
emergence of the full-fledged Odia public sphere.
As we invoke the concept of the newly emerged public sphere, the idea of
the “public” (Jansadharan or sarbajanik) was not without its antecedents in
this part of the world. Indigenous pedagogic structures comprising pupils, the
guru and mnemonic texts were not immediately supplanted by European
models equipped with printed texts. Traditionally too, there existed such sec-
ular and sacred common spaces like temple bazaars, haats and bathing ghats.
One comes across references to these in extant literature. But for purposes of
social interaction, the sense of the “public” operated within the space of an
oral–aural relationship. The few who read scribal texts disseminated ideas
through recitation or narration (what was known as pothi padhali) in temples
and other such open places. Even after the transition from the oral–aural to
print–public, the elements of speech and audience continued to be a part of
the new public sphere. Thus, one cannot ignore indigenous forms of, what
one might call, the “proto-public sphere.” Not that the public sphere, in the
strict theoretical sense in which we use it today had an identical indigenous
version, but it would be inaccurate to deny a pre-history of the public sphere,
or simply an available public space where people met and discussed matters
of common interest, including sahitya.

Bhagabat Tungi
Sisir Kumar Das has astutely observed that temples provided “greater
opportunities for the people, irrespective of the social and economic status,
12 Introduction

to participate in the congregation where the poets themselves or trained sing-

ers used to present their compositions.”55 Odisha’s numerous temples offered
even greater opportunities for public gatherings and discussions, no doubt.
But one institution that was unique to the Odia-speaking tracts was the
Bhagabat Tungi or Gadi or Ghar. Several contemporary accounts of its func-
tioning are extant in fictional and ethnographic works. One of the most inter-
esting accounts can be found in Fakir Mohan’s novel, Chha Mana Atha
Guntha. I quote a brief extract: “In the temple, there is a Bhagabatgadi,
where the sacred books are kept. On festive occasions such as Radhastami,
Janmastami, and during the month of Kartika, villagers gather to listen to the
sacred books, which are read collectively.” The Tungi was also a shared place
for a larger communal fellowship.56 “Whenever a stranger arrives in the vil-
lage, or if a villager is unable to cook at home, for whatever reason, he can
pay two paise to the temple cook and get a bellyful of prasad,” Fakir Mohan’s
narrator continues, but tellingly switches to addressing the English educated
babus, and thus, corroborates the point I am making here:

It might be easier for you to understand the value of a temple if we use

English instead of native terms: the temple in the village functioned as
a church, a public library, a restaurant, and a town hall. And let us
leave it at that; we need to move on to other important matters.57

Such accounts from the second half of the nineteenth century cultural context
give us a fair idea of the role that temples played and about the pre-history of
the modern “public.” These are tiny structures (hence tungi) not belonging to
any individual and built from funds and labour contributed by the villagers
of any given village with the purpose of holding “public” meetings, mostly in
the evening. Jatindra Mohan Singh too describes how the Odia Bhagabat,
composed by Sri Chaitanya’s contemporary, Jagannath Das, the Odia poet-
saint, was read by the village priest:

This small house is closed from three sides by mud-walls. On one side
there is a small doorway. This can also be called a large chest or strong-
room. On the western side of this house, the sack of pothis or palm-leaf
manuscripts bedecked with tulsi, sandalwood paste and dry flowers, is
placed most reverentially on a raised platform, where it receives due
obeisance. This is called, “Bhagabat Gosein.” An earthen lamp is lit in
front of it, and next to it is seated the village priest reading out the
Bhagabat from a palm-leaf manuscript. Huddled around him are about
fifteen people listening to the recitation. Those who came late are sitting
outside, listening to the Bhagabat most reverentially.58

But this was not the only purpose of the public institution. It was also used to
deliberate on problems pertaining to the community, to dispense justice and
also as a “village school.”59 Its expenses, by no means large, were borne by
 Introduction 13

the villagers, every family taking turns to provide the tungi with the expenses
incurred towards dipa and naivedya. A couple of things are worth recording
here. One was the democratic nature of this unique institution, where people
from different castes congregated, including people from the so-called lower
castes. Puri and other Brahman-dominated areas were less enthusiastic about
the institution that idolised the Odia Bhagabat, since the Sanskrit scriptures
were considered to be sacrosanct. Pandit Nilakantha’s autobiographical
account is a testimony to this:

In the Bhagabat Tungi of Gopabandhu Das’s village Suando in Puri, the

day was one of a weeklong ritual comprising the reading of all the
twelve scandhas of the Odia Bhagabat…Prasad was served to the
Bhagabat… We also sat down to partake of the bhoga, along with
Gopabandhu…. It was a new experience for me. We are shasani
Brahmans [high in the hierarchy of Brahmans] …. [Apart from other
prohibitions] we were not supposed to partake of the offerings to the
Odia Bhagabat…which is untouchable for us. Jagannath Das was also
a shasani Brahman. Because he wrote the Bhagabat in Odia his village
Kapileswar shasan was declared untouchable in all of Puri.60

The genesis of the Odia Bhagabat—and, therefore, Bhagabatghar—is tradi-

tionally attributed to a form of dissidence by the deprived, non-Brahman
castes against the dominance of the so-called upper castes and Sanskrit. It,
therefore, shows the importance of the institution. This traditional institu-
tion as a public space is also fodder for Fakir Mohan’s wit and imagination
that enables him to construct a fictional setting. His short story, “Bagula-
Baguli” is about Bidia Patra of the untouchable caste, who was the chowki-
dar of the village Bhusandpur. Now a widower, he would go out in the
evenings with his motherless infant to the Bhagabatghar, spread out a torn
mat on the floor in front of it and put his son to sleep on it. The puranas were
stacked up in the Bhagabatghar and the Brahman who recited the purana
was called the Purana Panda of the village. People had to contribute to the
funds of the Bhagabatghar; if they did not have money, they could donate
paddy. Others may or may not attend the evening readings, but Bidia Patra
had never missed one, not even once in the last 40–50 years. If he was unwell,
he would still make it to the Bhagabatghar, though with much effort. He
listened to every word, beginning with “Sukaubacha” and ending with
“Vimasyapi.” He knew most of the Bhagabat by heart, and if any passage
was incomprehensible, the other devotees would look towards Bidia and ask
for an elucidation, which Bidia provided with aplomb. He could quote many
erudite passages while making a point during the discussions.61
The children of the “untouchable castes” were made literate through this
sole means, as pointed out by Jatindra Mohan Singh. The Odia equivalent
of the urban Bengali adda, the north Indian rural choupal, is the village
veranda, where village folk sit down to gossip and deliberate on all matters,
14 Introduction

petty and grave, happening around. The village panchayat also carried a
sense of the public that, apart from dispensing justice, acted as a place for
gatherings and discussions. Jatindra Mohan describes how “fifteen to
twenty old people” assembled under the banyan tree, “which grew in front
of the village deity, Batamangala.” The panchayats “settle all social and
other kinds of personal disputes in Odisha villages—people go to the civil
and criminal courts to seek justice only as a last resort.”62 The subversive
nature of the Tungi, along with that of the chahali and muth, can be better
appreciated from the following account by T.E. Ravenshaw in his letter
dated 20 July 1874:

In many instances, the pupils have run away; abadhans closed their
chatosalis, sent the boys away, or secreted them from the sight of the
sub-inspector. No sooner they see him, they call out “Padree is com-
ing”, and are afraid to meet him. They were afraid of being converted
to Christianity, is what the official reports …The Brahman of the village
muth had incited the villagers to reject a man who, as abadhan, had
been trained at a teacher training class to teach, suspecting that the
trainee was a Christian…; [A] Brahmin asked the students of a school
to leave the school and recite the Bhagabat probably at a Tungi. When
the abadhan refused permission to the boys, he was again accused of
trying to convert students to Christianity. Instead of being upset by all
this the official said in his report that it was “a cheering sign of the
spread of a higher intelligence.”63

The fact that the institution of the tungi was in a position to serve as a space
for public interlocution was further corroborated by the Gandhian leader of
Odisha, Gopabandhu Das. In his presidential address at an annual conven-
tion of Utkal Sammilani, he said: “The Bhagabat Ghar in rural Odisha is a
unique space for our national (jatiya) education.”64 Asked about the reasons
for the dwindling figures of literacy in Odisha, he pointed to the gradual
decline in the pre-modern culture of introducing male children to the Odia
alphabet ostensibly to enable them to read the Odia Bhagabat.

Pedagogic Spaces as “Public”

Apart from these tungis, innumerable chatshalis (pathasalas) in the tradi-
tional mode of pedagogy were being run in small and big villages before a
well-thought-out European education system was put in place in the second
half of the nineteenth century across the subcontinent. Worth noting here is
the letter from John Beames, which says,

There have always been in Orissa large numbers of private pathasalas,

and a calculation as to the number of children receiving education in
the district [of Balasore], based as that was in Government circular No. 1,
 Introduction 15

dated 15th January 1877, on the supposition that no children were being
educated except those shown in the Education Department’s returns, is
extremely erroneous.65

Fakir Mohan describes in his Atmacharit his experience of studying in the

village chahali with pupils from the so-called untouchable castes which
shows the integration prevailing in the village community along with other
traditional institutions like the Tungi. After the initial attempts of the mis-
sionaries to use education for the spread of Christianity met with resistance,
it took the colonial administration decades to implement a more secular
approach to pedagogy. The first “English” schools were set up in Odisha
around 1822. It is reported by W.W. Hunter that the condition of these
schools was appalling and only a handful of students from marginalized
castes attended them. “Up to 1838 there was hardly any school worth the
name…. by 1859 twenty-nine government schools could be set up.” The lack
of printed textbooks was a major hindrance in the spread of education.
Traditionally, pothis stored in villages were used to teach. But these proved
to be of no use in the new schools. Rajendralal Mitra, in a lecture at the
debating society of Cuttack in 1865, said that in the previous three months,
“approximately three hundred Bengali books had been printed as against a
mere three or four Odia books.”66 Mitra’s observation was borne out in the
list of Odia books published put out in the Dipika. Apart from religious
texts, only four secular texts had been published in Odia, three out of which
were official documents, schedules, etc. Only one work can be called “liter-
ary”: an Odia translation of Vidyasagar’s narrative based on Kalidasa’s
Shakuntala.67
Jatindra Mohan’s account is again helpful here.68 In the chapter,
“Odishara Chatashali,” he recounts how both boys and girls attended this
chatshali, both wearing the same kind of dress and both wearing their hair
long. Blackboards, ink, pen and paper were unheard of as teaching–learn-
ing tools and there were no printed textbooks either. In the beginning, the
students scrawled large letters of the Odia alphabet on the earthen floor
with pieces of indigenous chalks. As they made further progress, they could
scrawl smaller letters. After a certain time, they were taught the use of the
stylus and palm leaves:

Nowadays, in Bengal, the alphabet is taught to the students in school

with the help of books full of pictures of flowers and animals. They
learn the alphabets through the use of nursery rhymes. But, in Odisha,
there is no need for the students to take recourse to such learning pro-
cesses as they learn the correct pronunciation and intonation. They
infuse music into the dead alphabets. The way they recite these sounds
gives the impression of the Bhagabat being recited.… By this time, such
textbooks as Bodhadaya, Charitabali and Kathamala had not been
translated from Bangla into Odia. In the absence of such books, supreme
16 Introduction

knowledge is transmitted to the pupils from the Brahma-like teacher.

They work out complicated sums orally…The teacher knows his
Baidehisha Bilasa, Bhagabat and Rasakallola by heart. He recites these
to the villagers who listen to him in awe and are dumb-struck. For a
Bengali, it is impossible to compose verses without acquiring knowl-
edge from textbooks. But these teachers in chatshalis can. In Bengal
there is a difference between textbook language and the spoken idiom;
but in Odia there is no such difference. This is why it is possible for a
teacher and villagers in Odisha to read the [newspaper] Utkal Dipika.
Even common people who have very little education can read newspa-
pers in Odisha.69

Natabara Samantaray, however, argues that the purpose of teaching certain

texts in the chatshalis was to inculcate spiritual values and those aspiring
poets, who studied in the chatshalis in their childhood, tried to emulate their
models, and thus a certain kind of taste remained unchanged for centuries.70
The chatshalis established the foundation of such aesthetics, which made a
deep impression on the students and enabled them to engage in fruitful ways
with great literature. Thus, these chatshalis became the training ground for
Odia kavya sahitya.71 But adhunik education aimed at generating a “scien-
tific temper,” and thus, the school textbooks were designed to cultivate a new
kind of epistemic domain. This new aim of education initially at least under-
valued literature.
Women, too, began participating in such public spaces, but they were
mostly of Brahmo orientation. Apart from this, British officials, too, set up
their own clubs and “at homes,” which were emulated by the newly educated
middle class, the bhadralok. The history of this is inseparable from the mate-
rial context of setting up of printing presses, which had to look out for sub-
scriptions, as well as some kind of government patronage. A few schools
were also set up with missionary effort for girls’ education. Though Hindu
parents tended to shun these, over time, it was championed by the neo-liter-
ate among the “natives.” Reba Ray, married to a Brahmo, was instrumental
in setting up a girls’ school in Cuttack. She also launched the first secular
periodical for women.72

Bhand, Rahasya and Chatuni

Yet another enduring public-cultural space, not as visible as the two dis-
cussed above and by no means limited to the Odia-speaking tracts, was gen-
erated by the circulation of folk tales around figures such as Gopal Bhand,
Tenali Raman, Birbal and so on. These tales provided occasions for debates
on aesthetic issues related to Odia and questions of justice, as one can adduce
from the folk tales and proverbs themselves and were thus also forums for
subversion, however ineffective. Gautam Bhadra believes that Gopal Bhand
was not an individual, but only a - product of folklore, invented by a given
 Introduction 17

culture. Jesters like Gopal are known to have existed as part of the royal
court. Bhadra says that:

The Bhand both questioned and strengthened the power of the king.
At the India Office Library, I have read over 250 collections featur-
ing Gopal Bhand. But not one of them was a collection of Gopal
Bhand stories, per se. The politics of fundamentalism reduces every
cultural element into a definitive historical origin and contrived
“facticity”.73

Bhadra points out that not everything has to be established as historical

truth. He also points out that Gopal Bhand and other comic figures of Indian
origin, or popular in Indian culture, such as Birbal or Mullah Nasruddin, are
often credited with the same stock of stories, which are date-defying. In the
context of Odisha, it is conjectured that the eighteenth-century Odia court
poet, Jadumani, may have been influenced by the structure of many such
“jokes,” though there is no evidence to support this theory. More impor-
tantly, it is likely that the Bhand stories found their way into intelligent
conversations in the addas and subsequently took the form of humorous
pieces, which were more often than not subversive, and ended up being
published in literary periodicals. They were printed under the rubric,
“Rahashya” or “Rang-Rasa.” Interestingly enough, the witty verses, with
their pithy lines, were titled Jadumani Rahasya. Such rahasya pieces were
crafted mostly in the form of prose dialogues, where encounters with the
new languages of the dominant groups became the butt of ridicule, in line
with the subversive intent of Bhand or Jadumani narratives. The humour is
invariably at the cost of a “pathan” (Muslim), a Bengali, a Saheb or a
Brahman. Many of these were written by Fakir Mohan, but appeared as
anonymous pieces or under pseudonyms. One can see traces of the form in
Fakir Mohan’s novels and short stories. Lest one should question the rele-
vance of these stories to the idea of the “public sphere,” one would do well
to be reminded of how, with the growth of urban spaces, these traditional
institutions gave way to forums in town halls and places of debate, set up
during the colonial period, when newly arrived print culture began playing
its role in disseminating information and providing food for political and
cultural thought. There is a streak of the bhand in many of Fakir Mohan’s
narrators. As the writer of rahasyas, Fakir Mohan makes use of the bhand
figure as his narratorial strategy, certainly his novel, Chha Mana Atha
Guntha. As Satya P. Mohanty says:

[The narrator] enters the modern Indian novel from the world of oral
discourse; his rhythms and shifting moods make him the quintessential
satirist who reaches beyond the delicate sensibilities of the middle class
to create a new kind of reader and a new kind of self-critical social
subject.74
18 Introduction

This observation strengthens our contention about the indigenous forms

feeding the nascent public sphere.

The Field of Scholarship

Pioneering historiographical work by Benedict Anderson, Partha Chatterjee
and the subaltern school on the interconnectedness of imaginative literature
and nationalism was followed by many studies in the context of India from
1990s onwards. However, in the initial years, such “Indian” studies were
mostly Bengal-centric, Calcutta being the imperial capital, and were partly
also because of the availability of vast archival resources. Meanwhile,
though, there have also been happy exceptions to this, such as Christopher
A. Bayly and Paul R. Brass who made pioneering interventions in lan-
guage-based nationalisms in North India.75 More recently, exclusive studies
of languages in the south-east and south-west regions of India have cast the
net wider and many more languages such as Tamil, Bangla, Hindi, Marathi,
Telugu, Maithili and Konkani have received close and exclusive scholarly
scrutiny at the hands of cultural and book historians.76 The new focus on the
non-Bengali languages clearly show the many differences between them and
their counterparts in Bengal, even though it is true that colonial modernity in
the subcontinent was mediated by the Bengali elite. A landmark volume,
Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, conceptual-
ised and edited by Sheldon Pollock, is also a testimony to such efforts as
indeed is the volume edited by Stuart Blackburn and Vasudha Dalmia.
From among the number of significant studies by social scientists men-
tioned above, many make instrumental use of the concerned sahitya when-
ever their larger arguments need to be buttressed by suitable examples from
literary texts. Their emphasis is either on exclusive issues of print, the public
sphere, “nationalism” or linguistic identity.77 But others with language and
literature as their focus are closer to the aim of this book. Vasudha Dalmia,
for example, has studied the Hindi public sphere concentrating on the major
Hindi writer of the nineteenth century, Bharatendu Harischandra, in the con-
text of “Hindi nationalism.” Lisa Mitchell’s study of Telugu-speaking regions
argues that many forms of knowledge, having been newly organized around
languages, enabled assertions of community and identity. She also shows
how, by the early decades of the twentieth century, new linguistic identities
had begun to appear ancient and natural rather than recent and invented.78
Even more cognate to my study is the work of Francesca Orsini, who focusses
on literary production and the changes that took place in Hindi, from about
the 1920s.79 Yet another development in this field has been the growth of the
“history of the book” as a major, multidisciplinary area of investigation,
which has energised traditional disciplines such as history and literary studies
in new and unforeseen ways. These studies also address questions concerning
book history and literature, but not always as part of their central concerns.
A series under the editorship of Swapan Chakravorty and Abhijit Gupta
 Introduction 19

looks at literature, as it comes to life not only in its technology-induced ava-

tar due to advancement in the print industry—and more recently digitized
versions—but also in the pre-print form of manuscripts and engravings.
In doing so, they try to help literary studies employ historicism and objectiv-
ity with a rigorous engagement with the records. In the same vein, Ulrike
Stark’s monumental work is focussed on print culture, especially around the
Hindi publishing house, the Naval Kishore Press. Anindita Ghosh’s more
recent and exhaustive study of popular Bengali print culture dwells on pre-
vailing notions of “good” literature and languages.80
A major lacuna in many of these exceptional studies catalogued above is
that the Odia-speaking tracts, then spread over parts of the Bengal
Presidency, Central Provinces and the Madras Presidency, have been given
short shrift in the discussions related to the contexts of Bengali, Hindi and
Telugu public and literary spheres. Given South Asia’s complex multilin-
gual context, there is imminent risk of getting chained to one’s own per-
spective when attempting to build a singular narrative around only one of
the many Indian vernacular languages. This possibility is exacerbated by
the messy question of the liminality of almost all language-based borders.
An example might clarify the point. When Lisa Mitchel, in her otherwise
comprehensive study, refers to the people residing on the border between
Andhra and Odisha, she uses a perspective that compels her to state that
the southern districts of Odisha were predominantly Telugu speaking. From
my point of view, it could be just the other way round. It is possible that
when I speak of Odia in the Northern districts of present-day Andhra, I
might feel tempted to argue that those parts had many more Odia-speaking
people than Telugu speakers, and my claims could be as dubious as those of
Lisa Mitchel. Before making any claims, one needs to consider the histori-
cal fact that for centuries, these territories were part of one kingdom and
many of the inhabitants could have been bilingual, as is quite common in
India. Thus, it is possible that many writers worked in these liminal spaces
at a time when the invisible linguistic borders were porous. Among many
examples, one can think of the bilingual writer Bikram Deb Varma who
lived in Vizagapatnam (present-day Vishakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh
state) and made major contributions to the literary cultures of both Telugu
and Odia. Similarly, western Odisha, which was part of the Central
Provinces, and for a time had Hindi as its medium of instruction, did pro-
duce a community that knew Bharatendu Harischandra’s work rather well.
Moreover, the princes of diverse regions intermarried and Hindi was their
lingua franca. Thus, the sharing of borders and the consequent in-between
spaces could be one of the most common reasons why exclusive studies of
vernacular languages might present incomplete pictures. I maintain this
scepticism while narrating the story of Odia in the present study. Similarly,
in dealing with the literary history of any Indian literature, one cannot
afford to be amnesiac about the pre-colonial aesthetic. Odia cannot be an
exception to this historical reality. Thus, as European notions of the
20 Introduction

“literary” impacted the Odia public sphere and altered the traditional
understanding of sahitya, the encounter gave rise to a hybrid aesthetic, and
an entirely new body of writing redefined Odia sahitya, which this book
attempts to highlight.
In the context of the Odia public and literary spheres, scholarly articles and
full-length books by Nivedita Mohanty, Gaganendra Nath Dash, Subhakanta
Behera, Pritish Acharya, Chandi Prasad Nanda and Ravi Ahuja provide us
with rich insights into the historical shifts taking place in colonial Odisha.81 In
their different ways, these scholars, with the exception of Ahuja, have dealt
with the unavoidable question of Odia identity discourses, invoking, in gen-
eral, issues related to literature and arts. But they do so only insofar as the
subservience of these developments to the broader questions of Odia nation-
alism is concerned.82 However, a notable exception so far has been the sus-
tained research by the Odia scholar Natabara Samantaray from the 1960s to
the 1980s.83 Samantaray, in his history of modern Odia literature, has force-
fully argued that the foundations of adhunik Odia sahitya were laid through
the introduction of the discipline of sahitya as a curricular requirement in
European schools and, therefore, of the textbooks required to teach it. Many
Odia scholars inspired by his methodology have researched on several period-
icals of the time such as Indradhanu, Utkal Darpan, Sambalpur Hiteisini,
Utkal Madhupa, Utkal Pradipa and so on. But the larger map interweaving
these numerous and exclusive studies is yet to be drawn even in Odia, let alone
English. Gopal Chandra Mishra’s Odishara Bikashare Patrapatrikara Prabhab
and Shridhar Mohapatra’s Odia Prakasana O Prasaranara Itihas come close
to offering a history of print and publication in Odisha.84 But Gopal Chandra
Mishra’s focus is primarily on the impact of newspapers and periodicals on
the political sphere, and he ignores the transformation that the literary field
underwent. Although many of the other studies provide us with details of the
contribution of individual literary-cultural enterprises, they in no way offer a
clear pattern or an understanding of the interlocking grids of the journals that
mutually contribute to the growth and mutation of “modern” Odia literary
culture.
A recent short monograph on Odia modernity by Sachidananda Mohanty
offers a synoptic view of the periodical press in Odisha.85 It highlights the
contribution of a few influential periodicals and their editors and their sym-
biotic relationship with Odia modernity. More recently, Pritipuspa Mishra
has offered a close and comprehensive analysis of the processes leading to the
creation of the first linguistically organised province in India, Odisha.86 She
explores the ways regional languages came to serve as the most acceptable
registers of difference in post-colonial India. Examining the case of the adiva-
sis of Odisha, Pritipuspa highlights the way regional languages in India have
come to occupy a curiously hegemonic position vis-à-vis linguistic alterities,
especially where sizable Adivasi populations exist. However, the sharing of
borders and the inevitable in-between spaces is one of the reasons why such
exclusive studies of vernacular languages, barring a few, tend to present
 Introduction 21

incomplete pictures. Second, in such literary histories, where political aspects

of the public sphere are foregrounded, questions of the literary tend to get
elided. In the present monograph, I use this nuanced understanding to nar-
rate the story of the emergence of a new literary culture, that of “Utkal sah-
itya” or Odia literature, in the context of similar but conflicting,
linguistic-territorial cultures of Eastern India.
Scholars like Francis Mulhern, Chris Baldick and others have uncovered
the ideological foundations of the discipline of English literature that was
introduced in schools, colleges and universities in Victorian England. This
process also depended on the efforts of missionaries, who seized the advan-
tages of print technology to push their agenda.87 Elaborating on the implica-
tions of these ideas for India, Gauri Viswanathan has shown how the
“curricular study of English can no longer be understood innocently of or
inattentively to the imperial contexts in which the discipline first articulated
its mission.”88 While considering the shifts in traditional issues of bhasa and
sahitya, the question of ideology cannot be ignored. For, with modernity, the
colonised elite subjects, willy-nilly imbibed the ideological underpinnings of
colonial education and with it the newer notions of education and the disci-
pline of sahitya. In the case of Odisha, decisive roles were played by the
missionaries in Serampore and Calcutta to set up printing presses and stead-
ily spread print culture in many of the languages of Eastern India from the
early nineteenth century. The arrival of missionaries, such as William
Bampton, James Pegg, Amos Sutton and William Carey Lacey, in Odisha
resulted in a widespread distribution of tracts, translations, Odia grammar
books, etc., among the reading public, following the Serampore model. Until
1866, the Cuttack Mission Press was the only centre of Odia print, printing
hundreds of tracts and other titles in a variety of subjects and trained an
entire generation of print-house personnel. However, the decisive impact of
print on Utkal sahitya (as Odia literature was then called) was manifested
only after Gourisankar Ray’s Cuttack Printing Company and Fakir Mohan’s
Utkal Press were set up.

The Present Book

From the foregoing discussion, we find that in most earlier studies, the devel-
opment of Odia print sphere and Odia literature is examined either inde-
pendently of or in tandem with issues of Odia identity and nationalism. I
propose, therefore, to collocate the three concurrent developments of moder-
nity, print and sahitya to investigate the role played by them in reorienting
the course of hundreds of years of vernacular Odia literary culture. Further,
while not disagreeing with the above-mentioned thesis of Samantaray (that
the foundations for adhunik Odia sahitya were laid through the introduction
of the discipline of sahitya as a curricular requirement in European schools),
I seek to explore whether the overlapping Odia public and literary spheres
generated discourses that defined the new and re-defined the old cultural
22 Introduction

expressions of Odia language and literary culture. I try to examine the shifts
in literary culture in terms of their imbrications with the changes in political
filiations. This latter impulse, paradoxically enough, springs from an astute
observation by Samantaray himself when he says,

Two overlapping histories of the Odias of half a century each [1817–1868

and 1822–1873] are inextricably linked: On one hand, the “Paika Bidroha”
(or revolt of the foot soldiers) (1817), and the Odia linguistic agitation
(1868); on the other, the arrival of the missionaries (1822) and the launch
of [the first literary periodical] Utkal Darpan (1873). The first fifty years
were completely political, the history of which is steeped in social suffering
and misery. During this period, the life stream of Odias underwent thor-
ough humiliation and abjection. Life’s natural progress was interrupted
and stifled. The second stretch of fifty years was completely oriented
towards education. This period was steeped in solace and promise for a
better future. The life stream shone with new light….One was destructive,
the other one found expression in creating a new literature.89

This monograph, however does not aspire to be as schema-driven as the

above quote might suggest. But it is structured around three broad segments
as follows.

Three Segments
In this book, I trace the growth and development of a recognisably new liter-
ary culture in colonial Odisha in three broad, but overlapping, temporal seg-
ments. I see the years 1837–1866, as the first of these three stages, and as one
of preparation and prefiguration of what was to follow. It began when the
Cuttack Mission Press (1837) was set up. The press printed mostly religious
tracts, textbooks and one “literary” periodical, Prabodh Chandrika (1856).
But I focus on this phase only briefly, as it was in the second phase (1866–
1903) that Odia sahitya well and truly made the decisive break from its tra-
ditional moorings. The second segment started from 1866, when fledgling
literary ventures and linguistic-identitarian movements were initiated, up to
the time (mid-1890s) when the debates around obscenity and other aesthetic
issues, along with the fight for linguistic survival were taken up by the newly
educated Odias. This period was also significant because of the setting up of
the highly influential literary periodical, Utkal Sahitya (1897), printed by the
Utkal Sahitya Press, which also took up the publication of several books. The
period culminated in the strong collaborative institutionalisation of the two
movements, Utkal Sammilani and Utkal Sahitya Samaj (1903). This phase is
marked by the Odia elite’s focus on local interests, and the underplaying of
the larger nationalist, anti-colonial movements (Indian National Congress
and Swadeshi). The third phase (1903–1919) saw the rise of a new leadership
group led by young Gopabandhu Das and culminated in a focus on
 Introduction 23

pan-Indian struggles with the arrival of Gandhi on the scene. Gopabandhu

and the Satyabadi group began addressing larger political issues and wrote
an engaged kind of literature that was overtly political, moving away from
localism. This shift was symbolised by the launching of the third most impor-
tant periodical, and the longest lasting newspaper, The Samaj (1919).
Finally, a word about the overarching temporal framing of this monograph,
if it is not already obvious: 1866–1919. At one end of the spectrum, I begin
with 1866. The year was not only the epicentre of the great famine, but it was
also the year in which, as already mentioned, Cuttack Printing Company
launched the first indigenous Odia periodical, Utkal Dipika and took to
retrieving and printing many old and some selective new texts with a view to
countering the argument that Odisha’s “cultural capital” was meagre. Thus
began an influential Odia institution revolving around print that altered the
fortunes of a whole linguistic region. At the other end of the spectrum, Dipika
met its match, in terms of influence, longevity and credibility, only half a cen-
tury later when the Odia Gandhian, Gopabandhu Das, launched The Samaj in
1919. This was also the year when the parochial ideology of “Odisha for
Odias” began to wane after Gandhi’s arrival on the political scene. Insofar as
accessibility to print was concerned, 1919 also happened to be the year when
some school students were able to bring out a printed magazine called Chhatra
Darpan, echoing the title of the first Odia literary magazine (Utkal Darpan] in
1873.90 Initially, I had thought of limiting the study to the year 1915, when
Gopabandhu started the periodical Satyabadi, with the intention of combining
aesthetics with nationalist politics (for local and pan-Indian nationalisms were
not mutually exclusive), thus giving rise to a new political aesthetic. The other
alternative for the outer limit was the year 1917 in which Gourisankar ceased
to be the editor of Dipika. Gopabadhu, however, launched The Samaj in 1919,
which clearly and decisively broke away from the Dipika model. While being
a newspaper, the Dipika continued to devote much of its print space to the
cause of Odia language and literature. Even more importantly, it was in 1919
when the baton of Odisha politics decisively passed from Madhusudan Das to
Gopabandhu Das in the annual conference of the Utkal Union, a subject we
shall return to later.
Thus, the book addresses the question of the “local” phenomenon of the
adhunikikaran of a centuries-old tradition of sahitya in the context of colonial
Eastern India. It is, nonetheless, also about transculturation and global circula-
tion, as the entire process was overseen by the colonial and newly educated indig-
enous administrators. In the process, this book attempts to throw light on what
Regenia Gagnier calls the “transformation of one humanities field—Victorian
Studies—through the impact of recent research…”.91 After all, many Odias
wrote eulogia and panegyrics on the Empress and many aspects of Victorian
culture were imbibed by the Odias. Similarly, the book indirectly builds on the
other side of the story of English literature in colonial schools and universities
that Natabara Samantaray, and later, others have presented in their works
(Samantaray, 1964; Baldick, 1983 and Viswanathan, 1989).92 When the
24 Introduction

“mission” of English was unleashed in India, how did Indian vernacular litera-
ture look after their own interests? How did they emerge as the counter discipline
of vernacular sahitya? Were the “masks of conquest” exposed surreptitiously?
Or, were they reduplicated in vernacular languages? I hope to be able to address
these broader questions through the five main chapters of the book.

Chapter Summaries
This book contains five main chapters. Chapter 1 sets up the context for
what follows and describes the affective and material distresses caused by
two terrible sources of communal grief among the Odias of the late nine-
teenth century. One of these was the catastrophic famine of 1866, killing
one-third of the population of the Orissa Division of Bengal Presidency.93
The second source of grief among Odias is attributable largely to what
Sudipta Kaviraj has called, “the sub-imperialism of Bengalis,” then prevail-
ing in certain influential parts of the Odia-speaking tracts that had been
brought under the Calcutta Presidency by the colonial government. Apart
from the threat of the linguistic dominance of Bengalis, Odia learners were
put through Telugu- and Hindi-medium schooling in the rest of the Odia-
speaking tracts, which had been brought under the Madras Presidency and
the Central Provinces, respectively. Outlining these exasperating circum-
stances, the chapter examines the way such emotional pressures energised the
newly educated Odia print-public, leading to the emergence of an Odia pub-
lic sphere, from the 1860s onwards. The chapter then maps the increasing
availability of public spaces in the form of sabhas, town halls and debating
clubs in the years following the setting up of the earliest indigenous and sec-
ular printing companies, the most important one being Cuttack Printing
Company (CPC) and its weekly newspaper, the Utkal Dipika. The chapter
traces how these developments culminated in the founding of two mutually
inclusive robust institutions in 1903: the political, Utkal Sammilani (Utkal
Union) and the literary, Utkal Sahitya (Odia Literature). This chapter further
maps out the contribution of the missionaries and Company officials and
studies the value of the newly emerged public sphere in terms of its contribu-
tion to the political and aesthetic endeavours of the new Odia elite.
In Chapter 2, I examine the changes wrought by the advent of modernity,
especially with the introduction of European ideas of the “literary” for ped-
agogic purposes and the way other tenets of the category sahitya were debated
and taken forward. In the process, we shall also examine the new direction
that Utkal sahitya took in the public and literary spheres. The new writings
that emerged was driven partly by an anxiety to find suitable textbooks in
order to counter the argument in favour of Bangla as the medium of
instruction.
In Chapter 3, I try to outline the Odias’ changing perceptions of time and
space and their growing sense of a larger community with the advent of
modernity to show how this resulted in the sharpening and strengthening of
 Introduction 25

the hitherto imprecise intimations of nationalist consciousness. By the turn of

the century, these concepts had been reinforced, made tangible and were
quantified with precision through clock-time, Christian calendars, compasses
and maps, among other technologies of time-space. In the process, the Odia
elite saw the need to alter their understanding of the function of literature in
the larger framework of service to the Utkal Jati. In this chapter, I further
examine the inextricable political and aesthetic processes that were facili-
tated by the new knowledge disciplines of history and geography, which, in
turn and in tandem with colonial modernity, enabled the culture of secular
travel and travel writing. The chapter also charts the gradual coming into
consciousness of the newly educated community regarding their sense of its
heritage and its territorial spread, and the growing body of literary works.
In Chapter 4, I take into account and try to theorise the rise of a curious
but significantly new discourse of communal lamentation. The chapter stud-
ies the link between this trend and the nationalist aspirations of the Odia elite
and identifies a new thematic and structural strain in the discursive space of
the Odia public sphere that preoccupied itself with the fashioning of a
“moral” community. It is my contention in the chapter that it is largely out
of this discourse of lamentation that modern Odia literature acquires much
of its cultural traction and redefines its aesthetics. Similarly, the attempt that
writers in many of the periodicals made to re-examine their literary heritage
made them overconscious about ashlil or obscene writing (as opposed to shlil
or genteel), which created conditions for the articulation of a new adhunik/
modern sensibility that defined itself against the prachin/old. The chapter
further traces the conflict between traditional aesthetics and colonial moder-
nity that dominated the public sphere towards the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury. Though much of the battle was played out in public lectures and debates
in cultural centres like those in Balasore, Cuttack, Bamanda and Ganjam, but
the print sphere too was abuzz with the clamour for the “new.” This partly
explains the aggressive collaboration between writers, intellectuals and the
nascent political class, as well as the residual monarchic and feudal classes.
In Chapter 5, I study the role of the periodical press, especially that of
the newspapers, in providing access to adhunikata and the discourse around
it to those who lived far away (both literally and rhetorically) from urban
spaces and metropolitan centres. Even those who lived in the urban areas
had difficulty in understanding and accessing the changes they encountered
in their everyday lives. It was the mediation of periodicals such as Dipika,
with a wide circulation that the concept of the new or the adhunik pene-
trated the small towns and backwaters of the Odia-speaking areas, bringing
new ideas with them. Along with these details, the chapter looks at the new
developments over the previous decades, leading to the consolidation of
what gets increasingly recognised and designated as adhunik Odia sahitya
or literature.
Thus, the narrative offered below, even while it traces the developments
from 1866 to 1919, follows a non-linear structure. Rather than simply
26 Introduction

focusing on the basis of a chronologically arranged teleology, the chapters

are organised around issues and themes. The concluding chapter, to state the
obvious, is devoted to the interweaving and dovetailing of the different seg-
ments of the central argument of the book. As this book is heavily dependent
on the vernacular archives, mostly in Odia, but also in Hindi and Bangla, I
have translated a good number of them. So, unless otherwise mentioned, all
translations may be taken as by me.

Notes
1 Excerpts from the report were reproduced by Alexander Smith, the Commissioner
of the Orissa Division, in his letter dated, 5 August 1882, with the caption, “The
State of Education” for the years 1878 to 1885. The said letter was addressed to
the Secretary to the Government of West Bengal. See Mahendra Prasad Dash
et al., Eds. Bhasabhittika Swatantra Odisha Pradesh Gathana [Formation of
Separate Orissa Province on Language Basis (1803–1902)], Vol I, Part I.
Bhubaneswar: Odisha State Archives, 2010, pp. 113–114). Pathasalas were
pre-colonial, indigenous schools. Besides, the Joint Director of Schools in ques-
tion was, in all probability, Radhanath Ray.
2 Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, ed. Joseph Devy. New York: PF Collins and
Sons, 1902, p. 105. Accessed from [Link]
com/oll3/store/titles/1432/0415_Bk.pdf on 30 November 2021.
3 It would be anachronistic to use the term “Odisha” for all the Odia-speaking areas
then as after the British occupation of the region, it was administered by the Bengal
and Madras presidencies, respectively, in the north and south; the western parts
were under the Central Provinces; and the rest were under numerous feudatory
chiefs. Ravi Ahuja describes the political entity it then comprised thus: (i) the
“Cuttack Division” of the East India Company’s “Bengal Presidency” (that is the
“Mughalbandi” coastal districts of Balasore, Cuttack and Puri, annexed in 1803);
(ii) the coastal district of Ganjam (ceded to the “Madras Presidency in 1765); (iii)
the “little kingdoms” or “gadjats” in the interior, most of which were allowed to
keep a semblance of independence until the end of the British rule. (Ravi Ahuja,
Pathways of Empire: Circulation, ‘Public Works’ and Social Space in Colonial
Orissa (c.1780–1914). Hyderabad: Orient Black Swan, 2009, pp. 115–117).
Odisha and Odia were anglicized as Odissa and Uriya or Oriya by the British,
respectively, and have been used until recently. On 4 November 2011, these were
officially changed to Odisha and Odia, in order to conform to the way Odias
themselves pronounce and write them.
4 Anindita Ghosh, Power in Print: Popular Publishing and the Politics of Language
and Culture in a Colonial Society. New Delhi: OUP, 2006, pp. 14, 33–34.
5 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread
of Nationalism New York: Verso, 1983, p. 45.
6 Bernard Cohn, “The Command of Language and the Language of Command,” in
Ranajit Guha, ed. Subaltern Studies: Writings of South Asian History and Society,
Vol. 4. New Delhi, 1985.
7 Initially, orthodox Odias continued to be suspicious of print. They believed that
God resided in inscribed palm leaves (and even those palm leaves that were as yet
uninscribed in sacred words) rather than on printed pages.
8 Suniti Kumar Chatterji, Varna-Ratnakara. Eds. Suniti Kumar Chatterji and Babua
Mishra. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1940; 1998, p. xi.
9 Lalit Kumar, “Caste, Script and Language—The Curious Case of Maithili Print,”
in Javed Majeed, Sumanyu Satpathy and Wendy Singer, eds. Regional Languages,
 Introduction 27

Identity, and the State in Modern India. London and New York: Routledge,
forthcoming.
10 Graham Shaw, “South Asia,” in Jonathan Rose and Simon Eliot, eds. A Companion
to the History of the Book. London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007, pp. 126–137.
11 In the same letter (dated, 5 August 1882) quoted above, Alexander Smith, the
Commissioner of the Orissa Division, noted that: “The direct administration of
Orissa by the British Government dates from 1803, and the province has therefore
in point of time had half a century less of the benefits of English rule than its more
advanced neighbouring Bengal.” Mahendra Prasad Dash et al., 2010. p. 111.
12 Natabara Samantaray (1964), Odia Sahityara Itihas (1803–1920). Cuttack: Self,
1982, p. 212.
13 In the context of this book, “Eastern India” refers to the east of the Indian penin-
sula close to or along the coastline of the Bay of Bengal, comprising major parts
of the erstwhile colonial territories of parts of present-day Assam, Bengal, Odisha,
Andhra, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh under three different administrative zones:
Madras and Calcutta Presidencies and the Central Provinces.
14 Going by the existing histories of these languages, it is difficult to agree with
Ghosh that before the arrival of print, “struggles took place among competing
social groups” (Anindita Ghosh, p. 3). Sisir Kumar Das talks about “linguistic
interaction” between these languages. But he offers a more complex pattern
before and after print arrived among these literary cultures, calling them “pro-
phane” and “meta-phane” Sisir Kumar Das, History of Indian Literature (1800–
1910). New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2005, pp. 27–46. In the battle fought among
languages of the elites, languages of the subalterns, so-called lower castes and
Adivasis, got a raw deal; homogenization led to subtle forms of exploitation.
15 Fakir Mohan Granthabali. Vol II, Eds. Krushna Charan Behera, Debendra Kumar
Dash. Cuttack: Grantha Mandir, 2002. p. 56.
16 Samachar Darpan, 16 May 1835; quoted in Samantaray, History, p. 206.
17 Ulrike Stark, “Hindi Publishing in the Heart of an Indo-Persian Cultural
Metropolis: Lucknow’s Newal Kishor Press,” in Stuart Blackburn and Vasudha
Dalmia, eds. India’s Literary History: Essays on the Nineteenth Century. New
Delhi: Permanent Black, 2010, pp. 251–279.
18 For the connection between the events in 1857 and the many administrative deci-
sions, see Anindita Ghosh, Power in Print, pp. 30–37.
19 This was one reason why attempts (soon to be abandoned) were made to make
South Asia either monolingual or mono-scriptural Rev. James Long, “Notes and
Queries Suggested by Visit to Orissa in January 1859.” Journal of the Asiatic
Society of India, vol. 28, no. 3, 1859, pp. 189–190. For a detailed discussion, see
Sumanyu Satpathy, Will to Argue. New Delhi: Primus, 2017, pp. 31–34.
20 Anindita Ghosh, Power in Print, p. 3.
21 Lalit Kumar, “Caste, Script and Language: The Curious Case of Maithili Print.”
22 Yet, they failed to realize until much later that Bangla literary tradition had fewer
prachin or ancient texts than those in Odia, Maithili or Assamese, as Bengalis
made claims on Boudhgaan, Charyapada and even the Maithili poet Vidyapati, as
part of their “rich” literary heritage. The present-day histories of Assamese, Odia
and Hindi literatures too all begin by claiming these linguistic ancestries as their
own. Besides, Maithili, a language in its own rights, has been included in the VIII
Schedule.
23 Javed Majeed, Colonialism and Knowledge in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of
India. London and New York: Routledge, 2019, pp. 5–8.
24 Then, with the rise of the East India Company as a political power, the three
Presidency cities, Bombay (Mumbai), Madras (Chennai) and Calcutta (Kolkata),
became rapidly developing centres of print, as did Serampore, which was the
accidental site of the Baptist Printing Press located 40 kilometres upstream from
28 Introduction

Calcutta. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the growth of printing in
South Asia became phenomenal. While the three Presidency cities continued to
dominate, a host of other centres of printing began to create their own ecosystems
of production and consumption.
25 Swapan Chakravorty, “A Note on Nineteenth Century Bengali Prose,” in Abhijit
Gupta and Swapan Chakravorty, eds. Print Areas: Book History in India. New
Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004, p. 203.
26 Abhijit Gupta says: “The first two centuries of the coming of print to India were
very much a coastal affair, confined to missionary enclaves such as Goa and
Tranquebar (Tharangambadi).” Abhijit Gupta, The Spread of Print in Colonial
India into the Hinterland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021, p. 1.
27 Adhunik Kabita, ed. Chintamani Behera. Cuttack: Das Brothers, 1960.
28 Brajamohan Mohanty, Odia Sahityare Adhunikatara Darshan (The Philosophy
of Modernism in Odia Literature). Cuttack: Janata Press, 1967.
29 Dasarathi Das, Adhunika Kavya Jignasa: Chitrakalpa. Cuttack: Gitanjali Press,
1974.
30 Almost a century later, when modernism in Western Literature that had been
pioneered by the French Symbolists, Imagists, Dada and Surrealists, etc., acquired
canonical status, and Odia literature belatedly came under their influence, the
new trends were also called adhunik. The large number of articles and books that
the leading Odia critic Natabara Samantaray and his contemporaries wrote sel-
dom made any distinction between the two kinds of Odia modernity. While pre-
fixing the description adhunik to the writers and works of the late nineteenth
century (Radhanath et al.) and those of the Odia poets (from Sachi Rautray to
Ramakanta Rath who wrote under the influence of Eliot, Auden and Rilke) they
made indiscriminate use of the term. See Adhunik Kabita Ed. Chintamani Behera.
Cuttack: Das Brothers, 1960; Odia Sahityare Adhunikatara Darshan (1967),
Brajamohan Mohanty, Odia Sahityare Adhunikatara Darshan, Cuttack: Janata
Press, 1967; Dasarathi Das, Adhunika Kavya Jignasa: Chitrakalpa. Cuttack:
Gitanjali Press, 1974. I do not see any reason why Odia modernism of the lat-
er-day variety warrants any definition in the context of my book.
31 Christopher A. Bayly, The Birth of The Modern World, 1780–1914. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2004; Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Provincializing Europe:
Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference,” in Princeton Studies in Culture/
Power/History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000, pp. xii, 301. P.
Chatterjee, South-South Exchange for Research on the History of Development.
Erasmus University, 1997. Carol C. Chin, “Our Modernity,” in Modernity and
National Identity in the United States and East Asia, 1895–1919. Ashland: Kent
State University Press, 2010. Arif Dirlik, “Thinking Modernity Historically: Is
“Alternative Modernity” the Answer?” The Asian Review of World Histories,
vol. 1, no. 1, 2013, pp. 5–44. [Link] S.
Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities,” Daedalus, vol. 129, no. 1, 2000, pp. 1–29.
32 Kalidasa Granthabali tr. Dhaneswar Mohapatra. Cuttack: Friends’ Publishers,
2005, p. 406.
33 Sheldon Pollock, “New Intellectuals in Seventeenth Century India, 1.” The Indian
Economic and Social History Review, vol. 38, no. 1, 2001, p. 5.
34 I am here alluding to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s catchy phrase, “The Muddle of
Modernity.” referred to earlier. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Muddle of
Modernity.” The American Historical Review, June 2011. [Link]
ahr/106.4.1322.
35 Artaballabh Mohanty, ed., Prachin Gadyapadya. Cuttack: Prachi Prakasan, 1932.
36 Amos Sutton, Amarakosh. Cuttack: Orissa Mission Press, 1845.
37 Sutton, 1841.
 Introduction 29

38 Monier Williams, A Sanskrit-English dictionary: Etymologically and Philologically

Arranged with Special Reference to Cognate Indo-European Languages.
Clarendon Press, 1899. (Original work published 1872); Vaman Shivram Apte,
1890. Motilal Banarsidass 1998 The practical Sanskrit-English Dictionary, 1998.
39 Sudarsana Acharya, ed. Indradhanu: Unbingsha Satabdira eka Bishmruta Patrika.
Berhampur: Berhampur University, 1991. my emphasis.
40 Sudipta Kaviraj, “An Outline of a Revisionist Theory of Modernity.” European
Journal of Sociology, vol. 46, no. 3, 2005, pp. 497–526, p. 502.
41 Odia newspapers and periodicals will continue to preoccupy us, often occupying
the centre stage in the entire narrative.
42 Utkal Darpan, 1873, p. 112.
43 Ibid., p. 110.
44 Utkal Prabha, 1891, p. 10.
45 Pyari Mohan Acharya, Odishara Itihas. Cuttack: Cuttack Printing Press, 1879.
46 Sadhana Parashar, “Preface,” in Kavyamimamsa of Rajaśekhara, ed. Sadhana
Parashar. New Delhi: D.K. Printworld, 2000. Also see, Sudarsana Acharya, Odia
Kavya Kaushal. Cuttack: Friends, 1983.
47 Last quarter of the ninth and first quarter of the tenth century AD.
48 Parashar, p. 29.
49 Sudarsana Acharya, Odia Kavya Kaushal, p. 169.
50 Pollock, pp. 262–263.
51 See the Introduction by Kumudrajan Ray (pxxi). Also see Siddharth Satpathy,
“The Quest for Sahitya: Rise of Literature in Colonial Orissa,” in Language
Policy and Education In India: Documents, Contexts and Debates, ed. M. Sridhar
and Sunita Mishra. London: Routledge, 2017, pp. 211–235.
52 Sudarsana Acharya, Odia Kavya Kaushal, p. 133.
53 Jagannath Pandit, Ras Gangadhar, Varanashi: Choukhamba, 1964 [source: see
Sudarsana Acharya, p. 504].
54 Rosinka Chaudhuri, The Literary Thing: History, Poetry, and the Making of a
Modern Cultural Sphere. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 2013.
55 Sisir Kumar Das, A History of Indian Literature: 1800–1910. New Delhi: Sahitya
Akademi, 1991, pp. 35–36.
56 The Odia tungi is a variant of the village panchayat of north India that Premchand
describes in his titular story, “Panch Paremeswar” (“Holy Judges” in Premchand:
The Complete: Short Stories Vol I M. Asaduddin, Ed. Penguin Random House
Books, 2017. Print, pp. 514–522).
57 Fakir Mohan Senapati, Six Acres and a Third: The Classic Nineteenth-Century
Novel about Colonial India. Trans. Rabi Shankar Mishra et al. Berkeley: U of
California, 2006. Print, pp. 86–87.
58 Jatindra Mohan Singh, Odishara Chitra (The Image of Odisha) 1903, tr. Shoma
Chand. Cuttack: Arya Prakashini, 2006, pp. 36–41.
59 Also see Jagabandhu Singh, Prabandhasara. Brahmapur: Cuttack Students Store,
1929, pp. 207–221.
60 Nilakantha Das, Atmajibani (1963). Cuttack: Cuttack Students Store, 2003, p. 20.
61 Fakir Mohan Senapati, “Bagula-Baguli,” in Fakir Mohan Granthababli:
Galpmala, ed. Kailash Pattanaik. Cuttack: Friends’ Publishers, 1999, pp.
151–152.
62 Jatindra Mohan Singh, Odishara Chitra, 2006, p. 42.
63 Ibid., pp. 97–99.
64 Gopabandhu Chayanika, Ed. Pritish Acharya. New Delhi: NBT, p. 21 (pp. 3–38).
65 Mahendra Prasad Dash et al., eds. Bhasabhittika Swatantra Odisha Pradesh
Gathana [Formation of Separate Orissa Province on Language Basis (1803–
1902)], Vol I, Part I. Bhubaneswar: Odisha State Archives, 2010, p. 104.
30 Introduction

66 Ibid., p. 62. As early as 1854, some 2,000,000, and by 1859, some 8,000,000
Bangla books had been published. (Rev James Long quoted by Ulrike in Empire,
p. 65).
67 Ibid., p. 63.
68 Jatindra Mohan Singh, Odishara Chitra, pp. 29–35.
69 Ibid., pp. 39–44.
70 The early formal primary schools, before modern schools came to India with
colonial education, had one teacher known as Abadhana, who was well versed in
arithmetic, ancient Odia and Sanskrit literature. They used to emphasise moral
education, eds. Sumanyu Satpathy and Animesh Mohapatra. New Delhi: Sahitya
Akademi, 2017. Print. p. 47.
71 These were “Keshaba Koili”, “Kala Kalebara”, “Manobodha”, “Gopibhasa”,
etc., for popular and easy reading, or such high texts as “Mathura Mangala”,
“Rasakallola” and “Bidagdha Chintamani.” The content of this literature ori-
ented the pupils towards religion. Those who intended to be poets were educated
in Sanskrit grammar, aesthetics and versification, along with religious scriptures
and literature in Sanskrit. Thus, the Odia poets’ Odia Kavyas were modelled on
Sanskrit literature. See Samantaray, Odia Sahityara Itihas, p. 127.
72 See Sachidananda Mohanty, ed. Bishmruta Parampara: Odia Sahityare Nari
Pratibha (1898–1950). New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2002, pp. 6–7.
73 Quoted in Chandrima S. Bhattacharya (Published 11.05.14, 12:00 AM) Online.
Source: [Link]
cid/1289600 (accessed on 27 July 2022). In the Odia lexicon, the act of “bhand”
is described as “buffonery” and banter with nonsense expressions (Purnachandra
Bhasakosha, 6073).
74 Satya P. Mohanty, “Introduction” in Fakir Mohan Senapati, Six Acres and a
Third: The Classic Nineteenth-Century Novel about Colonial India. Trans. Rabi
Shankar Mishra et. al. Berkeley: U of California, 2006. p. 7. Emphasis mine.
75 Paul R. Brass, Language, Religion and Politics in North India. Cambridge:
Authors Guild, 1974.
76 Vasudha Dalmia, Christopher Rolland King, Harish Trivedi, Shamsur Rahman
Faruqi, Alok Rai, Francesca Orsini, Asha Sarangi, Prachi Deshpande, Priya Joshi,
Veena Naregal, Farina Mir and Ulrike Stark have studied language politics in the
context of North and Western India; Sumathi Ramaswamy, A. R.
Venkatachalapathy, Lisa Mitchell, Kavita Datta, Stuart Blackburn et al. have por-
trayed politics of language in South and South-East India.
77 These works, especially the series under the editorship of Swapan Chakravorty
and Abhijit Gupta, look at literature as it comes to life not only in its technolo-
gy-induced avatar, due to advancement in the print industry—and more recently
electronic versions—but also in the pre-print form of manuscripts and engravings.
In doing so, they tried to help literary studies employing historicism and objectiv-
ity with a rigorous engagement with the records. In the same vein, Ulrike Stark’s
work is focused on the print culture and especially on the Hindi publishing house,
the Naval Kishore Press An Empire of Books: the Naval Kishore Press and the
Diffusion of the Printed Word in Colonial India. Ranikhet: Permanent Black,
2008. A more recent and exhaustive study of popular Bengali print culture
attempts to show prevailing notions of “good” literature and languages (Anindita
Ghosh, Power in Print: Popular Publishing and the Politics of Language and
Culture in a Colonial Society, 1778–1905. New Delhi: OUP, 2006).
78 Lisa Mitchell, Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a
Mother Tongue. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2009.
79 Francesca Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere 1920–1940: Language and Literature
in the Age of Nationalism. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 2002. Rosinka Chaudhuri,
The Literary Thing: History, Poetry, and the Making of a Modern Cultural
Sphere. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 2013.
 Introduction 31

80 Anindita Ghosh, Power in Print: Popular Publishing and the Politics of Language
and Culture in a Colonial Society, 1778–1905. New Delhi: OUP, 2006.
81 This list includes works both in English and Odia. Nivedita Mohanty, Odia
Nationalism: Quest for a United Orissa, 1866–1956. Rev. & Enl. ed.
Jagatsinghpur: Prafulla, 2005.
82 The term Odia nationalism was in vogue until the mid-1980s, after which it is
being increasingly replaced by terms like “Odia identity” or “Odia sub-national-
ism.” See Gaganendra Nath Dash, “Odia Ashmita Chinta,” in Punascha
Janashruti Kanchi Kaveri. Bhubaneswar: Ramadevi, 2014, pp. 238–326.
83 Natabara Samantaray’s Odia Sahityara Itihas, and several other books, focussing
on the period between 1800 and 1920, have been exemplary in making use of
extant archives. Natabara Samantaray: A Reader, eds. Sumanyu Satpathy and
Animesh Mohapatra. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2017.
84 Gopal Chandra Mishra, Odishara Bikashare Patrapatrikara Prabhab, 1979.
Sridhar Mohapatra, Odia Prakasana O Prasaranara Itihas. Cuttack: Grantha
Mandir, 1986.
85 Sachidananda Mohanty, Periodical Press and Colonial Modernity: Odisha
(1866–1936). New Delhi: OUP, 1916.
86 Pritipuspa Mishra, Language and the Making of Modern India: Nationalism and
the Vernacular in Colonial Odisha, 1803–1956. Cambridge: CUP, 2018. She also
examines questions of readership and pedagogy in an article in colonial Odisha in
her “Fashioning Readers: Canon, Criticism and Pedagogy in the Emergence of
Modern Oriya Literature,” Contemporary South Asia, vol. 20, no. 1, 2012, pp.
135–148.
87 Sisir Kumar Das, History of Indian Literature (1800–1910): Western Impact:
Indian Response. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1991. Abhijit Gupta, The Spread
of Print in Colonial India into the Hinterland. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2021.
88 Gauri Viswanathan, “Preface to the Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition,” Masks of
Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. New York: Columbia
University Press, 2014.
89 See Samantaray, Odia Sahityara Itihas, p. 21.
90 Kalindi Charan Panigrahi, Ange Jaha Nibheichhi [1901–1972]. Cuttack: Cuttack
Students’ Store, 1973, pp. 184–188.
91 Regenia Gagnier, Literatures of Liberalization: Global Circulation and the Long
Nineteenth Century. Gewerbestrasse: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, p. 6.
92 Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism 1848–1932. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1983; Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary
Study and British Rule in India (1989). New York: Columbia University Press,
1989.
93 The Bengal Presidency was an administrative unit of colonial India. It consisted of
parts or whole of the following modern-day states/nations: Assam, Bangladesh,
Bihar, Meghalaya, Odisha, Tripura and West Bengal.
1 Sahitya in Times of Crisis
Print, Periodicals and the Odia
Public Sphere

While narrating his experiments with the printing press in an emotionally

charged section of his autobiography, Fakir Mohan describes the distressing
shape in which he found his mother tongue, Odia. He cites this as the reason
why he could not rest content even after meeting with success at writing and
publishing Odia prose textbooks. He told himself, rather: what use was it if

only school children studied Odia books? The mother tongue can
improve only if the general public read it. [For] even Odia-knowing
people outside [the European schooling system] did not know how to
read [Odia] prose. If asked to do so, they would try to read out prose
passages in a sing-song manner, like rhymed verse.1

The context in which the author makes the observation is in need of some
elaboration. Fakir Mohan, through these chapters in his autobiography,
agonised over the dominance of Bengalis, the elite among whom had by
then made near-successful attempts to introduce Bangla (in lieu of Odia) as
the medium of instruction in schools on account of their vastly improved
print and publishing industry. The reason given for this preference, Fakir
Mohan says, is that there was no dearth of readers and writers of Bangla
prose, whereas Odias had hardly any. Instead of expressing a strong
anti-Bengali sentiment, he castigates fellow Odias for neglecting their own
language. Thereafter, in successive chapters in his autobiography, he reiter-
ates his vow to “improve Utkal bhasa” by setting up an Odia printing
press. For, Fakir Mohan believed that a community’s language would
improve only when the common people were able to read and write prose
in their own language. He, like his contemporaries, knew only too well that
the issues of Odia language and literature were integral to the then-ongoing
politics of dominance, questions of Odia identity and territorial integrity.
Such individual attempts to generate a conducive literary sphere would
soon multiply and go hand in hand with creating a favourable public sphere.
For, during the second half of the nineteenth century, ideas of Jati, desh and
bhasa gripped the imagination of diverse colonised communities as never
before.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003431220-2
 Sahitya in Times of Crisis 33

Under what social or political pressures did these surface? Were these the
product of the then nascent local nationalism/linguistic identity politics? Did
the introduction of European education play a role in the self-definition of
the Odia elite; and if so, in what ways? How much did the Odias’ survival
strategy owe to the advent of print; the literary and public spheres and their
control over it? This chapter is an attempt to probe these and similar ques-
tions with a view to examining the advent of the adhunik Odia public spaces
by charting the trajectory that the Odia periodical press took from the time
of its inception– due to local “political” compulsions– to the defining and
broadening of the scope and limits of the question of the “literary.”

The Outbreak of Emotion

The year 1866 is often referred to as a watershed moment in the history of
modern Odisha for more than one reason: it was the year of the great famine
(Na’anka durbhikhya), partly the outcome of the criminal abdication of
administrative responsibility and, partly, due to crop failure. One-third of
the population of the Odisha Division of Bengal Presidency perished during
the famine,2 the experience of which was so devastating that it became a
metaphor for hunger for generations of Odias to come. But it also instilled
among them a sense of communal suffering, and hence, a larger sense of
Odia community. Coincidentally but not surprisingly, 1866 also saw the
launch of the first secular and indigenous Odia newspaper, Utkal Dipika.
Apart from being a significant event in itself, Dipika played an energetic role
in promoting the cause of the Odia language vis-à-vis the dominant Bangla,
as well as against the imposition of Hindi and Telugu.3 The founding of the
newspaper and the success of the agenda it stood for was responsible for the
paradox of 1866 being both the annus miserabilis, so to say, and the annus
mirabilis.4
The famine forced thousands of hungry Odias to throng the anna chhatras
or free kitchens (literally, free-rice-feeding camps) that the missionaries had
set up, giving impetus to the hitherto sluggish attempts at conversion. Not
many written narratives of the trauma have survived, but the posthumously
published long autobiographical poem by Ananta Das, a survivor,5 carries a
vivid account of the ordeal. The racial memory of the trauma continued to
reverberate and has outlasted the Great War.6 As recently as in the 1970s, the
bilingual Odia poet, Jayanta Mahapatra (1928–present) poignantly retrieved
and relived the moment of his grandfather’s hunger and conversion in a short
poem about the latter’s diary.7
However, the history of dominance and exploitation was more complex
than this, and the famine was not the only source of mass emotional upheaval
for the Odias at the time in question. Three territories in the Odia-speaking
region were hitched to the administrative wagons of the Calcutta Presidency,
Central Provinces (western Odisha) and the Madras Presidency (southern
Odisha). This was dubbed tini thentia kakudi badi (three-beaked cucumber
34 Sahitya in Times of Crisis

garden) by the editor of Utkal Dipika, Gourisankar Ray, whose leadership

and preeminent role in shaping the Odia public sphere, and, with it, Odisha’s
destiny during the period in focus (1866–1919) cannot be underestimated.8
Many other Odia-speaking areas called the gadjat were ruled by local feudal
lords and kings, the Rajahs of Puri and Mayurbhanj being the most promi-
nent with the former seen as the symbolic head of the Odias. Even so, for
nearly half a century, their self-image was already that of victimhood and
subjugation as their territories were wholly or in parts occupied and ruled
successively by invading Muslims, Mughals, the Nizam of Hyderabad and
Maratha marauders. Subsequently, the Maratha occupying certain Odia-
speaking regions were expelled by the East India Company army and the
areas were brought under the Calcutta Presidency.9 This was when Bengalis
strengthened their dominance over the Odia population as a powerful Bengali
lobby used their access and proximity to the colonial officials to exploit the
loopholes in the so-called “sunset law” for unscrupulous land-grabbing that
threatened to weaken the material base of the Odias.10 By the time English
education was introduced in Odisha, Odias had internalised the Bengalis’
pretentions of superiority. The best example of this pretention is the remark
of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay—someone the aspiring Odia writers
looked up to as their role model—who said that “Bengalis have no history,”
whereas “even the Odias have their history [chronicles].”11 For decades, the
Odias’ relationship with the Bengalis went through phases of mutual
exchange, cooperation, reciprocal antipathy and acrimony. Shared hostility
came to a head in the 1860s when the British government experimented with
several administrative measures regarding Odisha zamindaris as a result of
which rich Bengali landholders acquired most of the 2340-odd Odia
zamindaris, of which as many as 1011 went to the Calcutta-Bengali counter-
parts between 1806 and 1816. The Bengali intermediaries, thus, virtually
turned the region into their fiefdom.12 Over and above all these, the immedi-
ate impact of the famine pushed the Odia community further to the brink,
and the newly educated Odias began anxiously fighting for the protection of
their language and, consequently, for their linguistic identity and for the inte-
gration of Odia-speaking territories. On the other hand, the Bengalis were
engaged in making instrumental use of modernity towards consolidating
their dominance and deployed their material and intellectual energy to capi-
talise on the head start they had made in print technology.13
Well documented, all this has now become a familiar enough narrative
of domination, territorial dismemberment, imposition of non-Odia lan-
guages, famine and hunger that eventually led to Odia nationalism.
Repeated ad nauseam, the narrative has been reduced to a clichéd political
teleology, and is, thus, in need of a more nuanced understanding. The role
played by the Odia intelligentsia, who grabbed the agency rather than leav-
ing their fate to the colonial forces, needs to be tempered by the story of
the contribution of their “intimate enemies” towards protecting their com-
munal legacy. We can, perhaps, adequately reinterpret the affective
 Sahitya in Times of Crisis 35

sentiments triggered by such developments as have already been briefly

outlined by invoking Charles Taylor’s formulation about nationalism being
“an outbreak of emotion that is understandable when people are under
strain because of, say, a disorienting social or economic transition, espe-
cially if this is accompanied by hard times.”14 One does not have to look far
to locate the time and space for the well-spring of emotion, which flooded
political aspirations and galvanised the creative imagination, altering radi-
cally, as we shall see, the course of the Odia literary tradition. This was the
point I wished to make by quoting the extract from Fakir Mohan’s autobi-
ography. For instance, similar affective sentiments prompted the intelligent-
sia to set up printing presses, town halls and debating societies, which
combined to create a public sphere geared towards generating both politi-
cal and cultural opinions through debates and discussion. In what follows,
I trace the “outbreak of collective emotion” and chart the response of the
Odia intelligentsia in the public and literary spheres which were under the
strain of not only the “disorienting social or economic transition” but also
under extreme duress because of the great famine. It will be my endeavour
to examine the way the public and literary spheres were coeval, eventually
to become increasingly inextricable. Further, I shall attempt to show how
these developments provide the basis on which Odia intellectuals redefine
and reconstitute the concept and scope of sahitya in the public and literary
spheres. Though, initially, compulsions of pedagogic requirement triggered
such discussions, subsequently, it was the literary periodicals that provided
an exclusive space that facilitated the forging of a newer, more dynamic
aesthetic that was not allowed to stabilise.

Interrogating the Hegemonic Discourses

Like their counterparts in other subjugated linguistic territories, the Odia
alumni of the time—all products of the modern European school system—
became conscious of the huge gap between the print culture of neighbouring
Bengal and their own. The Bengali elite’s claim to cultural superiority over
their Odia counterparts was partly based on a strong body of printed adhunik
Bangla books, particularly of “literature,” especially in prose, which could
then be used as pedagogic tools. In contrast, there were hardly any printed
Odia books worthy of pedagogic use. In the process, the Odia intellectuals
seemed to have gotten into a state of utter abjection,15 lamenting their decline
from a real or imagined glorious past, a latter-day fall from grace, as it were.
They had internalised this and similar hegemonic discourses to such an extent
that it took a contemporary Bengali intellectual, Rangalal Bandyopadhyay,
to point out the absurdity involved in such assumptions. The contrast he
pointed out was actually in favour of Odia. In his introduction to the Odia
poet Dinakrushna Das (1864), Rangalal declared emphatically that Odisha’s
cultural history was richer than that of the Bengalis. There was a time, he
said, when Utkal desh was more powerful than the Banga desh, and had
36 Sahitya in Times of Crisis

ruled over a large part of Bengal. It had also lost independence for a much
shorter period than Bengal. He added that Odia poetry had been born much
before the birth of Bangla poetry. Odia poetry of the past was not inferior to
Bangla poetry; rather in some aspects, it was superior.16
With the backing of such allies, the English-educated Odias too began ques-
tioning the rationale of the Bengali sense of superiority and dominance. The
chief protagonist of such combative resistance was Gourisankar Ray who with
the help of a few dedicated associates set up the first indigenous printing press
Cuttack Printing Company (CPC) in 1864, and gave themselves and their fel-
low Odias a forum to launch a strong movement by bringing out the weekly
newspaper, Utkal Dipika from 1866 onwards. In fact, it was Utkal Dipika
that carried a report of the setting up of “Utkal Bhashoddipani Sabha” by the
intelligentsia of Cuttack with a view to improving the language of Utkal17 and
published the Odia version of the above-mentioned speech of the president of
the association, Rangalal.18 It also reported that the colonial government was
planning to adopt a policy of imposing Bangla as the medium of instruction
and introducing Bangla textbooks in schools in Odisha.19 One Kantichandra
Bhattacharya came out with the pamphlet, “Udiya Ekta Swatantra Bhasa
Noi” in 1872 in favour of the policy. A speech carrying a similar tenor came
from a seasoned scholar, Rajendralal Mitra who supported Kantichandra’s
plea to abolish Odia as the medium of instruction. Not satisfied with the print-
ing of the report criticising these, Gourisankar also offered spirited rejoinders
to effectively counter such arguments. Even so, the sense of insecurity among
Odias had not been completely dispelled. In my rapid recounting, the sequence
of these events might appear to have happened in one go. But, in fact, each was
followed by a vehement reaction in the form of protest as well as a petition to
the colonial government by the Odia elite and then there would be a lull. There
would be yet another insinuating remark by a Bengali or an administrative
decision by the powers that be that would lead to a similar flare up.20
After years of such debate, petitioning among the public and dithering in
administrative circles, the medium of Odia was restored in most schools.
Then the Odia elites took it upon themselves to print medieval Odia clas-
sics—until then in circulation orally and in expensive and hard-to-get palm-
leaf manuscripts in order to bolster their stock of printed books. They
desperately began looking for, “discovering,” identifying and dating palm-
leaf manuscripts, tracing back the heritage to the fifteenth century. The pop-
ular works of Dinakrushna and Upendra Bhanja were edited with scholarly
tika or notes. But this also led to certain controversies around obscenity,
surely a derivative discourse with its sources in Victorian England. Apart
from resulting in self-censorship, the controversies impacted the kind of new
literature that began to be produced and printed. However, the process of
textbook production, especially the urgency of the requirement, prompted
the Odia elites to look for other models in Bangla and English. The discipline
of sahitya, too, was introduced as part of school curricula. The scramble for
selecting and printing Odia sahitya texts led to the re-examination of
 Sahitya in Times of Crisis 37

definitional aspects of sahitya. As a corollary, the question of Utkal bhasa

and sahitya also got inextricably linked to Utkal desh. This contributed to the
gradual alteration of the expressive modes of writing and facilitated the
emergence of new literary genres and sub-genres. As the Odia book historian
Arabind Giri puts it:

It was incumbent upon [the newly educated youth] to improve, develop

and strengthen Odia language, literature and culture. Determined to
achieve this they assumed leadership roles by setting up printing presses,
preparing and producing textbooks; and also by organising and trying
to unify the scattered Odia speaking tracts by generating public opinion
through newspapers and periodicals.21

In spite of their recurrent squabbles with the Bengali elite and their protesta-
tions with the British administration, the fact that the educated Odias bene-
fited from certain intimate enemies cannot be gainsaid. Not to take credit
away from Gourisankar and others, the contribution of a few Bengalis and
British administrators ought to be duly recognised.

The Intimations of the Enemy

The monthly magazine is key to the progress of sahitya; and the love and
respect it receives is an index of the prosperity of sahitya.22

Odia historians tend to give full agency to the new educated class in Odisha
for launching the bhasa suraksha andolan or “save Odia” movement, the
desh mishran (demand for the unification of the Odia-speaking tracts), and
even the railways, perhaps with some justification. But one cannot ignore the
contribution of a few colonial administrators, who had already debated and
generated the discourses on these very subjects much before they caught the
imagination of the Odias themselves. It is a fact of colonial history that the
Bangla public sphere pre-dated its Odia counterpart, and just as much of the
former had imbibed discourses from the English press, the Odias may have,
in turn, imbibed the same from their familiarity with both the English and
Bangla documents and periodicals. Whereas some administrators voiced
opinions for the use of Bengali as the medium of instruction, many others
had argued in favour of Odia being a distinct language. The following discus-
sion should make this clear.
The role of the periodical press in disseminating ideas and information can
hardly be overemphasised, with Dipika and its editor, Gourisankar playing
the part of a stellar leader. Jatindra K. Nayak is of the view that “what the
magazine offered to the devitalised Oriya society in 1866 was the possibility
of cultural resistance to the British and Bengali rule.”23 Yet, we cannot ignore
the many crucial ideas and opinions of colonial administrators and scholars
and those of Bengalis (supportive or hostile) that shaped the Odia elite’s
38 Sahitya in Times of Crisis

political and linguistic agenda and action. The colonial think-tank made pub-
lic many of their thoughts, plans and policies in various fora. Periodicals like
Dipika were either supplied copies of these in English or obtained proactively
to circulate them in Odia paraphrase or translation.24
Already in 1839, an official report pointed out that there was an acute
need for the preparation of “school books as there does not exist a single
work of any kind, which could be adopted as a class book in the Ooriah [sic]
language.”25 But much before the Bengali elite came up with their ideas of
superiority, in 1848, Lewin Bowring, the collector of Cuttack insisted that
Odia was “but a dialect of Bengalee.”26 Eight years later, E. Roer, the then
newly appointed Inspector of schools in the Odisha division, held an oppo-
site view: “The Ooriah language cannot be considered a dialect of the
Bengalee, though nearly related to it.”27 As is reflected in the history of the
Odia language movement, Bengali opponents of Odia were influenced by
views such as those of Bowring, while the Odia elite were armed with the
statements of officials like Rohr. Soon, of course, John Beames and Ravenshaw
began to play a decisive role in favour of Odia. The point I am trying to make
here is that the intellectual development of both the Bengali and Odia elites
was also shaped by three decades (1835–1866) of debates and discussions
among British officials.
Similarly, insofar as the movement for desh mishran (unification of Odia-
speaking territories) was concerned, there existed a body of discussion and
debate among British officials before the Odia elite took the matter to their
hands. Lord Dalhousie, for example, had said in 1853 that “it was impossi-
ble for one man to take on the administrative responsibility of such a vast
province [as Bengal],” and proposed its partition. In 1855, similarly, Henry
Ricketts28 observed that after

much consideration, I am decidedly of the opinion, that unless some

reasonable and strong objections can be offered by the inhabitants,
Sambalpore should be transferred to Cuttack. The inhabitants are—
most of them—Oreeahs [sic] and have no affinity or community of
interest of any kind with the people of Chota Nagpore.29

These ideas and suggestions, of course, had been aired in the pre-Dipika
years too. But, as someone deeply anguished by the goings-on during his
student days, Gourisankar must have been influenced by the reports. Later,
in 1868, George Chesney too had suggested that “Cuttack or Odisha”
should be separated from “Bengal as Cuttack had no natural affinity with
Bengal, and the river system of the country, which takes its origin in Central
India, tends to separate it from the delta of the Ganges.” He went on to add
that,

even to this day Cuttack is more easily approached by sea from Calcutta
than by land, and at certain seasons it can scarcely be reached at all by
 Sahitya in Times of Crisis 39

either route. This isolation, and specially the difference of language,

render a separate administration, of officials stationed permanently in
the province a great desideratum for Cuttack.30

To give more instances of the colonial quandary, when Northbrooke proposed

the bifurcation of Central Provinces by merging some of its portions with other
provinces, others recommended the merger of Sambalpur with Chota Nagpur
Division. These documents were not immediately available to the Odia public
in the pre-Dipika and pre-Odia periodical press days. But after 1866, the peri-
odical press, aggressively reporting these trends, ensured that the Odia print
public began to demand the unification of scattered Odia territories. A report
in Utkal Dipika, in its issue of 16 January 1872, responded to the latter pro-
posal thus: “It would always be prudent to form provinces based on languages
used by people and thus by the above logic it is not desirable to separate
Sambalpur from Odisha.” Later, under the title of “Administrative Reforms in
Odisha,” Utkal Dipika carried the following report:

We came to know from The Daily News of 31 May that the Government
is considering the proposal to redraw the administrative boundaries of
several chief commissioners. As a part of the plan Central Provinces no
longer would have a Commissionerate, some portions of the Provinces
would be merged with Bombay and some others with the North Western
Provinces, and the remaining portions merged with Orissa would form
a separate Commissionerate. Thus, if Orissa too would be carved out as
a separate province the way Assam was separated from Bengal, then the
administration of Bengal Presidency would be confined to a managea-
ble unit and would no longer be ungovernable. In other words, the
physical dimension of the Presidency would be commensurate with the
ability of its administrator.31

The logic in this argument seems to have focused on the merger of the scat-
tered areas of the Odia-speaking territories. The same article continues:

The idea of having most, if not all, Odia-speaking areas under one admin-
istration is a sign of progress for Odisha and is a matter of immense pleas-
ure. To this end, the wise people of the region have time and again
informed the Government and the general public that the reason for
Odisha’s lack of development is the region not remaining under one
administration, and that the welfare is possible only if the territories rang-
ing from Ganjam to Sambalpur, where Odia is spoken, come under one
set of rules and administration and they would no longer be consigned to
the peripheries of Bengal Presidency, Central Provinces and Madras
Presidency. This would result in the real development of the people. Thus,
there is no doubt that it would be a matter of great pleasure for the people
of Odisha if the Government implements the above proposal.32
40 Sahitya in Times of Crisis

Such a demand for the unification of Odia-speaking tracts and Gourisankar’s

leadership role in energising the public sphere remained unchanged for the
next 25 years or so. His part in invigorating the literary sphere was equally,
if not more, crucial than this. As Gaganendra Nath Dash says, the “Save
Odia movement” spearheaded by Gourisankar helped the cause of Odia sah-
itya. Therefore, one has to admit that he (Gourisankar) played a crucial role
in the growth of evolution of adhunik Odia sahitya.33
In turn, the opinion so created by the Odia public sphere was not lost on
H.G. Cook, the then Commissioner of Orissa as he made the following state-
ment on 5 July 1895:

As a question of administrative reform for which there is much to be

said, I have to advocate the extension of the divisional boundaries so as
to include the whole area populated by races speaking the Oriya lan-
guage, or, at any rate, some definite areas adjoining Orissa where the
Oriya language prevails … .The areas that I refer to are the Sambalpure
district of the Chatishgarh Division of the Central Provinces with the
Tributary States of Patna, Sonepur, Rarhakol, Bamra, Kalahandi, and
the whole or part of the Ganjam district with the states of Kimidi and
Gumsur.34

Clearly, the question of language had become an administrative priority for

the colonials. Different administrators, over a period of time, recognised that
Odia was a separate language, and thus, it would be appropriate to bring it
under a separate and single administration. However, it is worth mentioning
here that, while Chesney’s suggestion was an outcome of the administrative
apathy experienced in the region until then, which was manifested in the
wake of the devastating 1866 famine, Mr. Cook’s bold observations can be
seen as a response to the mass movement of 25 years (1871–1895). How
much of the thinking and confusion in the decision-making processes of the
colonial masters made its way into the new Odia public sphere is not hard to
guess. But this much is clear from the reportage in the Dipika that the Odia
reading public was already getting politically conscious about what was in
their best interest. It is no surprise, therefore, that the decision to introduce
Hindi, instead of Odia, as the language of communication in the offices and
courts of Sambalpur hurt the interests of the local community, the elite
among whom launched various modes of protest. These included a number
of politically worded petitions. As a result of the resistance posed by the
people of Sambalpur, along with the rest of Odisha, Odia was reinstated as
the official language on 1 January 1903.
Dipika did not limit its voice of dissent to north Odisha, covering news
from western and southern Odisha as well. The 24th January issue of Utkal
Dipika reported that since the difficulty of the Odias of Ganjam district
became intolerable, the rajas, zamindars and general public of the district
sent a petition to the Governor General, requesting him to merge Ganjam
 Sahitya in Times of Crisis 41

with the Orissa Division under the Bengal Government. In this context, it
must be said that the “Ganjam Jatiya Samiti,” established in 1902 at
Berhampur, marked the inception of the nationalist movement in Ganjam.
Their petition met with considerable sympathetic approval at the Utkal sam-
milani which was organised there in April 1903. Several proposals for the
progress of the Odia language were approved at the Ganjam Jatiya Samiti
held in the same month. As we shall see presently, the Utkal Sammilani meet-
ing held on 30 and 31 December 1903 at Cuttack was just an expanded
version of the Ganjam Jatiya Samiti.35
Thus, in this section we have seen the role played by the colonisers in
providing fodder mutually for the Odia Bhasa Suraksha and Deshamisrana
agitations. Both Natabara Samantaray36 and Gaganendra Nath Dash37 have
identified the years 1868–1875 as those that drove the former and 1866 to
1903 that drove the latter agitation. But the official records had laid the
foundation for both from 1840 onwards. In the initial years of the move-
ments, language-based agitation—leading to demand for the unification of
Odia-speaking tracts—was largely individualistic without any mass base;
they turned into mass movements only at the turn of the century.38 This
change was made possible by the rise of the public sphere under Dipika,
Gourisankar and his circle of collaborators. The suppressed emotions of the
public for decades in the previous century needed to be channelised for which
a conducive public sphere was needed.
We have already discussed the pre-history of the Odia public sphere in
various forms of traditional institutions and cultural practices such as the
temples/Bhagabat Tungi, Gopal Bhand and time-honoured pathasala. But the
more recognisable version of the same emerged with the coming of colonial
modernity. In the following section, I shall trace its growth in the Odia-
speaking tracts resulting in powerful institutions that successfully questioned
colonial and local dominance.

The Union of Utkal Sahitya and Jati

The pun on the word “union” in the section heading is intended: it is both a
reference to the political forum, Utkal Sammilani or Utkal Union and the
literal union as in “coming together.” Though set up at different times, the
Utkal Sammilani and Utkal Sahitya—purportedly, one political and the other
literary—joined hands in 1903, but both had independent and interdepend-
ent relationship prior to that year. We shall briefly outline the important steps
that led up to this “union.”
It is undeniable that the newspapers aroused the political awareness of the
people and drew their attention to various problems of local and national
interest. In Odisha, the concept of forming associations was still in its infancy.
As Nivedita Mohanty says, “with the expansion of press activities…the situ-
ation changed radically.”39 In 1866, one of the first associations [sabhas] was
set up in Balasore, called Utkal Bhasa Unnati Bidhayini. On 25 April 1868,
42 Sahitya in Times of Crisis

Dipika reported that some learned and aristocratic people of Cuttack had
formed an association where newspapers were distributed freely to facilitate
discussions. T.E. Ravenshaw, then Commissioner of Cuttack, attended the
meeting held on 15 April 1868 and commended the initiative. But the deni-
zens were not enthusiastic about it. After a lukewarm response of the public
to the initiative, the Dipika spread the message across its readership as to
how useful such associations were for desh-hith (welfare of the desh).
Meanwhile, more associations such as the Odisha Islamic Association were
set up (1888); but of all the associations, the Utkal Sabha or the Odisha
Association, set up in Cuttack on 16 August 1882 to safeguard the interests
of Odias turned out to be the most effective.
By the 1880s, the Odia intelligentsia had become proactive in its attempts
to counter-hegemonic forces through the setting up of organisations. Of
these, Odisha Association turned out to be the forerunner to the Utkal Union
and Utkal Sahitya. Madhusudan Das was one of its conveners and it voiced
many of the local concerns of Odias, becoming a significant mouthpiece,
attracting rajas and zamindars across the scattered Odia-speaking tracts. It
gathered enough traction to enlarge its area of action. The need for a more
organised forum was soon mooted under the leadership of Madhusudan Das.
Meanwhile, two other regional organisations, the Khallikote Sammilani and
Ganjam Sammilani (1902–1903), contributed to the idea of a larger organi-
sation. As I have already pointed out earlier, the first session of Utkal
Sammilani was held in December 1903 in Cuttack, a conference was held in
Ganjam under the auspices of the Ganjam Jatiya Samiti in April 1903. Apart
from the proceedings of the meeting, Utkal Dipika published a report on
“the warmth and enthusiasm with which guests from other Presidencies were
received.”40 It must be reiterated here that Ganjam was then a district in the
Madras Presidency and the many prominent guests were from the Odisha
Division of the Bengal Presidency. Utkal Dipika also published a news item
describing the special reception that was accorded to Madhusudan.41 When
the news of Madhusudan’s participation in the conference spread, a lot of
excitement surged among people. “A large crowd gathered at the railway
station to receive him.”42 The tone of celebration in the report is noteworthy,
as it shows a sense of relief in the periodical published from Cuttack.
Especially significant was the fact that Gourisankar Ray and Nilamani
Vidyaratna, editor of Prajabandhu and an organiser of the event, had been at
loggerheads in the early 1890s. It is obvious from this that the two had bur-
ied the hatchet in order to promote the cause of Odia nationalism.
Thus, Madhusudan succeeded in unifying the sentiments of the people of
far-flung areas, who had been equally agitated by the threat to the Odia lan-
guage. Samantaray says, “The two crises in Odia national life—the cata-
strophic famine of 1866 and the proposal to remove Odia from the schools
of Odisha—led people to prioritize the idea of developing the desh.”43 Finally,
the Utkal Sammilani (Utkal Union Conference; henceforth, UU) was formed
and its first convention was held at Cuttack on 30 and 31 December 1903.44
 Sahitya in Times of Crisis 43

This session of the UU was an unprecedented event in the history of modern

Odisha, as, unlike before when the meetings were held at a micro-local level
with a small number of local people in attendance, in this congregation, peo-
ple came from all over the scattered Odia-speaking tracts to take part in the
deliberations. The coming together of several rajas, maharajas, zamindars,
commoners, educated gentlemen, government employees and even the
Commissioner to discuss the welfare of the matrubhumi was an unprece-
dented event in Odia-speaking areas. The Utkal Sahitya Samaj also met at the
same venue. Because of the spread of readership of Dipika and other news-
papers, the event caught the imagination of Odias across all scattered areas.
In this imbrication between the political and the literary, the defining moment
arrived in the Odia-speaking tracts with the convergence of the twain: the
Utkal Sammilani and the Utkal Sahitya Samaj.45 This momentous occasion
was marked by the presence of the most prominet writers of the time like
Fakir Mohan and Radhanath and the many feudatory chiefs, who were
patrons of the arts. The inaugural convention of the Utkal Sahitya Samaj was
held the following day with Radhanath as the President. Many writers were
also asked to preside over the subsequent meetings of the UU, whenever the
feudatory chiefs or the rajas were not available.46
From mid-nineteenth century onwards, the subject of the promotion of
Odia language entered public discourse in such a way that the literary sphere
could no longer be addressed independent of the public sphere. An example
of this can be had from the following section of the resolution of the 1903
UU Conference:

The name of the Sammilani is “Utkal Sammilani”. [The] welfare of

the Odia speaking tracts will be its main concern, and all the Utkalbhasi
areas are called Utkal. Those who are domiciled permanently in Utkal,
that is, those who consider Utkal to be their home, will be considered
Utkaliya even if they belong to different jatis. Those who have come
here and lived for many years thinking of this as their motherland and
have devoted their life to the welfare of Odias, and those who con-
sider their service to the Odias as their duty, we consider them as our
own.
….
Among the Utkaliyas are Hindus, Mussalmans, Christians, Brahmo,
etc…Thus religion cannot come within the purview of our deliberations
on the Odia-language based struggle of the Utkal Union since there will
be serious cleavage among ourselves.47

Thus, the resolution shows how print secularised the Odia language, in the
sense that, the communal identity of the speaker/user of a language could be
ignored in the face of any threat to their language. Of course, quite the con-
trary might have happened, as it did in the case of Urdu and Hindi and
Musalmani Bangla and Hindu Bangla.48 The very fact of considering all the
44 Sahitya in Times of Crisis

Odia-speaking regions as Utkal, and the people, irrespective of their jati and
varna, residing in these areas as Utkaliya, clearly suggests the feeling of desh-
mishrana. Such a newly imagined conception of desh and jati involved, to use
Cook’s words quoted earlier, “the extension of divisional boundaries so as to
include the whole area populated by races speaking the Oriya language.”
While giving the clarion call for Odia unity in his address to the UU,
Madhusudan Das defined jati along the following lines:

By jati is meant generally the Brahman and untouchables/the caste sys-

tem in general. But I am not using the term in that sense. I am using it
in the sense in which we talk about the English, the Japanese, and the
Bengali jatis. By Utkal jati we refer to those who think of themselves as
the progeny of Utkal, and pride themselves in the glorious history of
Utkal.49

Then, he quickly moves on to using the term in the sense of a “nation.”

Madhusudan is interested in defining the term, as he is preoccupied with the
subject of individual/personal life and “national” life.50 Since this idea is very
similar to what was then being articulated in Bengal by leading intellectuals
like Tagore, and is a much-discussed subject among the social scientists and
historians, we need not dwell on it.
In a similar vein, Radhanath too addressed the importance of sahitya
in nation building in his presidential address at a convention of Utkal
Sahitya Samaj held one day earlier: “In order to improve the lot of the
jati, it is absolutely imperative that the jatiya (national) sahitya (litera-
ture) be strengthened.”51 The resolutions in these political meetings, as we
shall see, can be made better sense of by looking at their context and
historical circumstances. Conversely, an extended and close study of Odia
print culture can reveal its impact on Odia society and culture, the growth
of public opinion and, finally, its role in Odia national awakening. In the
process, such focus on the Odia print sphere can reveal the way the last
few decades of the nineteenth century and those of the early twentieth
century radically altered the course of the Odia literary tradition. Thus,
around the turn of the century, questions of Odia language, literature and
identitarian politics became one, a veritable reconfiguration of “a jati in
print,” so to say.52

Press of the Mission and the Mission of the Press

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the missionaries had sown the seed
of the literary and public sphere by deciding to launch newspapers and peri-
odicals. After setting up missions in Odia-speaking tracts in 1822, they expe-
rienced difficulties in transporting the printed material from Serampore to
Cuttack. So, the missionaries felt the need to set up a printing press at Cuttack
itself. A formal decision was taken at a meeting of the missionaries in
 Sahitya in Times of Crisis 45

Loughborough following which the Orissa Mission Press was set up in 1837
at Cuttack. The idea was mooted by William Lacey, at home on leave, at a
meeting of the Committee of the General Baptist Missionary Society held at
Loughborough on 17 May 1837. The minutes read as follows:

Agreed that it is desirable to establish a printing press at Cuttack, to be

placed under his [i.e. Sutton’s] direction, if it can be managed by native
workmen, that Bros. Lacey and Sutton be empowered to take the nec-
essary steps, the press being sent from this country.53

With their effort, the first Odia stone types were devised for the purposes of
printing Christian texts with a view to spreading Christianity, as was the case
with other regions.54 The report on the activities at Fort William College,
dated 20 September 1804, mentioned the preparation of Odia types for the
first time under the supervision of William Carey.55 As in the case of Bangla, it
was Panchanan Karmakar Mistry who had helped Carey in the endeavour.56
Graham Shaw rightly observes that

the Cuttack Mission Press, which still continues to operate today,

though on a very limited scale, played an important part after Serampore
in the development of early Odia printing. It established the printing of
Odia in its homeland for the first time and brought it out of the shadow
of Bangla. It also, thanks to the knowledge and industry of Sutton, laid
the foundation of modern Odia philology.57

Even contemporary periodicals commented on the momentousness of the

occasion. The periodical, Friends of India noted:

The establishment of a press in any province is an important era in its

history. It is delightful thus to contemplate the rapid increase of the
means of intellectual and religious improvement, through means of this
mighty engine in the various and even remote provinces of this empire.58

Perhaps this felt need for a press had something to do with the proposed
introduction of local languages with effect from 1837 in the lower courts of
the region, because of which administrative rules and regulations needed to
be translated from English and Bangla into Odia. The report quoted above
also asks rhetorically, “why should not the government avail itself of the
means of communication with the people which have thus been provided, by
publishing its own Acts and Notifications through the same channel [of
printing]?”59 For the purpose, a Government Gazette was set up along with
a translation committee with Amos Sutton as the head. Between 1838 and
1859, 105 Odia gazettes were printed. The magazine was meant to dissemi-
nate government rules and regulations for the public to be aware of. Thus,
the Mission Press cannot be said to have acted as an instrument of creating
46 Sahitya in Times of Crisis

and circulating public opinion around Christianity. Nonetheless, a large

number of Christian texts were translated and printed in the press.
Soon, the missionaries felt the need of bringing out a few periodicals and,
between 1849 and 1861, Gyanarun (1849), Prabodh Chandrika (1856) and
Arunodaya (1861) were launched. With the exception of Prabodh Chandrika,
the magazines mostly carried discussions pertaining to religious (Christian)
matters and stray news items. The annual subscription of the monthly maga-
zine Prabodh Chandrika, when paid in advance, would cost a rupee and a
half. Its first editorial explicitly mentioned that it was not designed to pro-
mote any religious faith: such was the apprehension of the Odia readers
regarding conversion—a fear that was not entirely unfounded in view of the
instances—that they needed additional reassurance.60 To emphasise that its
contents were secular, the editorial further declared that it had intended to
publish “the works of great minds from the past and present, instructive
pieces, works of learned Bengali scholars in Odia translation, knowledge as
well as literary texts.” The longer works were to be serialised “from begin-
ning to end.” Readings for both moral uplift and pleasure would also be
published, it promised. The secular turn is evident in a humorous poem that
seems to be a satire on Brahminism:

The farmer asked the Pundit

How grave is the sin of killing a monkey?
The Pundit, consulting his shastra said,
There is no sin that is graver.
The farmer said, “Oh, dear!
It’s your son who has killed the monkey.”
The Pundit hurriedly retorted, “In that case,
The consequences are not so bad!”61

The verses can be seen in terms of a tacit missionary agenda to defame—and,

thereby, subvert dominant Brahminical Hinduism, but it can also be seen in
terms of the arrival of a new literary genre, social satire. We see Gourisankar
deploy irony and satire in his Dipika. We see the genre fully fleshed out in the
pages of Indradhanu and Bijuli in the 1890s.
The prose that one encounters in the periodical, though still sounding
quite odd at places, is much closer to adhunik Odia than was the case earlier,
according to those reliable critics who have seen the back numbers of
Chandrika. According to Bansidhar Mohanty, Chandrika’s contribution to
adhunik Odia literature is immense. It is clear from its editorial that it tried
to seize the growing discontent among the Odias and the simultaneous stok-
ing and generation of nationalist feelings. The familiar strategy of compari-
son with “neighbours” is deployed, as the editorial continues:

Within the last few years, in neighbouring Bangadesh,62 the Bengali lan-
guage has been standardized and beautified by their learned scholars.
Many schools and colleges have been set up with a view to imparting
 Sahitya in Times of Crisis 47

indigenous and English education. Numerous printing presses have

been set up too. In the last thirty-seven years, nearly one hundred news-
papers and periodicals… as also numerous knowledge texts have been
disseminated throughout the Bangadesh. Unfortunately, very few such
needful efforts have been made in [our Utkaldesh]. The result is there
for everyone to see: the best positions in government institutions such
as in the courts’ etc. have all been taken up by Bengalis.63

Like many other instances of eulogy of Bengali superiority, Bangla prose was
somewhat overrated as in the above assessment on the Odia side of the
notional fence. Not many contemporary Bengali scholars would have agreed
with this view. Haraprasad Shastri (1853–1931), for instance, in an essay on
the Bengali language published in Bangadarshan was complaining in 1881
that “none of the authors who have written in Bengali so far cared to learn
the language well.”64 The models Odias followed included Ishwar Chandra
Vidyasagar (1820–1891) and Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay (1838–1894).
The former was criticised by Shastri for his “impure” prose, and the latter
too was judged guilty of Anglicised prose by critics ranging from Chandranath
Basu (1844–1910) to Sukumar Sen (1900–1992).65
Thus, though not exclusively literary, Prabodh Chandrika was arguably
the first periodical of its kind in Odia: a hybrid that combined the features of
both a newspaper and a quasi-literary periodical. Despite the fact that
Chandrika was a missionary publication, it served the cause of the Odias in
promoting Odia prose and highlighting their woes. Chandrika lasted three
years.

Cuttack Printing Company and After

A few years after Prabodh Chandrika folded in 1859, the idea of bringing out
a periodical occurred to Bichitrananda Das. In 1864, he, along with his
friend, Gourisankar mooted the idea of setting up a printing company. They
set up Cuttack Printing Company (CPC) in Dargha Bazar of Cuttack with the
help of many local shareholders.66 Among the sponsors and collaborators
were a few clerical staff, law officers, the Rajah of Dhenkanal and some
jamindars. It became not only a printing press but through it the rising mid-
dle class tried to establish themselves and their own identity. As Debendra
Kumar Dash says, “a cultural hub grew around CPC through the involve-
ment of the gentry of Cuttack.”67 But procuring the heavy machine proved to
be a challenge. It was even more difficult to find Odia types which were not
easily available. When an old machine and English types were procured, the
Company was able to meet its running costs by printing government orders.
A litho machine with Bengali types was procured too. The machine still could
not be used for Odia printing until the famine took a deadly turn, and
Bichitrananda and Gourisankar debated whether CPC should make arrange-
ments to sell rice or confine its activities to printing. The decision was in
favour of the second option, and Utkal Dipika was launched.
48 Sahitya in Times of Crisis

The first issue of Utkal Dipika was published on 4 August 1866. It was
printed by the lithographic process and priced at four annas (one-fourth of a
rupee). The proprietors of the company ensured that the first issue reached
every important person in Cuttack. It featured famine-related news items as
well as shortcomings in relief operations. From publishing discussions of the
most trivial happenings in the desh to issues pertaining to the government,
analysing the incidents threadbare, to critiquing them, were all carried by the
press, and the press was bold enough to everything it thought important.68
Samantaray is of the view that no other press could do what CPC was able to
achieve.
Though there was a gap of nearly 30 years between the setting up of the
first and second Odia presses69 (1837,1864), others followed in quick suc-
cession. The third Odia press, the Utkal Printing Company, was set up in
1865 by Fakir Mohan Senapati at Balasore. In his autobiography, Fakir
Mohan narrates the attempts he and the educated fellow Odias such as
Baikuntha Nath De, Radhanath Ray and Nityanand Senapati made to put
together a printing press with a view to increasing the corpus of printed
Odia books by first forming a committee called “Utkal Bhasa Unnati
Bidhayini Samaj” and then a company called “D.P. Das and Co.” in 1866.
Their first attempts failed to bear any fruit, but the same group of people
under the leadership of Fakir Mohan formed another company called, P.M.
Senapati and Co.70 and then set up a press—this time successfully—called
Balasore Utkal Press in 1868. Soon after, the company launched the period-
ical, Bodhadayini o Balasore Sambad Bahika under the editorship of Fakir
Mohan. With the aim of separating news from sahitya, yet avoiding the
burden of having to run two separate periodicals, Fakir Mohan chose to
make it a hybrid of both, devoting the first part (Bahika) to news and the
second part (Bodhadayini) to sahitya. But literary contributions were hard
to come by, and Fakir Mohan himself had to fill the space under the rubric,
sahitya. The periodical ran for nearly two years as an irregular monthly,
and then from July 1871 onwards as a fortnightly before the literary sec-
tion, Bodhadayini was jettisoned in 1872 in favour of Balasore Sambad
Bahika, which continued to run purely as a newspaper. Fakir Mohan was to
say later, “But the press ran well. It printed official documents, forms, etc.,
and earned substantial profit.” When T. E. Ravenshaw inspected the work-
ing of the press, Fakir Mohan says in his autobiography, “he was delighted
and gave us an allowance of Rs. 10. But instead of accepting it as a personal
gift, we invested it in two shares in his [Ravenshaw’s] name.” When the
press folded, the profit (Rs. 30) was shared with him.71 Thus, like Dipika,
Utkal Press also made a profit out of published books and commercial
printing. In this context, what Ulrike Starke says of the Naval Kishor Press
is true of these two presses as well: they nicely illustrate “Anderson’s con-
cept of the ‘convergence of capitalism and print’.”72 Indeed, the influential
role that these two presses played in forming and disseminating public opin-
ion during the last three decades of the nineteenth century can hardly be
 Sahitya in Times of Crisis 49

exaggerated. Just as Fakir Mohan often cites the example of Dipika and
CPC as his models before embarking on Utkal Press and Balasore Sambad
Bahika, others who aspired to set up presses and launch periodicals visited
CPC. Fanindra Bhusan Nanda says, “Basudev Sudhala Deb, the Raja of
Bamanda visited Cuttack in 1872 and was impressed by the functioning and
work culture of the Cuttack Mission Press and the CPC.” This inspired him
to start a printing press of his own at Bamanda and later launch the paper,
Sambalpur Hiteisini.73
Following CPC and Utkal Press, the next press to be established in terms
of chronology and importance was the De Press of Balasore, set up by
Baikuntha Nath De, the local Raja, a patron of the arts and a writer of no
mean order. The other presses that followed were Mayurbhanj Raja Press
(1870); Kalipada Bandyopadhyay’s Odia Patriot or Utkal Hiteisini Press in
Cuttack (1873)74; Jagannath Rao’s Odia Printing Corporation/Victoria Press
(1885); and Sudhala Deb’s Bamanda or Sudhala Press (1885). In the 1870s
and 1880s, the number of Odia periodicals too grew rapidly. These included,
apart from the already discussed Balasore Sambad Bahika (1868, 1873),
periodicals like Utkal Hiteisini (1869), Bideshi (1873), Utkal Darpan
(1873), Mayurbhanj (1880), Purushottama Patrika (1882), Samskaraka
(1883), Nabasambad (1887), The Odia (1887) and Sambalpur Hiteisini
(1889) to reinforce the initiative taken by Dipika.75 The newspapers aroused
the political awareness of the people and drew their attention to various
problems of local and national interest.
Weeklies, such as Balasore Sambad Bahika, published new genres such as
biographical sketches, travel writing, book reviews and discussions, etc.,
alongside news items, with a view to promoting and shaping literary sensibil-
ity among readers. These weeklies helped the young and educated to become
established as writers by offering them suitable and conducive forums. In
trying to point out the stylistic and grammatical inconsistencies in the new
writings, however, such pioneering enterprises earned the wrath of many
writers. Sudarsana Acharya puts this succinctly:

Considered from many diverse perspectives, there can be no two opin-

ions about the fact that, the last four decades of the nineteenth cen-
tury were significant in channelizing a new literary tradition. Weekly
papers like Utkal Dipika and Sambad Bahika attempted to prepare
the ground that proved conducive to literary production. Apart from
the primary focus on news coverage, their attempt to inculcate literary
sensibility in the reading public through publishing life writing, travel
writing, reviews and criticism, discussion and rejoinders on diverse
contemporary issues did not go in vain. Alongside this, the role they
played in protecting the autonomy of the Odia language, in freeing
the latter from the all-consuming influence of Bangla, in freeing it
from ungrammaticality, is no less significant. By pointing fingers at
writers, translators, fellow-editors and colleagues, they earned no
50 Sahitya in Times of Crisis

small wrath of critics; they had to bear the brunt of attacks from all
directions, heaps of insults were hurled on them, and they were called
such names as “selfish,” “envious,” “egoistic,” “arrogant,” “intellec-
tual bullies”. But the distinguished editors of these journals respected
the past, welcomed the present, and gave direction to the future;
encouraged the new writers and gave due respect to the well-estab-
lished ones.76

Nonetheless, it became increasingly evident to the Odia elite that the best
way to develop an adhunik Odia literary corpus and thereby give impetus to
the burgeoning print culture, sahitya patrika or literary periodicals needed to
be set up. Women writers, few though they were, began contributing to the
periodicals by the 1890s.

The Periodical Press and the Literary Sphere

By way of going into the genesis of adhunik Odia sahitya, Natabara
Samantaray gives a comprehensive account of the history of textbooks in
Odisha. Such a history, he argues, is necessary for anyone wishing to explain
and understand the swerve from a complex indigenous tradition comprising
at least four centuries of literary history to the new or adhunik world of
Odia literature through the impact of colonialism since 1803, when Odisha
came under the British sway.77 In the process of proving his hypothesis, he
also studies numerous newspapers and periodicals. It is hard to disagree
with this reading of Odisha’s cultural history. My disagreement with
Samantaray is one of emphasis, as my hypothesis is that without the literary
sphere created by the periodicals and the great service of the numerous
printing presses involved in the production of the periodicals and books, the
adhunikikaran of Utkal sahitya would not have been possible. My reading
of the period along these lines follows the hint provided by the following
reminiscence of one the pioneers of adhunik Odia literary culture, Ram
Sankar Ray:

When I was trying to write plays, I wrote a novel called Bibasini when
the entrepreneurs of a monthly periodical Utkal Prabha requested me
to do so (1891). Fortunately, the periodical lasted long enough for me
to complete the novel. When the curators of another periodical
Indradhanu approached me to write a novel, I started contributing to it
in serial form a novel called Unmadini. Unfortunately, because by the
time the paper ceased publication when the novel was incomplete,
Unmadini remained unfinished. Bibasini is well-known as the first Odia
novel; and it has been included in the syllabi of educational institutions
from Kolkata to Madras.78
 Sahitya in Times of Crisis 51

The above passage illustrates the new development that sets up a straight-
forward link between the periodical press and literary production.
Similarly, a correspondent to the Utkal Darpan says, “It is not such a
good idea to write books straightaway. Periodicals are the arena for the
initial exercise of one’s talent. So, aspiring writers must first try to write
essays in the periodicals.”79 The advice was perhaps taken very seriously,
as the practice of publishing kavyas, novels and even shorter pieces of
prose and poetry in the periodicals continued for nearly two decades even
after professional indigenous printing presses were set up. Books of poems
and short stories began to be published regularly only after the turn of the
century. Thus, without the creation of a public sphere, especially through
the form of print media and literary periodicals, the newly educated class
would not have succeeded in putting their creativity across to the newly
emerged reading/print public. Though much of the debate and discussion
was about aesthetic issues, a lot more was geared towards the formation of
a “moral” community of the emergent aspiration for an Odia land, the
periodicals providing the necessary forum. The fact that these along with
the debating-society-like forums that took up the cause of the reinstate-
ment of Odia as the medium of school instruction eventually got chan-
nelised into the reorganisation of the Odia-speaking regions suggests the
validity of the Habermas model. The political processes towards that end
were strengthened, ironically enough, by hurried discourses on a “national”
literature. This body of “national literature” had hitherto been quite amor-
phous as part of the “Odia” consciousness around both the cult of
Jagannath and scriptural works, like those of Sarala Das, and the
Panchasakha (or the pentad of friends). The medieval vernacular body of
writing/aural-oral circulation of 400 years was now superimposed on the
imagined body of the Odia land and vice versa. It is here that one begins to
understand the role of the rooted culture of Bhagabat Tungi that we have
already discussed.
It is not difficult to locate the consolidation of the consciousness of an
identity around the Odia language among its speakers. This is perceptible in
the frequent appeals by the elite made to fellow Odias to buy books and
periodicals and read them as well as write for them. It was not rare to come
come across speeches of the emergent middle-class and their writings in the
periodical press. A case in point is the article by the staunch Brahmo,
Pyarimohan Acharya, titled “Utkal Sahitya” published in the magazine Utkal
Putra on 3 June 1874. There he laments:

Who would deny Odia literature’s pathetic situation today? To this day,
it is difficult to find a simple, lucid, non-erotic, and yet interesting piece of
prose or poetry. Forms such as drama and the novelistic mode are yet to
make any strong impression [on us]. We are unaware of any history book
in this language other than [Fakir Mohan] Senapati’s Bharatabarshara
52 Sahitya in Times of Crisis

Itihas and a few unpublished histories of England translated from

Bangla. Books relating upakhyans or episodes or travel are rare. It will
be impossible to count all that is unavailable. Barring literature in sci-
ence and mathematics, whose number will barely cross seven or eight,
that too, if we count the compilations and translations, the condition of
pure literature does not inspire confidence. What we have in this cate-
gory are some old kavyas adorned with highfalutin words, spiritual
inclination, obscene wordplay and at places simple, eloquent and
grounded poetry that flowed from the pens of Bhanja, [Dinakrushna]
Das and [Abhimanyu] Samantasinhar. But these cannot be safely trusted
into the hands of adolescent pupils with tender minds. But of late, the
taste of people is undergoing change. Though Odisha has not felt this
change explicitly, it is just a matter of time before its effects are
palpable.80

Irrespective of the ideological thrust of the passage quoted above the

lament in it appears around the time with which Samantaray begins his
study of the crucial role that the textbook production processes played.
Ending his chapter on the subject, Samantaray says, “Though [the new
literary values] were visible even prior to 1870, they became manifest in
the years between 1870 and 1880.”81
This perception of a new literary value necessitated the production of a
new kind of sahitya. An exclusive focus on textbook production as an agent
of the aforementioned change, therefore, can be misleading. For, no new lit-
erature can be produced in a cultural vacuum merely for purposes of peda-
gogy. The manufactured “change in literary taste” as we shall see,82
necessitated a new medium and a new conduit. The production of newspa-
pers first and then the emergence of the literary periodicals constituted an
expression and fulfilment of a “necessity.”
Thus, when a need for exclusive sahitya patrika or literary periodicals
was felt, such literary periodicals as Utkal Madhupa, Pradipa, Utkal
Prabha, Indradhanu and Bijuli appeared one after the other. Finally, the
biggest of them all in terms of influence and longevity, Utkal Sahitya,
appeared in 1897. It was not as if early newspapers in Odisha did not
publish literary pieces and debates about literary issues. But they were
peripheral to the news-oriented editorial thrust. A further point that needs
to be made here is that these papers carried advertisements on recently
published works, plays, poems and anthologies. Needless to say, many
contemporary Bangla literary periodicals provided the Odia entrepreneurs
among the educated middle class with the necessary model. After all, such
Bengali periodicals as Sambad Prabhakar (1831), Tatwabodhini (1843),
Bibidhartha Sangraha (1851), Masik Patrika (1854), Education Gazette
(1856), Somprakash (1858), Banga Darshan (1872), Bharati (1877), etc.,
were already famous. The fact that these literary periodicals were edited
 Sahitya in Times of Crisis 53

by literary stalwarts of Bengal (Ishwar Chandra Gupta, Rajendralal Mitra,

Bhudev Mukhopadhyay and Bankimchandra) was an added source of
inspiration for their Odia counterparts.
Fakir Mohan had launched the periodical Bodhadayini O Balasore
Sambad Bahika with two sections, the first section being literary while the
second carried news. Since no researcher has recently seen any copy of
Bodhadayini O Balasore Sambad Bahika, its role as a pioneer in Odia liter-
ary journalism cannot be assessed. Researchers like Debendra K. Dash have
pieced together scattered bits of evidence and hints from Mrutunjay Rath’s
early account of these periodicals to arrive at a few possibilities and it is
likely that Kalidasa’s Meghaduta in Radhanath’s Odia rendering had
appeared there.83
In the absence of any clear proof of Bodhadayini’s contribution, most
historians think of Utkal Darpan as the first exclusive literary periodical in
Odia. When Utkal Darpan was set up by Raja Baikuntha Nath De in 1873,
it was widely welcomed by aspiring writers. The announcement in Dipika
said:

We have made up our mind to start a monthly periodical called Utkal

Darpan. The advancement of Utkal sahitya, the correction of the social
mores of Utkal, these are the main aims of the periodical. This is why
articles on education, sahitya, bigyan, music, social and administrative
policy related matters will be published in it.

It began as a monthly and was converted into a fortnightly in 1875, before

becoming a weekly in 1877 until it ceased publication in 1885. When an
educated class, inspired by the so-called literary taste, got engaged in
textbook production with a view to creating an appropriate body of liter-
ature, they needed a robust medium for expressing their thoughts. Utkal
Darpan provided the forum necessary for the expression of such aspira-
tions.84 It published the works of writers such as Radhanath, Madhusudan
Rao, Biswanath Satpathy, Jaykrushna Choudhury, Bholanath Das,
Bholanath Samantaray and so on. The first two contributed the bulk of
the Darpan, which brought together the early crop of adhunik Odia writ-
ers.85 Two prominent features are noticeable in its contents: traditional
outlook and borrowings from Bangla. The magistrate of Balasore, T.
Norman wrote to T.E. Ravenshaw about the literary entrepreneur,
Baikuntha Nath De as: “…the leading gentleman [B. N. Dey] in Balasore
in works of public enterprise... has established an excellent press for
printing in the English and Odia characters and edits meritorious maga-
zines and newspapers.”86
However, even Darpan was not above serving news to its readers, such
as the column, “Bibidh Sambad,” or Miscellaneous News attests.87 The
monthly edition carried about 24 pages of the demy size. Utkal Dipika
54 Sahitya in Times of Crisis

was critical of the practice of serving news in a literary periodical. The

editor of Darpan offered a weak defence: the relative lack of new contrib-
utors and writers left some space to be filled up, he said, as an alibi for the
inclusion of news items. Though most such items were indeed newswor-
thy, one or two frivolous items such as a single hibiscus plant in someone’s
garden bearing flowers in two different colours, white and red, were also
included.
While according Darpan the role of a pioneering enterprise in the cause of
the new sahitya, we should add that it is only as a collective that literary
periodicals in the last three decades of the nineteenth century paved the way
for the building of an entirely new corpus of sahitya. In so doing, these peri-
odicals helped in the evolution of new forms, forging a healthy Odia prose
tradition and redefining the aesthetic values in traditional kavyas, bringing,
in fact, the adhunik world into the ken of literature. This is evident from the
exchange of letters and mutual support among themselves. Even when there
were bitter rivalries, as was the case with Indradhanu and Bijuli, they con-
tributed to the strengthening of Odia literary culture.
After five glorious years of Utkal Darpan, Utkal Madhupa was brought
out through the efforts of the two brothers, Gourisankar and Ram Sankar
Ray. Issues of Madhupa were printed at Gourishankar’s CPC. After the
cessation of Madhupa, the same printers launched yet another literary peri-
odical, Pradipa. By now (1878), the situation had improved from the time
Fakir Mohan made his first attempts, as the newly educated class had many
writers among its ranks. They were aware of the foreign traditions and got
busy with adaptations and translations, apart from writing original works.
Since many of them were Odias who knew Bangla, or Odia-literate pra-
bashi Bengalis, they combined their knowledge of European traditions with
new developments in Bangla literature. In fact, Darpan was published
about a year after Bankimchandra had started Bangadarshan. Such was the
healthy symbiosis between the two cultures, in spite of the bickering among
themselves, that one edition of the latter carried a summary of an issue of
Darpan.88
The period between the 1870s and 1890s was when Odia writers and
contributors to the periodicals made serious attempts to “modernise” Odia
literature. Whereas pieces like “Dhanajay Singh” and “Italiya Yuva” (not to
mention Madhusudan Rao’s “Pranayara Advut Parinama” or the Strange
Consequence of Romance) were attempts to forge the genre of the novel,
these were structurally akin to short stories rather than novels. In fact,
numerous such translations and adaptations appeared in these periodicals.
The ballad, “Prematari” by Ram Sankar published in Pradipa was said to be
an adaptation of Goldsmith’s Hermit. When the poem appeared in a book
form, Dipika pointed out certain flaws and gave detailed suggestions as to
how it could have been crafted differently.
 Sahitya in Times of Crisis 55

A contemporary, Rev J. Long had suggested that, “a new literature is cre-

ated in three stages: i. translation ii. adaptation and iii. original writing.”89 In
the case of Odia, though, all the three stages seem to have coalesced, adapta-
tion and translation were undertaken in great numbers initially, while origi-
nal works were fewer in number. Ram Sankar and his friends succeeded in
forming around Pradipa a community of adhunik writers, slowly, but surely.
By the year 1885, one can see the flowering of their talent in the extant pages
of Pradipa. The shortage of writers during the decade before was no longer a
constraint for this journal.
While ushering in the adhunik, print brought in an inescapable cultural
conflict, namely, new kinds of “battle of books.” These battles were fought at
different levels as, after the setting up of printing presses, several questions
arose: what to print and why; what to resist; prachin texts versus adhunik
ones; translations from English, Sanskrit or from Bangla; from among the
older texts whether those of Upendra Bhanja and such other erotic works or
those which were free from eroticism. All these can be seen in the debates,
editorials and controversies that play out in the public sphere. The parameters
of these debates were predicated on the primary battle between older, classical
aesthetics versus imported aesthetics. The home of such debates, the arena of
the battles, was none other than the new institutions conducive to literary
production such as the debating societies, sabhas, samitis, town halls etc. The
obvious shift from the pre-print to print economy occurred in the creation of
institutional structures, initially as vague silhouettes rather than in detailed
contours that are mirror images of their European counterparts.

Pressures of Material Conditions

When Bengali was the medium of instruction in the Mughalbandi areas of
Odisha, numerous Bengali authors of textbooks earned large sums of
money by way of royalty, while the Odia writers of textbooks lamented
their paltry earnings. Thus, it may be argued that language debates in
Odisha were not entirely based on idealistic considerations, removed from
material conditions of textbook production, and the choice of the same in
the curricula. Urging students and the Odia public to read and write as a
means of service to the desh and its language was similarly not without its
material aims, such as obtaining a government chakri. Yet, the importance
now attached to sahitya was almost Arnoldian in the way the mission of
English, purportedly fashioned in the building of the moral fabric of the
community, nation building, etc. It was necessary to show that only
through the service of Odia language and literature it was possible that the
desh could be uplifted. Further, for the same purpose, one had to discrim-
inate between good, or desirable, and undesirable sahitya. After all, by
now, sahitya was administered as a curricular requirement in schools and
56 Sahitya in Times of Crisis

later in colleges. This set about a chain reaction. Fakir Mohan, Radhanath
and the other Odia writers responded energetically to the pressures of
material conditions that followed the British occupation of Odisha in the
aftermath of Muslim and Marahatta challenges and in the face of Bengali
dominance. The realisation of the need for identarian politics was immedi-
ately met with when European education helped the new elite to make
instrumental use of their cultural capital through the conjoining of Utkal
Union and Utkal Sahitya Samaj. Individually, Fakir Mohan’s intuitive
response to colonisation through the hegemony of languages came in the
form of wordplay and irony in order to saturate his works with the rasa of
laughter. Both his and Radhanath’s cerebral response to English and
English education was in the form of subtle anticolonial resistance. The
driving force in both the cases was the fear of the loss of linguistic auton-
omy and cultural diversity due to the hegemony of the cosmopolitan over
the vernacular. Within the realm of vernacular “modern,” Odia writers
were highly vigilant about developing idioms appropriate to prose and
poetry so as to strike a balance between the old and the new, the “national,”
the aesthetic and the political. Above all, they were sensitive and respon-
sive towards the reception of their works in the periodicals and tried to
either convince the audience to take them in favourable direction or mould
their art accordingly.

Potentially Subversive
Before concluding the chapter, it may be necessary to remind ourselves that
the print medium was always thought of as potentially subversive, and
colonial officials were well aware of this threat. Though they kept track of
the public sphere, the form of surveillance at this stage they practised
appears to have been mild. A few examples should suffice. Of all the papers,
Dipika was often cited as the most established weekly newspaper. T. E
Ravenshaw, in his letter dated 23 July 1873, under the subject heading,
“Public Press—Its Tone and Influence,” says that, “The native press, which
represents the zeminder [sic] class, is not conducted with much ability, and
has but little influence.” Giving some details about two papers, “Utkal
Dwipica [sic] and Utkal Putra, which,” he points out, “attract most
notice…but they are more interested in the mode in which magistrates
apply their powers, and distribution of appointments.” The tone of Utkal
Dwipica [sic], “I believe is very fair…. One native paper in Balasore,” is
SCRUPULOUSLY LOYAL AND CAUTIOUS [sic]. Utkal Darpan is purely
literary and avoids politics.”90 This indeed looks somewhat surprisingly
innocuous. For instance, the press too had adopted an attitude of coun-
ter-scrutiny. Gourisankar, for example, had kept up the pressure on the
 Sahitya in Times of Crisis 57

government about its (mis)management of famine-related measures. E.J.

Barton, Assistant Collector, Khurda, J.S. Armstrong, Assistant Collector,
Jajpur and T.M. Kirkwood as well as John Beames, Collector of Balasore
were all targets of Gourisankar’s reporting in the Dipika for various acts of
omission and commission.91 The purpose here is not to study the value of
the print media in terms of whether the press fulfilled that function; rather,
it is to see it in terms of its contribution to the expansion of the public
sphere. Even while granting these papers and periodicals license, officials
looking after education kept track of, and were expected to report any
suspicious publication to their higher authorities.
In hindsight, the years between 1865 and 1903, thus, prove to be the
most crucial in the history of adhunik Odisha, that is, from the time of
its complete annexation by the British in 1803 and its eventual statehood
on the basis of language in 1936. For instance, the first decisive steps
towards the two-pronged linguistic agitation—one demand was for the
restoration of Odia as a medium of school education and as court lan-
guage and the other was a call for the unification of the Odia-speaking
tracts—by educated Odias were taken in early 1860 and that led to the
formation of Cuttack Printing Company. With the breaking out of the
Great Famine in 1866 and the launching of Utkal Dipika and setting up
of sabhas in different parts of the Odia-speaking regions, an Odia public
sphere that was inseparable from the literary sphere emerged, gaining
steam in no time. By the 1870s, more printing presses, innumerable
forums, sabhas and periodicals had seen the light of day. After the
demand for the language attained a decisive stage, the road map for the
unification of the Odia-speaking areas became much clearer. With the
consolidation of the scattered sabhas and unions in 1803, the Utkal
Union and Utkal Sahitya were formed and joined hands. In all this, as we
have seen in the chapter, print facilitated the development of a lively
public as well as literary sphere that played a major role in generating a
strong sense of an identity among a large number of educated Odias
scattered across Odia-speaking tracts, which reoriented Utkal sahitya.
These, between them, also created the sense of a quasi-Odia cosmopolis
subsuming local linguistic variations. The vast body of traditional scribal
Odia sahitya was inconsistent in terms of the idioms and spellings they
used. But in the post-print era, Odia readers and writers became con-
scious of the need to forge a mutually acceptable and usable language
through a shared sense of 400 years of literary and cultural heritage.
Thus, print and education not only worked in tandem to the advantage
of Odias in several spheres—not least the political—but the nexus in the
best sense between the two also gave rise to a literary sphere that led to
a few complications, as we shall see in the next chapter.
58 Sahitya in Times of Crisis

Figure 1.1 The front page of Prabodh Chandrika, the first Odia secular monthly
magazine. It was first published in 1856, edited by Rev. W. C. Lacey and
printed by W. Brooks. Prabodh Chandrika continued for three years.
 Sahitya in Times of Crisis 59

Figure 1.2 The first annual report of Cuttack Printing Company.

60 Sahitya in Times of Crisis

Figure 1.3 A notice regarding a “Public Engagement” (the first anniversary meeting
of the Cuttack Debating Club) published in Utkal Dipika, 06 February
1869—an instance of emerging modernity and the new Odia public spaces.

Figure 1.4 A present day “Bhagabat Tungi” in rural Odisha—where the Bhagabat is
read and worshipped.
 Sahitya in Times of Crisis 61

Figure 1.5 A super royal Columbian Printing press similar to the one purchased by
Fakir Mohan Senapati from Kolkata. (Image credit: National Museum of
American History, Smithsonian Institution).

Notes
1 Fakir Mohan Senapati, Fakir Mohan Senapatinka Atmacharit, ed. Debendra
Kumar Dash. New Delhi: NBT, 2010, pp. 56–61; 72–78.
2 Though it is impossible to arrive at an accurate figure, Bidyut Mohanty has esti-
mated the mortality figure to be around one million. See Bidyut Mohanty, “Orissa
Famine of 1866: Demographic and Economic Consequences,” Economic and
Political Weekly, vol. 28, no. 1/2, 1993, pp. 55–66.
3 Numerous studies exist on the subject. For a recent though brief study, see
Subhendu Mund, “Interminable Anxieties: Odia Language Movement in Colonial
Odisha,” in M. Sridhar and Sunita Mishra, eds. Language Policy and Education
in India: Documents, Contexts and Debates. New Delhi: Routledge, 2016, pp.
79–89.
4 It is so-called by the Odias because 1866 happened to be the ninth regnal year
(na’anka) of the Raja of Puri, Dibyasimha Deba.
5 First published belatedly in the periodical, Prabhat August 1937. Reprinted in
Eshana, vol 57, December 2008.
6 I allude to Paul Fussell’s title here. The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1977.
62 Sahitya in Times of Crisis

7 Jayanta Mahapatra, who was born and brought up in Cuttack as a Christian,

writes about how his hungry grandfather crawled to a shelter where missionaries
saved his life, but for a price. He was converted to Christianity, which he docu-
mented in his diary, now “yellowed.” Jayanta Mahapatra, “Grandfather,” Life
Signs. New Delhi: OUP, 1983. p. 19.
8 It is an idiom referring to a cucumber garden owned by three neighbours who are
responsible for nourishing it. Utkal Dipika, 13 March 1869, p. 42. A thenta is a
narrow strip of land running into water.
9 See Sudarsana Acharya, Odia Asmitara Sandhan O Upendra Bhanja
Kavyalochana. 2013, Brahmapur: Self, pp. 17–20. Hermann Kulke discusses
the structure of Odia unity under the godhead, Jagannath in medieval times,
and the idea of territorial integration versus “segmentary state” (Hermann
Kulke, “Fragmentation and Segmentation Versus Integration? Reflections on
the Concepts of Indian Feudalism and the Segmentary State in Indian History”.
Studies in History, Vol. IV, No. 2 (1982) pp. 237–238).
10 The new law stipulated that the land-holding tax ought to be paid before sunset on
the due date, failing which the owner would forfeit their rights to the land. Either
because of ignorance or logistics the owners failed to meet the deadline of sunset
and, thus, a large number of Bengali clerks bought the land at a throw-away price
at auctions held in Calcutta. The owners did not even get to know about the auc-
tion, let alone the consequent change in ownership of their property.
11 Emphasis mine to indicate the implication that the Odias were inferior. Partha
Chatterjee, “The Nation and Its Pasts,” in Partha Chatterjee, ed. The Nation and
Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1999, p. 76.
12 Sudipta Kaviraj calls the process, the “sub-imperialistic delusions” of the Bengalis.
“The British did introduce cultural forms, which they saw as part of the civilizing
processes of modernity…As British rule extended westward, extensive Hindustani-
speaking territories were added to the Bengal presidency. Bengalis duly developed
sub-imperialistic delusions about themselves and considered other groups within the
larger territory of the presidency their natural inferiors (Sudipta Kaviraj, “The Two
Histories of Literary Culture in Bengal,” in Sheldon Pollock, ed. Literary Cultures in
History: Reconstructions from South Asia. Berkeley: U of California, 2003, p. 537).
13 The story has been told many times over about the way Gourisankar, Fakir
Mohan, Sudhala Deb, Baikuntha Nath Dey and others invested in the printing
presses and brought out newspapers and literary periodicals as well as textbooks
mainly with the aim of safeguarding the Odia identity. Even Gandhi would use
this technology in South Africa. See Isabel Hofmayer’s work on the subject on
Gandhi’s Printing Press is well-known (Isabel Hofmeyr, Harvard: Harvard
University Press, 2013).
14 Whether the Odia movement can be called “nationalist” is a moot point here. I
shall use it off and on for convenience and to avoid theoretical clumsiness. Charles
Taylor, “Nationalism and Modernity,” in Robert McKim and Jack McMahanl,
eds. The Morality of Nationalism. New York and Oxford: OUP, 1997, p. 32.
15 I am using the term in its common parlance and not in the sense which Julia
Kristeva describes the psychic state of an individual.
16 Quoted in Gaganendra Nath Dash, Punascha Janashruti Kanchi Kaberi. Bhubaneswar:
Ramadevi, 2014, p. 154.
17 Utkal Dipika, 26 May 1867.
18 Though this issue of the periodical is no longer available, it was reproduced by
Bansidhar Mohanty in Bansidhar Mohanty, Odia Bhasa Andolana, 2nd ed.
Cuttak: Sahitya Sangraha Prakashana, 2001, pp. 211–222.
19 Utkal Dipika, 04 Jan 1868.
 Sahitya in Times of Crisis 63

20 The sequence of events is well documented by, among others, Gaganendra Nath
Dash in several of his articles. See, espicially, his Punascha Janashruti Kanchi
Kaberi, pp. 255–273.
21 Arabind Giri, ed. Odishara Prathama Sahitya Patra: Utkal Darpan (1973).
Rourkela: Pragati Utkal Sangha, 2007.
22 Chandramohan Maharana, Utkal Sahitya, vol. I, no. i, p. 4.
23 Jagannath Prasad Das, Desh Kaal Patra. “Introduction,” in Jatindra K Nayak, tr.
A Time Elsewhere. Middlesex: Penguin, 2009, p. viii.
24 As Natabara Samantaray says, many “British administrators in the mid-nine-
teenth century—much before the Odias started articulating the idea of a separate
Odia administrative region—seriously considered the advantage in governance of
having speakers of a particular language in a separate administrative region.” In
this section of my argument, I draw liberally on the article by him. (Natabara
Samantaray, “A Brief Introduction to the Making of a Separate Odia Province,”
in Sumanyu Satpathy and Animesh Mohapatra, eds. Samantaray Natabara: A
Reader. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2017).
25 “Report of the General Committee of Public Instruction of the Presidency of Fort
William in Bengal, for the year 1839–40,” Reproduced by Natabara Samantaray,
“Sikhya Bibhag o Odia Sahitya,” in Adhunik Odia Sahitya: Bikashara
Prushthabhumi. Bhubaneswar: Gangabai Samantaray, 1979, pp. 29–30.
26 Ibid., pp. 29–30.
27 General Report on Public Instruction in the Lower Provinces of Bengal Presidency,
1857–58, pp. 132–33. Back translated by me from Natabar Samantaray, Odia
Sahhityara Itihas, p. 112.
28 Henry Ricketts was Commissioner of the Orissa Division. Natabara Samantaray
argues that, at this stage of the “save Odia” agitation, the creation of a discrete
state was not a priority.
29 Quoted in Natabara Samantaray, “Swatantra Utkal Pradesh Gathanara Sankhipta
Parichay,” Adhunik Odia Sahitya: Bikashara Prushthabhumi. p. 132. I reproduce
here the original spellings of place names verbatim.
30 Ibid.,
31 Utkal Dipika, 10 June 1876.
32 Reproduced in Natabara Samantaray, Adhunik Odia Sahitya: Bikashara
Prushthabhumi. pp. 136–137.
33 Gaganendra Nath Dash, “Gourisankar O Odia Bhasasurakhya Andolona” rpt in
Punascha Janashruti Kanchikaveri. p. 270.
34 Samantaray, Adhunik Odia Sahitya: Bikashara Prushthabhumi. p. 134.
35 Natabara Samantaray astutely points out: “[Though] the jatiyabhaba that
emerged around the issue of language gradually took the form of a demand for
the unification of Odia-speaking tracts, it never became a demand for a separate
province.” Ibid., p. 138.
36 Ibid., pp. 131–150.
37 Gaganendra Nath Dash. Appendix, Punascha Janashruti Kanchi Kaveri, p. 255.
38 Samantaray, Prushthabhumi p. 138.
39 Nivedita Mohanty, Odia Nationalism, p. 25.
40 Animesh Mohapatra, “The Local and the National in Oriya Public Sphere 1868–
1948”. University of Delhi, 2015. Unpublished dissertation.
41 Utkal Dipika, 18 April 1903, which cites the Prajabandhu as its source.
42 Ibid., The enthusiasm reached such a pitch that they insisted on pulling the car-
riage (which was supposed to be drawn by horses) themselves, as a mark of
respect. Madhusudan Das resisted such an overwhelming welcome and started
walking, and was finally allowed to travel by the carriage, this time drawn by
horses. Gopabandhu Das, who accompanied his mentor Ramachandra Das to the
64 Sahitya in Times of Crisis

conference, must have been a witness to the effusive reverence shown to

Madhusudan Das, then already a larger-than-life figure. For a detailed report of
the meeting, see the 10 Jan 1903 issue of Utkal Dipika.
43 Samantaray, Adhunika Odia Sahitya: Bikashara Prushthabhumi, p. 135.
44 Surya Narayan Das, Deshaprana Madhusudan. Cuttack: Grantha Mandir, 1971,
145–150.
45 “From the beginning (1903), the annual convention of the Sahitya Samaj has been
held on the day before the annual meeting of the Utkal Sammilani. People from
different parts of Utkal gather together for the Sammilani. Because this arrange-
ment would make it convenient for them to participate in the Sahitya Samaj meet-
ing, such an arrangement has been made.” (Report of the 3rd annual meet of the
Utkal Sahitya Samaj prepared by Chandrasekhar Nanda, Utkal Sahitya, vol. IX,
no. 12, p. 324).
46 Madhusudan Das is reported to have said that he had “re-converted” the Maharaja
of Mayurbhanj [who was married into the Bengali family of Keshab Chandra Sen and
was therefore known as a Bengali king] into an Odia by getting him to be elected the
President of the UU conference. Nivedita Mohanty, Odia Nationalism, 1982, p. 53.
47 In Debendra Kumar Dash, Utkal Sammilani 1903–1936, Rourkela: Pragati Utkal
Sangha. 2005. pp. 43–44.
48 Swapan Chakravorty, “Purity and Print: A Note on Nineteenth Century Bengali
Prose”. Print Areas Eds. Abhijit Gupta and Swapan Chakravorty. New Delhi:
Permanent Black, 2004, p. 204. Yet, the partition of Bengal on the basis of com-
munal identity in 1905 backfired. Decolonisation involved both linguistic and
communal identity politics, but it also involved a contradiction that resulted in
the breaking up of East and West Pakistan.
49 Surya Narayan Das, Deshaprana Madhusudan, p. 289.
50 Odias sometimes felt indebted to the British as they believed that the British
would be able to safeguard their linguistic autonomy. Among others, John Beames
analysed in great detail the differences between the two languages to prove that
Odia was not a “dialect” of Bangla. (John Beames: Essays on Orissan History
and Literature. Ed. Kailash Pattanaik, Jagatsinghpur: Prafulla, 2004, pp. 94–108).
Fakir Mohan Senapati describes his indebtedness to [Link] and John Beames
and describes their support for Odias against the dominance of Bengalis. Fakir
Mohan Granthabali, vol. II, pp. 78–82.
51 It is not that such collaboration between desh and its cultural capital, especially
Sahitya, was unprecedented in the intellectual history of Odia-speaking regions.
At least a decade earlier, periodicals like Utkal Prabha were making the con-
nection quite explicitly. In the first issue, the editor, Chaitanyaprashad Ray said
in his editorial entitled, “Suchana”: “There is no doubt that the more the jati-
yabhasa and jatiya sahitya develop, the more will be the improvement in the
social condition of the jati.” Kabibar Radhanath Granthabali, eds. Prasanna
Kumar Mishra and Debendra Kumar Dash. Cuttack: Grantha Mandir, 2010,
p. 331.
52 Swapan Chakravorty, “A Note on Nineteenth Century Bengali Prose,” in Abhijit
Gupta and Swapan Chakravorty, eds. Print Areas: Book History in India. New
Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004, p. 203; 202.
53 Quoted in Graham W. Shaw, “South Asia,” A Companion to the History of the
Book, p. 35.
54 Like elsewhere in India, the missionaries pioneered the publications in Odia in the
early nineteenth century, first from Serampore and later from the Mission Press
located in Cuttack primarily through the efforts of Charles Lacey, Amos Sutton,
et al.
55 See Natabara Samantaray, Odia Sahityara Itihas 1803–1920, p. 173.
 Sahitya in Times of Crisis 65

56 The venue was the Serampore Mission Press. M. S. Khan, following G. Smith,
observes that Mrutyunjay Vidyalankar, Chief Pundit of Fort William College, pre-
pared the initial draft, whereas S. K. De quotes the official proceedings of the
College where he is named as simply Pooroosh Ram. See Graham W. Shaw,
“South Asia,” in A Companion to the History of the Book, p. 35.
57 Ibid., p. 41.
58 James Pegs, A Brief History of the Rise and Progress of the General Baptist
Mission in Orissa, p. 223, Reproduced in Samantaray, Prushthabhumi, p. 69.
59 Ibid.,
60 Prabodh Chandrika, January 1856 no. 1; pp. 1–3; cited in Bansidhar Mohanty,
Cuttack: Friends’ Publishers, 1978, p. 9.
61 Ibid., p. indecipherable.
62 Not to be confused with the latter-day Bangladesh.
63 Ibid., pp. 1–2.
64 Quoted by Swapan Chakravorty in “Purity and Print: A Note on Nineteenth-
Century Bengali Prose,” Print Areas: Book History in India, p. 197.
65 Ibid., p. 200.
66 See Mrutyunjaya Rath. Karmajogi Gourisankar. Bhubaneswar: Lark Books,
1925 (rpt 1998) and Krushna Chandra Kar, Karmabir Gourisankar. Cuttack:
New Students Store, 1955. A fictional account of how the idea was mooted and
materialized appears in Jagannath Prasad Das, Desh Kaal Patra. Though a few
incidents are imagined, much else is based on facts, pp. 41–43; 119–121.
67 Debendra Kumar Dash, in Adi Natyakar Jaganmohan Lal Granthabali, ed.
Smaran Kumar Nayak. Cuttack: Jagannath Rath, 2006, p. 250.
68 Natabara Samantaray, Odia Sahityara Itihas, p. 174.
69 Ibid., pp. 175–177.
70 Fakir Mohan used to spell his name in English as Phakeer Mohan Senapati, Fakir
Mohannka Atmacharita, ed. Debendra Kumar Dash. New Delhi: NBT, 2010.
71 Ibid., pp. 77–78.
72 Ulrike Stark, “Hindi Publishing in the Heart of an Indo-Persian Cultural
Metropolis: Lucknow’s Nawal Kishore Press,” in Vasudha Dalmia and Stuart
Blackburn, ed. India’s Literary History: Essays on the Nineteenth Century. New
Delhi: Permanent Black, 2016, p. 254.
73 Fanindra Bhusan Nanda, Sambalpur Hiteisini Eka Adhyayana. Bhubaneswar:
Subhas Chandra Mishra, 2002, p. 17.
74 Utkal Hitesishini (1869), published from Cuttack Society, was also a useful peri-
odical, though not much talked about in histories of the Odia periodical.
75 Pritish Acharya calculates the number of periodicals to have increased from four
in 1871 to 34 by 1900. See, National Movement and Politics in Orissa, 1920–
1929. New Delhi: SAGE India, 2008, p. 9.
76 Unabimsha Shatabdira duiti Bishmruta Patrika: Utkal Madhupaa O Pradipa.
Collected and Edited, Sudarsana Acharya Rourkela: Pragati Utkal Sangha.
2009.
77 This work was carried out by Samantaray long before scholars like Lisa
Mitchell traced the emergence of language as a new foundational category for
the reorganisation of literary production, history-writing, pedagogical prac-
tices, and assertions of socio-political identity in southern India. Lisa Mitchell,
Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother
Tongue. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009; New Delhi: Permanent
Black, 2010.
78 Ram Sankar Ray, “Bhumika,” in Ram Sankar Ray Granthabali. Cuttack: Bani
Bhandar, 1930. no p.
79 Utkal Darpan, vol. I, no. iv, p. 117.
66 Sahitya in Times of Crisis

80 Quoted in Samantaray Odia Sahityara Itihas, p. 95. I shall argue how ruchi pari-
bartan or change of taste was manufactured rather than self generated and sui
generis.
81 Ibid., p. 148.
82 I have placed the phrase, “change of taste” in quotes as I have questioned this
phenomenon elsewhere in the book.
83 See Radhanath Granthabali, p. 44.
84 Arabind Giri, Utkal Darpan, p. 14.
85 Quoted in Giri, ibid., p. 14.
86 A Brief History of Balasore Raj Family (1900), p. 57 quoted in Arabind Giri,
p. 20.
87 Ibid., p. 67.
88 Ibid., p. 49.
89 Report on the Native Press in Bengal. Quoted in Natabara Samantaray, Odia
Sahityara Itihas, p. 521.
90 Alexander Smith dated 5 August 1882 under the heading, “Public Press.” The
tone is “temperate and loyal” … “certainly not disloyal.” But influence is now
said not to go beyond the town, Balasore. Similarly, the following year, A Smith
under the heading, Public Press dated 28.6.1883. Already, one can notice, some
signs of anxiety about the public sphere. See Mahendra Prasad Dash et al., Eds.
Bhasabhittika Swatantra Odisha Pradesh Gathana, pp. 96–128.
91 Jagannath Prasad Das, A Time Elsewhere, tr. Jatindra K. Nayak, 2009, pp. 121–
122; 191–192.