Riot or Write ?

The English in these translated stories is supple and responsive to the many registers of Oriya.

The Other Side of Reason: Oriya Stories from the Edge; Himansu K. Mohaptara and Paul St-Pierre, eds. Grassroots, Rs. 195.



Good things, they say, come in small packages. This slim volume containing eight contemporary stories translated from Oriya and an elegant introduction proves how right they are.

Clear principles

Though Himansu Mohapatra (the editor who provides the introduction) denies that the collection is based in either thematic coherence or topicality, it is not a haphazard affair either. There are clear principles of selection at work. Thus ‘readability’, judged by the criteria of aesthetics (fine writing) as well as politics (social criticism), is a paramount consideration. The next is translatability into English, which requires, he stipulates, that the stories be able to ‘cut across cultural divides through the sheer force of their human content.’ And finally all the selections are stories ‘from the edge,’ by which he means they record the experience of the ‘other’, outside the ‘comfort zones of the middle class.’ As a non-Oriya reader who puts herself in the hands of the editor and translators, I found it to reassuring that these are representative texts, stories that emerge from and stand witness to their culture and times.

Two of the stories — “History” and “Fear” — are exclusively about this middle class. Two others — “The Picture Within” and “Window View” — bring in the ‘other’ — a tribal married couple, poor neighbourhood children — to disturb the middle class perspective. The remaining four stories are located emphatically beyond the pale of respectable society. The low life they represent may shock or move the implied middle-class reader, but those effects do not seem to be their primary purpose. Instead they are filled with purpose and meaning, the characters possess interiority and subjectivity, and their worlds exist without reference to any norm except their own. Of these, perhaps Paramita Satapathy’s “Ours by Love” and Giri Dandasena’s “Lefri’s Bonda” are betrayed by their sentimentality, in part because both authors seem to view submission to rape as woman’s sacrifice. Bijoy Pradhan’s “A Case of Unnatural Death” and K.K . Mohapatra’s “The Whore: A Love Story” are as unsentimental as they come: the first a gothic horror not meant for the squeamish, the second filled with bawdy humour and straight satire.

Despite the editor’s warning that the stories are ‘so locked into their respective little islands of space and time as to rule out the presence of a communicating door between them,’ it is tempting to trace motifs across them. I have mentioned the shared meaning of rape in two of the stories. I could not help comparing, either, the male paean to a woman’s breasts that comes at the end of “A Case of Unnatural Death” to the whore’s caustic satire of her male clients who “paw” her breasts “as though they’re mounds of dough or something” in ‘The Whore.’ It is perhaps this inter-textual commentary that makes me unable to accede to Mohaptra’s reading of the passage in the early story as a lyrical rhapsody reaching ‘metaphysical heights.’ Floating in the stream of consciousness of the constable Aniruddha when confronted with a female corpse crawling with worms, the passage seems instead to express the limits of his language, his inability to move beyond the banal moral implied in the contrast between (male) desire for the female body and the horror of decaying flesh, rather than an authorial intervention.

But these are matters for readers to discover and judge for themselves. Perhaps the detailed readings of each of the stories provided in the introduction might be redundant for this reason, though indeed they are full of helpful insights. If I have refrained from remarking on how brilliant the stories themselves are, it is because somehow the comment can come to seem subtly insulting, almost as if one is surprised to find these kinds of excellence in writing in the regional languages. If surprise there is it is not at the stories themselves, however, but at the conditions that must exist for such a dynamic literary culture to flourish. One wishes that the editor could have told us more about the little magazines, the critical community, the readership, the influences, and the institutions that promote contemporary Oriya literature. We are given helpful historical background, but not much by way of contemporary context.

Fine work

A final observation about the translations carried out by various hands but all overseen, apparently, by Paul St- Pierre. They are a pleasure to read, a far cry from the usual trial-and-error attempts of amateur hands that we have got used to in the local translation industry. The English language they work with is supple and responsive to the many registers of Oriya deployed in the stories, just sufficiently estranged from English idiom to convey the fact that they have been translated but not obtrusively so. Altogether it is a neat little book, free of typos and smart in appearance. It appears that Grassroots has already published an impressive number of translations from Oriya. This volume is a distinguished addition to their list.