| Pub. Date | : March, 2021 |
|---|---|
| Product Name | : The IUP Journal of English Studies |
| Product Type | : Article |
| Product Code | : IJES050321 |
| Author Name | : Manoranjan Rath and Pramod Kumar Das |
| Availability | : YES |
| Subject/Domain | : Arts & Humanities |
| Download Format | : PDF Format |
| No. of Pages | : 11 |
Adivasis constitute more than 22 percent of the population of Odisha. Their simple lives have provided writers with a lot of stuff for literary imagination. A survey of Odia literature down the years shows that Odia writers became interested in these indigenous people particularly after the colonization of Odisha in 1803. For administrative purposes, colonial rulers came in contact with the Adivasis and started writing ethnographic details about them, in which they were portrayed as savages. With the emergence of the Odia middle class toward the end of the nineteenth century, the Adivasis got a place in the literary imagination of Odia middle-class writers. This class showed interest in the Adivasis' lives and wrote both fictions and nonfictions about them, which were published in the emerging periodicals of that time. This paper proposes to study the predecessors of this novelization of Adivasi life. It analyzes the first four decades of the twentieth century when interest in the Adivasis gradually increased in Odisha. The paper confines itself to the Odia literary imagination of the Adivasis before the publication of Paraja (1945), a classic on Adivasi life. The role of the middle class in creating this world has also been discussed.
Bhima Bhuyan was the first novel written on Adivasi life in Odisha. The novel was
written in 1898 and published in 1908 by Edward Press, Cuttack. This novel became a
trendsetter in Odia literature as far as the theme was concerned. The portrayal of Adivasi
life in a vivid manner came more than three decades later in the novels of Gopinath
Mohanty. Paraja was published in 1945, followed by other novels like Amrutara Santana
(1949) and Shibabhai (1955). However, there has been little discussion on the theme of
Adivasi life in Odia literary imagination before the publication of Bhima Bhuyan and during the gap between Bhima Bhuyan and Paraja. Essays and short stories on tribal1
life began to appear in the literary periodicals at the beginning of the twentieth century. It
is interesting to note that such writings were the products of the Odia middle class that
emerged during the latter half of the nineteenth century. This class portrayed the tribal
society in various cannons of literature, especially short stories and essays.