Gopinath Mohanty's 'Oblivion and Other Stories' paints a lyrical portrait of dispossessed

Bindu Menon

As an iconic and prolific writer, who gave a new dimension to Odia and modern Indian literature, Gopinath Mohanty was also one of the first to give voice to the invisibilised, dispossessed tribal in his works. Mohanty, who served as a civil servant for many years in then Orissa, became intimately drawn to the tribals and their way of life during his postings in the most backward regions of the state. The story goes that while posted in Koraput, a group of local moneylenders and landlords petitioned the then Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, against Mohanty in a letter that read thus: “He is always fond of hillmen and behaves like hillmen himself. He very little respects other classes of people before them. He behaves as if only born for adivasis.”

It is, therefore, not surprising that Mohanty’s empathy was reflected in his writing. His literary compass never skewed towards romanticising or othering the tribals; rather, he treated them with the dignity and sympathy that one ought to accord to any human being. Many of his works deal with the exploitation and alienation of tribals not just from the commons but also from their cultural space. While some of his important novels like ‘Paraja’ and ‘Amrutara Santana’ have been translated into English and other languages, his stories, save for a few, remain unknown to those unfamiliar with Odia. The credit, therefore, goes to Sudeshna Mohanty and Sudhansu Mohanty, who took the onus of translating some of his stories. Considering that Mohanty wrote close to 150 stories, the task wasn’t easy. The translators finally picked 20 stories, written between 1935 and 1988. Save for the milieu, the emotions and situations in these stories aren’t bound by time or geography and have a familiar and, often nostalgic, ring to them.

Take the opening story ‘Oblivion’ (1941), which takes us on a jolly lorry ride with the protagonist Sibaram Salura, whose chest-thumping pride at his youthfulness and pleasure-filled life takes a sudden, precipitous turn. Similar in vein, though less flippant and more sombre, is ‘Licence’, a story of the masochistic tiger-hunting havildar and his legendary exploits that hide a murky past. Mohanty probes the dark caverns of the mind as effortlessly as he enters the depths of the forests, wrapped in prose that is earthy, visceral and sensory. In writer Amitav Ghosh’s words, Mohanty is “one of those writers from whose works neither the aggregate nor the non-human have ever been absent”.

One also gets an all-encompassing view of the social life of mid-20th century India in these stories. And seldom does it seem anachronistic. The immutable class divide and plight of women in a patriarchal world is detailed in Mohanty’s very first story, ‘Da’, which he wrote when he was just 21. The monotony of domesticity, revealed through the eyes of men in stories like ‘A Good Samaritan’ and ‘Town Bus’, juxtaposes the sexual proclivities of the male against the composite goodness of the female.

Poverty is a recurring theme in many of his stories: it takes two young men towards a morbid descent in ‘Paper Boat’ and tugs at the heart in ‘Endless’, where a little boy, deprived of new clothes for the festival, keeps his hopes alive. There is nothing redeeming about poverty yet the poor survive with a quietly ravaged dignity, like the girl in ‘Upper Crust’, who is pushed into selling her body by her grandmother. When she sees the rich man’s son ogling at her after she has scrubbed herself of her defilement, she gathers her clothes, “looks up defiantly… walks away into the damp hovel — insolent, nonchalant, bristling and unyielding. The rich man’s son drops his head to his chest”.

The translators have taken care to retain the colloquial and lyrical timbre of Mohanty’s prose in a way that seems organic, which is a feat. The story ‘Chakrapani’ follows a venerable old Sanskrit scholar who, one fine day, takes to eating biscuits with gusto and causes quite a kerfuffle in the village. This slightly involuted tale tinged with humour offers a rollicking portrait of village life as well as an insight into the perennial temporal-spiritual debate. Similar in tenor is ‘Cricket’, where the grand old lady of the household observes with disdain, the cricket mania in her family and even among her daughters-in-law, but quickly gets sucked into the feverish excitement of a game synonymous with religion in the country.

As the Jnanpith Award citation quite truly reads, “In Mohanty’s hands, the social is lifted to the level of the metaphysical.”