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Divided into four parts — Pathfinder, Frontiersmen,
Consolidators and Among the Inheritors — the book features
works by Fakir Mohan Senapati, the father of modern Oriya prose,
Gopinath Mohanty, a Padma Bhusan awardee and the first-ever
recipient of the National Sahitya Akademi Award, Faturananad,
Bhubaneswar Behara, and modern-day writers Jagannath Prasad Das
and Akshay Mohanty among others.
The stories have
as varied themes and perspectives as one can expect from writers
whose works are separated by almost a century. Some of the
stories are formal experiments in storytelling, others are
rooted in real-life situations and events, while still others
portray the lives of ordinary people caught in the intricacies
of everyday life. Human emotions that remain the same no matter
how many changes take place in society, form the connecting
thread among these varied stories. For instance, Gopinath
Mohanty’s hero in his story Ants is driven by a frenzy
to reach the top in whatever he does but finally bows down to
the realisation that success which is measured in terms of
man-made parameters cannot make one happy and this realisation
sees his conversion from a tough officer to a humane one.
Such emotions are
apparent in other stories too. Upendra Kishori Das’ story Witch’s
Hunt deals with emotions like love and jealousy, while
Faturanad’s The Snake God deals with deception.
Interestingly the hero (or the villain) of the story demeans a
snake for harming defenseless creatures saying, "did God
make you a creepy crawly so that you could harm the
innocent," but later justifies his own actions as he
deceives others using the same snake as a representation of God.
The new-generation
writers adhere more to modern themes. In Goodbye, Darling
Ghost, Manoj Das says farewell to the past and embraces the
future. One of the most interesting stories is Chaudhry Hemkanta
Mishra’s The Stench through which the writer depicts
man’s insatiable zest for life which is reflected in the
concluding sentence "we were so full of joy at being alive,
so drunk with the happiness of being in motion, nothing else
mattered`85."
The selection of
the stories in this volume speak highly of the work done by the
three editors and translators — Paul St Pierre, Leelawati
Mohapatra and K. K. Mohapatra — in picking up the right
stories and thus fulfilling the very most basic criteria of a
good anthology. In doing so, the trio have opened a door for the
readers to discover some of the best Oriya stories written over
the past 100 years.
Another
outstanding aspect of the book is the quality of the
translation. The prose flows with a smoothness which makes the
stories a pleasure to read, as they must have been in their
original form.
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THE
transition phase of any society is almost always fascinating. Seeds
of new idea germinate, old values perish and, most of all, the clash
of the new and old ideas give birth to interesting speculations. So
it is not without reason that most short story writers prefer to
base their creations against such backdrops.
