Is
there another Indian novelist whose books contain, not just so many beautiful
sentences, but so many different kinds
of beautiful sentences, as those of Gopinath Mohanty (1914-1991)? No Indian
novelist is as consistently and meaningfully melodious as him, and with no one
else’s material does the reader feel such a strong sense – very hard to achieve
in novelistic prose – of the concentration and economy of music. Most
thrillingly, when one reads Mohanty’s great novels of tribal life in Odisha,
one realizes that the notes he summons derive not just not from his own feeling
nature, but from his material: the pleasure and danger of the forest, the
proximity and capriciousness of the gods, and the elemental beat and spark of
the life-force itself.
Thankfully,
the impact of Mohanty’s stylistic dexterity and felicity in Odia shine through
even in translation – or have been made to do so by some very painstaking and
adept translators. Amrutara Santana, published
by Sahitya Akademi in a translation by the Odia scholars and professors of
English literature, (the late) Bidhubhusan Das and Prabhat Nalini Das, as The Dynasty of the Immortals, is one of
two great novels about Odia tribal life written by Mohanty in his youth. The
other is Paraja, which appeared
almost thirty years ago in an excellent translation by Bikram Das.
Mohanty’s
engagement with the tribals of Odisha began fairly early in life. As a young
bureaucrat enlisted in the Odisha Administrative Service in the years just
before independence, he lived in distant outposts in the district of Koraput,
then, as now, one of India’s poorest regions. But when the young city boy with
an MA in English Literature came into contact with people whom those of the
social order to which he belonged thought of as primitive, simple-minded
hillmen, he found in them a beauty and integrity, a generosity of spirit and a animistic
empathy, a love of song and story that cried out to be enshrined in words.
But
the tribals were also the “other” of mainstream Indian civilization, relentlessly
patronised and exploited, destined to be on the wrong side of history even when
India rid itself of its colonial masters. (“The Kandha,” Mohanty writes
presciently, “is to be found wherever the forest is. However, once the forest
is opened up, the Kandha is evicted from his land.”) Like his contemporary
Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay in Bengal with his forest novel Aranyak, Mohanty set out to describe
both the rapture and the tragedy of this other way of life. But unlike
Bandyopadhyay, he chose to do so from the point of view of the forest-dwellers
themselves.
Readers
of Paraja, about the tribe by that
name, will immediately recognise the feel and force of the limber, capacious,
almost centreless point of view in Dynasty
of Immortals, about a group of Kandha tribals in a group of isolated,
impoverished villages (“Here, humankind did not get anything from nature
without a struggle”) in the Eastern Ghats. The narration ricochets continuously
from the intimate and the domestic to the wide-angle and the cosmic, from the
narrator’s almost ethnographic observations about the Kandhas to a tracking of
the minds of diverse characters that unspools for us the same worldview from
the inside. Mohanty’s translators find short and long, shapely and broken,
sentences that capture the many shades of light and dark, the many intricate
subtleties, that he conjures up.
Mohanty’s
distinctive narrative method adds to the feeling of extreme intensity and
compression: in tightly sculpted and focussed chapters no more than five or six
pages long, written almost as short stories, we are hit by wave after wave of
powerful feeling. But the jolt in this case is not just aesthetic, but – in
Mohanty’s time and in our own – political. Mohanty’s ecstatic style is an
instrument precisely designed to reveal the beauties of the way of life of his forest-dwelling
protagonists.
Out
here in the forest, distinctions between the human and the animal realm, the
world of human artifacts and that of nature, the living and the dead, seem to be
much more blurred than in modern industrial society. We sense this right from
in the opening chapters of Dynasty,
when the man who appears to be the protagonist of the story, the elderly
village headman Sarabu Saonta, collapses and dies; nevertheless, his presence
echoes across the 600 pages that follow. “Sarabu Saonta loved this earth,” we
read. “He did not know how to love with discrimination. Life was truth, beauty;
let the old body be destroyed, he would be reborn in this beautiful land.”
After
Sarabu dies, his son Diudu, daughter Pubuli, and daughter-in-law Puyu are left
to carry on all the rituals and reveries of their realm: the forbidding and
enchanting forest, with its light and shade, cooing birds and hungry tigers. In one scene, reminiscent of the story of the killing of the male krauncha bird and the grieving sounds of its mate that inspired Valmiki to invent the shloka meter of the Ramayana, Diudu kills a bird on a hunt and, reaching it as it lies thrashing on the ground, thinks he sees a cloud rising in the pupils of its eyes as it expires—an astonishing image. There are other thrilling hunting scenes, in which the contrasting energies of human social dynamics and violence towards beasts are mingled as expertly as Leo Tolstoy did in Anna Karenina (Mohanty was a voracious and cosmopolitan reader and even translated War And Peace into Odia).
In
choosing characters who approach the business of living with such rapture and
intensity, Mohanty reminds one of other twentieth-century artists and
philosophers who, in an ideological age, have resisted the reduction of life to
any system – people like the French film-maker Jacques Becker, who declared,
“In my work I don’t want to prove anything except that life is stronger than
everything else”, or the Iranian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo, who after being
incarcerated in prison comes to the paradoxical realization that “the meaning
of life is life itself.”
The
forest is the realm not just of food-gathering, of the hunt, but also of love,
the place where human beings succumb to “the instinct of eternal nature”. It is
the place, in other words – and this is where Mohanty’s focus on a very
particular social world at a particular historical moment acquires a universal
resonance – where man and woman become Man and Woman, carrying on the eternal
dance of life and creation.
Repeatedly
in Mohanty’s novels, we are given this sense of what one might call deep time,
the sense of an archetype playing itself out repeatedly across the centuries.
The young people falling in love for the first time thrill to this new emotion;
the storyteller, meanwhile, thrills to the sense of the very same figures
becoming indistinct, bringing the past to life within the folds of the present.
“Then the dialogue of Kandha courtship through question and answer ensued, the
exchange of words from time immemorial; thousands of years had rolled by in the
formulation of such exchanges.” For his characters the link to the past is not
a matter of the historical record but rather an imaginative one rooted in a
feeling for nature and the cosmos; it is in this sense that the tribals with
their short life-spans and many hardships are nonetheless “the dynasty of the
immortals”.
In
1953, a letter of complaint arrived at the office of Prime Minister Jawaharlal
Nehru, sent to him by the land-owners and moneylenders who comprised the elite
of Koraput. The letter said (I take this from an essay about Mohanty written by
the critic JM Mohanty) – “To our great calamity and disaster Sri Gopinath
Mohanty is posted here as the special assistant agent at Rayagada. 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."
Perhaps
the letter had an unintended effect. When the Sahitya Akademi was founded in
1954 to award literary achievement in the 24 major languages of India, Amrutara Santana was judged the
first-ever winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award for Odia literature. It has
taken sixty years to produce a worthy translation in English (marred, sadly, by
the terrible layout and copy-editing that has unfortunately come to be the
general standard for Akademi publications). The wait, though, has not been in
vain. Mohanty’s ecstatic vision, shot through with light and dark, sings here
on every page. In time, the world will grant that this contemporary of Garcia Marquez and Vasily Grossman had a vision of life no less original and enduring than them. But for now, let at least us Indian readers ignore no more this marvellous hillman standing at our very own doorstep.
