Six Acres And A Third

Mohan Senapati Fakir

Description

This sly and humorous novel by Fakir Mohan Senapati one of the pioneering spirits of modern Indian literature and an early activist in the fight against the destruction of native Indian languages is both a literary work and a historical document. Set in Orissa in the 1830s, Six Acres and a Third provides a unique view from below of Indian village life under colonial rule. This graceful translation faithfully conveys the rare and compelling account of how the more unsavory aspects of colonialism affected life in rural India.

Sujets

• Histoire
• 20th century
• History of Asia
• India

Informations

• Publié par: Penguin Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 01 février 2006
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789351182511
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Fakir Mohan Senapati
Six Acres and a Third
Chha Mana Atha Guntha
Translated from the Oriya by Rabi Shankar Mishra, Satya P. Mohanty, Jatindra K. Nayak, and Paul St-Pierre Introduction by Satya P. Mohanty
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
Introduction

Chapter One: Ramachandra Mangaraj
Chapter Two: A Self-Made Man
Chapter Three: V nijye Vasate Lak m s Tadardham K ikarma i
Chapter Four: Inspecting the Paddy Field
Chapter Five: The Mangaraj Family
Chapter Six: Champa
Chapter Seven: Goddess Budhi Mangala
Chapter Eight: Zamindar Sheikh Dildar Mian
Chapter Nine: Village News
Chapter Ten: Bhagia, the Weaver, and Saria, His Wife
Chapter Eleven: Gobara Jena, the Chowkidar
Chapter Twelve: Asura Pond
Chapter Thirteen: Words of Wisdom
Chapter Fourteen: The Conspiracy
Chapter Fifteen: The Bagha Singh Family
Chapter Sixteen: The Auntie from Tangi
Chapter Seventeen: House on Fire
Chapter Eighteen: Saantani
Chapter Nineteen: The Police Inquiry
Chapter Twenty: Ram Ram Lala, the Lawyer
Chapter Twenty-One: Cuttack Sessions Court
Chapter Twenty-Two: Gopi Sahu s Shop
Chapter Twenty-Three: The Law of Karma
Chapter Twenty-Four: Inquiry into a Death
Chapter Twenty-Five: The Mangaraj Household
Chapter Twenty-Six: Lalita Das, the Monk
Chapter Twenty-Seven: A Marvelous Encounter
The End
Glossary
Copyright
About the Author
Born into a Khandayat family in a small village near Balasore, Orissa, Fakir Mohan Senapati (1843-1918) was a poet, novelist, administrator, social reformer, printer, businessman and patriot.
*
Rabi Shankar Mishra is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Sambalpur, Orissa.
Satya P. Mohanty is Professor of English at Cornell University, U.S.A.
Jatindra K. Nayak is Reader in English at Utkal University, Orissa.
Paul St-Pierre is Professor of Translation at Universit de Montr al, Canada.
Introduction
Satya P. Mohanty
Set in colonial Indian society during the early decades of the nineteenth century, Six Acres and a Third tells a tale of wealth and greed, of property and theft. On one level it is the story of an evil landlord, Ramachandra Mangaraj, who exploits poor peasants and uses the new legal system to appropriate the property of others. But this is merely one of the themes in the novel; as the text unfolds it reveals several layers of meaning and implication. Toward the end of Mangaraj s story, he is punished by the law and we hear how the Judge Sahib ordered that his landed estate, his zamindari, be taken away. It is sold to a lawyer, who-as rumor in the village has it- will come with ten palanquins followed by five horses and two hundred foot soldiers to take possession of Mangaraj s large estate. The ordinary villagers react to this news by reminding one another of an old saying: Oh, horse, what difference does it make to you if you are stolen by a thief? You do not get much to eat here; you will not get much to eat there. No matter who becomes the next master, we will remain his slaves. We must look after our own interests.
Fakir Mohan Senapati s novel is written from the perspective of the horse, the ordinary villager, and the foot soldier-in other words, the laboring poor of the world. Although it contains a critique of British colonial rule, the novel offers a powerful indictment of many other forms of social and political authority as well. What makes Six Acres unusual is that its critical vision is embodied in its narrative style or mode, in the complex way the novel is narrated and organized as a literary text. The story of Mangaraj and his evil deeds is presented in the narrative as one among many such stories, but the thematic resonances of the other stories and histories can be appreciated only by an attentive reader. Senapati s novel is justly seen as representing the apex of the tradition of literary realism in nineteenth-century Indian literature. 1 But its realism is complex and sophisticated, not simply mimetic; the novel seeks to analyze and explain social reality instead of merely holding up a mirror to it.
In his magisterial History of Indian Literature, 1800-1910, Sisir Kumar Das calls Senapati s novel the culmination of the tradition of realism in modern Indian literature, referring to its implicit links with earlier instances of realism in fiction and drama. All these plays and novels contain elements of realism in varying degrees but none can match Fakir Mohan s novel in respect of its minute details of social life and economic undercurrents regulating human relationships and the variety of characters representing traditional occupational groups. 2 Both the naturalist realism that builds on the accumulation of details and the analytical realism I mentioned above, which explains and delves into underlying causes, are achieved in Senapati s novel through a self- reflexive and even self-parodic narrative mode, one that reminds us more of the literary postmodernism of a Salman Rushdie than the naturalistic mode of a Mulk Raj Anand. Central to this narrative mode is a narrator who actively mediates between the reader and the subject of the novel, drawing attention away from the tale to accentuate the way it is told. Until we become comfortable with this narrator and his verbal antics, join him in witty interchange, and ponder our own implication as readers in the making and unmaking of facts, both narrative and social, we cannot say that we have fully engaged with Senapati s sly and exhilarating text.
Indeed, even the first few lines of the novel invite such an active relationship between narrator and reader. We are given facts that are themselves partial, and at least partly fictional, and it is up to us to interrogate the authority of the teller. As storyteller, the narrator is in fact playing a variety of social roles. As readers, we are encouraged to participate in the decoding of these roles, in inhabiting a dynamic space where social meanings are being constructed and exposed almost simultaneously. The subject is Ramachandra Mangaraj, the hero of our story:
Ramachandra Mangaraj was a zamindar-a rural landlord-and a prominent moneylender as well, though his transactions in grain far exceeded those in cash. For an area of four kos around, no one else s business had much influence. He was a very pious man indeed: there are twenty-four ekadasis in a year; even if there had been forty such holy days, he would have observed every single one. This is indisputable.
The first two sentences appear to be factual, unlike the next two, which contain the narrator s interpretation. But if you were in clined to dispute the narrator s emphatic conclusion about Mangaraj, or if you had doubts that the observance of ritual fasts may not be conclusive evidence of piety, you may well begin to wonder why the discussion of Mangaraj s pious nature comes immediately after the two sentences about his property and his money-lending business. The information in the second sentence would then begin to look a little less natural and simple, and you might ask if it was merely an accident that for . . . four kos around, no one else s business had much influence. Senapati s Indian readers may also have been placed on alert by the obvious exaggeration in the third sentence: an ekadasi is the eleventh day of every fifteen-day lunar cycle, and so, by definition, we cannot have forty ekadasis! One way or another, every attentive reader is introduced not so much to the virtues of the landlord Mangaraj as to the unexpected shifts in the narrator s tone. We are asked to be on our toes, to be active interpreters-not simply as literary critics but also as social beings. The Oriya word for moneylender in the text is mahajana, literally noble man ; the link between moneylender and virtue is not the narrator s own creation, but is instead a social and linguistic convention, reflecting a commonly held prejudice encoded in everyday language. What the narrator urges us to do is to question this seemingly natural link. Once we begin to do that the discursive values of Senapati s narrator are a bit easier to grasp and understand.
A key feature of the narrator s discourse is irony. Statements do not mean what they seem to say. More generally, actions that seem to be virtuous may need to be interpreted more carefully, for appearance and reality do not always coincide, and the social world may be quite different from the one that is depicted for us by our scribes, our priests, our rulers, and our teachers-those invested with authority. The irony of the narrator can be subtle, but it often swells to full-blown sarcasm, at times evoking an irreverent and explosive form of humor. This wide tonal range is what the narrator draws on to organize our critical and evaluative perspective. Here is the rest of the first paragraph, which marks major shifts in tone that represent only a part of the full tonal range that is used in the novel:
Every ekadasi [Mangaraj] fasted, taking nothing but water and a few leaves of the sacred basil plant for the entire day. Just the other afternoon, though, Mangaraj s barber, Jaga, let it slip that on the evenings of ekadasis a large pot of milk, some bananas, and a small quantity of khai and nabata are placed in the master s bedroom. Very early the next morning, Jaga removes the empty pot and washes it. Hearing this, some people exchanged knowing looks and chuckled. One blurted out, Not even the father of Lord Mahadeva can catch a clever fellow stealing a drink when he dips under the water. We re not absolutely sure what was meant by this, but our guess is that these men were slandering Mangaraj. Ignoring their intentions for the moment, we would like to plead his case as follows: Let the eyewitness who has seen Mangaraj emptying the pot come forward, for like judges in a court of law we are absolutely unwilling to accept hearsay and conjecture as evidence. All the more so since science textbooks s