One of Nandini Sathpathy’s stories is “Wounded Pride” in the collection titled One Step Towards the Sun; Short Stories by Women from Orissa edited by Valerie Henitiuk and Supriya Kar, which was published in 2010. Here, she explored the sexual dilemmas of a housewife trapped in the hollows of a dull marriage.
Sanghamitra, in a marriage of 25 odd years, let the hem of her saree to soak in the urine of her child and wiped off her husband’s greasy hands, losing her individuality, yard by yard. Wrapped in the evenness of those sarees, she untied the knots of her imagination and escaped into ideas of a romance with an old friend. The story ends with the character rekindling her romance with her own husband, rediscovering him in a new light.
Nandini unabashedly wrote about the weight of domesticity that crumples within it the sexuality of a woman. Beyond the high chambers of patriarchy, women have sexual desires that were, and perhaps still continue to be, a taboo to talk about.
She was a political figure seeking the love and support of those masses who stood donning the same patriarchy that her writing sought to disrobe. What a life of contrasts. Communism and feminism and all such ideas that radically alter the accepted arrangements, tend to invite collective suspicion. On the one hand, you need the support and love of the masses. On the other hand, you want to question popular beliefs. It is a slippery slope. She tasted the highs and lows of power. From moving in the Prime Minister’s closest circles to running for MLA elections in one out of hundreds of constituencies in the country, she did it all without losing a single election.
Her friends, contemporaries, and juniors meandered into and away from sharing that a section of society had opinions about her character and her proximity to her male colleagues. What other way is there to do politics than roam the streets with men, one wonders. Unprovoked, people even shunned rumours of her disregard for her less-achieving husband, Devendra, inadvertently confirming the existence of such views in political and social circles. The last bit was most likely the doing of those constant parallels drawn between Indira Gandhi and her own life story.
The same story of the woman named Sanghamitra earlier appeared in the anthology titled Song of the Evening, which was translated by JB Mohanty under the title Indifference. It was published by Orient Paperbacks (and distributed by Hind Pocket Books) in January 1975 when she was Chief Minister of Orissa. The collection’s first story is titled “Janpath”.
The story is set against the backdrop of a Janpath of the 1960s, when hawkers and flower-sellers roamed freely, drawing the attention of cinemagoers towards themselves, a reality that repeated itself daily even in changing times.
The story brings out the dichotomies of the time. Those going to air-conditioned restaurants, breaking the finest breads with silver knives on milk-white upholstery, also enjoyed the sight of orchestras. But they judged the live performers, especially if they were girls. In her story, her friend judges a singer named Nora, and makes a comment about her being dressed cheaply. Nora describes the singer as a tasteless addition to a decent restaurant where the civilised go to dine. In the story, she questions such opinions and then traces Nora back to her home where tuberculosis, polio, and poverty sit on woven wooden cots (chaipais). Nandini lived on Janpath, the road the story is named after. It was clear from her writing that she absorbed a lot of what was going on around her, things that did not make it to Parliamentary speeches.
Some other titles in the book sketched a beautiful bridge between the social and political truths of the time. In a story titled “The House of Cards”, a woman named Pratima, who tunes out of news broadcasts on rural welfare in search of romantic songs, discovers that her daughter has been volunteering for India Gandhi’s programmes. She is infuriated at her daughter who utters with confidence even as she is being scolded violently, “The leaders say the country cannot be built unless the students make up their mind to do their work.” As a young social worker, her parents may have let her stay out late, get beaten up at protests, and be thrown in jail, but the story seems to suggest that she was familiar with the rejection women student leaders faced in their families.
The next story titled “Victory”, part of the same 1975 anthology, brought to light those reservations in people’s minds about adivasis who had converted to Christianity. This is a story about a couple, Robert and Mary, who end up co-inhabiting a small home with Shankar and Sushila in a slowly urbanising Cuttack. Soon enough, the Hindu higher caste woman begins suspecting Mary of trying to lure her husband.
There’s a deeper historical point to be made here. From the Mughal era to the British, and well into post-independent India, women from nomadic tribes and Dalit communities that are in search of livelihood, have ended up becoming sex slaves to upper-caste men. Prostitution is not a tradition or “an old profession”; it is an outcome of generations of poverty and subjugation.
Assumptions about the character of lower-caste women in a story that Nandini penned nearly 50 years ago, may still hold true in several parts of India. Such opinions are outcomes of a society that has embraced discrimination so artistically that it seems like a part of the design. The contempt that the otherness bred may have been resolved at the end of the story, like it would have been in a movie, but only after the vices of a divided society stood surfaced.
Incidentally, when she became Chief Minister of Orissa in 1972, none other than Jnanpith awardee and poet par excellence, Sitakant Mahapatra, was appointed her secretary. Mahapatra went on to serve as the Chairman of the National Book Trust. From Gujarati to Punjabi, his poetry and essays have been translated and interpreted by different cultures. He was awarded the 1974 Sahitya Akademi Award in Oriya for his poetry collection, Sabdara Akasha (The Sky of Words). In December of 2021, in between Covid’s crests and troughs, the 85-year-old recalled his first interaction with the Chief Minister. “She said, ‘Sitakant ji, with great hesitation, I am requesting you to join my office.’ She said her office will involve working at odd and long hours and that she did not want to disturb a writer like me who needed time to think and write, daily,” said Mahapatra, who was conferred with the Padma Vibhushan in 2011. He feels that since Nandini came from an illustrious family of writers, she understood the needs that writing posed on individuals. She thus made her Private Secretary DP Bagchi (who was junior to Sitakant in age and rank) take on most of the work.
While sharing the story of how he worked in her office during her short first tenure as CM, 50 years ago in 2021, the octogenarian slowly rose from his chair and opened one of many steel cupboards around him. He tapped book spines, as though they were piano keys making music that only he could hear, and suddenly stopped at one. It was a Hindi book titled Smritiyon Mein Harvard and it had been translated by an author named Dinesh Kumar Mali and published by Book Rivers in August 2019. The book was rebirthed in Hindi Sitakant Mahapatra’s reflections from the year he spent at Harvard as a Senior Fellow.
Far away from the glamour of big cities, where Ivy League alumni meet up over velvety wine and platters of grape and brie, there are such stories of scholarship lying lost in translation in one among many steel cupboards. “You write poetry in the language that you dream in. I dream in Odia,” says Mahapatra, one of the most popular contemporary poets of Odisha.
In 1949, an 18-year-old Nandini Panigrahi wrote a story titled “Chimnira Daka”. Half a century later, it was translated by Sachidananda Mohanty as “The Call of the Chimney” and published in a book called Early Women’s Writings in Orissa, 1898-1950: A Lost Tradition (2004). In the story, Siba and his wife, Phula, are living out their days, toiling away at a paddy field. Despite long days of hard work, their stomachs aren’t full. Siba goes on to work at a factory but they remain just as poor.
In the story, one gets a sense of those jawlines and rib cages that edge out of small, skinny bodies. One also feels in her prose-poetry the dampness of those raindrops that break through the thatched roofs beneath whose failed shelter an ailing child yearns for medicine, for milk, for drops of nourishment, and moments of love. There’s a line in the translation that goes, “What was it that took away all the proceeds? Where did lakhs and lakhs of rupees disappear? Siba got the reply the day the association for the workers was formed. Not just in the factory, he searched for his enemies everywhere. They lay scattered – in the village, among the relations and kinsmen, among crores of workers.’
Sachidananda Mohanty, who served as Vice-Chancellor, of Central University of Orissa, feels Nandini’s writing reflects the pain she carried in her heart. As he combed dusty, old library shelves to hunt out slim editions of her stories for translation, he realised that the prose she penned may have acquired a political (communist) colour as she drifted through party politics, but her writing was ultimately about human suffering.
Excerpted with permission from Nandini Satpathy: The Iron Lady of Orissa, Pallavi Rebbapragada, Simon and Schuster India.