Maguni's Bullock Cart and Other Classic Odia Stories is one of the short story anthologies curated by Mini Krishnan for HarperCollins India. Krishnan served as the editor – and conceptualiser – of the collection while Leelawati Mohapatra, KK Mohapatra, and Paul St-Pierre translated the stories in tandem, working under the Odia philosophy of “pitha khaiba na bindha ganiba?”: Would you rather savour the pancake or count the holes in it? In other words, “if the translation resonates with the reader, does it matter whether one or three translators were involved?” After collecting translated short stories “the way other people collect watches or potted plants”, Krishnan decided to edit the stories into a book series of three languages: Kannada, Malayalam, and Odia. Krishnan’s goals are lofty, varying from building “a treasure house of our own pasts” to participating in the need for Indians to keep up with world literature, “a trend that has led to a sudden visibility for translations of Indian literary works”.
A wealth of information and pleasure
The collection hosts 20 stories from various Odia writers, of whom only one – Fakir Mohan Senapati – has the honour of a double feature. The stories offer a wealth of information and pleasure. First and foremost, they are simply delightful reads, including the highlights of Fakir Mohan Senapati’s “Rebati”, Upendra Kishore Das’s “The Flame”, Bhagabati Charan Panigrahi’s “The Kill”, and Sachidananda Routray’s “Flower of Evil”. Yet beyond the stories, the collection offers a jumping-off point for further research that yields fascinating results into the lives and minds of figures rarely mentioned in the broader context of Indian literature. Fakir Mohan Senapati was an orphan before he turned three and paid for his education by working as a child labourer, eventually becoming one of the most widely read Odia writers. Meanwhile, Bhagabati Charan Panigrahi was a founding member of the Forward Bloc and the Orissa Communist Party before he was mysteriously murdered by the British police for his revolutionary stories. All the lives in the book – from the characters in stories to the authors themselves – are compulsively absorbing.
Of course, given the goal of the book, the usual markers of a short story collection are thrown out: a cohesive theme, a uniform texture, and a complementary tone. The stories in Krishnan’s collection are varied across all parameters – length, style, plot, and voice. Yet this is what makes it a refreshing and exciting read. Only three things bind together the stories: they were all written in Odia, originally published or produced between 1898 and 1945, and they aim to represent the flavour of the literature being widely consumed and circulated during this particular and deeply transformative time in Indian history. As such, political currents run under many of the stories, at times explicitly mentioned – as in Kalindi Charan Panigrahi’s “Victory Celebration”, or subtly shifting the social order – as in Suprabha Kar’s “The Long Wait”.
In Panigrahi’s “Victory Celebration”, contempt for the “wartime government” and a rising sense of nationalist sentiment firmly root the story in the mid-40s, right before independence. Yet “politics”, at least as information or news, is a background to the more important story, one of the Parida clan who suffer a series of deaths until only a sick father and his son and daughter remain. The family, under the rule that declared Orissa “a surplus state”, starves. The government “had squeezed the peasantry dry in its procurement drive and had sold off the entire rice stock beyond the borders, triggering a famine.” Meanwhile, their father is under strict instruction from a dubious doctor to consume rice gruel, sparking a series of events that set the son on a journey across villages, looking for anyone hoarding enough rice to buy. In the son’s journey, the sun beats down hot, rejections flow freely, and rice becomes a precious and expensive commodity that balances the line between life and death. “Victory Celebration” is written with such clean unemotionality that its subject matter becomes doubly moving and tragic. It’s a collection highlight and encapsulates a whole world – with a cast of characters and a parasitic government – within a mere thirteen pages.
Colonial modernity
The titular story, Govabarish Mohapatra’s “Maguni’s Bullock Cart” is another pinnacle. It follows the story of Maguni, a beloved bullock cart driver who is slowly driven out of business with the introduction of a bus system. Firm in his belief that the bus will never outdo the relationships he has built with the village, he waits by an empty bullock cart as customers flock to the bus instead. This continues until his money dries, food disappears, and he dies. Maguni, like most of the other stories in the collection, is firmly situated in the world of “colonial modernity”, a shift in the social, cultural, and authorial landscape driven by the rise of industrialisation and rapid urbanisation. According to a detailed introductory note from the translators, the forces that introduced the bus to the village are the same as those that “demanded that the expansive and digressive oral narration … be replaced by an authorial presence controlling the economy of the narrative.” As far as the title of the collection goes, “classic” means modern colonial, down to subject matter and form.
Mini Krishnan’s collection is carefully arranged and decadent, introducing stories from Odia writers on a national and international scale. It’s a fascinating record across history, culture, and literature of a turbulent, exciting, and rapidly changing period of Indian history. Krishnan’s goals for the collection were lofty, but she might have just achieved them.
Maguni’s Bullock Cart and Other Classic Odia Stories, translated by Leelawati Mohapatra, KK Mohapatra, and Paul St-Pierre, series edited by Mini Krishnan, HarperCollins India.
