LANDMARKS IN ORIYA LITERATURE

By Dr. MAYADHAR MANSINHA. M.A., Ph. D.

A little more than a decade ago, our language-area could not be easily located on the map of India. It is Orissa’s misfortune that the entire period of British rule, which brought glory and prosperity to most other regions of India, was one dark night for her. But the Oriyas justifiably proud of the fact that, all through this dismembered existence, it was their language which kept the impulse to be re-united, ever green. And so, the Oriyas living in the four different Provinces of Bengal, Bihar, Madras and Madhya Pradesh, were united at long last in the year of grace 1936. Orissa, however, is only a diminutive shadow of the historic kingdom of Kalinga or Utkal, which extended from the Ganges to the Godavari and from the sea-board to the foot-hills of the Vindhyas. Even now several million Oriyas live beyond the boundaries of the present Orissa State. As educational Adviser to the former Eastern States Agency, I have had the opportunity of hearing Oriya spoken and sung in the entire eastern belt of the Central Provinces, extending from Bastar State in the south to Jashpur State in the North and as far west as the Sakti State.

Hemmed in on all sides by the sea and mountains and forests Orissa has had a more or less indigenous growth of her own art, culture and literature. If politically it is the Indian State with the smallest non-Hindu minorities in its population, culturally also it is the purest and linguistically the closest to Sanskrit. If one walks in the streets of Sambalpur even today, one would feel as though the figures from the walls of Ajanta and Konarka had suddenly come alive. Those picturesque men and graceful ladies whom we meet in ancient Indian art, do still exist in real life in large parts of Orissa, if they exist at all anywhere in India. It is on this soil that you meet the Hindu architecture and sculpture in perfection and in profusion. The temples of Orissa, gracefully tapering into the blue heavens and adorned with magnificent carvings, have been exciting the admiration of all who see them, the Sun-temple at Konarka being a marvel of beauty in the entire world of Art. In the Oriya language the number of foreign words might be counted on one’s fingers, the entire body of the language still remaining almost wholly Sanskritic. And we have had a continual line of Puritans in the language, ever since the beginnings of English education, who have tried to maintain its original purity against any innovations in style and diction. The battle royal is going on even today, the old guard declaring the western innovations in the language as unnational, unpatriotic and heretical.

The differences between the four East Indian languages, Assamese, Maithili, Bengali and Oriya are so thin, that if one knows one of them fairly well, there will be little difficulty for one to understand others. It is just like the close affinity among the Scandinavian languages, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish which started individual literatures of their own only the other day. Because of the close affinity between the two neighbouring languages, Oriya and Bengali the Buddhist ballads and lyrics of the eighth century A.D., discovered in Nepal and published by the late M. M. Haraprasad Sastri under the name ‘Bauddha Gan O Dohan’, are justifiably being claimed by both Bengali and Oriya scholars to be the beginnings of poetic creation in either language.

By the 13th century, however, facts about Oriya language and literature began to take clear outlines out of the wilderness of scholars’ conjectures and controversies. We see the first prose utterances in Oriya in an inscription of the 13th century on the walls of a temple at Bhuvaneswar, and the first lyrical notes were heard almost at the same time. It is significant that prose from the beginning was employed for practical official purposes, while poetry was the vehicle for the emotional outbursts of mother Yasoda for young Krishna who had left Mathura under royal orders. This lyric, popularly known as ‘Kesab Koilee’, is still recited by school children in thousands of Orissa villages to the immense joy of aging parents.

From this slight beginning in the 13th century to the 20th in our times, this literature of the Oriyas has grown in dimensions and varieties, as a national literature is expected to, with a rich harvest of epics, Puranas, Kavyas, songs, prose poems and lyrics of all categories. Like the synthetic religious culture for which Orissa is noted her literature also has been fertilised by streams from all sources. While the language is Aryan, the basis of the entire metrical system and of the musical compositions is Dravidian. Among the Oriya poets and litterateurs are fishermen, weavers and aboriginals, Andhras, Bengalees and Marathas. Bhim Bhoi, the blind Kondh poet of the 18th century, still enraptures millions of Oriyas through his philosophic Bhajans. The aborigines are such an integral part of the Oriya people that they always find a place in our literature from the 14th century down to modern times, both as authors and as subjects of poetry and fiction. This may be unique among all North Indian languages. In the temple of Jagannath there is a prose chronicle of the country and its changing rulers, which is continually being written by an official chronicler for the last so many centuries. An immense amount of literature also still lies buried in the palm-leaf libraries of villages and important families scattered allover the Province. Almost each village in Orissa and almost each important family still possesses a library of palm-leaf manuscripts with the village or family priest as its custodian. Unaided by the State, unencouraged by jealous and contemptuous Brahmins–the custodians of Sanskrit learning–and without much patronage from the aristocracy, this literature of the Oriyas has grown up through centuries, entirely through the magic appeal of poetic creations that Orissa’s poets have made a gift of, to the nation. The Oriya literature, therefore, unlike its neighbouring sisters, is mainly a mass literature, born out of the soil and meant for the soil. I may present the story of our first two giants, who still entertain, dominate and sublimate the minds of vast masses of Orissa more than any other poet, ancient or modern, to substantiate my assertions.

The first to emerge on the horizon is Sarala Das in the 14th century, the poet of the Oriya ‘Mahabharat,’ the first large book in the language. Almost a contemporary of Chaucer, Sarala Das exhibits to some degree the same rough and vigorous qualities, the same unblushing eye for truth and the same instinct for description and characterisation as the English poet. His descendants are still flourishing in his village in the district of Cuttack, and his birth place and burial mound have become places of pilgrimage. It is incontrovertible that he, a tiller of the soil, was completely ignorant of Sanskrit. Like the Soottish poet Burns, Sarala Das often got the irresistible impulse to write while ploughing the fields. And piecing together what he had heard from Brahmin Pandits, this semi-literate peasant started writing the ‘Mahabbarat’ in a language which till then contained no more than a few folk-songs and which was contemptuously looked down upon by both the rulers of the land and the Brahmin intellectuals.

This ‘Mahabharat’ of Sarala Das is a grand composition. It could not be a translation of the original in the very nature of things, as the poet was ignorant of Sanskrit. And so it has become more or less an original creation. The poet has upset the order of Books in the original and the continuity of its narrative. He has narrated the story in his own unhampered way, giving full freedom to his unbridled imagination, grafting new stories, new situations on the old tale and throwing away incidents and stories of the original as he pleased. The whole epic is written in the vital, vigorous, straightforward language of a rustic, caring little for embellishments, indulging often in hyperboles and mixing up the realities with the figures and happenings of the imaginary world. And significantly enough, the realities were invariably based on the poet’s limited experiences within his environment, thus turning the whole poem into a picture gallery of men and matters of contemporary Orissa. The poet throbbed with patriotism for the land of his birth. He makes the Pandavas visit the important holy places in Orissa on their way to Heaven, and tries through a half-satiric and half-morbid story, in which Yudhishthira had to marry again in his old age during this pilgrimage, to prove that the soil of Utkal is the most heroic and creative in all the world. Indeed it would naturally have appeared so to the poet, as Orissa in his time was still vigorously independent, while the entire North India and the major portions of the South had by that time been conquered and ruled by Mohamedans for over a century.

After finishing the ‘Mahabharat,’ Sarala Das, it appears, wished also to reproduce the story of the ‘Ramayana’ in Oriya. But the story of the ‘Ramayana’ given by Valmiki had not much appeal for this peasant who had enjoyed and admired the zest for life in all its crude and unhampered vigour in the characters of the ‘Mahabharat.’ The poet, because of his peasant-like realistic attitude to life, had dragged the demigods of the Sanskrit ‘Mahabharat’ from their olympic heights and made them appear as common men and women battling over petty things and yielding to the common temptations as we all do. To such a poet the wholly idealistic tale of Rama and Sita must have appeared tame enough. And so he wrote a new ‘Ramayana’ in line with his unique ‘Mahabharat’. While Valmiki had made Ravana rule over a kingdom called Lanka. Sarala Das created an imaginary land called Villanka whose ruler Ravana, instead of having ten faces, was given a thousand. The thousand-faced Ravana repeatedly defeated Rama and his brothers and his generals. He was at last killed, however, by Sita through the power of her purity and virtue. Such a conception, depicting woman’s subtler powers as superior to the crude physical energy of the male is certainly unique, considering the age at which it was born.

Attempts have been made to place before the Orissa public authenticated translations of the original ‘Mahabharat’ in prose and verse by Rajas and Maharajas through the help of Pandits, as a counterblast to the poetic hotch-potch of Sarala Das. But the nation has rejected the offers of Pandits and Maharajas, and still keeps adoring the rude, unpolished, yet vital production of a semi-literate peasant of the 14th century. The ‘Mahabharat’ in the neighbouring language, Bengali, was first written about two centuries after Sarala Das whose epic, therefore, was translated into Bengali to satisfy the masses of Bengal.

The next giant on the scene is Jagannath Das, an absolute contrast to the peasant-poet Sarala Das, being a Brahmin by caste, a son of a minister to the king of Orissa, and a thorough scholar in Sanskrit. But to the eternal blessing of the race, this Intellectual and social aristocrat determined in early youth to abandon the pride and prejudices of his class and caste, and to make his life and learning a complete dedication to God and his people. Defying the contempt of the Court, friends and critics, Jagannath started writing the ‘Bhagavat Puran’ in the language of the masses, to show them a path of faith and virtue which is difficult for an Indian to find out with a sense of certainty without a fair knowledge of Sanskrit, of which the masses were then, even more than at present, completely ignorant. Jagannath Das not merely wrote the ‘Bhagavat’ in Oriya but wrote it in the most elegant, mellifluous and lucid diction as yet possible in the language. He invented a new metre, the nine-lettered metre, better known as ‘Bhagavat’ metre, for this literary adventure, which too has turned out to be the handiest instrument for versification in Oriya. It is said that while young Jagannath Das was busy translating the ‘Bhagavat’ canto after canto, he, as a test of his success, used to sit under the famous banyan tree within the precincts of the Jagannath Temple and recite the verses to the crowds of pilgrims which daily visited the shrine.

The pilgrims from all corners of Orissa heard spell-bound this new religious poetry which was so long a sealed book to them, in the language they spoke daily among themselves but with the magic touch of a poet and a saint added to it. Young Jagannath was satisfied that his translations were after all successful, and his fame and that of his book spread far and wide through pilgrims in a short time. Scribes started copying it as holy labour, and villages vied with one another for possessing a complete set of Jagannath’s ‘Bhagavat’ with a house its own, where the village elders could assemble in the evening after the day’s toil to listen to it being recited by the village priest. So, almost each village in Orissa began having a ‘Bhagavat’ house which was a multi-purpose institution, combining in it the village assembly, the village school, the village library and the village church. It appears now that the birth of Jagannath and his ‘Bhagavat’ in Oriya were matters of destiny. Not long after Jagannath passed away, the dark night descended on the prosperous and independent kingdom of Orissa, which had defied repeated Moslem and non-Moslem invasions for centuries. The land was attacked and conquered bit by bit from the North, the South and the West. The Moghuls, the Pathans, the Mahrattas and the British overran the country one after another. The kingdom was dismembered, brothers killed brothers, and through misrule, extortion, famine and internecine battles, the peasantry–the back-bone of the race–was almost dehumanised. These dark days continued from the 16th century right up to 1936. But this long night of misfortune, however, could not kill the Oriya people. In dismembered and exploited misery, the great cementing force among them was Jagannath’s ‘Bhagavat’ as it still is. Through three centuries of misfortune the ‘Bhagavat-ghar’ continued to be the rallying point for the masses in Orissa. It is still the simple literary ambition of the average unsophisticated Oriya peasant to be able to read and recite the ‘Bhagavat’ in his old age, or listen to it being read and recited by his children. In fact he sends his child to school with the main objective of giving him as much literacy as will enable him to read, the ‘Bhagavat’ which has so far been the greatest incentive to the spread of literacy in Orissa.

Jagannath was a contemporary of Chaitanya who spent the last 8 years of his life at Puri. The poet and the saint liked and respected each other as soon as they met. But as Jagannath and his Oriya literary friends and disciples, who are now described as ‘five associates’, had already been moulded in their own processes of spiritual and literary strivings, they were unaffected by Chaitanya’s religion. Up till then Orissa had a religious culture of her own. It was an indefinable combination of the Vedic, the Buddhistic and the aboriginal or Tantric streams of thought and all were symbolised in the Lord Jagannath. From widely current legends it has been asserted that Jagannath was originally a tribal God of the Savaras. Later on this God has had Buddhistic and Brahmanic metamorphosis in which stage he lasts till today. As a Brahmanic God, Lord Jagannath at Puri represents the reappearance of Krishna in Kali Yuga. So the Krishna cult had practically turned out to be the Jagannath-cult in Orissa, and the Beatific Realisation, till Chaitanya came on the scene was through a sort of Vedantic self-examination and Buddhistic self-purification as also through esoteric Tantric processes. That is what we find being held out in the writings of Jagannath and his associates.

But the tempting process of sublimated sex-love as the way to Divine realisation as preached by Chaitanya, and the cheap austerity of ‘Kirtan’ as practised by him, now began to have the most baneful effects on Orissa’s society, literature and politics. Misunderstood by feeble and untrained minds, the sublimated sex-love as a spiritual practice has produced a huge mass of pornographic literature, both religious and secular, that did not exist before in Oriya and has considerably vitiated society. In politics also Chaitanya’s stay at Puri hastened Orissa’s day of misfortune. Charmed by his magnetic personality, his religious ecstasies and his erudition, many high officials of the kingdom resigned their posts to enjoy his divine companionship at Puri; and while the great Krishnadeva Raya of Vija.ysnagara was knocking at the southern gates of the empire, King Prataparudra of Orissa was spending sleepless nights in his palace at Cuttack, sending emissaries to the young mendicant Chaitanya to be favoured with a ‘darsan’. The inevitable happened. Orissa was soon trampled under the feet of invaders after centuries of glorious and vital independence. And after this, we reach the second period in Oriya literature with the background of subjugated and dismembered political existence over centuries.

(To be concluded)

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