Prose fiction in India highly developed as it is now, was introduced to our literature, surprisingly enough, only a hundred years back. It is then that our story-tellers chose to express themselves in the new medium rather than in verse as they had done till then. The motivations for this change were many: the winds of the Indian Renaissance that stimulated the creative spirit and prompted it to give free play to various modes of expression; the felt necessity of reaching out to a larger number of readers in a manner they would perhaps understand better; the influence of the West where prose fiction had made significant strides; and possibly to slowly-growing realization that the truths of the human condition were better communicated in plain prose, rather than in verse, bound by some time-honoured constraints of poetics. Oriya prose fiction conforms to this all-India pattern. It was inspired by the same kind of reasons, and also came into being at about the same time, namely in the late nineteenth century. However, the sequence in which the two forms of fiction, the short story and the novel, followed each other varied with different regions.
It is a curious fact of our literary history, that though the Oriya language is fairly ancient, with a developed literature centuries old, (older than many others in the country) the beginnings of prose fiction accompanied the movement to counter the false notion, sought to be implanted in the minds of the British administrators by some interested parties, that the Oriya language did not have a separate identity of its own. Fakir Mohan Senapati (1843-1918), the acknowledged pioneer of mod-ern Oriya fiction, was with others, trying to stave off a certain danger to the Oriya language, when he wrote novels and short stories, after many years of writing textbooks for school children. His fiction was of greater immediate relevance for the purposes of the movement. The emergence of the Oriya journals Utkal Sahitya in 1897 followed by Mukura in 1905 and Sahakara in 1919 aided the short story in no small measure. Guided largely by the same purpose, they were ideally suited to the brevity of this literary form.
Rebati, the first Oriya short story in the sense we understand the term, was published in 1898, a year after Fakir Mohan had published his first novel Chha Man Ath Gunth. But while his novel was, historically, not the first of its kind, and had been preceded by a couple of pseudo-historical romances, authored by others in the two decades prior to it, the same cannot be said about his short story. It marked an unprecedented exercise in story-telling, which went beyond the era of legends and folktales. Yet, it carried no marks of a tentative beginning, or groping for effect in a new medium. On the contrary, it was a mature piece, and unabashedly Oriya too, thanks to the folksy language, humour, and style, typical of Fakir Mohan.
A story of blighted hopes and ambitions of a country girl became, at one level, pure tragedy in the classic sense. By itself it was an unlikely beginning for a new experiment. But the surprising part was that the tragedy was laced with black humour, 'justifying' the death and miseries suffered by the family. The imprecations of the only surviving member of the family, the old disconsolate grandmother, constitute the famous last lines of the story. They were, in effect, aimed at society rather than fate; when she said that it all happened because the girl was allowed to study-a grievous sin, if there was one! This comment on the human condition in a given social milieu is a deadly mix of irony and intensity, which is far removed from the direct authorial statements on the good and evil, or on the inscrutable ways of the gods that characterized earlier Indian literature. It can thus be stated that the Oriya short story was startlingly mature and modern at the moment of its birth- a rare promise that could not unfortunately be kept up by those who immediately followed the master. Not that they lacked in sincerity, but that they failed to take a cue from him in telling a story in simple prose and realistic detail, and tended too often to be melodramatic.
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