Abstract
Life’s Little Tales is a bouquet of 21 stories/essays dappled in layers of research, life-writing and reflective notes on Time. The book has been published by Sikshasandhan. It is modestly priced at ₹195/-. This collection presents a series of insightful tales on a range of themes such as: Adi Kavi Sarala Das’s retelling of the epic Mahābhārata and its complex interpretations; reflective notes on life, self-musings on professional life in academic institutions such as CIEFL (presently named as EFLU), friends, colleagues and retirement; exploring colloquial expressions in the linguistic and literary traditions of India (specifically of rural Odisha); and memories strewn in the life-writing genre. The author of the book is a former professor of one of the premier Indian Institutes of Technology, where he taught for a considerable duration of his professional life. In addition to stories on his life and times, the book has a few slightly provoking politico-cultural stories of ‘Rasagola’ (p. 113) and of ‘Upuri’ (p. 143). For instance, the narrator defines this ‘upuri’ in Odia as not exactly to be translated or understood as ‘bribe’. It is, as he states an ‘additional illegitimate income…upuri is almost neutral’ (p. 144). The collection is a treasure-trove of memories, experiences and a pragmatic world-building of the vast, unrelenting and undivided nature of Time.
This collection of essays is for readers who have an interest to escape the neon-lights of a recklessly demanding social-feed driven world, and dwell upon the charms of a sea of tales and deeply researched layers of cultural signifiers and signified(s) ranging from food to festivities, from language to portrayal of women in colloquial expressions. The collection is meant for anyone who is interested to delve into the cultural depths of India, particularly that of Odisha. It compels the discerning reader to reflect on the idea that languages like any human or animal species may be at the risk of extinction. For instance, in the essay ‘Dying Languages,, the essayist mentions; “A language dies when its last speaker dies or shifts to another language. Language endangerment and death is a societal phenomenon; therefore, in principle, it can be stopped” (p. 79). The positive characteristic of this collection is that the sections could be read as stand-alone essays as well as a part of the entire series. The book has 175 pages, and each thought strand is a carefully woven, intricate tapestry of reflective notes and meticulously designed arguments, keeping the taste of a non-expert audience in mind.
These 21 stories/essays represent the notes of a record-keeper who is keenly watching the twenty-first century with the lens of experience and creative instinct that bind time past to the time present. The essays can be tentatively classified into three thematic strands: (a) tales from epics such as Mahābhārata and Lakshmi Purana (there is a fascinating tale entitled ‘The Story of Alakshmi’ in the collection); (b) musings on language and the problems of language; (c) life of individuals in the teaching profession in India (incidentally, ’tenure’ is a recent import as a term and system in Indian academia). These essays intricately overlap into one another in their themes, plots and sub-plots, and sometimes even the characters, such as Draupadi and Arjuna. It is difficult not to find resonances with people we know and meet every day in the institutional circles and in our homes.
In the ‘Preface’ of the collection, the author mentions that the pieces are written, ‘in a casual and conversational narrative mode, these personal and reflective essays are about a village boy’s growing up…’ (p. 5). However, the use of language and meditative thoughts which characterize the essays hardly indicate any rawness of views, or uneven edges of rustic expressions. The tone is that of a refined academic, who has control over both words and expressions. While one reads through the collection, the lines of demarcation between the genre of short-stories and essays start blurring, and the reader(s) may easily be led to think that (s)he is reading a short-story, rather than an essay.
The horizons of short-fiction and personal essays overlap in the book and gradually pave way for one another. While reading the collection, I was constantly reminded of the essays published by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in Tatler and Spectator (Addison & Steele, 2004), and some of the personal reflective essays remind one of Charles Lamb and his essays of ‘Elia’ (Lamb, 1823). Two striking essays in the collection are ‘Of Retirement’ and ‘Facing Death’, which are dense expressions of the personal voice interspersed with the public space of narration from epics such as the Mahābhārata. The poignant metaphor of ‘Death’, when it touches the personal can beguile you to think of ‘Elia’ at one moment, and of the pragmatism of Mahābhārata in the commentaries of Chakravarthi V. Narasmihan, in the next moment. In the essay ‘On Facing Death,’ for example, the narration moves from a commentary regarding the ‘knowing’ of an impending death on the part of King Parikshita and Jayadratha in Sarala Das’s retelling, to a comparative self-musing concerning the author’s colleagues from academic institutions across the country who had a sense of their own impending deaths (pp. 171–173). In the personal essay, ‘Of Retirement’, the narrator brings an important life-writing element that considers the experience of senior citizens during the pandemic. While there have been several research papers published in 2022 that detail the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on children’s well-being (Bussières et al., 2021), there are negligible number of studies that focus on the impact of the pandemic on emotional health of senior citizens and their lives. It is only in the pages of literary life-writing such as the essay mentioned above, that one hopes to read about the impact of the pandemic on elderly. Consider the following extract as an illustrative example:
As I sit behind the window in the fourth-floor apartment in which I now stay, day after day, the sunrise and the sunset, I wait for the next day. Without hope, without despair. For months I have not stepped out of my apartment. I do not know when corona will be sick of us and leave us to return to the life we were living and complaining about before she decided to descend on our physical and mental space. In these days of corona, there is no looking forward to anything. (p. 168)
The essay captures hard-hitting realities of isolation and aloneness during the pandemic that form the dénouement of a ‘retired life’ of the elderly citizens, as it is called in India. It also raises an ethical question regarding the idea of productivity so easily associated with age and with youth in all sectors of Indian economy. The essay could be used as a reading selection for a postgraduate-level class in Literature and Language studies.
This collection is styled by an understated humour and a tongue-in-cheek storytelling of some of the fascinating rituals mentioned in Odia folktales. For example, in his essay ‘Rasagola’ offering a vivid description of the temple traditions of Shree Jagannath, the narrator wryly mentions the Rasagola Dibasa in Odisha, celebrated since 2015. He word-paints the minute details of rasagolas, including their colour—‘all white in colour’ (p. 117). From a playful depiction of the people and their festivities, the narration changes to high-seriousness with reflection on Shree Jagannath’s task of mollifying his upset spouse Devi Mahalakshmi. It is ‘She’ who has actually the important task of feeding the world: ‘As devotees with much love feed Jagannath rasagolas before he feeds this sweet to his offended spouse, the provider of food to all who need food, unobtrusively, tradition starts its journey to oblivion’ (p. 117). These are significant accounts of faith and tradition combined with gender roles wrapped in the humblest of expressions. Coming from an academic who has worked his entire life in an Indian Institute of Technology, known for their affiliation to naturalism and rationality, these stories of faith and spiritualism are refreshing. During the present times when it is considered fashionable to denounce one’s faith and traditions, these essays speak of an urgent need to preserve some of the fading traditions with earnestness rather than cosmetic glamour.
Twenty-first century is fast turning into a century of the war of words, and the war of worlds. In these exciting times, where every literate individual has become an author of some repute, thanks to social media pages, blogs, review platforms and other quick publishing avenues, finding a storyteller who attunes the reader to a ‘classical’ literary and linguistic temperament has become a challenge of no mean order. In this context, the archaic term ‘Quicksand’ comes to memory. Quicksand was considered as a popular trope of adventure novels and cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. These days the word has been out of favour, considering the scientific rationalist statement that it is baseless to claim that any human being could actually drown and die completely in a quicksand. In the spirit of this knowledge, we could treat quicksand as a trope of storytelling in the twenty-first century. It is in this context, that one may say it is possible for any human being to thrive in joy in the vast quicksand of words and stories in the present times.
In the above context, B. N. Patnaik’s writings emerge as a redeemer of the Literary and Linguistic muse. It is high time that literary readers within and beyond Odisha recognize his valuable contributions to bring Sarala Mahābhārata to the light of the day at the turn of the twenty-first century. There are several international and national voices who are also pioneers of commentaries on Sarala Das (such as Gopinath Mohanty, Jatindra Nayak among several other luminaries). However, if there is a ‘reliable’ and consistent re-teller of the retellings of Mahābhārata, then one could trust the narratives of B. N. Patnaik in this collection as well as in the other collections that he has meticulously been writing/compiling for all these years. The author does not embellish his essays or stories with jargon, or complicate the plot and structure of the tales. He tells the tales. The narratives are poised along dense interpretative style of the author, rather than fashionable literary and linguistic obfuscation. His dedication to Mahaprabhu Shree Jagannath, to Sarala Das and his persistence with the stories of Mahābhārata in these essays can inspire studies in Indian Literature and Comparative cultures to break the apprehensions regarding exploring artistic depths of their own epic traditions. This collection inspires to study the fascinating tropes and traditional motifs in the texts of India, with cautious research and a systematic approach. The only weakness in these essays is nostalgia (if that could be called a weakness).
It may be difficult to locate Life’s Little Tales, as it is not freely available on e-commerce sites. Therefore, contacting the publishers to get a copy of the book is probably the best way to access this book. Hopefully, the book will be added to library collections soon.