Modern Odia Literature

This is a sequel to my book, Colonial Odia Literature. The book encompasses the literature produced by the authors who were born after 1947. It traces the theoretical configurations of modernism all over the European literature and in the light of that paradigm analyses the poetry, fiction, drama and non-fictional prose works written in Odia literature in the 1960s and onwards.

In short, the book outlines the literary and aesthetic convictions of later day Romantics, their waging of a war of words against modernism, its sliding into aesthetic, stylistic fascism and experimental avant-garde. Gradually, the cultural paradigm shifts and the distinction between high art and low art are erased as we enter into the postmodern culture. The work of literary art turns into kitsch, a commodity in the mass culture/consumerist market.

Although written for a particular vernacular community, the book makes itself relevant for all the linguistic communities of India and abroad. Here is an attempt to make modern and postmodern literature intelligible and attractive to as wide a readership as possible. The book would elicit the interests of the lawyers and academicians, students and literary critics, sociologists as well as cultural theorists.

 About the Author

Ramesh P. Panigrahi (b. 1944) was born in Dharakote, a suburban town of South Orissa, India and he lives in Bhubaneswar. Author of 85 plays, 6 films, a Hindi theatre anthropoloy, 100 lyrics for All India Radio, 20 published stories, and a novel, including the translation of Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease, Panigrahi has enriched Indian theatre for more than fifty years. His plays are translated and staged in Bengali, Hindi and Assamese. He has published plays in English also. He directs in group theatre productions and has worked as a professional director for 19 Jatra plays, composes music for college chorus songs and has worked as the technical director of a Prahallada Nataka team to participate in Kattaikkuttu Kalai Valarchi Munnetra Sangam, Kanchipuram, Tamilnadu. Panigrahi’s plays for the folks and tribal people run continuously for 12 years in Jatra repetoires and for hundreds of shows on group theatre performances.