Chha Mana Atha Guntha (Six Acres and a Third) by Fakir Mohan Senapati, Penguin Modern Classics 2006
The 19th century Oriya novelist Fakir Mohan Senapati was, at least in his fiction, a most oblique writer — he hardly said or meant anything in a straightforward way. Much of his work is ironical and satirical, and of course irony and satire work through indirection, by way of the meaningful glance rather than the plainspoken word. Irony can often be applied too thickly, too predictably, and then it becomes as unsubtle as the more homespun narrative mode it disdains. Thankfully, this is not the case with Senapati: he always worked with a light and delicate hand.
At one point in Senapati's newly translated novel Chha Mana Atha Guntha (Six Acres and a Third), the narrator, in one of many instances in which he directly addresses the reader, notes that "unpleasant truths are better left unspoken; in other words, we are forced to forget half the truth and tell you the other half." This might serve as a loose definition of satire, which tells the truth by denying the truth. When Senapati describes the greedy ways of his hero, the venal zamindar Ramachandra Mangaraj, defending him all the while by saying that he is really a "kind and pious man" who is slandered by his subjects, Mangaraj is exposed more effectively than a simple and uninflected chronicle of his evils could have managed. The narrator is, in effect, repaying Mangaraj with the same duplicity that Mangaraj himself practices on those around him — he has a friendly hand on Mangaraj's shoulder, even while simultaneously winking at the reader, confident that "for intelligent people, hints usually suffice". This jaunty line of attack is Senapati's way of pointing to unpleasant truths in a way that also gives the reader pleasure.
Chha Mana Atha Ghunta was written in 1902; at this point, the novel in India was about four decades old. The novel form was a legacy of colonial rule, and most of its initial practitioners belonged to the new class of Indians who had, after the implementation of Lord Thomas Macaulay's Minute on Indian Education, received an education in English and gained exposure to Western art forms. (In 1864, the young Bankimchandra Chatterjee, as a district magistrate in Khulna in Bengal, wrote his first novel, Rajmohan's Wife, in English.)