The Oriya writer Jagannath Prasad Das is an extremely versatile figure, known for his poetry, plays and short stories. In 2006, he received the prestigious Saraswati Samman, an annual literary award for works published in any Indian language, for his book of verse, Parikrama. But for many, Das's opus is the voluminous prose work Desa Kala Patra (Place, time, identity), published to critical acclaim in 1992. Since then, and including in this new English-language translation, the book is being revered as a novel – a work of fiction. In the opinion of this reviewer, this is not an accurate representation of the merit of Das's work as a whole.
In literary matters, the British critic Terry Eagleton once said, 'Breeding in this respect may count for a good deal more than birth.' Even if a particular work is not considered literature at the outset, it can come to acquire such an identity through a process of critical grooming. A quick look at the history of the novel aptly illustrates this point. Works such as Tom Jones and Robinson Crusoe, which have significant historical aspects, have tended to be regarded as pure fiction – that is, aesthetic artefacts – by critics troubled with the historical aspects of these complex pieces of writing. At play here is a dominant critical practice that insists on literary 'purity'.
The same can certainly be said of Desa Kala Patra, a retelling of the history of mid-19th-century Orissa under colonial rule, often using recycled material: historical records, journalistic writings and fragments of autobiographies of Oriya writers. Since its publication, the work has seen a slow transmutation into fiction. The early reviews of the book engaged the author in a debate on the veracity of the accounts – often of a negative and scandalous nature – about the book's historical personages. Treating it as fiction thus came in handy, helping to soften the harsh glare of facts. This process was facilitated by the absence of bibliographic citations, which admittedly the book cries out for, steeped as it is in historical records and documents. With the publication of this translation, that process is perhaps now complete, the work is emphatically termed a novel. Unfortunately, this label will now be retrospectively applied to the original, which in fact was manifestly a work of cultural history, having been billed (in Oriya) on the dust jacket as 'an authentic and truthful record of a crucial period in the history of Orissa'.
It is true that history, with its narratives and plots, has a structure very similar to fictional works. If the historian Hayden White is to be believed, the writing of history is regulated at a fundamental level by the tropes of literature, such as tragedy, comedy, romance and satire. The distinguishing point, however, is that a historical work is grounded in facts in a way that a novel is not, even if a work of fiction draws heavily from recorded events. Interestingly, A Time Elsewhere and Those Days (1997) – the latter the English translation of the Bangla novel Sei Samay (1981) by Sunil Gangopadhyay – illustrate these opposite trends, although both recount the colonial encounter in their respective societies (Orissa and Bengal) during the 19th century.