Novel
Six Acres and a Third
ଛ ମାଣ ଆଠ ଗୁଣ୍ଠ
Fakir Mohan Senapati · 1902
Synopsis
In the village of Govindpur, in Orissa, in the 1830s, the zamindar Ramachandra Mangaraj passes for a pious man, fasts on the prescribed days and yet seizes, one after another, the peasants' lands. His gaze falls on six and a third acres of good land belonging to a couple of weavers, Bhagia and Saria, and on their cow Neta, whom they love like their child. With his servant and mistress Champa and the barber Jaga, he hatches the ruse that is to strip them of everything.
Context
The novel appeared in serial form from 1897 to 1899 in the journal Utkal Sahitya, under the pseudonym Dhurjati, then in book form in 1902. It is a satire: the narrator pleads the zamindar's cause with feigned gravity and mocks him, and colonial law is seen in it serving to dispossess the villagers. C. V. Narasimha Das translated it into English in 1967; the collective translation by Rabi Shankar Mishra, Satya P. Mohanty, Jatindra K. Nayak and Paul St-Pierre appeared in 2005 from the University of California Press. Parbati Ghose made a film of it in 1986.
Who it is for
A novel of about two hundred pages, whose irony lies in the narrator's voice. It is best to know what a zamindar was. No French translation.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as the first modern novel in Odia and as the most famous work of its author, the father of modern Odia literature.
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