Basanti is a misfit in conservative, pre-independence rural Odisha. Not only does she read and write, all her choices—from marrying for love to dispensing medicines to the poor and running a girls’ school—are unconventional. Her emancipatory aspirations evoke strong reactions from her surroundings, even surprisingly from her husband, who is supposedly passionate about women’s freedom. In this collaborative novel, nine young authors narrate the journey of a liberated woman who questions the socially ordained roles of women and argues for change, especially through education.
The authors, six men and three women, belonged to the ‘Sabuja Age’ in Odia literature, a short-lived, creative period of ten to fifteen years. Serialized in Utkala Sahitya between May 1924 and November 1926 and published as a book in 1931, with a revised version appearing in 1968, Basanti is the first fictional declaration of the independence of the Odia woman.
Himansu S. Mohapatra, Professor, P.G. Department of English, Utkal University, Bhubaneswar, Odisha, Paul St-Pierre, Adjunct Professor, Department of Linguistics and Translation, Universite de Montreal
HIMANSU S. MOHAPATRA has been publishing scholarly articles on the comparative studies of Western and Indian, mostly Odia, fiction of the nineteenth and twentieth century for almost two decades. Somewhere along the line his interest shifted to translation thanks to translations being a staple of comparative literature studies and also because of his association with Paul St-Pierre. The latter made him see that translation was both an act of writing and interpreting as well as a discourse of history. He began by publishing articles on translation in leading journals such as META and TTR and then went on to translate himself. He has collaborated with Paul St-Pierre. His first collaborative work is a translation of selected contemporary Odia stories into English. This is published as 'The Other Side of Reason' (2008). 'Basanti' is his second collaborative translation project. His third venture, already underway and also an act of collaboration with Paul St-Pierre, is a translation of a contemporary
Odia novel, 'Nija Nija Panipatha' (Battlefields of Our Own), by Jagadish Mohanty.
PAUL ST-PIERRE has been involved in the field of translation for more than forty-five years, ever since he wrote his Ph.D. thesis on Beckett's use of English and French, and his translation of his own works from one to the other. He taught translation studies at Universite Laval and Universite de Montreal in Canada, and was president of the Canadian Association of Schools of Translation and of the Canadian Association for Translation Studies. Since the 1990s he has collaboratively translated, with native speakers of Odia, from Odia into English, specializing in particular in the works of J.P. Das and of Phakirmohan Senapati. His most recently published translation is the latter's biography, 'Atmacharita', translated in collaboration with Basant Kumar Tripathy and Dipti Ranjan Pattanaik, and published by National Book Trust of India in 2016.
