Basanti

Serialised in Utkala Sahitya between May 1925 and November 1927 and published as a book in 1931, Basanti is a landmark attempt at writing a new kind of novel in Odisha. It is new at least in three senses. It is a product of a well thought out plan for collaborative writing. It is a novel with a focus on women. It is a novel of ideas. Nine young authors, six men and three women, belonging to the 'Sabuja Age' in Odia literature, a short-lived but immensely creative and restless period of roughly ten to fifteen years, came together to write this novel. Written against the backdrop of the political and social ferment of the time, marked by Gandhi's nationalist movement and the rising regional aspiration for state formation, Basanti is the first fictional declaration of the independence of the Odia woman. It is also the first and the last exemplar of the collective novel in Odisha.

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 Université Laval and Université de Montréal 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.