Fashioning readers: canon, criticism, and pedagogy in the emergence of modern Odia literature

Mishra, Pritipuspa (2023) Fashioning readers: canon, criticism, and pedagogy in the emergence of modern Odia literature. In, Zaidi, Nishat (ed.) Indian Modernities: Literary Cultures from the 18th to the 20th Century. London. Routledge. (doi:10.4324/9781003405788).

Record type: Book Section

Abstract

Through a brief history of a widely published canon debate in nineteenth-century Orissa, this paper describes how anxieties about the quality of “traditional” Oriya literature served as a site for imagining a cohesive Oriya public who would become the consumers and beneficiaries of a new, modernized Oriya-language canon. A public controversy about the status of Oriya literature was initiated in the 1890s with the publication of a serialized critique of the works of Upendra Bhanja, a very popular precolonial Oriya poet. The critics argued that Bhanja’s writing was not true poetry, that it did not speak to the contemporary era, and that it featured embarrassingly detailed discussions of obscene material. By unpacking the terms of this criticism and Oriya responses to it, I reveal how at the heart of these discussions were concerns about community building that presupposed a new kind of readership of literature in the Oriya language. Ultimately, this paper offers a longer, regional history to the emerging concern of postcolonial scholarship with relationships between publication histories, readerships, and broader ideas of community – local, Indian, and global.

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