760975

research-article2018
JCL0010.1177/0021989418760975The Journal of Commonwealth LiteratureRatti

THE JOURNAL OF

C O M M O N W E A LT H
Interview L I T E R A T U R E

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

2022, Vol. 57(1) 18–31
Writing the village, © The Author(s) 2018
Article reuse guidelines:
becoming the nation: sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0021989418760975
https://doi.org/10.1177/0021989418760975
The work of Manoj Das journals.sagepub.com/home/jcl

Manav Ratti
Salisbury University, USA

Abstract
Manoj Das is a leading senior writer within Indian literature, with his novels, short stories, and
poems centring on village and rural life, mingling realism and everyday experiences with elements
of mystery, mysticism, and the supernatural as he explores the vicissitudes and aspirations of
the human condition. As he describes here, Das has been “greatly influenced” by the transition
and transformation of India from colonialism to postcolonialism. His writings — with dramatic
suspense, magical realism, and a style that with a minimal touch can convey nuances of character,
motivation, and emotion — evocatively capture some of the most distinctive aspects of Indian
culture, spirituality, arts, and history. His work has been compared with other famed Indian
authors, particularly those writing in English (Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan, Raja Rao). In this
interview, Das reflects on his life work, including the role of translation (in an Indian context of
“transcreation”). Das also shares his candid views on the poetics and politics of “regional language
literature” (RLL) and “Indian writing in English” (IWE), an opposition relevant to postcolonial
studies in the context of the (national and international) distribution and reception of literature
and the wider politics of language. Conducted in the southern Indian city of Puducherry, home
to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, this interview presents the influence of philosopher and guru Sri
Aurobindo on Das and his work, including Das’s most recent scholarship on Sri Aurobindo.
Das also discusses the influences on him by the well-known Indian writers Bankim Chandra
Chatterjee, Fakir Mohan Senapati, and Rabindranath Tagore. This is the first interview with Das
published outside of India and in the West.

Keywords
Aurobindo, environment, India, language, Manoj Das, politics, religion, short story, South Asian
literature, villages

Corresponding author:
Manav Ratti, Associate Professor, Department of English, Salisbury University, Salisbury, Maryland 21801,
USA.
Email: manav.ratti@linacre.oxon.org
Ratti 19

One of India’s foremost and distinguished writers, Manoj Das (b. 1934) is especially
renowned for his short stories, with A Song for Sunday and Other Stories (1967) as his
first collection. Born in the village of Sankari in the eastern state of Odisha (formerly
“Orissa”), Das writes in both Odia (formerly “Oriya”) and English, with his output
spanning poetry, short stories, novels, children’s literature, editing, journalism, trave-
logues, and historical and cultural scholarship. His work has earned him the Sahitya
Akademi Fellowship (2007) for lifetime achievement, the highest literary honor
awarded by the Sahitya Akademi, India’s National Academy of Letters. He has also
received the Sahitya Akademi Award (1972) for his short stories. At the state level, he
has twice won the Odisha Sahitya Akademi Award, in 1965 for his short stories and in
1972 for his essays, the Sarala Award (1980), and the Sahitya Bharati Award (1995). He
has won the Saraswati Samman (2000), one of India’s highest literary awards, for his
Odia novel Amruta Phala (1996), translating into English as Divine Fruit, which inter-
twines a historical and contemporary story of existential search. Das has been honoured
with the Padma Shri (2001), India’s fourth highest civilian award, as well as numerous
honorary doctorates. He lives in Puducherry (formerly “Pondicherry”), a coastal city
about a hundred miles south of Chennai and a former French colony that attained de
facto independence in 1954 and de jure union with India in 1962. A devotee at the Sri
Aurobindo Ashram1 and a professor at the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of
Education, Das has lived in Puducherry since 1963.
The villages and rural culture of Odisha are central to Das’s writings. Das represents
Odisha’s peoples through a humanism that affirms moral growth and social responsibility.
His abiding concern with rural life and with closely writing the environment is evident in
numerous works, including his novel Cyclones (1987), his novella Bulldozers (1990), and
the short stories “The Crocodile’s Lady” (1975f), “The Submerged Valley” (1986), “The
Tree” (1986), “The Dusky Horizon” (1989a), and “Quest of Sunderdas” (1989a). In “The
Submerged Valley”, Das portrays the impact on ordinary villagers as the state displaces
them to make way for a reservoir. Among the new expanse of water, the people see the top
of their former temple and hill, and risk heading toward them by boat. The realism and
emotional subtlety of the story demonstrate Das’s skill in portraying the dignity of indi-
viduals and groups that might otherwise be invisible to the nation-state or elided under the
discourse of development. Das has stated that the “ecological ruination” of village life,
both physical and social, is caused by the “demonic hunger for false prosperity and lack
of respect for the rural grace, along with an inability to see the consequences of certain
kinds of development activities on the part of the entrepreneurs, planners as well as the
villagers themselves (at least some of them)” (Raja, 2014: 65). Written in Odia and
English, and with its stories of Odisha village culture read across the state, India, and the
world, Das’s work has been categorized and placed in the lineage of both Indian “regional
language literature” (RLL) and Indian writing in English (IWE) (see Nayak, 2010). Critics
have compared his writing of village culture with the writings of Raja Rao and Chinua
Achebe (see Nayak, 2010: 199; Behura and Rajasree Misra, 2015: 199).2
Das’s work also explores the transition of India from colonialism to postcolonial
nationhood, including the shift from casteism and feudalism (marked by princely states
and the zamindari or landownership system ruled by zamindars, rajas, and maharajahs)
to democracy, industrialization, and urbanization. These transformations appear in each
20 The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 57(1)

of Das’s novels — Cyclones (1987), A Tiger at Twilight (1991), The Escapist (2001b)
— and in several stories, such as “The Owl” (1986), “The Concubine” (1989), “A Time
for a Style” (1995), and “Mystery of the Missing Cap” (1995). Das explores the conflicts
between the disingenuity, even alienation, demanded by an emerging postcolonial politi-
cal class, and an aspiration toward moral awakening. The village becomes the focal point
for examining these conflicts. Das has stated: “Born in a village, born just before inde-
pendence [1947] and hence living through the transition at an impressionable age, I
thought I could present through English a chunk of genuine India. Well, right or wrong,
one is entitled to one’s faith in oneself!” (Raja, 1980: III). If his writerly craft partially
constitutes his faith, then it is through an economy of prose, using techniques such as
analepsis and autodiegesis (see Bera and Gupta, 2017: 94), that Das shows the organic
emergence of conflict, in all its psychological, social, moral, and spiritual dimensions,
within and among his characters.
Other major themes in Das’s work include transcendence, the supernatural, mystery,
and mysticism, as seen in his stories “Lakshmi’s Adventure” (1989a), “Sita’s Marriage”
(1989b), and “Farewell to a Ghost” (1994). Das represents the supernatural world not as
something to be doubted, but as a fact of reality. Reincarnation is a commonplace plot
feature in his stories “A Letter from the Last Spring” (1967), “Birds in the Twilight”
(1975f), “The Vengeance” (1980), “The Kite” (1986), “The Murderer” (1986), and “The
Brothers” (1989a). Critics have noted that the worlds of Das’s fiction reflect his belief in
a reality and consciousness that are all-pervading and subtle, beneath surfaces, and which
characters aspire to realize (see Raja, 2014: 110; Shukla, 2004: 89). Sarbeswar Samal has
argued: “The microcosm of Manoj Das is a close and compact world governed by its own
laws and regulations. It is an all inclusive and homogeneous world, based on an intimate
relationship and understanding between man and animal; natural and supernatural; the
mysterious and the realistic; and the extraordinary and commonplace” (1997: 39). As
with Gabriel García Márquez and other Latin American writers, magical realism for
Manoj Das is not only a literary technique but an epistemology, using the technique and
epistemology to understand consciousness.
Das’s fiction is marked by formal features including realism, irony, satire, and the
influence of ancient Sanskrit texts, such as the Hindu epics the Mahabharata and the
Ramayana, as well as Vishnu Sharma’s Panchatantra (animal fables originally written
around the 3rd century BCE). The Statesman has observed that in Das’s reworking of
Sanskrit epics, “instead of using the familiar, imported phrases and idioms, he plays
about with the language, picking words and using them in fresh connotation to build
imagery suitable to the [modern] Indian background” (qtd. in Raja, 2014: 25). The col-
lection Fables and Fantasies for Adults (1978) shows the influence of the Panchatantra
and also uses satire as social critique. Many of Das’s works employ satire, such as “The
Last I Heard of Them” (1975f) and “The Man Who Lifted the Mountain” (1979b).
Reflecting on satire, Das has averred: “I always remember what Jonathan Swift said:
‘Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders generally discover everyone’s face but their
own’. But I never forget to try to behold my own face in that mirror” (Raja, 2014: 103).
This self-examination reflects Das’s valuing of introspection as well as his conviction in
Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy of self-transformation towards higher consciousness. Some
of Das’s stories have multiple formal layers, which can include moving “from pathos to
Ratti 21

burlesque, from irony to simple moralizing” (Raja, 2014: 83). Stories that show formal
multiplicity include “A Trip into the Jungle” (1978) and one of his most anthologized
stories, “The Princess and the Storyteller” (1978). Das’s work is also marked by humour,
as in his novella Sharma and the Wonderful Lump (1978). As with his representation of
the supernatural, Das uses humour, irony, and satire with largesse, even sympathy, as
mechanisms to explore human consciousness (see Dash, 2017: 166).
In addition to short stories and novels, Das writes poetry, and only in Odia, having
published two volumes, Tuma Gaan O Anyanya Kabita (1992) and Kabita Utkala (2003a).
As with his prose, his poems are marked by a humanism that affirms moral consciousness
and growth by representing the rural life and natural environment, in addition to the
mythologies and legends, of Odisha. Das’s interest in Indian mythology and folklore
emerges in his scholarly volume, Myths, Legends, Concepts and Literary Antiquities of
India (2009). Das has also written several children’s books. Stories of Light and Delight
(1970) and Books Forever (1973) — the latter introducing the books of India’s past —
continue to be bestsellers in India. Das’s work has resonated with readers outside of India,
with his short stories included as representatives, often solely, of Indian and Asian litera-
ture in volumes in Australia (1982−1983), Canada (1975e), the UK (1972b), and the US
(1975a, 1975b, 1975c, 1975d, 1979a, 1983, 1985).
There are many dimensions of Puducherry — historical and timeless, physical and
spiritual — perceptible through the senses and silence, with parts of the city retaining
French influence in architecture, churches, and boulevards with Francophone names;
with monuments to Gandhi, Ambedkar, and the First World War along the seaside
promenade; with the Sri Aurobindo Ashram as its spiritual centre; and with a steady
stream of visitors — artists, scholars, writers, seekers — from around India and the
globe. Our conversation took place in the front room of Das’s home, close to the central
ashram site containing the meditation courtyard with its samadhi or tomb-shrine of Sri
Aurobindo and The Mother. I was greeted by Das himself, clad in a white kurta pyjama.
Upon entering Das’s home, I noticed rosewood-framed photographs, again of Sri
Aurobindo and The Mother, displayed on the wall. Perhaps that was a fitting prelude to
my time with Das, with his calm presence filling the room and complementing its soft
silver walls and white borders, the symmetry of our settees, the slow and silent ceiling
fan, and the morning light of the skylights. And again rosewood: this time in the glass-
panelled bookcase below the photographs, with several vases of flowers and a portrait
of Krishna on its white surface. The bookcase contained titles such as Iconography of
Minor Hindu and Buddhist Deities, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the
Japanese Empire, and Indian Carpets and Floor Coverings, thick volumes of the
Gazette of the Union Territory of Pondicherry, and a series with titles on Wittgenstein,
Fanon, Lukács, and McLuhan. The eclecticism of these titles reflects that of Das’s cul-
tural and aesthetic imagination. He is a natural and charismatic storyteller, speaking
with ease, passion, and a seemingly effortless grasp of character, event, and detail. The
text has been authorized by Manoj Das.

MR: Your first collection of stories, A Song for Sunday and other Stories, was
published in 1967. What led you to creative writing, and to short stories in
particular?
22 The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 57(1)

MD: It is not a very easy exercise for me to tell you exactly how I came to write
short stories, since I believe this inspiration for writing is inherent in some
people. Such as it is, some people are constituted in a manner to become art-
ists, musicians, and I believe some people to become storytellers. I do not
know how it happens, unless you believe in consciousness incarnate with a
certain kind of pre-concept, or a consciousness which wishes to have some
new experiences in a particular lifetime. Perhaps that new experience includes
closely observing life, and that acuteness of observation can lead to literary
expression.
MR: In your memoir, Chasing the Rainbow: Growing Up in an Indian Village
(2004), you discuss the influence of village life on you and your work.
Could you expand on that?
MD: With respect to my childhood influences, my village [Sankari, in the Balasore
district of the eastern state of Odisha] was probably one of the finest places I
have ever seen, but now it is gone. In 1942, when I was seven, a terrible cyclone
struck the whole area, both my part of Odisha and the neighbouring part of
Bengal. A famine followed, and I saw before my eyes so many familiar faces
confronting death. It was a very sad and shocking experience. Moreover, dur-
ing that period of melancholy and sadness, the World War was going on. All of
these, I believe, must have helped me and contributed to my small range of
experiences: the wonderful location, the beauty of the place, the silence, the
love of the people, and also the storm, the deaths, the epidemic, a gang of ban-
dits surrounding and invading our house, our narrow escape from death.
MR: How did your early education influence you and your impetus for creative
writing? Your native language is Odia, and you had learned English only
later, in school.
MD: My primary school was one of those typical small village schools. There was
no question of an English-medium school in my area. Years later, I came to
town to join the regular academic stream. My fellow students — when I was
seven, eight, or nine years old — would prod me to tell stories, and I built up
narratives for them. This is, I believe, how the impetus began.
Also, my mother herself was a great lover of literature. She would write poetry
in our mother tongue, Odia, and she had read a number of classics, such as the
Mahabharata and Ramayana, in our own language. I thus learnt a variety of
stories from these classics. I began by writing poetry. So I became known as a
budding poet, but as I started writing stories, somehow people and magazine
editors were more interested in those than in my poems. Readers demanded
more and more stories, publishers demanded them, and that’s how I became
stuck with fiction — short stories and, much later, novels. I never aspired to
become a popular writer or a great writer. For me writing was spontaneous. It
was just like one whistles, one sings, one talks.
MR: You mentioned that you began by writing poetry. Your volumes of poetry
(1992, 2003a) are written in Odia. Why do you write poetry only in Odia?
MD: I do not write poetry in English because I believe that the mother tongue is the
language of the subconscious. Poetry can come out best only in one’s mother
Ratti 23

tongue, and not in any other language which you have learnt later. I also see
poetry as a more intellectual genre than prose — it allows me to pursue ideas
and forms that would otherwise be inexpressible in prose. It also allows me to
explore my inner experiences and feelings, psychological and spiritual.
MR: Who are some of the writers that have inspired you?
MD: To be frank, even from my childhood, before I could learn to read or write, the
stories of the Mahabharata and Ramayana inspired me. Then when I was
capable of reading, I read the father of modern Odia fiction, Fakir Mohan
Senapati — his works were treasured by my mother. And then, as I grew up, I
of course read Tagore without difficulty, as I knew Bengali from my child-
hood. Another influence was Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. More than Tagore,
it was Bankim Chandra who inspired me, as a model. Among current writers,
there are not any who have influenced me, except for Sri Aurobindo, who has
inspired my vision of life. Unconsciously I must have been influenced by other
current writers, but consciously definitely not. I have always felt my own way
of writing.
MR: You have achieved critical success as a writer in both Odia and English.
How did you come to writing in English?
MD: I started writing in English because of a provocation. I was a third year student
in the college. Somebody brought to my notice a write-up on the Indian vil-
lage, written by an Indian author who lived abroad. That was an impression
that insulted the psyche of rustic India. I cannot recall the title and the author,
but the piece was written in English, and published somewhere abroad, not in
an Indian publication. It was a silly article, satirizing the villagers and their
habits and their mindset. I felt revolted. This is not the village that I know. And
having been born and brought up in a typical Indian village, I thought I owed
it to my background to present a portrait of rural life as I have experienced it.
MR: Your short stories in Odia are bestsellers and your work in English (for
example, 2001a) also sells well. As a bilingual writer, how does the lan-
guage difference between regional language literature (RLL) and Indian
writing in English (IWE) inform your work?
MD: How many people abroad know about this particular language called Odia?
But my language is a very developed language. And if you read my short sto-
ries in English, they are all present in Odia too. I don’t translate; I rewrite.3
Suppose inspiration comes for a story and the immediate demand is from an
Odia editor or publisher, then I write it in Odia. Years later, I might sit down
again and write the same story in English. Similarly, about 50 per cent of my
stories are written originally in English, and some of my novels are in English,
but I also write them again in Odia.
MR: What do you think accounts for the differences in visibility between RLL
and IWE?
MD: Indian literature is so varied and so wide that each language has its peculiarity,
a series of nuances exclusive to it. However, at this historical moment, when
we speak of Indian literature, most people have in mind Indian writing in
English. Now so far as Indian writing in English is concerned, there existed
several magazines in India, I mean English-language magazines. And the most
24 The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 57(1)

powerful avenues for an Indian writer of English short stories were two forums.
The most important one was the Illustrated Weekly of India, once a widely-
circulated magazine combining news and reviews with creative writing. It
would devote full, long pages to poetry and it regularly published short stories.
My novella Sharma and the Wonderful Lump (1978) had been serialized in it,
as well as R. K. Narayan’s novel The Man-eater of Malgudi (1961). The maxi-
mum number of my stories were published in that magazine. Secondly, there
was a monthly magazine called Imprint. It published mostly fiction, but also
belles-lettres and topical essays on aspects of culture. Both have been phased
out by now. So when you speak of short stories in English today, you have to
look either into published anthologies, or academic magazines published by
universities, which hardly circulate outside of academia. Some of the publica-
tions brought out by American universities have a circulation beyond their
campus, but in India that is not yet the case.
MR: In this context of distribution and circulation, could you comment on
RLL?
MD: There is a great resentment among the non-English writers of India. I observe
that the best of Indian writing remains in Indian languages, but we do not have
professional or gifted translators. Workshops are conducted by the Sahitya
Akademi and the National Book Trust to guide and motivate translators, but
few translators have emerged who can preserve in English the Indian psyche
as it is reflected in Indian fiction in different languages. Secondly, there is a
general impression today that some writers write with commitment to only one
aim, namely, to attract readers overseas. That is a rather unfortunate motiva-
tion. A novel could be a cocktail of 40 per cent eroticism and 60 per cent social
realism and win an international award. I do not know how the judges choose
such books. These are just my impressions. I am a writer; I am not a judge or
a critic.
But when the Ramayana and Mahabharata were written, or when Vishnu
Sharma wrote the Panchatantra, where were such questions of popularity or
circulation? Yet these classics exist, and they are dazzling purveyors of Indian
literature. A writer’s life might be limited to 50, 60, or 70 years, but literature
is something which is a perennial stream of creativity. Works which deserve to
be remembered or to be immortalized, they will achieve that recognition over
the course of time.
MR: Organically?
MD: Yes, you cannot set out a programme for it. Of course it would be good if we
had some excellent translators and we could identify the right kind of nov-
els. But when one says “the Indian psyche”, this cannot be forced into any
novel. It is either there, or it is not. A writer who is steeped in the Indian
consciousness, his writing naturally projects that. So one should not be
compelled to think, “Well, I should write something which will appear to be
so genuinely Indian that it will be accepted as the true representative of
Indian literature”.
MR: Critics have categorized you and your work, both historically and in
impact, among IWE writers like Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan, and
Ratti 25

Raja Rao, whose works have been received as representative of Indian

literature (see Nayak, 2010: 199; Behura and Rajasree Misra, 2015: 199).
Could you comment on their work or their influence on you?
MD: There was a time, before Independence, when men like Dr Mulk Raj Anand,
whom I consider the doyen of the Indian novel in English (see, for example,
his classic novels Untouchable (1935), Coolie (1936), and Two Leaves and a
Bud (1937)), were projecting for the first time the sorrows of the toiling masses,
the labour classes, and tea-garden workers (we see this in Two Leaves and A
Bud, with its beautiful title). Independence from colonial rule slowly changed
the situation. R. K. Narayan was highly popular for some time, and that popu-
larity still somewhat exists, because he was focusing on the little ironies of life,
the mild humour, the gossips, and specimen characters from small towns and
villages. He examined these subjects with wit and compassion, revealing a
hitherto unexplored area of Indian life. Additionally, writing about hill life,
there is my friend Ruskin Bond — he’s very popular, his books sell quite well,
and people love him. He writes about the hills and those regions because he
lives there and identifies with that quaint lifestyle. There were other gifted
writers, such as Raja Rao. He was more a philosopher than a fiction writer, and
for the most part he successfully adapted the art of fiction to suit his message,
though sometimes the thought element dominated his art. So they were the
famous trio — Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, and R. K. Narayan.
At the moment I cannot find any writer of fiction in English who can be com-
pared to these earlier authors’ popularity or their appeal, for various reasons.
That said, things are moving, things are changing, and new writers are coming.
So many writers are popular in the sense that they receive international awards,
and are published by noted publishers abroad. But their quality I do not think
can be determined so easily. It may take another half century to identify that
properly — whether they are really inspired writers or merely clever and
skilled artisans of emotions and words, looking for certain situations, and tak-
ing advantage of such situations.
MR: With respect to representing India, many of your stories, such as “Mystery
of the Missing Cap” (1989b), and each of your novels in English (1987,
1991, 2001b) represents the transitions experienced by India, from coloni-
alism and feudalism to postcolonial independence, democracy, urbaniza-
tion, and industrialization. How have these transitions influenced you?
What have you strived to represent through these transitions?
MD: I have been greatly influenced by them. Ancient India was accustomed to a
kind of feudal rule, but this feudal rule was different from the serfdoms in any
other country. Every village was a unit, a self-sufficient unit, and the village
elders were men of conscience. I met dozens of elders in my childhood. They
were not people who were exploiters, and nor were they rude or unkind. They
understood everybody’s lives, and they would sit and decide issues. Village
panchayats4 were far more practical, efficient, and truer to the problem than
any decision that could be arrived at in a court of law through arguments
between lawyers. This age-old village life suddenly experienced a new wave
of patriotism, which was brought about by a new breed of politicians. “Mystery
26 The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 57(1)

of the Missing Cap” (1989b) begins in an India which was marked by the four
major castes (Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, and Shudras), and abruptly a
fifth caste appears: the patriots or patriotic caste. I wanted to show how a coun-
try whose people who have never been exposed to these alien democratic con-
cepts face a crisis. How will they cope with it? Some lose their balance, some
become overambitious and can’t reconcile their own inner innocence with the
hypocrisy and pretensions demanded by the new policies and politics. And
what happens to them? The story records the paradox in the situation to a cer-
tain degree.
MR: Your above-mentioned stories and novels about transitions raise the ques-
tion of the future, perhaps an unknown one. Now with more than 70 years
after Independence, what is your diagnosis of the postcolonial trajectories
of these transitions? For example, how do you view democracy in India, or
India’s relation with other nation-states, postcolonial or otherwise?
MD: India and Indian democracy are certainly related to and aligned with other
democratic countries. India has much backwardness which others don’t have,
and many weaknesses which they don’t share. But India nonetheless has some-
thing exclusive: a wonderful vision of the future, and a great tradition to retain
and to pursue it. I believe India has a reasonably bright future in the world
community as we move forward in the twenty-first century.
MR: Could you describe that vision of the future?
MD: The vision of the future is definitely a more united world, not in the sense of
becoming one through a brotherhood of sorrow, as H. G. Wells (1907) saw, but
a brotherhood of delight: delight of achievement, delight of understanding.
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, I believe that the whole of humanity is
growing towards an enlightened future. And India will have a specific role in
translating that vision into a world reality. That will be an adventure of
consciousness.
MR: In this sense of literature as the coming together of the internal as spiritual
and the external as political, you have lived for many decades in
Puducherry, a city home to Sri Aurobindo, who was at once political and
spiritual. How has that sense of the spiritual and the political influenced
you or inspired you, as you look back now, in the late 2010s?
MD: Sri Aurobindo’s life was incredible. In its first phase, he fought for the libera-
tion of his motherland. In the second phase, he strove for the liberation of
humanity from its imprisonment in ignorance. How Sri Aurobindo has inspired
me is as follows: he is the one person I have found who has a vision of man as
an evolving being. Everybody else takes man as he is — this is man, we make
his psychoanalysis, we make his social and political order, in order to serve
this man. Sri Aurobindo is a visionary who sees that this man is not the final
product of evolution. Man continues to evolve, and this insight of Sri Aurobindo
inspires me. All our problems — our experiences of life, sorrows, anguish,
agony, pleasures, delight, and even death — can be seen in a new light. After
such a reinterpretation of psychology, you look at man as having something in
him which is still deeply inherent, which unfolds gradually, birth after birth,
life after life, and which will make man quite different from what he is today.
Ratti 27

Sri Aurobindo’s term for this is “supramental”. He uses the word supramental
not because it is much greater than “mind”, but because it is a qualitatively
different kind of consciousness which will take hold of you and me. When you
look at the complex and wondrous history of evolution, right from gross matter
to life, and then to mind, you come to believe that the process could not have
ended with the present man, a half-complete being. Once you are acquainted
with Sri Aurobindo, you become an incorrigible optimist.
MR: Much of your work affirms moral growth and human consciousness, from
as early as your first collection of stories (1967), and stories like “The
Tree” (1986) and “Lakshmi’s Adventure” (1989a). Has that incorrigible
optimism affected your writing and, if so, how?
MD: Not consciously, because I was a writer from my childhood. Long before I
could write even, I was composing. I have had my moments of pessimism also,
shaped by World War II, the atomic bomb, and the Holocaust.
MR: Does that pessimism especially reflect itself in any of your works?
MD: In the late 1960s, I was pessimistic about the future of humanity. “A Trip into
the Jungle” (1978) [the story is suggestive of cannibalism] first appeared in
1971, in The Illustrated Weekly of India. It was later adapted into the award-
winning Hindi film Aaranyaka (1994), directed by Apurba Kishore Bir. But
nevertheless, when I moved to Puducherry [in 1963], Sri Aurobindo’s philoso-
phy gave me optimism about humanity. And his vision has certainly sustained
me in my writing, in my zeal for communicating. It has had some subtle influ-
ence on my writing, but I’ve never tried consciously to bring his philosophy
into my creative writing. It’s different when I am invited to give a talk on Sri
Aurobindo. I speak on Sri Aurobindo, I sometimes write on Sri Aurobindo,
though I don’t write generally on mystic subjects. But in my creative writing,
in my novels and short stories, I do not consciously bring him in.
MR: What have you been working on recently?
MD: I’m translating into my own mother tongue Sri Aurobindo’s epic Savitri
(1997). I’m also working on a novel. It is set in India and contains typical
Indian characters. Also, I have been researching Sri Aurobindo’s tremendous
experiences in jail, the people who came in touch with him, their private
records, their family diaries, and books which are extant and which have been
out of print for many decades. I have worked on a thorough biographical
reconstruction of Sri Aurobindo’s life, serialized in the monthly magazine
Mother India. I discovered many unknown things about him, which I have
brought to light.
MR: Could you describe some of those unknown things?
MD: In 1910, Sri Aurobindo became the first Indian statesman on whom a com-
plete debate took place in the House of Commons. Ramsay MacDonald, the
leader of the Labour Party, told the Treasury Bench that he had read in The
Times that a warrant had been issued against Mr. Aurobindo Ghose (at that
time he was not known as Sri Aurobindo) for having published a “seditious”
article in a magazine called Karmayogin.5 MacDonald requested that the
magazine be placed in the library of the House of Commons to give British
politicians a sense of its content. Montagu was then Under Secretary of State
28 The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 57(1)

for India, and he reported that the government of India had not yet sent
through the magazine issue. Two weeks later, when he asked again about the
magazine and was again informed that the government had not yet received it,
MacDonald produced a copy of the Karmayogin. He read out the whole arti-
cle, line by line, and one member of the House asked whether the article was
published in Bengali. To this Ramsay MacDonald responded that the article is
written in excellent English and that Ghose is practically an Englishman. He
read out the whole thing, challenging his peers to show the article’s so-called
sedition.6 Keir Hardie, the founder of the Labour Party in England, supported
him in this argument. These matters were never brought to public attention by
any historian. In the history of the freedom movement, he is the first Indian
statesman on whom there is a complete debate, but nobody has exposed this.
MR: You have had a prolific, distinguished career, with your work becoming an
exemplar of Indian literature and the nation. When you look back at your
body of work, what have you learnt from that, and what has this taught
you about Manoj Das?
MD: I have learnt — to be very honest — only one thing, that I have so much to
learn. That’s the only statement I can make. I know life will continue even after
this life.
MR: How would you like your body of literature to be remembered?
MD: The future alone can say that, because nothing is ever lost. Even if my own
literature is not read, those who have read my work have derived inspiration.
My literature will lead to their own creation of literature, and will leave its
mark on that literature. That is how things grow. For example, how many peo-
ple outside my home state read Fakir Mohan Senapati? Senapati was one of
my inspirations and he is there in my writing.
MR: Is there any message you would like to convey that you have not conveyed
in previous interviews?
MD: [Laughs] What message can I convey, sitting in the shadow of Sri Aurobindo,
whose message for humanity is to aspire, grow, and transcend yourself? I do
not give any messages, or if I do, it is a subtle message. A pronounced message
is a prophet’s gift, not that of a writer. Subtle messages are bound to be there,
because the artistic process and the reading process are spiritual, psychological
processes — psycho-spiritual processes, you could say. And those subtle mes-
sages have to be discovered by readers — maybe not consciously, but instinc-
tively and meaningfully.
(Puducherry, December 2017)

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Manoj Das, Anand Kumar, P. Raja, Bob Zwicker, the Sri Aurobindo Ashram
Library, the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives and Research Library, and Auro University.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article: This research was funded by a Sabarmati Fellowship at the Gandhi
Ashram (Ahmedabad) and a Salisbury University Faculty Mini-Grant.
Ratti 29

Notes
1. The Sri Aurobindo Ashram was founded on 24 November 1926 and is named after Sri Aurobindo
(1872–1950), who began life as Aurobindo Ghose. Having lived from 1879 to 1893 in the UK,
where he studied for the Indian Civil Service at King’s College, Cambridge, Ghose was a national-
ist, freedom fighter, writer, and philosopher. He devoted himself to a spiritual life after moving in
1910 to Puducherry, where as a guru he became known as Sri Aurobindo. He developed the phi-
losophy of integral yoga or supramental yoga, as a form of self-perfection and liberation by which
the soul and nature unify with the divine consciousness (the consciousness which is both inherent
in the self and above the mind, or supramental). Sri Aurobindo’s major works include The Life
Divine (2010; first appeared serially between 1914 and 1919), The Synthesis of Yoga (1999; first
appeared serially between 1914 and 1921), and the epic Savitri: A Legend and A Symbol (1997;
first drafted in 1916). Sri Aurobindo’s fellow guru at the Ashram was The Mother (1878−1973),
whom Sri Aurobindo considered his spiritual equal, giving her the name The Mother. Born in Paris
as Mirra Alfassa, and having worked there as a visual artist, The Mother settled in Puducherry in
1920. She helped form the Ashram and became its spiritual head after Sri Aurobindo retreated
into seclusion. The Mother would regularly explain and interpret Sri Aurobindo’s work for stu-
dents and disciples, leading to books such as the seven-volume Questions and Answers, covering
1929−1931 and 1950−1958 (see, for example, The Mother, 2004).
2. As some literary historical context for Das’s work, Fakir Mohan Senapati (1843−1918)
was the first writer to establish the short story in the Odia language, publishing “Rebati” in
1898, the earliest short story extant in Odia (see Senapati, 2003). The short story became
especially developed in Odia by writers Dayanidhi Mishra (1891−1955), Chandra Sekhar
Nanda, Bankanidhi Pattanayak (1889−1961), Dibyasingh Panigrahi (d. 1948), Lakshmikanta
Mohapatra (1888−1953), and Godavarish Mohapatra (1898−1965), each of whom showed a
concern for social realism and rural life (see S. K. Das, 1995: 263; Lal, 1992: 4062). Das can
be contextualized among Odia writers known for their sensitivity to social issues and reform,
including Gopinath Mohanty (1914−1991), Nityananda Mohapatra (1912−2012), Kalindi
Charan Panigrahi (1901−1991), Bhagabati Charan Panigrahi (1908−1943), and Sachi Raut-
Roy (1916−2004) (see S. K. Das, 1995: 263; Lal, 1992: 4062). Das can also be considered
among the early group of Indo-Anglian writers from the late 1930s onward, alongside Mulk Raj
Anand (1905−2004), Ruskin Bond (b. 1934), Nirad Chaudhuri (1897−1999), Nisha da Cunha
(b. 1934), Anita Desai (b. 1937), Arun Joshi (1939−1993), Kamala Markandaya (1924−2004),
Aubrey Menen (1912−1989), R. K. Narayan (1906−2001), Raja Rao (1908−2006), and
Khushwant Singh (1915−2014) (see Varughese, 2013: 8). Graham Greene has compared Das’s
work with R. K. Narayan’s work, given the latter’s representation of village life in Malgudi: “I
imagine Odisha is far from Malgudi, but there is the same quality in his stories with perhaps
an added mystery” (Nayak, 2010: 199; see also Samal, 2015; Raja, 2016). Manoranjan Behura
and Rajasree Misra have compared Das’s writing, even globalization, of Odisha village culture
to Chinua Achebe’s writing of the Igbo culture in Nigeria (Behura and Misra, 2015: 199).
3. This notion of translation as a rewriting can trace its origin in the idea of translation as tran-
screation (see Lal, 1972). Transcreation emphasizes the agency of the translator, in that rather
than a strictly imitative source text/target text relation aiming for fidelity, transcreation sig-
nals the creative role of the translator. Transcreation views the translator’s audience as a
contemporary one, giving licence to the translator to modify the source text for contemporary
readers, especially when the two texts are separated by culture and/or time (for example, tran-
screating ancient epics for contemporary readers, as when P. Lal transcreated ancient Sanksrit
plays and the epic Mahabharata into English, although his native language is Bengali).
4. A panchayat (ayat meaning assembly; panch meaning five) is a village council as part of an
Indian system of self-governance at the grassroots level, for villages, with jurisdiction over
30 The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 57(1)

civic matters. A panchayat can consist of a group of elderly leaders, either elected or gener-
ally acknowledged by the village.
5. Das first researched this material in 1972, leading to his book Sri Aurobindo in the First
Decade of the Century (1972a). This book was based on Das’s research in the Old India
Office Library, London; the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh; the National Archive,
New Delhi; the National Library, Calcutta; the Theosophical Library, Adyar, Chennai; and the
Sri Aurobindo Ashram Library, Puducherry. The second edition of this book was published in
2003 (see Das, 2003b).
6. For the full exchanges, see Das (2003b: 149−171). According to MacDonald, the following by
Ghose is the “key-sentence in the whole article” (Das, 2003b: 157): “‘If the nationalists stand
back any longer, either the national movements will disappear or the void created will be filled
up by a sinister and violent activity. Neither result can be tolerated by men desirous of their
country’s development and freedom’” (Das, 2003b: 157). MacDonald also quotes the following
extract by Ghose: “‘Fear of the law is for those who break the law. Our aims are great and hon-
ourable, free from stain and reproach. Our methods are peaceful though resolute and strenuous.
We shall not break the law, and therefore we need not fear the law’” (Das, 2003b: 158).

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