A unique novel written collaboratively in the 1920s by nine young authors from Odisha, Annada Shankar Ray, Baishnab Charan Das, Harihar Mahapatra, Kalindi Charan Panigrahi, Muralidhar Mohanty, Prativa Devi, Sarala Devi, Sarat Chandra Mukherjee, and Suprava Devi. The novel is the first manifesto of feminism in Odia literature.

• Introduction by Himansu S. Mohapatra


• Basanti


• About the authors and translators

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.