Six acres and a third : the classic nineteenth-century novel about colonial India / Fakir Mohan Senapati ; translated from Oriya by Rabi Shankar Mishra ... [and others] ; introduction by Satya P. Mohanty.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Senapati, Fakir Mohan, 1843-1918.

Contributor:

Mishra, Rabi Shankar.

Standardized Title:

Cha māṇa āṭha guṇṭha. English

Language:

English

Oriya

Subjects (All):

Odisha (India)--Social life and customs--19th century--Fiction.

Odisha (India).

Genre:

Fiction.

Physical Description:

198 pages ; 22 cm

Place of Publication:

Berkeley, Calif. ; London : University of California Press, 2005.

Summary:

This sly and humorous novel by Fakir Mohan Senapati--one of the pioneering spirits of modern Indian literature and an early activist in the fight against the destruction of native Indian languages--is both a literary work and a historical document. A text that makes use--and deliberate misuse--of both British and Indian literary conventions, "Six Acres and a Third "provides a unique "view from below" of Indian village life under colonial rule. Set in Orissa in the 1830s, the novel focuses on a small plot of land, tracing the lives and fortunes of people who are affected by the way this property is sold and resold, as new legal arrangements emerge and new types of people come to populate and transform the social landscape. This graceful translation faithfully conveys the rare and compelling account of how the more unsavory aspects of colonialism affected life in rural India.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN:

0520228820

0520228839

OCLC:

61757052