I had just moved from listening to ghost stories to reading detective novels. This was about seventy years ago. I was a junior high school (Class VIII and Class IX were informally called junior high school classes, and Classes X and XI, senior high school classes) student then. The first detective novel in Odia I read was about dasyu (dacoit) Rabin and his younger brother dasyu Ratan. There was a beautiful princess in the story whom the senapati (army chief) of that small kingdom longed to marry. He was already married but had kept this fact a secret from everybody. Not being the king, he didn’t have the privilege to marry more than once. To marry the princess, he had the consent of the king, who was weak and was dependent on him for his throne. The helpless princess somehow managed to get in touch with Rabin and Ratan, whom she called bhai (brother), and these two not only saved her from that marriage but also exposed the senapati, humiliated him, and put him squarely in his place. The good dasyus became my heroes instantly. They were not just good but very intelligent as well. What impressed me most was that they would announce in advance that they would be at such and such place and would be there on time, do what they wanted to do, and escape, no matter how many policemen or soldiers were there on duty to arrest them. I read that book many times. I have forgotten the title of the book. I do not remember the name of the author. I do not think I knew his name even then. At that age, if the story was interesting, the author did not matter; the story did. During childhood and early boyhood, everyone has what we may call the “Barthevian mindset” about the irrelevance of the author.
The Rabin and Ratan story is our Robinhood story. It has no conventional detective because there is no place in the story for investigation. There is nothing to investigate. The “outlaw” is the protector of the helpless victim of the powerful, who are empowered by law. As far as I know, dasyu Rabin and dasyu Ratan kind of detective story is no longer written in Odia – like Robinhood stories are no longer written in English.
Some say that when things disappear, their stories disappear. Sounds persuasive. But the relation between the real-world existences and their stories is more complex. Ghosts have not disappeared from our life – both villagers and city dwellers say ghosts exist. But where are the ghost stories? Some years ago, a friend sent me a few ghost stories. They were unreadable – the ghosts were silly. Looks like no one writes a good ghost story now – “good ghost story” is a ghost story in which the ghost is malicious and vicious in the extreme. Now, there are bhaktas (devotees), and they tell us about their bonding with the Lord (watch Jai Jagannath TV channel for some of this). But it is very unlikely that someone will compose another Dadhyatabhakti or write Dadhyatabhakti-like stories which celebrate the bhakta. By the way, Dadhyatabhakti, an eighteenth-century composition by the poet Rama Dasa, is very probably the first work in Odia literature that focuses on the bhakta rather than Bhagawan. Looks like it’s going to be the last in that genre in Odia.
The dacoits in the books I read after the Rabin and Ratan book were, unlike Rabin and Ratan, crooks and criminals – each one of them. There was this book called “Denjer Signal (Danger Signal).” That was what the thug called himself. He was a ruthless murderer who always managed to escape after murdering his victim. Maybe the novel I have in mind was one of a series – Denger Signal series? Except for Rabin and Ratan, I do not recall having read any detective story in which the dasyu was not eventually caught. The arrest of the criminal brought closure to the story. A story without a closure can be very unsatisfying, especially if it is a crime story or a ghost story. By the way, it was never the police who caught the thugs. They were always outwitted by the criminals. It was always a private detective who got them, and he always had a friend who was his assistant in investigation, like Sherlock Holmes had his Dr. Watson. The police came only at the very end with the handcuffs.
To increase their interest value, these novels told a bit of the lifestyle of the rich, who were not royals. This might look irrelevant, but it’s understandable. Life of the rich is of interest to those who do not belong to that class. More generally, we all have a romantic streak in us: the “amor of the far,” which in the present context, translates best into the fascination for what is beyond our reach at the moment. Generally speaking, in these novels, it is the criminals who live the life of the wealthy. I never read a detective novel or a short story in which even a member of a gang walked or rode a man-pulled rickshaw or a cycle rickshaw to go somewhere, as the commoners did in the times these novels were written. He rode for free; the rickshaw puller did not have the courage to ask him for money.
Village boys like me encountered many words in these novels before they saw the objects they referred to: the crooks, who behaved as law-abiding men during the day and killed at night, had sofas at home which only the urban upper-middle-class people could afford in the early nineteen fifties in Odisha. I knew the word “sofa” before I saw the object called “sofa.” But it was their food that fascinated me. They would have anda bhaja (egg fry, i.e., omelette), mansa chap (mutton chop), kalija bhaja (liver fry), kukuda jhola (chicken curry), cakes, and biscuits which most from the villages had never eaten. I had eaten biscuits, but those I had eaten were pathetically different from what the thugs in those novels ate. As for eggs, to continue on a personal note, I knew the taste of only the boiled egg. In my childhood days, it was sick food for me. To me, a schoolboy from a small town, the food items in the novel were remote, vague, and alluring. I had my first anda bhaja and mansa chap at the best restaurant in Cuttack for these foods those days: Khan Hotel. Today I am not sure what I relished more: the delicious stuff that I had at Khan Hotel or the corresponding food words, which, at leisure, I would leisurely roll and roll and chew in my mouth. Before I leave this topic, I must mention that Rabin and Ratan ate biscuits dipping them in their tea. They were vegetarians. As for drinking, the “danger signal” types poured whisky into their mouths, whereas Rabin and Ratan relished only tea. Food and drink demarcated the good and the bad in the society.
I cannot recall when I began reading Kanduri Charan Das’s detective novels. For the first time, the name of the author mattered to me. At A.H. Wheelers in Cuttack and Puri and later, Kharagpur railway station on my way to Kanpur, where I worked, I would look for Kanduri Babu’s novels. I must have read almost all his novels. These were intelligent novels where the focus was on investigation. In his novels, it was not the criminal but the detective who was the hero of the story. One of his stories lingers in my mind still. It was the deeply touching tragic story of Sadakat, a good man who had killed a criminal in order to avenge the killing of the girl he loved. The criminal was a “king.” At the end, Sadakat was traced and was arrested, but I wished for once that the author had planned a different ending! Now, more than five decades after I read Sadakat’s story, I still feel very sad about him.
(The views expressed are the writer’s own)
Prof. B.N.Patnaik
Retd. Professor of Linguistics and English, IIT Kanpur
Email: [email protected]
(Images from the net)