Novels, Society and History

(a) The Oriya Novel : In 1877-78, ,Ramashankar Ray, a dramatist, began serialising the first Oriya novel Saudamani.
But he could not complete it. Within thirty years, however, Odisha produced a major novelist in Fakir Mohon Senapati (1843- 1918).
The title of his novel Chaa Maria Atha Guntha (1902) portrays six acres and thirty- two decimals of land. It announces a new kind of novel that will deal with the question Q ^ of land and its possession. It is the story of Ramchandra Mangaraj, a landlord's manager, who cheats his idle and drunken master, and then eyes the plot of fertile land ^ owned by Bhagia and Shariya, a childless ” weaver couple. Mangaraj fools this couple, and puts them into his debt so that he can take over their land. This pathbreaking work showed that the novel could make rural issues an important part of urban Ans. preoccupations. In writing this, Fakir Mohon anticipated a host of writers .in Bengal and elsewhere.
(b)Jane Austen was an English novelist who gives us a glimpse of the world of women in the general rural society in the early 19th century. Her novels make us think about a society which encouraged women to look for ‘good' marriages, and find wealthy or propertied husbands. The first sentence of Jane Austen's (1775-1817) Pride and Prejudice states : ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.' This observation allows us to see the behaviour of the protagonists, who are preoccupied with marriage and money, as typifying Austen's society.
(c) Pariksha Guru reflects the inner and outer world of the newly emerging middle classes.
The characters in the novel are caught in the difficulty of adapting to colonised society and at the same time, preserving their own cultural identity. The world of colonial modernity seems to be both frightening and irresistible to the characters. The novel clearly intends to teach the reader the ‘right way' to live, and expects all ‘sensible men' to be worldly-wise and practical, to remain rooted in the values of their own traditions and culture, and to live with, dignity and honour.
In the novel, we see the characters attempting to bridge two different worlds through their actions: they take to new agricultural technology, modernise trading practices, change the use of Indian language, making them capable to transmitting both Western sciences and Indian wisdom.
The young are urged to cultivate the healthy habit' of reading the newspapers. But the novel emphasises that all this must be achieved without sacrificing the traditional values of the middle-class household. With all its good intentions, Pariksha Guru could not win many readers, as it was perhaps too moralising in its style.