‘I write in blood, rooted in the soil where I belong’: Jnanpith Award winner Pratibha Ray
· Scroll
Thinking of the famous, and oft-repeated, advice that Lord Krishna gave to Arjuna when the latter was flummoxed about whether he should turn against one of his own in the Kurukshetra War, or be faced with the humiliation of not fighting against injustice, Acharya Digdarshi, a devout Gandhian, in Pratibha Ray’s novel Uttarmarga, wonders if he should leverage the wisdom advocated in the epic Mahabharata to “inspire [the poor, illiterate peasants] to rise against the oppressive zamindar and join the freedom movement”.
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Published in Odia in 1988 the novel was published in English translation in 2025 by Kanak Hota, who named it Where Freedom Reigns. This conundrum that Digdarshi is faced with helps Ray put things into perspective for her readers: that the Indian freedom movement wasn’t nationalistic in the sense that one is often attuned to understanding it, and that people at the grassroots level were organising what’s lost in history, which is why she felt it necessary to foreground these unheard foot soldiers in her novel.
In her defiance towards the elites who were bestowed with, or assumed, this privilege to speak on everyone else’s behalf, Ray’s literary politics is clear – she wants her readers to keep their eyes and ears open so that...