“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy” – a common linguistic proverb.
“A language is a dialect with a printing press” – a common linguistic proverb; modified.
The first printing press in Odisha was established in 1838 by Charles Lacey and Amos Sutton, English missionaries working in the area. The Orissa Mission Press, or the Cuttack Mission Press, was a hand printing machine, and the first text it printed was a satire on the Jagannath Festival: “Gundicha Yatrara mahashcharya phala.” This press, still in operation today, predominantly functioned through the labour of local workers from non-dominant castes and minority religions. Early in the morning, employees would have to sit in front of the monotype machine, facilitating communication between its keyboard and caster, and typing copy. Meanwhile, long reams of perforated paper were churned out by the rollers, operated by employees who would stand in front of them to monitor the printing process. Stacks of this paper—produced in mills set up specifically for this purpose—-sat on the floor. They would be cut into smaller sizes by four or five employees at a table, soon hidden from view by A4 towers. The printed sheets would then be dried and bound at a small shop off the main, larger printing room. The heavy rollers, covered with ink, would also have to be cleaned and maintained at the Roller Shops. The final product, once ready, would be delivered to bookshops, or kept aside for dissemination. A crate of books would be placed in a horse-drawn carriage, and delivered to its final location, perhaps a nearby Mission school.
Though most literary production in Odisha was controlled first by missionaries, and then by elite Hindu writers, the presses themselves were run by employees from castes and communities underrepresented in literary production. Studies into the histories of print literature tend to focus on ideas of representation, finding printed texts to be a reproduction of social and cultural ideologies that influence and shape literature. However, print is also an industry: an industry that in nineteenth-century Odisha and Bengal, ran through the labour of Dalit and Muslim workers. When William Carey established the Serampore Mission Press in 1800 in Bengal, he essentially began a process of colonial philology that demarcated different languages. This press printed around forty languages—“including Chinese and even Odia,” as one Bengali scholar notes, and thus began the processes of missionary education, regional conflicts, and language-based political movements. This essay maps the various levels of exclusion—dominant castes, powerful states, and the colonial government—that accompanied and were influenced by the printing press. Taking the history of print in the nineteenth century as its site of analysis, it looks at the various power dynamics that came into force when literature began to be printed.
In 1837, a year before the printing press reached Odisha, the Bengal government passed Act No. 29 which changed the language of communication between the British and local administrative bodies from Persian to Hindi, Odia, and Bengali. This act had limitations from the onset, creating hierarchies between languages—first English, then major languages like Bengali, and Odia, and finally adivasi languages like Chakma, Ho, Gond, and Munda. English or dominant languages like Bengali got imposed on populations speaking in other vernacular languages.. This colonial classification, significantly, led to the formation of states on a linguistic basis. However, this taxonomy subsumed many vernacular languages and dialects under larger linguistic umbrellas. Clearly, this Act both reproduced conflicts and unequal power dynamics between vernacular languages, and also exacerbated existing tensions: as each language had to prove its singularity, neighbouring languages got thrown into competition with each other. While this act ostensibly prioritised vernacular linguistic diversity, it actually led to the erasure of several languages and dialects in its acknowledgement of a few majority languages. At its heart lay colonial anxieties about India’s linguistic diversity, as the Inspector of Revenue in Orissa, 1869-1870 noted, “Diversity of speech is a great evil; it obstructs intercourse and offers a serious obstacle to the advance of civilization”.
In the context of Bengal and Odisha, a struggle began to eliminate liminal spaces. Bangla, at the time, had already had the advantages of a printing press for thirty-seven years, and was a more powerful language socially, culturally, and economically. Soon after this act, a Bengali campaign began to institute Bangla as the official language in Odia schools, revenue, and administrative bodies. In 1841, the Commissioner of Orissa received a petition for the Sudder Board of Revenue to be conducted in Bangla as opposed to Odia. Under colonial rule, Bangla had managed to present itself as a concrete, developed language in terms of having a body of literature, representative speakers in administrative bodies, and economic and cultural capital. The missionary printing presses had a clear role to play here: as Rangalal Bandhyopadhyay said at the time, “If we investigate the rise to favour of our Bengali language in such a short time then we will find that printing presses and organizations for religious propaganda are responsible.”
The agenda to subsume Odia linguistically, occupationally, and territorially into Bengali also proceeded on the grounds that Odia was only a dialect of Bengali. As the Collector of Cuttack noted in 1854, “The Ooriah of this district, whether it may originally have been, is not but a dialect of Bengalee, from which it differs chiefly in pronunciations and in its written character. I would submit as a measure of general policy, it is desirable that the Ooriah should cease to exist as a separate language within the British territories.” The supposed commonalities between the Odia and Bangla languages thus became the prime site for the Odia-Bengali debate. The common origin of Odia and Bengali in Sanskrit became the main point of the Bengali monograph “Uriya Swadheen Bhasha Naye”—Odia Is Not an Independent Language—written by Kantichandra Bhattacharya. The repercussions of discontinuing Odia as the language of instruction in schools would be that the language would have no means to disseminate itself via education. This move was a result of the idea of “the derivative and subordinate nature of the Odia language.” For Bhattacharya, Odia was a “corrupt, impure” form of Bangla. As one moved away from Calcutta, the epicentre of pure Bangla, the language, he stated, got increasingly polluted. He noted, “As faults arising from contact with undesirables result in a deterioration of characters, so does such contact in the case of language lead to the deterioration of language.” Casteist rhetoric is clearly fundamental to Bhattacharya’s linguistic beliefs—Odia, for him, is an “undesirable” language, spoken by crude people to be kept at arm’s length. Caste is also read into the preference for Bengali over Odia. For Bhattacharya and his fellow thinkers, while Bangla originated from Sanskrit, the pure, upper-caste classical language, in Odisha, Bangla became mixed with adivasi languages, which is how Odia became distinct from Bengali. This, to him, meant that Bangla was transformed into “a rude, harsh, impure, colloquial and lowly dialect” in order to give rise to Odia.
Bhattacharya’s anti-Odia thesis was countered by John Beames, a colonial linguist in Odisha. In his 1867 text, Outlines of Indian Philology, he contested the notion of determining whether a language was a dialect or an independent language based on whether speakers could understand each other. He argued that in India, many languages share similar words. While Beames demonstrated the adivasi roots of the Odia language, he also questioned why Bangla should not be considered a dialect of Hindi if Odia is to be considered a dialect of Bengali. He pointed out that on geographical grounds, Bengal did not have a single unified language—along with Bangla, languages such as Garo, Santhal, Khond, Suanga, and Sabara were also spoken in the region.
The Odia literary and political community responded strongly to these statements. Newspapers at the time pointed out that Bangla had only developed due to continuous colonial patronage and a steady stream of resources. Had Odisha also received enough support to have a proper educational system in Odia, the language and its literature could also have developed in a similar manner. Articles in these newspapers urged the Odia people to rise against the assimilation of Odisha into Bengal. Odia, as a language, also changed in public conceptualisation—it went from being a language of communication to the more emotionally loaded “mother tongue.” The Cuttack Mission Press was used by Gaurishankar Ray and his associates to develop a steady stream of Odia textbooks, and it was this printing initiative that became the foundation of modern Odia literature. Finally, their efforts prevailed, and in 1936, Odisha became recognised as an independent state on a linguistic basis.
Though the Oriya Language Movement is ostensibly a triumph of regional self-assertion, it contains undercurrents of unresolved conflicts within Odisha. In Thoughts on Linguistic Provinces, B.R. Ambedkar analysed the intersection between linguistic and caste power in regions and states. For instance, he states that in the case of Maharashtra, the dominant regional language should not be recognised as an official state language as this would lead to the control of resources by the regional upper-caste Hindus, and a lack of minority representation. While this seems to run counter to the achievements of the Odia community, by criticising concepts of unilingual statehood, it actually counters the inter- and intra-regional conflicts put into motion by early colonial philology. The majority of literary production in Odisha was dominated by upper-caste elites. Casteism and feudalism were clearly a part of Odia society with Dalits, Adivasis, and marginalised communities being gatekept from representation in literature, despite being largely responsible for the functioning of the printing press. As Dr Raj Kumar writes in his introduction to Bheda, “Dalits in Odisha, as elsewhere in India, have been victims of caste oppression for centuries. Predominantly rural and illiterate, they have become one of society’s most exploited peripheral groups. Over the years, they have lived in subhuman conditions and have suffered economic exploitation, cultural subjugation, and political powerlessness.”
While Odia elites monopolised public schools and literary production, ensuring that Dalit students and writers were gatekept, it was upper-caste Hindus who were most resistant to missionary activity, fearing the loss of caste. This contradiction is revealed in Amos Sutton’s Rise and Progress of Mission to Orissa, “And I plainly told him that if he would serve Jesus Christ his caste must be relinquished; and that if he were baptized I would publicly declare it gone. His last effort to keep his caste was, a proposal that I should state the truth, if asked about his caste, but say nothing about it if nobody inquired; but I replied that the caste stood like a stone wall to prevent the progress of the Gospel. That it was an enemy to Jesus Christ, and that none of his friends could spare it.” Though Sutton seems to condemn caste in this passage and others, the missionary agenda in Odisha in this time was oriented around religious conversion, as opposed to spreading education to oppressed castes; as Dr Raj Kumar notes, “Unlike other places, missionary support for Dalit education came late to Odisha”.
Odia literature in print was pressed into the service of regional identity-building across poetry, short fiction, and the novel. The first Odia novel was written in 1888—Umesh Chandra Sarkar’s Padmamali. Printed by the Cuttack Printing Company, it is part political realism, part medieval romance, and an intense, feudal love story that culminates in a rivalry over the titular heroine, Padmamali. This combination of contemporary realistic theme and the older romantic form was a feature of several novels across India at the time, such as Chandrakanta or Indumati. Fakir Mohan Senapati’s canonical novel Chha Mana Atha Guntha, published in 1902, deviates from this writing pattern. Out-and-out social realism, it uses the figure of the touter from theatre to create a sly, oblique narrator who unsettles conventional reader-response to the novel form itself. No information we receive about the socio-economic structures and exploitations within the village the novel is set in can be taken at face value. Senapati focuses on the follies of the colonial legal system, oppressions by zamindars, and the collapse of a village. While Padmamali glorifies upper-caste rulers, Senapati takes a more complicated view of stakeholders in Odia society: there is, for example, a detailed derision of the Mohanty community. At the same time, Brahmincal figures such as the “Sanatani” are revered, making the caste politics of this novel questionable. In terms of key figures within the Odia literary canon, there is also the poetry of Gopabandhu Das, which does focus on caste oppression, but takes on a patronising and dehumanising tone.
Literature by Dalit writers in Odisha has rarely survived to contemporary times. Before the emergence of print, there was a steady body of protest literature in Odia. Sarala Das, the fifteenth-century author responsible for developing a large canon of Odia literature, wrote the Odia Mahabharata and Ramayana. His tales undercut the casteism and feudalism of the myths, and also replaced their inaccessible Sanskrit with everyday Odia. The Panchasakhas, a Dalit literary association, was formed by Balarama Dasa, Achyutananda Dasa, Jasobanta Dasa, Ananta Dasa, and Jagannatha Dasa. After Independence, the Dalit Jati Sangh was set up in 1953, by Govind Chandra Seth, Santanu Kumar Das, Jagannath Malik, Kamhu Malik, and Kanduri Mali. Though the Odia novel has attempted interesting formal experiments—Basanti, published in 1931, was written by nine authors—it continuously centred upper-caste experiences and protagonists. I must note here that in contemporary times, Akhila Nayak’s novel Bheda, published in 2008, and translated by Dr Raj Kumar into English, explicitly deals with the steady feudal-capitalist caste-based oppression in educational, social, and political spaces in Odisha.
Despite lack of representation in print, it was essentially the adivasi roots and aspects of the Odia language that allowed it to be distinguished from Bengali and other Sanskritic languages. This created a conflict for the upper-caste and upper-class Odia elites: while drawing attention to the adivasi influences of the Odia language were necessary to maintain linguistic and regional independence, internal racial and casteist biases also made them anxious about accepting and acknowledging a connection between themselves and adivasi communities. This was intensified by colonial historians like W.W. Hunter, who in his History of Odisha, described Odisha as “a primal, uncivilized land that still has evidence of primeval life extinct elsewhere,” with no civilization or history of its own. Thus, what Pritipuspa Mishra describes as “the adivasi spectre”—a central linguistic, political, and cultural part of Odia society—put into question neatly drawn notions of Odia history, communities, and language. It also exposed that what was conceptualised as a pan-Odisha linguistic movement actually applied only to a limited educated, urban, Hindu elite. As Mishra notes, this conceptualisation excluded adivasi communities such as Khondh, Savara, Godaba, Poroja, Munda, Oraon, Kharia, Hos, and Bhumij, which were not Hindu, or Odia speaking. The difficulties with trying to imagine a single historical past for Odisha were made even more damaging by the need to frame a political narrative that would support the idea of a progressive Odia linguistic community. It is also important to note that language is not the only arena of difference between adivasi and dominant caste communities: the latter have continuously exploited adivasi resources and community members. As Mishra and other scholars have pointed out, to blanket adivasi communities under an imagined progressive body of Hindu Odia elites is to whitewash long traditions of refusal to be appropriated and resistance against these very people.
There is much that cannot be printed. As the story of print in Odisha shows, the arrival of the printing press gave certain languages the means to consolidate themselves and prove historical longevity. At the same time, the colonised region of Odisha also had to scramble and acclimatize to the press and the culture it brought with it in order to sustain itself. In the bid to prove the existence of the written word, several oral traditions, histories, tales, theatres, and Jatra were excluded, and the press was effectively utilised only by a limited regional elite sub-group. At the same time, different communities are ultimately written into the history of print: if not in representation, then in the continuous running of the machine itself.