Unlike Maharashtra—which was deeply transformed by the mass social movements of Mahatma Jyotirao Phule and Dr. BR Ambedkar—colonial Odisha’s early public sphere lacked a similar radical, Dalit-led mass mobilization. The initial intellectual attacks on the caste system during the late nineteenth century were heavily driven by the urban, educated Odia elite, which included prominent domiciled Brahmo Bengalis and upper-caste reformers. This challenge to caste is captured by a contemporary Bengali wisecrack that accurately reflects orthodox anxieties about how colonial modernity was destroying traditional caste boundaries: ‘Jaat nilo teen Sen. Wilsen [Wilson’s Hotel], Keshab Sen [the Brahmo reformer], Istisen [railway station].’
However, it was not until the arrival of younger Dalit writers like Basudev Sunani and Akhila Naik that Dalit writing was recognized as a major literary movement in Odia. These two figures are pivotal to the modern Odia Dalit literary movement. Naik wrote Bheda (2010), widely recognized as the first Dalit novel in Odia. Sunani is highly celebrated as a leading voice whose extensive poetry, essays, and activism have comprehensively documented contemporary Dalit consciousness and subaltern struggles in Odisha.
Naik’s Bheda and Sunani’s Padapodi (2014) have both been translated by Raj Kumar in 2017 and 2025 respectively in a collective bid to further augment and make available a growing body of Dalit writing across diverse Indian languages to a wider audience. The book under review here, Padapodi (Burnt: Beyond Return ), draws on real-life events of arson in a Dalit village (pada) in western Odisha to which Sunani belongs. The author says in his prefatory note to the English translation that on 21 January 2012, forty Dalit houses of Lathore village in Bolangir district of Odisha were burnt down by upper-caste mobs following a dispute over the buying of a vest by an ‘untouchable’ boy. Sunani was deeply moved by the sight of loss and acute suffering of the victims, realizing how ‘hideously unjust and inhuman it was to burn down an entire basti over such a trivial matter. The caste angle to the incident was obvious’ (pp. xiii-xiv). He was deeply shaken and tried to exorcise the haunting visions by writing poetry. Not satisfied, he was compelled to write the novel, almost wholly based on the real-life details.
Burnt is the story of Makaru’s journey, both in life and on the train, the latter holding a tight grip on the narrative as the protagonist—if a victim may be so called—recollects the anguish of both witnessing and suffering atrocities perpetrated on the untouchable class of Lathore. The narrative begins with a realist description of the train compartment in which Makaru (who appears to be the alter ego of the novelist) is travelling. He looks upon his fellow passengers, many of whom are from the more privileged class of society but with hardly any civic sense, smoking like a chimney, throwing peanut shells and even allowing little girls to urinate on the floor. In a way, Makaru’s comments run counter to the perception of the stereotype of the ‘lower’ or untouchable caste, deconstructing the ‘upper’/‘lower’ binary. Makaru is travelling from Raipur to Lathore, known in railway parlance by its Aryanized name, ‘Harisankar Road’. The concluding para of the first chapter is self-explanatory: ‘Makaru’s ancestors had lived in Banjipali, a village about three kilometres from Lathore, before his family migrated to Raipur, leaving no trace of their old home. He returns because all forty houses in the Dalit basti of Lathore have been burnt.’ The novel is full of episodes that arouse anger, but they also evoke deep empathy for the victims through their poignant portrayal of suffering.
The regional variations of the Odia language are so acute that they can sometimes be mutually incomprehensible. Even within the same regions, the idiom could vary with caste in different bastis. Going by the standardizer of Odia Gopal Chandra Praharaj’s observation in early twentieth century, there was a recognizable linguistic register used by the Dalits. He wonders if there was no difference between the ‘polished home-spoken idiom’ and that of the people belonging to the Bauri-Kandra caste. This not only shows the status the elite accorded the Dalits, but also the linguistic hierarchy associated with caste. It is important to note that Sunani and Naik deliberately deploy the idiom of the ‘Bauri-Kandra’ to fight age-old prejudices.
This poses a serious challenge to the translator, not so much to those who translate between Indian languages as to those who translate such texts into English. Unsurprisingly, in his Translator’s Note for Bheda, Raj Kumar says, ‘Translating it from Odia into English was not at all easy. Naik, a student of Odia literature, has used words… that are not textbook Odia.’ By ‘translating them into standard English idioms and phrases, they would lose their cultural significance.’ While he has stuck to this principle while translating Bheda, he adopts a different strategy in Burnt, where he has ‘let the semantics and technicalities of verbatim translation take a backseat’, and taken a few ‘creative liberties with the colloquial language used consciously by Sunani’. In the process, unfortunately, the cultural ecology in Podapodi is disturbed in Burnt with occasional excesses of Anglicized idiom in the latter, such as ‘Oscar winning performance’ of an actor, ‘icing on the cake’, ‘what is the big deal’ … or, even words such as ‘damsel’ and cliches like ‘time being a healer’, etc. The moot question is, has translation theory shifted from an earlier pro-author stance of faithfulness to the source text, which was often at the cost of readability, to the other extreme of adaptation and transcreation, leaning towards the reader of the target language? At what cost, only time—and, perhaps, a comparison between Raj Kumar’s translation of Bheda (2017) and Burnt (2025)—can tell.
Sumanyu Satpathy is former Professor, University of Delhi, Delhi.