Provincial victorians: global capital and literary taste in colonial Odisha

Abstract

ABSTRACT Published in 1902, Fakir Mohan Senapati’s famous novel Six Acres and a Third sets up a parallel between the import of English commodities and English literary taste into Odisha in late nineteenth century. The paper takes this parallel as its point of departure to explore colonial Odia discourses on political economy and literary criticism, and goes on to study how they construct Odisha as a peripheral space. The paper finds that the public discussions on economy and literature shared a common ideological code. This code preferred to engage with history, whether economic or literary, by turning it into a moral question. This ideological code deeply informed the peripheral middle-class imagination, which often spoke for a working alliance between educated middle orders native aristocracy and colonial state for the sake of economic and literary progress in the region. The paper concludes by showing how this code was at work in Fakir Mohan, in his responses to colonialism, and in his engagement with a fundamental problem of the peripheral space, that of redundant capital. ‘Provincial Victorians’ refer to Fakir Mohan and several other public intellectuals of his generation who came to see themselves as inhabiting the economic and literary peripheries of the Victorian world system.