Making sense of the new: Progress of modernity in colonial Odisha (part II)

Abstract

The first part of the article examined the cross-cultural semantics of the term modernity in the vernacular writing of the English-educated Odia intellectuals. It also threw light on the way the Odia elite, in the process of conceptualizing the new discourse and experience of modernity, came up with new terms such as adhunik/adhunikata as vernacular equivalents of modern/modernity. In this second part, the emphasis is on empirical and everyday manifestations of modernity in Odisha. It examines how the adhunik/modern came to be understood and internalized in vernacular idioms and the way it took a somewhat different trajectory than that in the rest of the Bengal Presidency of which some territories of Odisha were then a significant part. The article argues that the English-educated Odias periodically questioned aspects of the new, highlighting older values, and deploying the lessons of value modernity/adhunikata in its abstraction primarily to promote Odia language and literature, and to press demands for welfare measures in the Odia speaking tracts.