States: Mizoram: Story of Plenty

In Orissa, politicians plot plots -- literally. The best-known novels of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, the 19th century Bengali writer, were recently released in a three-volume Oriya translation. The translator? Janaki Ballabh Patnaik, till February 9 chief minister of the state and since then a freelance if furious writer. Rendering such Bankim classics as Krishnakanter Will and Bisha Biksha into Oriya is not all that has kept Patnaik busy. Over the past two months, he has also compiled, edited and published the poems of his father, the late Gokulananda Patnaik.

The creative urge seems to run in the family. Patnaik's wife Jayanti, a former Congress MP herself, has translated K.M. Munshi's Krishna Avatar into Oriya. Son-in-law Soumya Ranjan Patnaik, also a former MP, has joined the club with a book of ponderous essays called Amo Ghararo Halchal (The State of Our Home). Patriarch JB is particularly pleased with his magnum opus, the Bankim collection. "It was time well spent," he says, "because writing gives me as much of a kick as politics. If not more." Patnaik proudly tells people that his literary career began well before his political one -- and that he penned an ode to Emperor Ashok when a humble schoolboy in Class VIII.

POLITICAL PENMANSHIP

J.B. Patnaik has just translated 14 of Bankim's novels into Oriya.
Naveen Patnaik is a noted author of cultural coffee-table tomes.
Nandini Satpathy has a Sahitya Akademi award for her fiction.
P.K. Patsani has found time to write an astounding 50 books.

Obviously being an "intellectual" is seen as a useful value-addition among Orissa's politicians. It somehow enhances public acceptability. By a conservative estimate, 40 leading Oriya politicians -- many of them of legislators and some even ministers -- have written books. Leading the pack, of course, is Naveen Patnaik, the venerable Biju's sophisticate son. Before he gave up the pen to found the Biju Janata Dal (BJD), Naveen wrote such coffee-table volumes as The Garden of Life: An Introduction to the Healing Plants of India and Second Paradise: Indian Courtly Life 1590-1947.

There's Nandini Satpathy, one-time chief minister who published her first novel, Kettoti Katha, in 1966. She's also a winner of the state Sahitya Akademi award. Outgoing BJD MP Prasanna Kumar Patsani is a politician who dabbles in poetry -- or is it the other way round? He has 50 books and this year's Fakira Mohan Senapit literary award to his name. He's also disarmingly frank about the utilitarian aspect of his penmanship: "Writing brings recognition. One climbs up the social ladder. A writer-politician is better placed than a non-writer."

Patsani's party colleague Panchanan Kanungo, MLA from Gobindpur (Cuttack), goes further in his assessment. With the confidence of four potboilers behind him, Kanungo remarks, "Orissa's politics can be awful. But its politicians are cerebral." Some see this as part of a historical process. After all, the National Movement in Orissa was led by writers and thinkers, and even Gopobandhu, the first Congress president in the state, was a man of letters.

The edifying past has given way to a more material present. Politicians are not beyond using their influence to ensure success for their books. When Kanungo tried to publish his first novel, in his pre-MLA days, he got himself a little collection of rejection slips. Today publishers queue up outside his door. It is unlikely that he's improved tremendously as a writer in the interim period.

There are other advantages to being a politician-cum-writer. The government could make bulk purchases of your books for its various libraries. Jadunath Das Mohapatra was fortunate that his one-act play Athaba Andhar was incorporated as a text by Utkal University a decade ago. Coincidentally, Mohapatra was state education minister at that point. Similarly, Satpathy's short story collection was adopted as a text by Berhampore University in 1974, when she was chief minister. Admits Patsani, "As politician writers, we are better placed than writers who are lesser mortals."

Finally, of course, there's literary sycophancy -- or its obverse, the poison pen approach. In the early '90s, when Kalinid Charan Behera was eager to cement his place in Biju's Janata Dal cabinet, he simply wrote a hagiography called Kalinga Bir. Evidently, the supreme leader appeared to be pleased.

On the other hand Jagannath Mallick, after he was sacked from Biju's ministry, demonised the then chief minister in Khudita Kharavela. The comic epilogue to the story is that today Mallick insists his book was "fictional". He has reason to worry as he's defected yet again and is now trying to get into the good books of Biju's son Naveen. Maybe he should have stuck to translations.