ABSTRACT
This chapter explains Natabara Samantaraya's thesis: a self-conscious fusion of Indian and European intellectual and cultural traditions constituted the experience known as literary modernity in Oriya. In subsequent years, literary education received increasing attention in the Oriya public sphere. Emergence of Oriya literature as an academic discipline brought in its wake intense debates on what kind of literature was worthy of being taught in schools. Samantaraya is well known for the wide-ranging and exhaustive survey he offers of the literature written in Oriya in the nineteenth-century. Literary modernity in Oriya consisted of synchronic comparisons with other academic disciplines and diachronic negotiations with pre-colonial aesthetic genealogies. The Utkala Sahitya was the most influential literary periodical in early twentieth-century Orissa. The Manual of Teaching contrasts the new model of education it advocates with the older model of education prevalent in the chatshalis, the traditional rural schools of Orissa.
