ABSTRACT
This essay examines the conditions of production of literary texts in nineteenth-century Odisha. In pre-colonial Odisha, writers and artists for their survival had no option but to depend on financial support of wealthy and powerful patrons such as kings and zamindars. In return for such favour many of them took recourse to the practice of bhanati, the attribution of the authorship of their own compositions to the patron. This practice was prevalent in the southern part of Odisha which had come under the heavy influence of literary conventions of the Telugu-speaking areas. Debendra Dash gives here the illustrative instance of Baladeb Ratha (1779–1840) who attributed the authorship of some of his poems to his royal patrons. He now goes on to show how the system of patronage underwent significant transformation under the impact of the economic and administrative policies introduced during colonial rule, emergence of an upstart middle class, and the advent of print culture. He places Gangadhar’s attribution of some of his works to his patron Nruparaj Singh, the zamindar of Barapali against this background and demonstrates how the poet’s relationship with the evolving system of patronage under colonial rule was a shifting and conflicted one. Debendra Dash convincingly argues that a misunderstanding of this relationship and an overemphasis on the poet’s poverty has resulted in a grossly distorted assessment of his extraordinary literary achievement. The essay derives its significance from the way it illuminates the integral link between a literary text and the matrix in which the text and its author are embedded.
