ABSTRACT
This essay examines aspects of contact and conflict between forest-dwellers and city-dwellers through a comparison of the portrayal of the Ekalavya episode in the Vyasa Mahabharata with its presentation in Sarala Das’s fifteenth-century Odia Mahabharata. The minor episode in Vyasa’s epic has been considerably expanded by Sarala Das who adds complex new dimensions to it. Gaganendra Nath argues that Sarala Das underscores the forest-city conflict and links it to the changes the poet must have witnessed in his own world. Moreover, he also strongly advocates the need for social justice for the forest-dwellers. Gaganendra Nath perceptively identifies the contours of the pattern underlying the conflict dramatized by Sarala Das in the Ekalavya episode: city-dwellers’ aggressive intrusion into the forest, their treatment of women forest-dwellers as rightful of objects of desire, the resistance of the forest-dwellers to such aggression, and their eventual defeat. The essay goes on to show how the conflict continues to be enacted in the modern world and follows almost the same pattern. Godabarish Mishra’s narrative poem “Arjun Singh”, Bhagabati Charan Panigrahi’s short story “Shikar” [The Hunt] and Gopinath Mohanty’s classic novel Paraja illuminate forest-dwellers’ vulnerability in the face of the city-dwellers’ exploitative machinations.
