Six Acres and a Third

-Fakir Mohan Senapati

“The nationalist search for the identity of a community is often preceded by a
construction of knowledge and consciousness of that identity.”

Before deciphering the actual essence of Six acres and a third by Fakir Mohan Senapati, I will try to present a brief scenario of Odisha before the British colonization.

History:

With the decline of the Mughal administration in India, Odisha came under the control of 2 extreme powers – the Nizams of Bengal and the Bhonsles of Nagpur. Where on one side the Maratha Marauders, having no intention of staying in Odisha, made it their exile land, the Nizams started sub-colonizing parts of Odisha. There was a phase in history when Odia was about to get registered as one of the dialects of Bengali.
And then started the famous event of English Colonization in Odisha.

Feudalism in Odisha:

“the insertion of India into colonialism is generally defined as a
change from semi-feudalism into capitalist subjection”

Feudalism in India was characterized by a class of landlords and by a class of subject peasantry, both living in a predominantly agrarian economy marked by a decline in trade and urbanism and by a drastic reduction in metal currency.
Interestingly, these zamindars plotted day and night to devour the helpless peasants and they succeeded in their devious schemes. They are the bourgeois who grew huge by looting the proletarians out of their physical strength and property. But what happens ultimately is that these zamindars got trapped unexpectedly by a superior force, The English, men who flew swiftly and robbed the toil of their whole life. The English entered just to trade but finally mastered encroaching upon all the riches of the colony.
Not only the colonizers from the outer world but also the insiders, like the Brahmins, fed from the pond. The Brahmins without doing any physical endeavor acquired a great deal of property by simply blessing the Maratha Subedars.
When the political and economical conditions in Odisha are analyzed, it is clear that British rule came as a liberating force for many. The Indians welcomed the British rule to free themselves from their previous colonizers, the Brahmins, the Marathas, and the Mughals. It became a metaphysical compulsion for the natives to await and to accept a better superior force.

Fakir Mohan Senapati and Colonization of Odisha:

Six Acres and a Third novel was
conceived as an answer to a social need and the needs of a specific mode of production. While Fakirmohan, trying to locate the ultimate cause of such a process, transcends history and time to speculate on human nature and the workings of fate, his immediate interest concerned the fifty years of political instability.
The circumstances under which colonialism came to Odisha were peculiar. The British did not grab power from the hands of the
indigenous rulers of Odisha. For a long time, the center of power that ruled Odisha was outside Odisha, either at Nagpur or at Murshidabad, and in many circles, the coming of the British was perceived as deliverance from misrule. The insidiousness of the colonial structures of power and culture could not be perceived by the common folk who had already been reeling under oppressive and exploitative systems of rule for quite some time.

The reaction of a native in Six Acres and a Third sums up the mood of the
people:

“Oh, horse, what difference does it make to you if you are stolen by
a thief? You do not get much to eat here; you will not get much to eat there.
No matter who becomes the next master, we will remain his slaves. We must look after our own interests” (205-206).

Six Acres and a Third record the political and the economic situation immediately after the occupation of the coastal districts of Odisha by the British East India Company. It highlights the consequences of the greed of the British rulers and their attempt to impose an alien economic and land revenue system. On the one hand, the British saved the common people from the violence and extortion of Maratha marauders, but, on the other, they ruined the traditional society in such a manner that the common people were disinherited from all their traditional occupations and professions. They were tied down to just one profession, i.e., agriculture. Soon, they were even disinherited from their lands by the Bengali sub-colonizers and were reduced to the status of farmhands. While the people in common were losing the moorings in their own land, a new privileged class got consolidated. This new feudal class consisted of the Bengali officers of the Company, the landlords from Bengal, and the few manipulative Odias who used their access to British education and their proximity to power to rise economically and socially. These neo-feudal were aping their colonial masters and were much more oppressive towards the common people, at whose cost they had risen socially.

Tragedy in Satire: Six Acres and A Third:

The dehumanizing effect of colonialism can be seen in the figures of Ramachandra Mangaraj, the protagonist of Six Acres and a Third. Mangaraj’s rise and fall can only be visualized in a colonial setup. By leveling traditional hierarchies and discrediting social norms, colonialism had spawned unnatural ambitions and easy means of fulfilling them. In the absence of the social safety valves that are available in a traditional society,
Mangaraj spends his childhood in a state of uncertainty and deprivation. In the absence of traditional social and moral reprimands, he uninhibitedly pursues his design of upward mobility through unworthy means.

Mangaraj manipulates the loopholes in the colonial legal system quite easily and establishes himself within a new feudal order where wealth and proximity to the rulers were the only qualifications for prominence. Mangaraj pays for his unnatural ambition and upward mobility through his alienation from the community. The signs of his dehumanization can be seen in the ruination of his family and the way he
has turned his house into a virtual brothel:

“Like birds of different feathers
seeking shelter in a large tree, [women] had flocked to Mangaraj’s house.
They kept arriving and leaving; it was impossible to keep track of their
movements” (54).

Mangaraj’s monomania for property not only transforms him into a commodity but also dehumanizes the entire world around him. Fakir Mohan seems to ascertain that not only greed but also the pursuit of wealth too could cause dehumanization. The colonial economic instrument is in this sense doubly corrosive: while allowing a few to arrogate power unto them and to enrich themselves disproportionately, it plunges the majority into a state of penury and disempowerment. Extreme poverty and disempowered, Fakirmohan rightly visualized, could be a source of moral degeneration and dehumanization.

For all its comic vitality, Chha Mana Atha Guntha is a poignantly tragic novel. Senapati’s world, that of nineteenth-century Odia society, had been transformed beyond recognition by the utilitarian ideas imported through “enlightened” British civil servants. A predominantly communal-rural-oral life started disintegrating under the pressure of a body of written laws and the alien values of English education. To the British,
this form of life had come to represent an anachronism, a crude form of socialism,
paralyzing the growth of individual energies and all their consequences.
The continuation of such a state of society, they felt, was “radically inconsistent with our rule both in theory and practice.”
Chha Mana Atha Guntha can be read as a passionate and moving rejoinder to the attitudes and programs of action enshrined in these remarks. For its characters, paralyzed by the “flood-like onrush” of English civilization, the utilitarian agenda practically meant the harsh imposition of unfeeling authority.

The action of the novel concerns a series of displacements affecting owners of the land, with the nature of ownership subjected to constant definition and redefinition. To take the one central example of the zamindari of Fatepur Sarasandha, we note that it was initially in the hands of the traditional Odia military aristocracy.
Senapati uses Sanskritized Oriya, a kind of Latinate diction, in describing them, thereby establishing the link between language and a way of life. This aristocracy loses its title to the land because it fails to cope with the new utilitarian dispensation which renders its benevolent paternalism and belief in personal valor obsolete. Over time, the zamindari passes into the hands of a Muslim trader (the ruling language is now Persian), who had bought it at an auction in Calcutta. This estate is then seen passing to an upstart Odia moneylender (the protagonist of the novel). In trying to defraud a poor weaver couple of a small parcel of land, (six acres and thirty-two decimals, to be precise), this moneylender-cum-zamindar gets into trouble with the law and loses his estate to his English-educated urban lawyer.

Faced with the law-enforcing agents of a colonial state (who take down every word that is uttered), the villagers of Gobindpur lapse into incoherence and silence. These are the same people who had a little while ago shown such remarkable resilience, pluck, and resourcefulness when they made the story of Mangaraja’s crime circulate with a lightning-like rapidity through the word of mouth. The very same people cower in fear because their depositions are “pen-imprisoned” or “Kalambandh” by the investigating officer. Writing is a source of power for those like Mangaraja, the protagonist of the novel, who can effectively control it. Mangaraja can dispose of the weaver couple through, among other things, his control over the written word. In the end, however, he loses out to an even more coherent, English-speaking/writing urban lawyer (Ram Ram Lala), a more finished product of the colonial/utilitarian order, who might be compared with Bitzer of Hard Times by Dickens. The shift from Mangaraja’s Oriya to Ram Ram Lala’s legal English denotes a transition from country to the city.

Chha Manna Atha Guntha is not, however, only an elegy on the gradual disappearance of a communal-rural-oral tradition. It also vigorously mobilizes resistance to the fact-based, rational order by raiding the resources of the same tradition.

On the day of the trial of Mangaraja, everything in the courtroom has been
“Englished”, as the novelist archly remarks. English law, in this instance, has turned English, thereby completing the alienation of the native Odias from a legal system designed to give justice to the individual members of an open, competitive society. Even the novelist is obliged to step into the role of a translator here, for the court proceedings on this day are conducted entirely in the English language in deference to the British civil surgeon who is present in the courtroom to give his testimony. Thus, the entire trial becomes an awesome display of colonial might, aimed at intimidating the native witnesses into submission.
Mr. H.R. Jackson, the white judge, at one point, threatens the Oriya defense lawyer with the cancellation of his lawyer’s license if the latter does not come to the point. Coming to the point, itself a thoroughly utilitarian prescription, means, in this instance, an unquestioned and unreserved acceptance of the authority of the British civil surgeon, A.B.C.D. Douglas (the son of, as the novelist playfully remarks, E.F.G.H. Douglas).
The irreverent wordplay on the English name here is part of Senapati’s wider purpose to defeat the language of power by the power of language. Senapati’s language derives much of its power from its allusive and allegorical qualities, the two main attributes of a rich and vibrant oral tradition.

Conclusion:

Senapati’s novel is a realistic portrayal of colonial rule. He balances the two realities of the Western Empire. The British colonial one on the one hand oppressed, enslaved, and exploited but on the other hand, it helped. Senapati says, “Today in the nineteenth century the sciences enjoy great prestige, for
they form the basis of all progress. See, the British are white-skinned, whereas Odias are dark in complexion. This is because the former have studied the sciences, whereas the latter does not know of these”.

British shaped India through its scientific inventions, a form of government and
enlightened many people. It was the missionaries who liberated the native people from their superstitious beliefs and provided education to the downtrodden natives. This is visible in the words of Senapati, “Ask a new babu his grandfather’s father’s name and he will hem and haw, but the names of the ancestors of England’s Charles the Third will readily roll off his tongue”. The British colonial rule was truly helping India by educating the lowly and deprived society. The downtrodden, illiterate people now became ‘babus’ because they have
mastered knowledge from their colonial masters. In other words, the natives were assimilated into the colonizers’ culture. The narrator is highly ironic in his words in conveying the realities.

Senapati’s every move in the novel is a critique of colonial rule. Every minute detail mirrors the consequentialism of British colonial rule in India.