Gopinath Mohanty

 

He and his elder brother, Kahnu Charan Mohanty, along with his nephew Guru Prasad Mohanty exercised tremendous influence on Oriya literature for about three decades. Born at Nagabali (a small village on the bank of River Mahanadi which can boast of producing some of the trendsetters in oriya literature be it Gopinath himself, Kahnu Charan and Guru Prasad) in Cuttack district on 20 April 1914, Mohanty received higher education at Ravenshaw College. He got his M. A. degree from Patna University in 1936.

Career

He joined the Orissa Administrative Service in 1938. Most of his service career was spent among the poor tribals of the undivided Koraput district. He retired from government service in 1969. In 1986, he joined San Jose State University in the U.S.A. as an Adjunct Professor of Social Sciences. He died at San Jose, Califormia on 20 August 1991.

Awards

He received Visuva Milan citation in 1950. He won the central Sahitya Akademi Award in 1974 for his prose-epic, Matimatala (The Fertile Soil; 1964). He was awarded the Soviet Land Nehru Award in 1970 for his Oriya Translation of Gorky’s work, My Universities, the D. Litt. Degree by Sambalpur University in 1976 and a Fellowship for Creative Writing in Oriya by the U.G.C. in 1979. In 1981, the government of India conferred on him Padma Bhushan in recognition of his distinguished contribution to literature. He was an Emeritus Fellow of Government of India for creative writing.

Novels

Gopinath appeared in the literary scene at Post Independent Age .The vibrant life of people of Orissa, rural as well as tribal, found expression in the works of these writers. In his fiction Gopinath Mohanty explores all aspects of Orissan life: life, both in the plains and in the hills. He evolves a unique prose style, lyrical in style, choosing worlds and phrases from the day-to-day speech of ordinary men and women.

Gopinath’s first novel, Mana Gahirara Chasa, was published in 1940, which was followed by Dadi Budha (1944), Paraja (1945) and Amrutara Santan (1947). He published 24 novels, 10 collections of short stories in addition to three plays, two biographies, two volumes of critical essays, and five books on the languages of Kandh, Gadaba and Saora tribes. Moreover, he translated Tolstoy’s War and Peace (Yuddh O Shanti in three volumes, 1985–86) and Togore’s Jogajog (tr. 1965) into Oriya.

Although Gopinath has tried his hand at various literary forms, it is for his novels that he will be best remembered. “Fiction, I realized, would best suit my purpose”, he once said in an interview to Indian Literary Review. He uses the novel to portray and interpret several dimensions of human existence. He draws the material for his writing from his rich experience and transforms it imaginatively into a powerful image of life.