Sankhari, a coastal village in the Balasore district of Odisha, is where Manoj Das was born on 27 February 1934, and it is where the essential material of his fiction was gathered long before he thought of himself as a writer. He spent his childhood in a landscape of paddy, palm and tidal creek, in a community where flood and folk tale arrived with equal regularity, and he drew on it for the rest of his life. Even after six decades spent far to the south, in Puducherry, the villages of his stories retained the exact texture of that coast — the temple courtyard, the rumour that outruns the fact, the old man who has seen something no one else will admit to seeing.

Early years and education

Das began writing extraordinarily young. His first collection of poems, Satabdira Artanada, appeared in 1949, when he was still in his teens, and by 1950 he had founded and was editing a literary magazine, Diganta — an act of remarkable confidence for a schoolboy from a Balasore village. His first collection of short stories, Samudrara Kshyudha, followed in 1951.

He graduated from Samanta Chandra Shekhar College in Puri in 1955 and took a postgraduate degree in English literature at Ravenshaw College in Cuttack. The choice mattered: he emerged equally at home in Odia and in English, and he would go on to write substantially in both, sometimes recasting his own work from one language into the other rather than allowing a translator to stand between him and his reader. Very few Indian writers of his generation held that double citizenship so completely.

Politics, prison and a turning

The young Das was a political radical. He was drawn into student activism of a distinctly revolutionary cast, and it cost him a year in jail. In 1959 he travelled to Bandung in Indonesia for an Afro-Asian students' conference, at a moment when that city stood as a symbol of newly independent nations imagining a shared future.

What followed was one of the decisive reversals of his life. Das turned away from Marxism — not in bitterness, by his own account, but because he came to believe that the transformation he wanted could not be achieved by political machinery alone. In 1963 he moved to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Puducherry, and he remained associated with it for the rest of his life. He became professor of English literature at the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, teaching there for decades and shaping several generations of students.

The change of direction did not produce a didactic writer. Das almost never preached in his fiction. What the philosophical turn seems to have given him instead was patience, a reluctance to judge his characters, and a settled conviction that the visible world is thinner than it looks — a conviction that shows up in his stories as atmosphere rather than argument.

The work

Das is most celebrated as a short-story writer, and his stories occupy a territory that is entirely his own. They are typically set in an Odia village, told in a mild and unhurried voice, and populated by recognisable people — a landlord, a schoolmaster, a servant, a wandering ascetic. Into that ordinary world something unaccountable is introduced: a ghost who behaves badly, a prophecy that comes true in the wrong way, a miracle that turns out to be a swindle, or a swindle that turns out to be a miracle. He never resolves the ambiguity by insisting on either explanation. The reader is left holding both.

Threaded through this is a gentle, forgiving irony. Das had a keen eye for human vanity and self-deception, and a marked reluctance to punish it. Greed and pomposity in his stories tend to be deflated rather than condemned, and his villagers are treated with the affection of someone who grew up among them and never came to look down on them.

His English collection The Crocodile's Lady appeared in 1975. He also wrote novels, among them Cyclones (1987), A Tiger at Twilight (1991) and Amruta Phala (1996), and he wrote a great deal for children, believing that work for young readers deserved the same care as anything else. Alongside the fiction ran a long career as an editor and essayist: besides Diganta, he edited the cultural magazine The Heritage in Chennai from 1985 to 1989.

Honours and legacy

Recognition accumulated steadily over half a century. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award for his work in Odia, and in 2000 the Saraswati Samman, one of the most prestigious literary honours in India. The Padma Shri followed in 2001, the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship — the Akademi's highest distinction — in 2006, and the Padma Bhushan in 2020, the year before his death.

Manoj Das died on 27 April 2021, at the age of eighty-seven. His standing in Odia letters is secure: he is regarded as one of the finest short-story writers the language has produced, and he did as much as anyone to carry Odia literary sensibility into English without flattening it. For readers who came to him first in English, he was often the first Indian writer to demonstrate that a village story need not be either a sociological document or a piece of nostalgia — that it could simply be strange, funny and true.

Sankhari remains the point of origin. The village supplied him with a world small enough to know completely and deep enough to write about for seventy years, and he repaid it by making its idiom legible to readers who would never see the Balasore coast.