Charudutta Panigrahi

An open reckoning with the Sahitya Akademi, with the nation, and — most uncomfortably — with ourselves

Here is a language that traces its lineage to Odra Prakrit, itself born of Magadhi Prakrit, spoken across eastern India more than fifteen hundred years ago. A language whose literary tradition runs through four documented evolutionary phases — Proto Odia, Old Odia, Middle Odia, and Modern Odia — an unbroken continuum that places it among the longest-running literary lineages on the subcontinent. A language whose soldier-poet Sarala Das rendered the entire Mahabharata in the fifteenth century, giving it the first act of epic literary ambition in any modern Indian tongue. A language whose Panchasakha poets — Jagannath Dasa, Balarama Dasa, Achyutananda Dasa, Ananta Dasa, and Mahapurusha Jasobanta Dasa— fused devotional mysticism with literary sophistication in ways that anticipated the Bhakti movement's finest hours. A language whose seventeenth-century titan, Upendra Bhanja, composed with a range and grandeur that set the formal register of classical Odia poetry for centuries to come. A language that, in Fakir Mohan Senapati, produced India's first anti-feudal, realist novelist before realism had become fashionable in most Indian literatures.

And here is that same language — declared a Classical Language of India in 2014, the sixth to receive that constitutional honour — represented by precisely seven monographs out of 651 in the Sahitya Akademi's flagship Makers of Indian Literature series. Seven. Out of six hundred and fifty-one. Let that number do its quiet, devastating work.

For context: English accounts for 274 of those monographs. Hindi claims 96. Urdu has 51. Tamil has 41. Kashmiri and Maithili have 28 each. Kannada has 27. Even Rajasthani — a language not included in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution — has 15. Bengali has 15. Odia, a classical language with four Jnanpith laureates and a literary tradition spanning a millennium, has seven. One might call this an oversight, except that oversights do not sustain themselves across six decades of publishing.

What Does "Classical" Even Mean Anymore?

The Government of India's criteria for classical language status are admirably specific: high antiquity of early texts over a period of 1,500 to 2,000 years; a body of ancient literature considered valuable heritage by generations of speakers; a literary tradition that is original and not borrowed; and a discontinuity between the classical form and its modern descendants. Odia meets every one of these criteria. Its inscriptional record stretches back to the Asanpat inscription of the third century CE. Its literary corpus, running from palm-leaf manuscripts to Penguin anthologies, is among the richest in the Indo-Aryan family.

But what does the designation actually confer upon a language in the daily life of its speakers? While established by the Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL) in Mysore, the physical Centre of Excellence for Studies in Classical Odia (CESCO) is set up in Bhubaneswar to focus on research and preservation of the language. Can its performance be made known to the public?  Two international awards for scholars. Some university chairs. These are not trivial, but they are administrative gestures, not cultural transformations.

The classical tag, for most Odia speakers, functions as a plaque on a building nobody enters. It is a credential deployed in competitive examination syllabi and government press releases, then quietly forgotten. It has not translated into a single additional translated Odia novel appearing on the shelves of a Delhi or Mumbai bookstore. It has not produced a dedicated chair of Odia literary studies at any of India's most prominent central universities that actually draws international scholars. It has not arrested the declining readership within Odisha itself.

The cynical reading — and it deserves to be stated plainly — is that "classical" status has become a political token, a concession to regional sentiment that flatters without empowering. The honest question is not whether Odia deserves the tag. It does, overwhelmingly. The question is whether the tag, in its current form, means anything at all.

A Language That Gave India Its First Literary Award — Then Watched From the Margins

Consider the sheer improbability of this fact: the first Sahitya Akademi Awards were given in 1955, with multiple winners across different languages simultaneously. Gopinath Mohanty was one of several inaugural winners that year. Mohanty went on to win the Jnanpith Award in 1974 for Mati Matala, a work that a Cornell professor of English (Satya Prakash Mohanty) has called the output of "the most important Indian novelist in the second half of the twentieth century."

He was not alone. Sachidananda Routray received the Jnanpith in 1986. Sitakanta Mahapatra in 1993. Pratibha Ray — one of the few women to win India's highest literary honour — received it in 2011. Four Jnanpith laureates from a single language tradition. Only Hindi, Kannada, Bengali, Malayalam, and Urdu have produced more. Odia stands alongside Gujarati and Marathi in this count, and ahead of Telugu, Assamese, Tamil, and Punjabi.

And yet, in the Sahitya Akademi's own bimonthly journal, Indian Literature, which describes itself as featuring translations from "twenty-three Indian languages," the representation of Odia literature has been, by any honest accounting, negligible. The journal did dedicate a special issue to Odia literature — in 1979. Nearly half a century ago. One special issue in sixty-eight years of publication is not celebration; it is a footnote.

The Mirror We Refuse to Face: Corrosive Complacency Within

Before directing all righteous anger at New Delhi's literary bureaucracy — and it deserves a generous share — Odisha must confront a more uncomfortable truth. The state's own literary ecosystem has been complicit in its marginalisation. This is not a failure of talent. It is a failure of infrastructure, ambition, and institutional will. Call it what it is: corrosive complacency.

The translation economy tells the story with brutal clarity. Hundreds of literary works from Bengali, Telugu, and Hindi have been rendered into Odia and fill the shelves of libraries across Odisha. The reverse traffic — Odia works translated outward into other Indian languages, let alone into English or other international languages — remains a trickle. The Odisha Sahitya Akademi has not, to this day, instituted a dedicated award for the translation of Odia works into other Indian languages. The result is a tradition that enriches its own readers generously while remaining functionally invisible to the rest of the country.

This invisibility is not entirely imposed from outside. It is partly cultivated from within, through a peculiar Odia tendency to treat literary heritage as a private devotion rather than a public project. The Odia literary community has, for decades, been content to celebrate its giants in memorial lectures and felicitation volumes that circulate among the already converted. It has not built the institutions — the translation houses, the literary agencies, the international residency programmes, the aggressive digital publishing platforms — that turn a regional literature into a national and global conversation.

Can you honestly ask yourself, “What is the University of Culture doing? Who is paying for it”?

Where is the Odia equivalent of the Kerala Sahitya Akademi's translation programme, which has systematically rendered Malayalam literature into dozens of languages? Where is the equivalent of the Katha Prize for translation that catalysed Hindi short fiction's visibility in English? Where is the Odia literary festival that operates at the scale and ambition of the Jaipur Literature Festival or even the Mathrubhumi International Festival of Letters? The Odisha Literary Festival exists, but it operates at a fraction of the scale needed to shift national attention. The state government's investment in literary infrastructure — digital archives, translation grants, international fellowships — remains negligible compared to what Karnataka, Kerala, or West Bengal commit to their literary traditions.

Odia literature's first Dalit novel — Bheda by Akhila Naik — arrived only in 2010, translated into English by Oxford University Press in 2017. This is not a commentary on Odia society's caste dynamics alone; it is evidence of a literary establishment that was slow to make room for voices that challenge its own inherited hierarchies. The experimental fiction, the graphic novel adaptations, the literary non-fiction, the podcast-driven oral storytelling — the forms through which younger literatures are renewing themselves — have been adopted in Odia letters at a pace that can only be described as glacial.

The language of literary criticism within Odia has calcified. The dominant mode remains reverential exegesis of canonical figures rather than the restless, argumentative, sometimes irreverent engagement that keeps a literary tradition alive. When Ramesh Patnaik noted in a 2025 essay that Odia literature's outbound translation record is dismal, the observation was treated as a lament rather than a call to arms. This is what corrosive complacency looks like: the ability to diagnose a disease while refusing the cure, decade after decade, until the diagnosis itself becomes a literary genre.

The Dwindling of Intellectualism — Or Its Quiet Retreat?

Is Odia intellectualism declining? The question is too crude. What is happening is subtler and possibly more damaging: Odia intellectual life is retreating into enclaves. The university departments of Odia literature, once hotbeds of debate, increasingly function as custodial institutions rather than generative ones — preserving old syllabi rather than producing new scholarship that engages with contemporary literary theory, comparative literature, or digital humanities. The brightest Odia literary minds often publish in English, contributing to departments of Comparative Literature or Postcolonial Studies at universities abroad, their insights circulating everywhere except back into the Odia literary ecosystem.

The Odia groups or the so-called Cultural Associations (both in the state and among the diaspora) are gerontocratic race of one upmanship in ‘individual intellectualism”, which dies as fast as it is thrusted upon. Even faster and the association is back to organising “event”, without objectives or outcomes.

In the 1950s, Dr. Harekrushna Mahatab's Bishuba Milan — organised through the Prajatantra — functioned as a genuine congregation of intellectuals where young, unestablished writers and thinkers were discovered, recognised, and publicised with a seriousness that set the benchmark for quality writing in the state; in the seven decades since, Odisha has not produced a single comparable platform, replacing that culture of literary mentorship with glittering five-star literary festivals in Bhubaneswar where a young writer from Sonepur or Kalahandi cannot even enter the venue.

This is not decline. It is dispersal — which, for a language that needs concentration and institutional density to survive, may be worse.

Meanwhile, the publication of new Odia literary journals has slowed. The readership for serious Odia fiction is ageing. Young Odia writers increasingly face a choice that writers in larger-market languages do not: write in Odia for a shrinking audience and minimal financial return, or write in English for visibility and livelihood. This is not a uniquely Odia problem, but the absence of robust institutional support makes it uniquely acute.

What Must Be Done — Not Eventually, But Now

The Sahitya Akademi must be held accountable for the grotesque underrepresentation of Odia in the Makers of Indian Literature series. Seven monographs for a language with four Jnanpith laureates and a literary history spanning a millennium is not an oversight — it is institutional negligence. The Akademi should commission at minimum twenty new monographs on Odia literary figures within the next five years, covering not just canonical names but the neglected: Bhima Bhoi, the tribal poet-saint; Gangadhar Meher, the Sambalpur lyricist; Kanhu Charan Mohanty; Binapani Mohanty; and the new generation of Odia women writers.

The Government of Odisha must establish a State Translation Mission — modelled on the National Translation Mission but focused specifically on Odia literature — with an annual corpus sufficient to fund at least thirty translations of Odia works into English, Hindi, and other Indian languages each year. The 728-page Big Book of Odia Literature published by Penguin Random House has shown that there is a market and an appetite. What is missing is supply.

Odia civil society — its literary associations, its university departments, its cultural trusts, its diaspora organisations — must abandon the comfortable posture of grievance and adopt the uncomfortable posture of action. Demanding recognition from Delhi is necessary. Building the infrastructure that makes recognition unavoidable is more necessary. The Utkal Sahitya Samaj, the oldest Odia literary body, must evolve from a ceremonial institution into an operational one, with a translation wing, a digital publishing arm, and an international outreach programme.

The Odisha state government should mandate and fund the digitisation of every Odia palm-leaf manuscript still in private or temple collections — an estimated corpus of hundreds of thousands of texts — before they are lost to humidity, neglect, and time. The Centre of Excellence for Studies in Classical Odia, currently housed in Bhubaneswar, must be upgraded from a research outpost to a fully-fledged institute with international faculty exchanges and publication capacity.

And finally, Odia literary criticism must be revitalised. This means funding new literary journals — digital-first, bilingual, argumentative — that are willing to be unkind to mediocrity and generous to experiment. A literary tradition that only praises itself is a tradition rehearsing for its own eulogy.

The Last Word — For Now

In 1869, Gourishankar Ray wrote an essay lamenting the neglect of the Odia language. Over 150 years later, that essay was included in Penguin's anthology, and its editors noted, with quiet discomfort, that it remained entirely relevant. This is the central paradox of Odia literary history: a tradition of extraordinary endurance, trapped in a cycle of extraordinary neglect — from outside and, more damningly, from within.

Odia literature does not need pity. It needs publishers. It does not need another memorial lecture. It needs a translation pipeline. It does not need the word "classical" on a government certificate. It needs the word "classical" to mean something — in bookshops, in syllabi, in the consciousness of a nation that has decided, through sheer inattention, that one of its oldest literary voices has nothing left to say.

The author writes on language policy, cultural institutions, and literary heritage in India.