Beyond the Word: The Multiple Gestures of Tradition

Educated in Utkal, Allahabad and Cambridge Universities, Sitakant Mahapatra is a well-known anthropologist and a major voice in Indian poetry. He has been a fellow in the Universities of Cambridge and Harvard. Perhaps the best known interpreter of the oral poetry of the tribes of India he has earlier edited, with critical introductions, nine anthologies of such poetry. He has published numerous articles on the anthropology of development and oral literature in journals in India and abroad and chaired sessions in International Ethnological sciences. A doctorate in Development Anthropology, Oxford University Press ahs published his seminal works Modernisation and Ritual and The Realm of the Sacred: Verbal Symbolism and Ritual Structure. A Jnanpith Award winner for his poetry, he was earlier President of UNESCO’s Inter-governmental Committee of the World Decade for Cultural Development. Currently Chairman of the National Book Trust of India, he lives with his wife at Bhubaneswar, his home-town.