Gopinath Mohanty, the eminent Indian novelist, passed away in August 1991 after a brief illness. His Paraja and Amrutara Santan, two of the finest Indian novels since Independence, are structured on India’s little-known tribal world. The former received rave reviews when it was published by Faber and Faber in 1987, forty-two years after the publication of the original in Oriya. Amrutara Sanatn was the first Indian novel to receive the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1955. This little book is a perceptive over-view of Sri Mohanty’s world of fiction, its passionate human concern, its lyrical prose and its existential commitment to life. In the detailed interview we come to know this great novelist’s view of life in our times and his attitude to love and death.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Sitakant Mahapatra
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.
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