Fakir Mohan Senapati has long been described as the "father of Oriya literature" for his pioneering writings in that language, which is spoken in India's Orissa region. Six Acres and a Third, his most well known work, explores the British colonial impact and the indigenous cultural and political resistance some 60 years before the novel's publication, at the turn of the 20th century.
The title refers to a small plot of land and the conflicts over its tenure, including sale and inheritance. The British imposition of new legal requirements, mediated through local administrators in their indirect rule method, unavoidably made some Indian people complicit in moving land to new owners who threaten the established social order.
Drawing on traditional Indian theatrical performative styles, the author creates a self-conscious narrator who mocks all the social pretenses he sees as abundantly present. This satirical slant opens the door for the serious social critique. Writing with hindsight, the author can foreshadow the outcomes of the disputes initiated in his pages, and thereby attribute blame for the resulting problems that he saw as primary in his own day.
https://books.google.com/books/about/Six_Acres_and_a_Third.html?id=8NhN-0g7unYC&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230118348_6
https://muse.jhu.edu/book/25638
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