- Lived:
- 13 January 1843, Mallikashpur, Balasore (Baleshwar, Odisha) → Balasore, the tributary hill-states of Orissa, Cuttack; died Balasore, 14 June 1918
- Field:
- literature and language politics — the founder of modern Odia prose: first modern short story, first great Odia novel, first Odia autobiography; leader of the fight that kept Odia alive in its own schools
- The Big Idea:
- A language survives only if it has schools, textbooks, printing presses and readers — so when officials moved to abolish Odia, a self-taught schoolmaster built all four; then, past fifty, he wrote the fiction that proved the language could do anything.
- In their words:
- "Mangarāj kept every holy fast. On ekādaśī he ate nothing at all — nothing, that is, but a measure of milk, a few bananas, and a little flattened rice." (the sly narrator of Chha Māna Āṭha Guṇṭha, chapter 1 — the sense rendered from the Odia)
- If you remember one thing:
- Told to his face that his mother tongue was not a real language, an orphaned village schoolmaster answered with a printing press, a shelf of textbooks, and finally a novel about six acres and a third of stolen land — and the language he saved now has some forty million speakers and a state of its own.