Jagannath Das: The Book Kept in Every Village

And here is the institution, which is the reason this entry exists.

What it is

A small building in a village whose only purpose is to hold the Odia Bhagabata and have somebody read it aloud.

Called the Bhagabata Tungi, or Bhagabata Ghara, and traditional Odia villages had one, and a great many still do.

What it looked like

Small. A single room, often raised, often open on one or more sides, sometimes just a platform with a roof, in a central place in the village where people passed.

Inside: the book, wrapped, on a stand, and a lamp.

And that is the whole contents. No image, in most of them, and this is worth pausing on: the object of the room is a book.

What happened in it

Somebody read, in the evening, aloud, and people sat.

The reader was whoever in the village could read, and did not have to be a brahmana and frequently was not, and the position carried standing.

And the audience was everybody: people came after work, sat on the floor or on the ground outside, and listened, and children grew up hearing it.

What else it was used for

And this is the part that makes it an institution rather than a devotional arrangement.

• The village meeting place. Matters that concerned everybody were discussed there
• Dispute resolution. Village disagreements were brought there and settled there, in front of the book, which gave the proceedings a weight that a private settlement would not have had
• A school, in effect. Children learned to read on the Bhagabata, because it was the text that was there and the one being read aloud, so the language they learned to read was Jagannath Das's Odia
• A shelter, for travellers and for anybody who needed one

Which is a great deal of function for one small room, and it worked because the book was the thing everybody had in common.

Why this is worth knowing about now

Because it is a working model of something that is otherwise hard to build.

A place in a settlement that belongs to nobody, is open to everybody, costs nothing to enter, has one shared object at its centre, and gives people a reason to be in the same room in the evening.

And the reading aloud is doing the work. A room with a book in it is a library. A room where somebody reads the book out loud is a gathering, and the difference is that the second one includes people who cannot read.

What has happened to them

Many are gone and many are neglected, for the ordinary reasons: television, phones, migration to towns, and the disappearance of the evening as a shared time.

And many are still running, and there have been efforts to restore them, and a Tungi in a village that still has one is generally somewhere you can walk into.

And a person who wants to do something about it can do the small version anywhere: read something aloud, in the evening, to whoever is in the house. It requires a book, a light and thirty minutes.

And this is a real historical episode and it is not widely known outside Odisha.

The Odia Bhagabata

Jagannath Das's Odia rendering of the Bhagavata Purana, in nabakshari chhanda, the nine syllable metre, complete, in twelve skandhas.

And nabakshari is the technical fact that made it work.

A nine syllable line is short. It is easy to chant, easy to hold in the mouth, easy to keep a rhythm in over hours, and easy for a listener to follow.

And a text designed to be read aloud every evening for four centuries by non professional readers to a mixed village audience needs exactly that, and it is why the Bhagabata and not some more elegant work became the book in the Tungi.

Its effect on the language

Enormous, and this is the standard scholarly position rather than a devotional claim.

The Odia Bhagabata standardised written Odia. It was the text that was everywhere, the one people learned to read on, the one that established what Odia prose and verse sounded like, and the vocabulary and idiom of the modern language carry it.

Which is the position Tulsidas holds for Hindi and Luther's Bible for German, and it happens when one widely distributed text arrives before a language has settled its written form.

1870

And then this happened.

In the nineteenth century, under British administration, a serious proposal was made to abolish Odia as a language of administration and instruction and replace it with Bengali.

The argument was that Odia was not a real language but a dialect, that it had no literature of its own, that maintaining separate arrangements for it was wasteful, and that the region should simply use Bengali.

A pamphlet published in 1870 argued the case explicitly, and the question was live for years, and the administrative machinery of the period was capable of implementing it.

What stopped it

A campaign, and the evidence the campaign used.

The Odia language movement of the period, in which Fakir Mohan Senapati, Radhanath Ray, Madhusudan Rao, Gaurishankar Ray and others took the case up, argued that Odia was an ancient language with its own literature.

And the exhibits were Sarala Das and Jagannath Das.

A fifteenth century Mahabharata and a sixteenth century Bhagavata, both original works in Odia, both older than a great deal of what the comparison language had, and both in continuous use in every village.

Which is a hard thing to argue with, and the proposal failed, and Odia is a scheduled language with classical status and about forty million speakers.

Why this matters beyond Odisha

Because it is the concrete answer to a question that recurs throughout this series.

Every entry here has recorded somebody choosing the vernacular over Sanskrit: Jnaneshwar in Marathi, Jagannatha Dasa in Kannada, Nammalvar in Tamil, Kabir in the north, Sarala Das and now Jagannath Das in Odia.

And the usual reason given is access: the material should reach people who do not read Sanskrit.

Which is true and is not the whole of it.

The other consequence is that the language acquires a literature, and a language with a literature is much harder to eliminate, and languages do get eliminated, and the mechanism is usually administrative rather than dramatic.

Odia was nearly abolished by a memorandum in 1870, and what stopped it was two poets, one of whom was a farmer and one of whom was punished for reading to women.

Where to go

• Kapileswarpur, Puri district, associated with Jagannath Das
• Puri: the Jagannath temple and the Rath Yatra
• Any village Bhagabata Tungi, if you are in coastal Odisha and can find a working one
• Bhubaneswar, for the Odisha State Museum's palm leaf manuscript collection, which is one of the largest in India

A daily practice from this entry

• Jai Jagannath, which is the Odia greeting and the invocation
• A few verses of the Bhagabata, in Odia or in any language, read aloud
• And the Tungi test, applied to your own house: is there a time in the evening when everybody is in the same room and something is being read

Who: Jagannath Das, roughly 1490 to 1550, one of the Panchasakha, from Kapileswarpur in Puri district. His father Bhagavan Das was a purana panda, one of the reciters at the Jagannath temple whose work was reading the puranas aloud to whoever came, so Jagannath Das grew up inside the business of reading a text out loud to an audience that could not read it, and everything he did afterwards is that job scaled up.

The name: Atibadi, very great, which the tradition says Chaitanya gave him after hearing him recite, Chaitanya having come to Puri in 1510 and stayed. The community around him is the Atibadi sampradaya and still exists. The title was also used against him, since very great can be said the other way, and a man being called very great by people who think he has overreached is a familiar situation.

Reading to women: he read the Bhagavata aloud in Odia in the temple precincts to whoever came, and the audience was substantially women, including widows and women of communities with no access to the Sanskrit texts. The objection was immediate on two grounds: that putting a Sanskrit text into Odia degraded it, and that a man sitting at length and regularly with women and reading them scripture was not acceptable. He was reported to the Gajapati ruler and punished, the versions including imprisonment and physical punishment. Both grounds are the same ground: putting the text into Odia and reading it to women are one act, making the material available to people who had been outside it. The propriety charge was the one that was easier to bring, which is a mechanism worth recognising, since the stated objection to somebody is very often not the actual objection and is chosen because it is the one that can be said out loud.

The Bhagabata Tungi: a small village building whose only purpose was to hold the Odia Bhagabata and have somebody read it aloud. A single room, often raised and open on one or more sides, containing the book on a stand and a lamp, and in most of them no image, so the object of the room is a book. Somebody read in the evening and people sat, the reader being whoever in the village could read and frequently not a brahmana. It was also the village meeting place, the venue where disputes were settled in front of the book, in effect a school where children learned to read on the Bhagabata, and a shelter. It is a working model of something otherwise hard to build: a place that belongs to nobody, is open to everybody, costs nothing to enter, has one shared object at its centre, and gives people a reason to be in the same room in the evening. A room with a book is a library; a room where somebody reads it aloud is a gathering, and the difference is that the second includes people who cannot read.

Nabakshari chhanda: the nine syllable metre, and the technical fact that made the book work. A nine syllable line is short, easy to chant, easy to keep a rhythm in over hours and easy for a listener to follow, which is exactly what a text designed to be read aloud every evening for four centuries by non professional readers needs.

1870: in the nineteenth century a serious proposal was made under British administration to abolish Odia as a language of administration and instruction and replace it with Bengali, on the argument that it was a dialect with no literature of its own. The Odia language movement, including Fakir Mohan Senapati, Radhanath Ray, Madhusudan Rao and Gaurishankar Ray, took the case up, and the exhibits were Sarala Das and Jagannath Das: a fifteenth century Mahabharata and a sixteenth century Bhagavata, both original works in Odia and both in continuous use in every village. The proposal failed. Languages do get eliminated and the mechanism is usually administrative rather than dramatic, and what stopped this one was two poets, one a farmer and one punished for reading to women.