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The Amalgamation of Realism and Fantasy and the Presentation of Multiple
Truths in Manoj Das’ Fiction
Dr. Pragyan Prabartika Dash
Lecturer in English
Vyasanagar Autonomous College
Jajpurroad, Odisha, India
Manoj Das uses both familiar and unfamiliar themes for his fictional works. While the
unfamiliar themes reflect over man’s mysterious relationship with the natural and the
supernatural world and man’s helplessness in the face of an omnipotent supernatural order, the
familiar themes have strong socio-political and human significance and point to man’s strengths
and weaknesses. Das very often mingles and juxtaposes both the themes and uses magical realist
devices and elements to offer the vision of a deeper and truer reality. Sarat Chandra Parida
rightly says that the themes of Manoj Das “range from the most matter-of fact happenings of
everyday life to the events suggestive of supernatural”( Short Stories Of Manoj Das.htm).
The stories and fictions of Das written about the time of pre-independence and postindependence period present the effects of transition. Born in a remote village in Odisha and
born before India’s Independence, he thoroughly uses in his fictions the experiences of his
impressionable age and of the epoch-making transitions through which the country was passing.
Thus we meet in his works lively themes relating to India's passage from the colonial era to
freedom, the impact of the end of the princely states and the feudal system, and the mutation of
several patches of rural India into clumsy bazaars. In this context writes K. R. S. Iyengar, “The
background is rural India, the changing yet changeless Indian village or the rather more quickly
changing ‘our small town’…not of Orissa alone, but of rural India” (The Hindu 1986).
In stories like “The Owl”, “The Birds at Twilight”, “Time for a Style” and “The Strategy”
we meet Zamindars devoid of their power due to colonial rule and the frustrations, day-dreaming
and anxieties in them arising there from. His novel Cyclones makes a penetrating study of the
village Kusumpur and its inhabitants when the village grows into a hick town. In The Tiger at
Twilight, the fear of the tiger is actually the fear of the unknown future in the hands of colonial
rulers. One could be attacked anytime by the tiger and so everyone is always under threat. In
The Escapist, the search for self is actually the search for National Identity which is felt all
through the novel. In a land where people can hardly differentiate between a fake and a true
mystic, the lesson given by the author is ironic through this search of the self.
One idea is very clear in all these stories and novels: facts are most often presented
before the characters in such a way that they are far from truth and reality. Being uneducated and
unemployed, people live in dreams and superstitions. Rural beliefs and superstitions arise from
inadequate understanding of facts like the decaying feudalism, the World War, the British
colonialism, the contemporary social-political scenario, the famine, the flood, the cyclone and
their devastating effects on ordinary life. Dick Batstone opines:
His work shows familiarity with every aspect of Indian village life, and also with
the effects of change on the feudal society that was breaking up, and the
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predicament of people, formerly of some importance, caught up in the social
upheavals involved in the making of new India. (Introduction to The Submerged
Valley and Other Stories)
Science and technology are difficult subjects to understand. So, even though realistic, the
subjects are being perceived as unreal and blurring by some people who have already formed
their opinions and live in their made-up worlds. They are suspended between dream and reality.
For instance, things like cinema and gramophone cannot be accepted easily by an old woman in
The Fourth Friend. A moving circus party plays music on a gramophone all day and the machine
is kept in a villager’s house. In the solitude of night, the old granny of that house is found to be
requesting the invisible singers to come out of the gramophone and receive food.
In “The Tree”, the banyan tree is believed to be the goddess having magical power, and
the pundit is possessed by it from time to time. The tree is both real and marvellous as long as it
lives. Various supernatural powers and prophesies are associated with an owl in the story “The
Owl”. The villagers connect their destiny and their future with it. In “The Crocodile’s Lady”, the
lady who claims herself to be a lady-crocodile once, is believed not only by the villagers but also
by Dr. Batstone, the learned foreigner who is charmed by her story. Mahatma Languly Baba’s
impact is as strong over the villagers as that of Abolkara in “The Submerged Valley”.
In “The Owl”, “The Submerged Valley”, “Farewell to a Ghost” and “The Dusky
Horizon” etc., the theme of the supernatural is very graphically portrayed. Supernaturalism
imparts to the fictions of Das qualities that could appropriately be linked with magical realism.
The reader comes across supernatural events occurring according to a separate set of principles
that are beyond the law of nature. Supernatural entities like angels and spirits appear in Das’
fictions. The reader meets the ghost of Pramath in “Friends and Strangers” which may be
hallucinatory, but is realistic so far as its action is concerned. The spirit of Ashok is seen in “The
Bridge in the Moonlit Night” and no explanation is given in the story to falsify it. Likewise, in
“Farewell to the Ghost," the theme of the supernatural is seen both from an adolescent and an
adult perspective, though in a delightful manner. Associative stories are believed to support the
existence of the ghost. People bid farewell to her by offering food and expressing grief and the
children change their playground near her new residence to give her company. With reference to
this story the newspaper daily The Hindu writes, “The treatment of the ghost in a charmingly
rural context laden with legend, myth, folklore and beliefs makes the appearance of the ghost an
endearing affair” (www. thehindu.com).1
Despite the ambience of fantasy, a hard core of realistic predicament underlines the
stories of Das. In “Evenings at Nijanpur”, supernaturalism is introduced through the presence of
the ghost of a young man who was the probable suitor of the headmistress once and who creates
the ambience of a third world for the lady. Her communication with the spirit and the spirit’s
possession of a young man to respond to her really captures the senses of the reader.
Das very astutely differentiates between mysticism and occultism through the themes he
uses in his stories. In “The Sage of Tarungiri and the Seven Old Seekers”, this becomes very
palpable through his simultaneous treatment of both the themes. The seven old members of
Merry Guys Club once become too curious about mysticism and wish to gain some miraculous
knowledge. Their inquisitiveness leads them to meet Tukan Baba, better known as ‘Weeping
Baba,’ who lives high up on a hill. They are given assurance by a disciple of the Baba that they
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would be blessed with the Baba’s weeping. But their excitement fades away when they see him
smiling instead for some unknown reasons. They get frustrated as they do not have the
knowledge to understand the mystic pleasure of the sage which he innocently expresses through
a smile while looking at the moon. Their frustration transforms into a vigorous urge to meet him
again when they are informed about the auspicious nature of his smile. Their mystic desire
transforms into a sort of aggressive greed and they try to enter into the cave of the Baba. But
soon they flee from that place with fear when they encounter two glaring eyes and a ferocious
roar of the guard which are instances of the occult practice.
The theme of “The Vengeance” is highly occult. Vilas Singh chases Bahadur, his age-old
enemy with an unending vengeance. He meets his enemy in his new incarnated form as his own
son so the story ends in sheer irony. Occultism again appears in “Red Red Twilight”. Das
realistically presents the process of exorcism.
Mystery surrounds the background of the fictions of Das. In this context the daily
newspaper The Hindu writes, “Mystery in a wide and subtle sense, mystery of life, indeed, is the
core of Manoj Das’s appeal” (www.thehindu.com).2 Mysteries in the fictions of Das are unfolded
before the reader from a child’s eye-view where the author himself is the speaker and the themes
are based on the recollections of his childhood memories. So when the mystery is unfolded, the
realistic message or fact behind it can easily be understood by the reader.
Mystery envelops the entire atmosphere of the novella The Dusky Horizon with its
natural and supernatural surroundings. The hill named “Peacock Hill” and the deep forest near it
create awe and wonder among the children of the near-by village. The ogre on the hill, the
goblins, the ghosts, the demons and the corporeal and the ethereal bodies are believed to be the
inhabitants of that forest and the hill and they create great inquisitiveness among the children.
Mystery is unfolded from time to time in the novella The Tiger at Twilight. The setting
of Samargarh and Nijanpur, surrounded by hills and mountains, is full of mysteries. The Raja’s
nocturnal adventures in search of his ancestral treasure and his faith in the Yaksha who is the
watchman of this wealth are highly mysterious. The man-eater tiger and the series of deaths
create tension and anxiety in the villagers as they always live under the threat of danger and
expect their Raja to save them from it. The princess’ emotional turmoil is shrouded in mystery
until it is revealed as a psychological disorder. Heera, the mysterious daughter of this Raja, is so
evil-minded that her moves and manoeuvres cannot be fathomed. Her face resembles that of a
tigress and she is supposed to be metamorphosed into a tigress at the climax of the story when
she loses her life. All these elements capture suspense and mystery which appear very much
gothic. It is also argued that “A Tiger at Twilight is a unique creation, at once unmistakably
realistic and surrealistic” (World of Manoj Das.com)3.
Das has seen through the miseries of the modern man which drive him to behave
strangely at times. Amaresh Dutta writes, “He penetrates into the psyche of the individual and
focuses on the perversions and miseries of life” (873).
In “A Transcendence”, Hiranmoy takes things to be done and orders to be passed by him
when in reality they are non-existent. One day he meets his old friend, a mystic by that time. He
sees puppies playing near his friend and taking them to be his grandchildren accuses him of
breaking the vow of celibacy. His perception is an illusion that creates humour in the story. Das
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skillfully mingles these fantastic elements with realistic backgrounds which relate to the
character’s old age and past reminiscences.
The pressure and fear of society, community and family sometimes compel people to live
in a fantastical world and make others believe in that world. This fantastical reality makes up for
their sense of inferiority. “Kuturi Nani” is a story where a helpless and suppressed woman builds
a magic castle in her imagination in which she lives with her prince charming. According to her,
the castle cannot be seen by any ordinary person, and the bridegroom cannot meet any one in
day-time during which period he is metamorphosed into a bear that even attacks her. Everything
is proved to be false one day in front of the child-narrator and the magic castle for him turns out
to be a dilapidated hut, and the prince charming a cruel drunkard who beats the poor woman in
reality and not in any metamorphosed form. All these are difficult to understand by the small
child and he suffers due to the transformation of his beautiful dream-world into a terrible reality.
The most amusing of all is “Bhola Grandpa and the Tiger” where forgetfulness makes the
old man do unbelievable things, including losing his grandson in a crowd, though without
realizing it. He walks ahead with a tight grip over the supposed hand of the grandson. On another
occasion, he is found sprawling on his veranda with his tongue stretched out. The most
miraculous thing happens when he comes across a tiger on his way home and stays up on a tree
the whole night in fear. But in forgetfulness, he dreamily climbs down in the morning and passes
in a calm and quiet manner before the staring tiger that was waiting for the prey all night.
Nothing happens between him and the tiger which creates utter amazement. He passes away in
his dream and his wife announces his death to be only a consequence of forgetting to breathe. In
this story reality and unreality confront each other in an amusing manner.
Man’s sense of isolation and disillusionment in this world is always portrayed under the
impact of fantasy by Das which has an entertaining value. With reference to Manoj Das, Jatindra
Mohan Mohanty opines, “The essential feelings of loneliness and helplessness on the one hand,
and a desire for hiding these behind a veneer of gaiety, entertainment and wit characterize many
of his stories” (Modern Indian Literature 314). Das investigates into man’s loneliness and his
struggle and suffering in search of the self. The search is often due to loss of freedom and it
recurs in his fictions most of the time. “Birds at Twilight” presents the struggle between loss of
freedom and the deathless attachment to freedom.
Rootlessness and disconnection from the community and the past make individuals feel
alienated. Das’s characters often struggle unsuccessfully to identify themselves, let alone possess
an essential self. The search for identity, both national and personal, often forms an integral
subject in the fictions of Das. In Cyclones, Sandip Choudhury searches for these two identities
and suffers like Saleem in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.
In the story “The Kite”, the theme is the loss of freedom and the ever-longing chase for it.
Kunja, the orphan boy chases after a kite the whole of his life which symbolizes his chase for
freedom. In his dreamland he lives with the kite and it becomes the purpose of his living. He has
lost it in his childhood and along with it he loses his freedom through false charges that bring
him imprisonment and bondage. His chases for the kite continue until he views one after a long
gap of seven years and even then he chases after it. The chase leads him towards the distant
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horizon and he finally plunges into the sea and loses his life. He is thus freed from bondage,
clutching the liberty with both hands.
Man’s alienation from family and society and his search for identity produce multiple
realities in front of him. They lead to a fall from one’s original belief. It is very poignantly
unfolded in the story “Sita’s Marriage”. Multiple realities behind the system of marriage shatter
the innocent dreams of Sita, a young girl and make her inner-self miserable. The glory associated
in her mind with the marriage of the girl Vasanti, a neighbour fascinates her in childhood and she
imagines herself as a bride. In her dream she becomes the bride of Lord Rama which makes her
a real mystic. The dreamland remains glorious in her as long as Vasanti is alive. But her
unsuccessful marriage and unnatural death suddenly blur in Sita the distinction between dream
and reality and even between known and unknown realities. Sita’s soul is fragmented between
them and they impel her to escape from marriage. It must have tortured her soul for which she
passes away silently when her marriage is fixed. The mystical self, which has long ago been
surrendered before God, is not be prepared to tolerate the artificiality and the hidden hypocrisy of
marriage system, for which her alienated soul escapes from this mundane world.
Degradation may appear in human nature due to social and political reasons for which
persons act unnaturally and face unreal situations. In “Sharma and the Wonderful Lump”, Mr.
Sharma, too proud to have the biggest lump on his head, earns name and fame out of this odd
thing. Even after removing it with the help of a mystic through the initiative of his mother, his
desire for recognition does not diminish. With the fantastical caricature of the Aboo (the lump),
the author presents the realistic aspects of society.
Social, political and personal problems often degrade man spiritually and morally. Man’s
own identity becomes blurred and he himself questions its purpose. The search for self becomes
essential and sometimes it sends him to another world. This theme has been elaborately dealt
with in the novel The Escapist. Padmalochan, a simple and sober workman and a not-soimportant person in the society, who is searching for his self, is instantly made the mystic Guru
who does not himself realize any spiritual metamorphosis in him. His alienation from society is
seen through metamorphosis and fragmentation of the self. His journey from a simple poor man
to an acting Saint and then to a real mystic is not easy to complete. It goes beyond the way of
normal perception and understanding. The mystical experiences of the fragmented self and its
merging with the deviated soul form the core of the story.
Man’s search for self and solitude even lead him to permanent alienation from reality or
visible reality for which he fantasizes many things and lives in a dreamland. He feels solitary and
lonely. Says Manoj Das, “Solitude let me clarify, is not necessarily only physical solitude. One
can remain in solitude even amidst a crowd, provided an inner discipline has been cultivated”
(archive.deccanherald.com).
The theme of terror is dealt with by the writer not only in the world of reality, but also in
the world of dreams and visions. The dream-world in a magical realist text is sometimes
transformed into a nightmare world of waking reality. In “The Assault”, Avani, the prominent
politician, when attacked by the stout goat, is gradually affected by the terror of that incident. It
affects him so much that it takes the shape of a nightmare and he gets confused between dream
and reality, losing the power to recognize whether he is dreaming while alive or is alive while
dreaming.
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“A Trip into the Jungle” by Shri Manoj Das is a unique story that generates terror in a
different manner. A trip is arranged by a group of people of high society into the jungle which,
paradoxically, is a trip to primitivism. They belong to the elite and the so-called civilized society,
but their fanatical conduct and violence expose their bestial nature and add horror to the
atmosphere. When, in the morning, they come to consciousness following their state of
drunkenness, they are not sure if they have eaten the flesh of Shyamal, their driver or of the boar
that they hunted in the jungle and this horrifies them.
In the novel Tiger at Twilight, terror is unleashed by a man-eater tiger which is
mysterious, murderous, and real. Its mysterious attacks always shock people when someone is
discovered to be missing or dead. The deaths, the anxieties, the frustrations, the temptations, the
fears and doubts originate with the tiger and continue to exist till its death. Its ferocious
appearance and giant-size make people spell-bound, helpless and restless, adding great
proportion of fear to the theme.
In creating extreme situations, Das could be compared to Toni Morrison. Morrison places
her characters in extreme situations, forces them to the edge of endurance and then pushes them
beyond a state which is too much for the human beings to bear. These conditions reveal the basic
nature of her characters. Das does exactly the same when he intends to reveal the core nature of
man in unexpected situations.
Das places the Raja in such an extreme situation in A Tiger at Twilight when he succeeds
after many tiresome nights in search of the hidden treasure. He experiences invisible bodies
watching him and sinister shapes applauding him when he successfully takes out the ancestral
chest from the enchanted lake, protected by the Yaksha. But what he finds within is heartbreaking. The age-old skeleton lies before him, which is ironically the reward of all those
sleepless nights he has passed and the pain he has taken to get it.
Dev faces one extreme situation at the climax of this story when the metamorphosis
occurs between Heera and the tigress. Everyone waits to see the tigress hunt, but when Dev takes
position with his gun; Heera suddenly approaches there and faces the tigress abruptly. This
experience is so shocking to Dev that his inner self cannot bear it. He narrates:
It was dreadful; the sensation was simply maddening. I felt like dashing my
head against the tree. I thought I wept blood. But I could not know the human
from the beast.
I do not trust the accuracy of my vision or my memory of that moment, but
think I saw them springing on each other with equal frenzy and fury. At once, my
power of discrimination was restored. I shot, aiming at the beast, before I fell into
a dead faint. (Selected Fiction 338)
Das creates another extreme situation for the seven old friends of the Merry Guys Club in
“The Last I Heard of Them” who seek happiness in extreme measure through the weirdest way.
Blessed with some magic water from Hidamba Baba, they use it to perceive men and women in a
club without their clothes which results in having the horrible vision of moving and dancing
skeletons chasing them to catch and driving some to insanity and others to death.
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Mythical and folkloric themes abound in the fictional world of Das. In the novella
Legend of the Golden Valley, the writer presents a fairytale world before the reader, a journey
with a young prince whose kingdom is usurped by a tyrant. The journey takes the reader into
strange lands to meet weird characters passing through magical situations and mysterious
adventures. Miracles happen in the life of the prince, and as he solves the mystery of the golden
idol, it transforms itself into a beautiful princess for him.
“Man Who Lifted the Mountain” is a type of folk tale. It is a dramatized form of the
narrator’s dream. He visualizes Thieffou, the poor thief being blessed by Luvurva Mountain with
a boon. The Mountain promises to stay weightless in his hands for an hour which is the time
required to collect some soil under it that would cure the princess of that State from an incurable
disease and for which Thieffou would be rewarded by the king. But, as soon as Thieffou gets the
royal treatment from the people for holding Luvurva Mountain in his hands, arrogance and greed
overpower him and he proposes to utilize the supreme power to punish everyone he wants, thus
transforming himself from Thieffou, the hero to Thieffou, the villain. But, in his impudence he
forgets about the specified time of one hour and to the utter amazement of the crowd, the
Mountain presses Thieffou under it for ever. People feel assured and, of course, the princess is
sure to be cured. It is a story within a story narrated by the author himself about what he dreamt
while dozing off beside the Luvurva Mountain.
The volume The Lady Who Died One and a Half Times and Other Fantasies consists of
stories from the Panchatantra and the Jatakas retold by Das. The stories have the style of the
magical realists who blend fantasy with reality. The first five stories -“The Lay Who Died One
and a Half Times”, “The Last Demoness”, “The Lion Who Sprang to Life After a Century”,
“Jewels from the Sky” and “The Last Night” -tell the journey of Samanta and Abolkara, the
famous master-servant pair of Pundit Vishnu Sharma. However, Das adds new dimensions to the
original plots by starting the narration from where they conclude. In this context Rama Kundu
writes:
It is interesting to note the points of convergence with, and divergences from the
original texts as the author changes both the structure and texture of the source
text, instills new themes, concepts, and ideas, adds fresh details, and carries on
the stories beyond their respective points of closure in the hypotext/s. ( Intertext
257)
“The Tiger and the Traveller” is the story of a cursed gold bangle that becomes the cause
of a magical metamorphosis of a human being to a tiger. The traveller, resolving to put an end to
his life, absolves himself from every earthly desire, and chooses a pool as his means of suicide.
In the pool lives a tiger who once was also a human being and a traveller, but being fascinated by
the gold bangle possessed by another tiger in that pool, he touched the bangle and was
metamorphosed into a tiger since, according to the curse associated with it, whosoever touches it
shall be transformed into a tiger. The new traveller also falls into the trap of greed at the sight of
the bangle, descends into the pool, receives the bangle and is immediately transformed into a
tiger.
The striking point of this story is that this new traveller, in spite of knowing the
predicament of the previous traveller of the Panchatanta, does the same mistake by receiving the
cursed bangle. Kundu opines:
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In spite of his having figured in a later fiction the traveller of the present story
cannot evade the fate of the protagonist of an earlier text, and must therefore be
destroyed by the tiger. But destroyed in what way? And as answer to this query
we are taken into the domain of magic realism. (261)
The realism that this story presents is about the nature of human beings that changes even
in extreme situations. He begins to love life when he is at the point of committing suicide. Of
course this puts him in a paradoxical situation from which there is no escape. He receives an
eternal cursed life.
Manoj Das tries to justify that realities do not lie in survival or existence, but in realizing
better experiences in life. His fictional world arouses the feeling that one should not suffocate
oneself in the attempt at living a beautiful life. Life justifies itself at the climax, on the way of
living it in a greater way. And the greater way is manifest through the combination of magic and
reality.
Note:
1. See“Marred by poor editing”.
2. See“Thinking through silence”.
3. See “Explorer of the Concealed Layers of Life”.
Works Cited:
Batstone, Dick. “ Intoduction”. The Submerged Valley and Other Stories. Wiltshire: Batstone
Books, 1985. Print.
Das, Manoj. Interview by Swapan K. Banerjee. “Writing from Solitude”. Sunday Herald
Articulations. archive.deccanherald.com. Deccan Herald. 3 Feb. 2008. Web. 12 May.
2011.
Das, Manoj. Selected Fiction. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2001. Print.
Dutta, Amaresh. Encyclopaedia of Indian Literature - Vol.1. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi,
1987. Print.
“Explorer of the Concealed Layers of Life”. World of Manoj Das. n. d. Web.16 Sept. 2012.
Iyengar, K. R. S. “Stories of Rural India”. The Hindu. 26 Aug. 1986. Print.
Kundu, Rama. “Recycling: Fable and Myth”. Intertext: A Study of the Dialogue between Texts.
New Delhi: Sarup and Sons, 2008. 247-305. Print.
“Marred by poor editing”. The Hindu: Online Edition of National Newspaper. 07 Sept. 2003.
www.hindu.com. The Hindu. Web. 12 Feb. 2012.
Mohanty, Jatindra Mohan.“Surveys: Oriya”. Modern Indian Literature: An Anthology. Vol.1.
Ed. K. M. George. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1992. Print.
Parida, Sarat Chandra. Short-stories of Manoj Das: a Brief Critical Study. Yabaluri.org. Triveni.
n. d. Web. 19 Oct. 2011.
“Thinking through silence”. The Hindu: Online Edition of National Newspaper. www.hindu.com
The Hindu. 18 March 2001. Web. 4 Jan. 2012.
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