Collated by Tusar Nath Mohapatra
Of all my contemporary academics, Sachi was the most authentic Sri Aurobindo scholar, especially with reference to Sri Aurobindo's socio-political relevance today. Apart from the personal loss, it is a huge loss in the field of Sri Aurobindo research. - GG
A must-read for thinkers and students, Sachi Mohanty’s Sri Aurobindo: A Contemporary Reader brings together Sri Aurobindo’s most compelling visions on human unity, cultural evolution, and modern global crises.
https://x.com/Nimai_Swain/status/2115371207524819208?a=__C81JblRiz6PcsL8XY&s=19
I am still unable to believe that Prof. Sachidanand Mohanty is no more. I can recall dozens of panel discussions where he was my co-panelist and offered rich, in-depth inputs. I remember his warmth as an elder brother who, from day one, gently forced me to call him Sachhi Bhai, not sir or professor.
What I must always remember as a writer is his critical contribution to Odia literature through editing, compiling, and elaborately writing about the women writers of Odisha. Being the proud son of a great woman poet of Odisha, he devoted his life to exploring the creative power of his mother, her contemporaries, and her predecessors. He was the finest authority on women’s writings in Odisha—an authority I fear ended with his untimely death.
https://x.com/MishraKedar1/status/2115472235360366641?a=HHdGj08ctXEkJCvWdbo&s=19
Himself a product of Sri Aurobindo International Central of Education, he was one of the finest commentator of Sri Aurobindo's literature. May Sachi Bhai inspire all of us.
https://x.com/Nimai_Swain/status/2115648369570021471?a=hodDH7clYcGtBQ2GzDM&s=19
An ‘Indo-Anglian’ legacy - Sachidananda Mohanty https://www.thehindu.com/features/magazine/an-indoanglian-legacy/article4927193.ece/amp/
Sri Aurobindo and the Modern Academic World by Dr. Sachidananda Mohanty https://overmanfoundation.org/sri-aurobindo-and-the-modern-academic-world-by-dr-sachidananda-mohanty/
Rebati's Sisters: Search for Identity Through Education
Rebati's Sisters: Search for Identity Through Education
Sachidananda Mohanty
India International Centre Quarterly 21 (4), 41-52, 1994
Irigary," The uniquely metaphysical logic of dichotomous oppositions" has always dominated" philosophical thought: for instance Presence/Absence, Being/Nothingness, Truth/Error, Some/Other, Identity/Dif ference, etc." 1 Women must constantly define themselves in terms of one half of the repressed categories as the Other, Absence, Silence, Error, Nothingness and the Insane. In the case of Orissa, feminist historiography of the kind Elaine Showalter had in mind is compounded by the problem of covering wide gaps even in newly retrieved areas of Oriya literary/cultural history. We must routinely make inexplicable leaps from a sparsely populated female landscape, from isolated instances of early women writers like Madhavi Dasi, Vrindavati Dasi, Tribhuvan Mahadevi, and Nih Shanka Devi to a more fecund region membered by those who wrote during the twenties and thirties of this century: Kokila Devi, Reba Ray, Narmada Kar, Pratibha Devi, Kuntala Kumari Sabat and others.
I suggest that one of the ways by which this fractured literary cultural history can be bridged is by subjecting key literary texts of the late nineteenth century, including those of the sympathetic male writers to a closer study. More specifically, I shall be arguing in this paper that Oriya novelist Fakir Mohan Senapati's (1843 1918) early, acclaimed and much anthologised tale" Rebati" 2 (1898) could act as a valuable missing link in tracing the continuity of the female literary tradition in Orissa. Apart from the concern with the issue of woman's education that is clearly borne out by the content of this first short story written and recorded in Oriya literature, I contend that Senapati's larger historical and socio-realistic interest
Ovid in Orissa: Translation and cultural representation in colonial India
Ovid in Orissa: Translation and cultural representation in colonial India
Sachidananda Mohanty
India International Centre Quarterly 26 (3), 119-126, 1999
similarities occur invariably when regions go through similar cultural and ideological experiences. In the British colonial settlements that came to be established in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, broad parallels in cultural forms and institutions became quite evident. It is this perspective that I wish to bring from Orissa. My aim is to see how translation mediates in the positioning of cultures. For my purpose, I shall take up a poetical composition called'Usha'by the Oriya poet Radhanath Ray1, generally acknow ledged as one of the makers of modern Oriya literature. I shall attempt to show that Radhanath's long poem was modelled after a Latin composition'Atalanta'in Ovid's Metamorphoses. 2 However, my inter est is not so much with tracing patterns of similarities and differences between the two texts so as to determine the question of what George Steiner aptly calls' fidelity'and'betrayal'—the traditional objective of translation study. Instead, I shall treat the translated text'Usha'as a free and independent rendering. I shall attempt to show that Radhanath's translations/adaptations like'Usha','Chandrabhaga'and'Parbati'were governed by a set of socio-cultural and ideological factors. In specific terms, I hope to show that Radhanath in'Usha'was not very burdened by the need to recapture the classical Latin heritage or to attempt poetical innovations through the use of exotic sources. As a poet working in a specific socio-cultural matrix, Radhanath, I argue, was engaged in the formation of a regional cultural identity.
[B] Travel Writing and the Empire
Travel Writing and the Empire
Sachidananda Mohanty
Katha, 2003
Travel has been a mode of assessment of territory, of knowledge gathering, and of putting a discursive system into place. This volume, edited and introduced by Sachidananda Mohanty, brings to you the range of hidden discourses that constituted and explored the issues central to the political and literary representation of Indian reality, and the politics behind it.
Burden of Shakti: Female Agency and Literary Creativity in Orissa
Burden of Shakti: Female Agency and Literary Creativity in Orissa
Sachidananda Mohanty
Economic and Political Weekly, 2442-2444, 2004
The issue of women as cultural icons is a highly contentious one with far-reaching political implications. Some outstanding literary women in late 19th and early 20th century Orissa consciously embraced Shakti, for personal empowerment and participation in wider political space. But the emblems they embraced and the lives they lived betrayed unsolved contradictions: personal love versus public service, drudgery of domestic life versus the desire for literary creativity, the loyalty to a married partner vis-a-vis the attraction to a true companion of the soul, intimate social longing and demands for public chastity.
[B] Early women's writings in Orissa, 1898-1950: a lost tradition
Early women's writings in Orissa, 1898-1950: a lost tradition
Sachidananda Mohanty
Sage, 2005
Based on archival research, this fascinating book brings together many of the neglected writings of Oriya women of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Sachidananda Mohanty focusses on a period when women’s writings dealt not only with questions of gender and identity but also with cultural, political and ideological issues of their times. Utilizing different forms—short stories, poems, essays, travel writings, novels and letters—these women writers responded honestly both to the world that was in turmoil around them and to the demands of their own inner selves. By articulating and advancing the personal in the public and by imbuing the personal with the social and the political, these ‘literary domestics’ transcended their limitations and became the precursors of a tradition that critically examined both traditional values and modern contingencies, yet sought to bring them together to fruition.
[C] Remembering Kishor Gandhi
[B] Sri Aurobindo: A contemporary reader
Sri Aurobindo: A contemporary reader
Sachidananda Mohanty
Routledge India, 2012
This book compiles some of the finest writings of Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) — the nationalist, visionary, poet-philosopher. It reflects the range, depth and outreach of the moral, intellectual and spiritual vision of this versatile and multifaceted genius. It aims at providing, at one place, access to the key concepts, tenets, and the spirit of the extraordinary range of texts authored by him. Although concretely grounded in contemporary times — with its location in a specific socio-cultural matrix — this work projects a body of writings that is certain to have lasting value. In particular, the compilation brings forth Sri Aurobindo’s social vision and his role as a cultural critic: his views on ethnicity, his exposition of the key role language plays in the formation of communitarian identities, his crucial understanding of self-determination which has incidentally become an important aspect of human rights discourse today. Situating the writings in a specific intellectual, spiritual and historical context, this collection will enable readers to appreciate the overall vision of Sri Aurobindo, in what can be conceived as a caravan of history of ideas in terms of a common heritage of humankind, and recent developments in theory and disciplinary practice, especially those pertaining to consciousness and future studies.
[B] Cosmopolitan modernity in early 20th-century India
Cosmopolitan modernity in early 20th-century India
Sachidananda Mohanty
Taylor & Francis, 2018
This book presents an alternative view of cosmopolitanism, citizenship and modernity in early 20th-century India through the multiple lenses of mysticism, travel, friendship, art, and politics. It makes a key intervention in the understanding of cosmopolitan modernity based on the lives and experiences of Rabindranath Tagore, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Sri Aurobindo, Mirra Alfassa, James Cousins, Paul Richard, Dilip Kumar Roy, and Taraknath Das. Using archival texts and photographs, Mohanty interrogates the ideas of tradition and modernity, the local and the global, and Self and the world as integral to the conception of a cosmopolitan world order. This second edition will interest scholars and students of modern Indian history, comparative literature, cultural studies, Indian philosophy, and South Asian studies and the general reader.
Sri Aurobindo in the University
Sri Aurobindo in the University
Sachidananda Mohanty
Indian Literature 67 (5 (338), 197-208, 2023
—Sri Aurobindo on modern psychology ri Aurobindo’s reputation as a poet, patriot, revolutionary, mystic, and Sexponent of the future evolution of Man, has eclipsed, for long, his major contributions to the modern university system. How has Sri Aurobindo been received in the academia in the East and West? What have been the debates around his poetry and literary writings? What is the lasting value of Sri Aurobindo in the context of the intellectual history and future studies? On his 150th birth anniversary, it may be fruitful to assess his place in the modern academic world.
I shall argue that while the reception of Sri Aurobindo in the mainstream academia in India and the West may have undergone a change after his passing, and some academic disciplines may not be as hospitable to him as before, newer vistas like Global Studies, International Relations, Consciousness Studies, Cosmopolitanism, Indic Studies, and Integral Education may witness the growing role of Sri Aurobindo in the thought systems of the world. Like all institutions, the modern university system has undergone
Colonial Periodicals and the Birth of a New Province: The Case of Utkal Dipika and Utkal Sahitya
Colonial Periodicals and the Birth of a New Province: The Case of Utkal Dipika and Utkal Sahitya
Sachidananda Mohanty
Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences (SH&SS) 29 (2), 202-217, 2022
This essay will explore the intersections between the twin periodicals, Utkal Dipika edited by Gourishankar Ray [1866-1917] and Utkal Sahitya edited by Biswanath Kar [1897-1934] in terms of authorial ‘intentions’ and textual practice. Located in the larger colonial context in British India, it will argue that in course of time, these pivotal intersections resulted in the birth of a new linguistic province called Odisha in 1936, one of the first of its kind in India. It will argue that the emerging print culture, created by the native gentry, under the British Raj, led to newer forms of linguistic and cultural imaginaries in eastern India whose contours are beginning to be unravelled in recent times.
