I met Prof Dharanidhar Sahu (1948-2025), who passed away earlier this month on October 21, in 1989 when I returned from England to rejoin Berhampur University. He had joined as Reader in English during the time I was away, becoming a part of the galaxy that included Prof Biyot Kesh Tripathy, Prof Soubhagyakumar Mishra, Dr E Raja Rao, Anasuya Kumari, Dr Niranjan Mohanty, Dr Dilip Das and Dr Ram Narayan Panda.
I remembered seeing his name as a contributor in an issue of Cuttack Review, an English language magazine being published from Cuttack in the 1970s and 80s. He had contributed a short story. This was before I met him. The same issue had published a critical essay of mine. The essay was placed in the middle of the magazine. The short story was tucked away at the end. This was – and I believe it still is – the universal line-up of contributions in magazines, even literary ones, with intellectual pieces taking precedence over creative ones. During the course of his long career at Berhampur University, from 1987 to 2008, he would do much to overturn that ordering, installing creative writing as the centerpiece of a literature teacher’s intellectual pursuits. But that time was not to be yet. Like every English teacher of that time he came under the sway of theory.
That was indeed a heady time, the 1990s. The English department of Berhampur University had caught the contagion from the theory wave. The Leavises and the New Critics were on their way out and structuralists and poststructuralists came flooding in. Dr. Sahu was quick to get to know the new heroes who had appeared on the literary firmament: Roland Barthes, Jaques Derrida, Jonathan Culler, Stanley Fish, Mikhail Bakhtin and so on. They had given Dr. Sahu new tools to interpret his old love: Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams.
He was a drama specialist and had written his PhD on the American playwright Tennessee Williams under the redoubtable Prof Bidhubhusan Das. That discipleship says something about Dr Sahu’s credentials as a voracious reader. For none other than a well and widely read person could qualify for a spot under a supervisor like Prof Das. Cats on Hot Tin Roofs, the book based on his PhD thesis, was published during this time.
With the old dues paid, he embarked on the most productive phase of his career. Before his retirement as Professor and Head of the department of English in 2008 he had burst on to the Indian Writing in English landscape with two novels (The House of Serpents; 1996 Simple Things of Life; 2001), a long poem about angelic and demonic figures in Greek myth (Heroes and Monsters; published in 2007), a book of translation (Three Satakas of Bhartruhari; 2003) and a philosophical meditation (A Dialogue with Life). He had quietly redefined the priorities for the English teacher in India. Together with Decameron on a Goan Beach, a book of short stories, and The Prince in Disguise (2015), a novel that he published after retirement, Dr Sahu had a created a sizeable body of work that became his lasting literary legacy.
But here is the most important thing: despite his obvious talent and accomplishments, to his numerous students, colleagues and friends Dr Sahu was a much loved and lovable human being. He was simple, warm and affable. He formed lifelong bonds with anyone he came into contact with. Unsurprisingly, he was without enemies, although he was on many occasions ridden roughshod over. Most well read people flaunt their erudition. Not Dr Sahu. Nothing excited him more than the smell of the printed book and talk about books.
I remember one evening of animated chatting at the Guest House of Sambalpur University. There were three of us: he, Prof Ashok Mahapatra and I. They were talking about the pleasure of reading Rabelais. Quotations and anecdotes from Gargantua and Pantagruel flowed from them so thick and fast that I declared that I would take up the book first thing on returning to Bhubaneswar. I had moved to Utkal University by then.
“I envy you, Himansu,” Dr Sahu said. To be envied and not pitied? I was astounded. When I asked why, he said he was envying me for the joy that would fill my days and nights as I sat down to read Rabelais. That was Dr Sahu. Books for him were meant to be shared. The solitary activity of reading to him was completed in a site of communal sharing that was the classroom. The passing of such a sweet teacher and human being is inevitably a sad thing.
Himansu S.Mohapatra is a noted academic and translator.
