Intercultural Love and History: A Literary Study of Bhima Bhuyan

Abstract

Experience is the mother of all writings of literature – be it novel, play, poetry, or autobiography. It is intensely related to the history of a time. Therefore, history and literature were symbiotic. History, infact, prepares the soil for the nursery of literature. Culture, too, is another segment of the social history that mould the human imagination and the sensibility. This is inextricably linked with the writer’s history of the time. The paper has done a study of the Bhuyan Adivasi, or tribe of Keonjhar district of Odisha, who were culturally opposites, attached to the kings and princes of Keonjhar by a kind of filial bonding. Culturally, Bhuyan Sardars or leaders carry the prince on their shoulders for the coronation. Consequently, as a reward for their utmost devotion, the king ties the Ranjeet saree on Bhuyan Sardar’s head. It is customary that the young prince will be coronated sitting upon the lap of a low-caste Bhuyan Adivasi. This cultural kinship has crossed the boundary of high and low and united them with an inseparable bonding of love and care. This basic history of the Bhuyans and the Kings of Keonjhar, imbibed as an experience by the novelist Gopal Ballav Das during his stay at Keonjhar as a government officer, has been transmuted to a unique fictional legend. Bhima Bhuyan – the first Adivasi novel in the history of Odia literature, retelling the celestial love and romance between a Bhuyan Adivasi and a charming princess of a royal family. Published in the year 1908, much earlier than Gopinath Mohanty, the unparalleled master-composer of tribal fiction, Gopal Ballav Das has been a trend-setter in inventing the poetic narration in prose. The love in each other’s hearts, with the fear of social and cultural taboos – an Adivasi and a princess – has been transformed into real platonic love, without having any communication between them. The tribal hero, Bhima, wishes to sublimate his desire by sacrificing his life, and Jema, the princess, has been exemplary in remaining forever unmarried and wished to live at Brindavan with the feminine perfection of adopting one lover and only one husband. The historical facts so nicely compromised with the fabulous imagination, added with romance and ripeness of love, have turned into a timeless art, forever madly inviting the fiction-lovers and enthusiastic researchers to dive deep and to explore the unexplored till date.