Face Surface Interface Ontology od Odia Culture

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RAMESH P. PANIGRAHI (b. 1944) was a former reader in English in the post- graduate department of Ravenshaw College, Cuttack and is a Sahitya Akademi Award winner for the year 1984. Besides his forty-three publications in Oriya, his English books/Edited books include: Oddiyan: Six Contemporary Painters from Orissa, Harman Publications, Continuity in the Flux Orissa, Harman, Perspectives on Odissi Theatre, Sangit Natak Akademy, Kalicharan Pattnayak (A Monography for Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi), Drawing a Full Circle, Sanbun Publications and The Splintered Self Character and Vision in Sam Shepard's Plays Abhijit Publication, New Delhi.

This initiatory book on Orissan Culture reminds me repeatedly how history has been politicized in India and how the Orissan perspective has been thoroughly marginalized. I begin to question the fundamental role the Indian historians assign to the concept of a state called Orissa. But my question reverbs back to me. However, I believe that there is a purpose in history and that it involves man's development through culture.

Culture is nature's way of nudging us to become independent of nature, liberating us from conditions that impair our freedom. Culture should aim at establishing institutions that leave individuals as free as possible to develop their moral goodness.

The cultural tradition of Orissa does not have a linear sequence of evolution. It does not run through epochs like a strand, which ties them together, rather the tradition emerges each time from the concealment of the destiny. The tradition of being that remerges in the different interpretations of it, offered by various epochs of our cultural history, is thus, characterized by breaks and ruptures. The first section of this book would show no retrieval of an original beginning of our culture. It reveals a series of repetitions that have no distinct beginnings, one that can ground it and justify the hermeneutical search for determinate meaning.

Broadly speaking, therefore, I had almost no viable option except organizing the material on Oriya culture from three different perspectives. First of it, as the title of the book states, this author is concerned with questions of ontology and epistemology, that is with issues oriented toward the very basis of "being" and "knowing" There is, in fact, a district theological flavour to much of this work in that it is deeply concerned with questions of ultimate meaning. Existence and transcendent being.

To make things seem less esoteric, I have endeavoured to deal with fields like sociology of knowledge, religion, theology, and Modernization. I have also added conceptual apparatus capable of dealing with such micro-sociological problems as internalization of values, as well as more microscopic problems such as the cultural construction of institutions, ideologies and changing social patterns.

Secondly, this book has also been garnished heavily on the empirical material culled from the tribal groups. This author has visited the tribal areas, preoccupied basically with questions of social order. Drawing on a wide range of materials from the primitive groups, I was eager to formulate arguments about rituals, symbolic deviance, social boundaries and comparative cosmologies, Therefore, this work, at places, has become more descriptive and ethnographic than critical and theoretical.

**Contents and Sample Pages**