Chittaranjan Das Compilation

Chittaranjan Das (October 3, 1923 – January 16, 2011) was generally known as Chittabhai throughout Odisha. His place of birth is Bagalpur village in the Jagatsinghpur district and his parents were Khusali Charan and Hiramani. Chittabhai was the third among the 5 brothers and 3 sisters. After his early schooling in the native village he studied at Punang School, Ranihat and Ravenshaw Collegiate at Cuttack. He passed his matriculation examination in 1941 and joined the Ravenshaw College, Cuttack, for higher studies. But he was soon drawn into the independence struggle and was jailed during the Quit India movement. On being released from prison he continued his studies at Shantiniketan and later in Denmark. The period in the jail influenced Chttaranjan greatly in many ways, one being his learning different languages, especially French.

He returned to Odisha in 1954 and joined the Jibana Bidyalaya, a school for Gandhiji’s basic education, at Champattimunda established by Nabakrushna Choudhury and Malati Devi. Later on he became the Head Master of this institution which was inspired by Gandhian ideals of living independently. He left Champattimunda after 4 years and went to took up a teaching assignment near Agra. In the mean time he was attracted to the philisophy of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Upon his return to Odisha he started teaching at the Institute of Integral Education, based on Sri Aurobindo’s teachings, at Bhubaneswar in 1973. He did not stay here for long but remained associated with this movement till the end of his life.

For Chttabhai the whole world was his home, the language and thought of all men were the same. He was proficient in many languages including Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Assamese, Sanskrit, Danish, Finnish, French, Spanis and English. His vast studies covered many areas of social and human sciences like philosophy, psychology, religious studies, linguistics as well as in the subjects of school studies. His breadth of knowledge is reflected in about 250 books he wrote or translated into Odia language. Notable among these are his writings on and translation of Sri Aurobindo’s and Mother’s works.

Chittabhai was a regular contributor to the newspapers and his columns appeared in major Odia dailies like Dharitri, Pragatibadi, Sambad, Samaja etc. Many of these short pieces have been compiled into books and give an insight to his thoughts on the contemporary affairs. His first writing, incidentally, was an article in the school magazine. The article ‘Socrates’ appeared in 1937 in the Ravenshaw Collegiate magazine Sikshabandhu.

Chittaranjan has travelled widely around the world. He has observer closely and tried to understand the social, cultural and political life of the countries visited and left behind his impressions in form of books. He has translated into Odia many books from countries he visited written originally in languages other than English. The extent and breadth of his translation work is quite vast. His deep understanding of the subject of the books under translation makes the results pleasing for the reader.

Chittabhai was an early morning diary writer. These captured his feelings of the moment on many happenings. The autobiographical diary entries have been published as ‘Rohitara Daeri’ (Rohit’s Diary) running into over 20 volumes. He was an eminent scholar of Odia language and culture and was highly regarded in the society, yet his life style was extremely simple. On the whole he was seen by all as a person loving all humanity. (Condensed from Sambad Sahityakosha)

Some of Chittabhai’s books could not be located for digitization and will be included in future if any one can make these available.

Of the 240 titles included in this compilation 170 were scanned at the NIT, Roukela under the project OaOb and have been reprocessed/optimised by Srujanika. The original pdf files can be found on the OaOb website (oaob.nitrkl.ac.in).

Pathika Prakashani is trying to keep most of Chittabhai’s books in print. For copies please contact: Bhagyadhar Sahu, L-166, GGP Colony, Rasulgarh, Bhubaneswar 751010, Odisha, India. Telephone: 9337085148, email: bkmocac1968@gmail.com.

Many admirers of Chittabhai have contributed to the preparation of this compilation. Among them Bharat Bhushan Mohanty, Ramakanta Swain and Asish Kumar Mohanty have played a major role in collecting the books and facilitating the work.