Dr. Vijayakumar Parameswaran Unnithan
On Jili, a woman from Gopinath Mohanty’s ‘Paraja’, and what her labour knew
She does not appear in any management textbook. She holds no certificate, no designation, no entry in any register of recognised workers. She lived in a cluster of thatched huts in the forested hills of Koraput, in what is now the state of Odisha in eastern India, in the Eastern Ghats, where the mahua trees bloom in spring, and the rivers run cold and clear through rock. Her name is Jili. She is the elder daughter of Sukru Jani, a Paraja tribesman, and one of the most instructive figures in the literature on work, dignity, and what happens when a system decides that a human being is ONLY a figure in someone’s ledger.
What Gopinath Mohanty saw
Gopinath Mohanty was a civil servant posted to the Koraput district of Odisha in the late 1930s, when the forests were deep, and the tribal communities of the Eastern Ghats still lived by their own calendars, their own gods, their own intricate customs of labour and love. He was not an outsider looking in. He drank rice beer with the Paraja people, danced at their harvest festivals, walked their paths, and listened, with the patience of a phenomenologist who understood that the most important things are rarely said directly. What he wrote from that listening became the novel ‘Paraja’, published in 1945. He was awarded India’s highest literary honour, the Jnanpith Award, in 1974. The award citation, which described the novel, says something that once read, cannot easily be forgotten: “In Mohanty’s hands, the social is lifted to the level of the metaphysical.”
The Paraja are a peasant tribe of the hills. The word itself means, in Sanskrit, simply “common people.” They lived by farming and forest-gathering, by song and seasonal ritual, by a set of social customs that outsiders misread as primitive but, on closer inspection, proved to be a sophisticated ecology of relationships. Their marriage customs, their harvest festivals, their rice-beer ceremonies, their worship of gods who lived in specific trees and streams, all of it formed a coherent world, full of beauty and difficulty in equal measure, entirely sufficient to itself.
Into this world, Mohanty introduces the forces that will dismantle it. The forest guard with his gun and his appetites, the moneylender charging fifty per cent interest on loans taken in desperation, the court that cannot read the documents it is shown, the entire slow machinery of a colonial administration that does not see people, only liabilities and resources.
Sukru Jani, the patriarch of the novel’s central family, is not a fool or a weakling. He is a competent farmer, a loving father, a man who knows the forest the way a Kerala fisherman knows the sea. In his bones, before thought. But competence is not protection when the system has already decided the outcome. A fine he cannot pay. A debt that compounds. His sons became gotis, bonded labourers, to the moneylender Ramchandra Bisoi. And Jili, Jani’s elder daughter, enters the story’s darkest passage.
The work that could not be taken
Before the world closes in on her, Jili is alive in the way that only Mohanty’s characters are alive, with a particularity that feels observed rather than invented. She collects mahua flowers in the early morning, that sweet-smelling bloom of the mahua tree from which the Paraja make their ceremonial rice-beer. She grows chillies to sell at the market. She works in the fields alongside her father and brothers. She dresses in her best sari for festivals, braids silver ornaments into her hair, and dances.
This is not background detail. In Mohanty’s world, the work a person does and the way they do it is the fullest expression of who they are. Jili’s labour, unhurried, rooted, rhythmically connected to the seasons, is her identity in the deepest sense. It is not what she does for wages. It is what she is.
“The moneylender wants to own her. The forest guard wants to use her. The court cannot see her. But none of them — and this is Mohanty’s most insistent argument — can take from her the knowledge that is in her hands, the seasons that are in her body, the forest that is in her memory.”
What the system attempts, in ‘Paraja’, is not merely economic exploitation. It is an act of ontological erasure. The attempt to reduce a person who exists in complex, seasonal, relational, spiritual fullness to a single dimension, her exchange value. Her body as bride-price. Her labour as debt repayment. Her presence as a problem to be managed by powerful.
She resists. Not with strategy, not with the vocabulary of rights, not with access to any institutional remedy, and none of those are available to her. She resists the way the root resists the concrete by being, stubbornly and completely, what she is. When the Sahukar forces himself into her life, she does not surrender. The novel records it plainly. She would not let him take her without a fight. This is not heroism in the conventional sense. It is something quieter and more durable, the refusal of a self to be entirely consumed by the forces arrayed against it.
The career that the system could not price
The Career Architect has a particular stillness when he speaks of people like Jili. Not sentimentality. He is too precise for that. A recognition.
What Mohanty understood, living among the Paraja, was something that most career frameworks still cannot accommodate. That the deepest form of work is not transactional. It does not begin with a job description and end with a performance review. It begins with belonging, to a place, a season, a set of relationships, a way of moving through the world that has been learned over generations and lives in the body before it lives in the mind. It is more or less a post-skill world.
Jili’s work, the mahua-collecting, the chilli-growing, the dancing at harvest, the caring for her younger sister Bili, is the particular form of right action that belongs to a specific person in a specific place and time. Not a universal duty. Not abstract virtue. But the precise, irreplaceable contribution that only this person, in this context, can make.
What the moneylender and the forest guard represent, and what the novel indicts with quiet fury, is the colonisation of svadharma by exchange value. The conversion of a life into a commodity. The reduction of a person who knows the forest and the seasons and the songs into something to be weighed and settled.
“This is not a historical problem. The question Jili asks, without being loud, is about every career that eventually forces you to get an answer. Who decides what my work is worth, and by whose measure?”
Mohanty does not offer a resolution. The novel ends in violence and surrender. Sukru Jani’s sons murder the moneylender and walk themselves to the police station. The system wins, in the narrow sense. But something in the way Mohanty writes the natural world around these people, about the mahua trees still blooming, the river still running, the hills still holding the light at dusk, suggests that the system’s victory is incomplete. The soil remembers what was grown in it. The forest remembers who walked in it with knowledge and care. These things do not appear in any ledger.
Gopinath Mohanty spent a lifetime trying to record what the ledger cannot hold. He smelled the hills of Koraput and came back with novels that the Jnanpith committee recognised as metaphysical. What he was actually doing, what the Career Architect would recognise immediately, was the most essential act of witness: seeing a person completely, in the fullness of what they know and who they are, before the system has finished reducing them to something smaller. Not sure whether Jili got to witness in her own time. She gets it now, in every reader who pauses long enough to understand what Mohanty was pointing at. The ordinary, attended to with love, does not stay ordinary for long. Even in the hills of Koraput. Even in 1945. Even now.
Post Script: At least in this post-skill world, where what a person can sense, discern, and become matters more than what they can be made to produce, extractive metaphors like ‘resources’ finally leave our work lives. That we stop asking what we can take from a person, and begin asking what a person, given the right conditions, can grow into.
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About the Author Dr. Vijayakumar Parameswaran Unnithan is a scholar- practitioner working at the intersection of career theory, employability, and organisation development. He is the originator of the Post-Skill Professional (PSP) Framework and Career Architect at Careertotus Consultants Pvt Ltd. He is the President of Asia Organisation Development Network (AODN) and publishes in leading management journals. Views are Personal.
PIc Credits:Gypsypkd, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons : Licence : https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/
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