Localizing Cultural Ethos of Classic Literature: Experiment with an Odia Classic, ‘Chatura Binoda’

Abstract

Localization is a process of adopting a culture and/or the reflection of a culture, what is true for Odia literature is more or less true for literature from other states also. Globalization, in many subtle ways, devalues the “local” and encourages a homogenization of culture. Here, localization has a role to play in establishing the uniqueness of the “local,” in this instance Odisha or India. Localization assumes vital importance for it establishes a dialogue between language and culture and acquaints communities with other ways of looking at life and experience. Localization is the force that makes it possible to imagine such a map—a map that, when fully sketched, would represent a wonderland of literary riches from diverse languages, all made intelligible to one another. In this paper, to understand the above things along with how the factors of localization components affect cultural ethos, we have adopted the iceberg model of culture and catalyzed it upon an eighteenth-century Odia classic Chatura Binoda, the masterpiece of poet Brajanath Badajena by localizing the same to Hindi language and as a result, determine how the deep-rooted cultural ethos is being loosened irrespective of the knowledge of both language and culture.