After the Deluge

The greatest work of Pratibha Ray is definitely her novel Magnamati (After the Deluge) first published in the Odia in 2004, translated into several Indian languages and into English by Prafulla Kumar Mohanty. Based on the 1999 killer cyclone of Odisha which devastated the entire coastal belt, it is one of the most original novels depicting the saga of mother Earth and her relationship with her children, the human race. Which she holds in display as she does trees, rivers, mountains and seas. Man is sustained by this mother, nourished in his destiny. But when man transgresses the epitomic tolerance of mother Earth, she chastises him with her demonic fury. The cyclone in this novel is symbolic of nature's fury which she lashes out on man and civilization with as much diabolism as she lavishes her love, kindness and divine grace with tenderness. Pratibha creates a world of villages, valleys, rivers, seas and people, tracing the history of the fisherman community to it's a mythical ancestor. This community, in the novel, grows organically, spreading far and wide like a world full of men of all religions, languages and professions, and how it grows and expands into a modern civilized unit despite primitive professions and poverty. After the Deluge is a powerful saga of the jest for life of man on the Earth and how Bikram and Girima unite the survivors into a human group to fulfill destiny's course in a new world called Basumatipur (Mother earth).