The Collectors Daughter

“The Collectors Daughter” by S.K. Das is a moving story set in Orissa and combines fact and fiction, history and personal narratives skillfully. Through its well sketched characters, the book is set against the backdrop of the 1866 famine that killed a third of Odishas population. The famine was so severe that women sold their children, men ate each other and bodies had to be dragged stark naked from the towns to lie by the roadside. There was an acute scarcity of food and most people were famished with hunger. William Stewart, the British Collector, rapes the young daughter of his native chuprassi and impregnates her but does not acknowledge his guilt. Narrated in the first person, the book tells the story of that dark period in Odishaƒ??s colonial history when people died like flies, hunger lingered in the bones but there was no end to the desire of the flesh.