Cuttack, March 2: Odia novelist Bibhuti Pattanaik called for detailed research into the works of Kishori Charan Das on his 92nd birth anniversary here yesterday.
Several personalities from the state paid rich tributes to the litterateur, known for his "timeless creations" in Odia literature, at an event organised by the Kishori Charan Smruti Parishad at Sriram Chandra Bhavan here.
Born in 1924, Das is credited for creating a new direction for Odia literature through his depiction of middle-class life and its problems and the urban intellectual's alienation post Independence.
Pattanaik, who was the chief guest at the event, said there was "need for research" into Das's inimitable works as "he is yet to get the right place in contemporary literature".
Das's works, he said, "revolved around the middle class or rather the upper-middle class urban life" and "the inner conflict of characters in urban milieu" in which he spent the most part of his life as an Indian Audit and Accounts Service officer.
Recalling one of his interviews with Das, Pattanaik said: "He was an honest writer whose works had nothing to do with the downtrodden as he could not feign any relationship with them."
Delivering the memorial lecture, noted Odia literary critic Gauranga Charan Das said his creations exemplified him as "an intricate personality", "an outsider" and "a liberated soul".
Das, who heads the department of Odia at Ravenshaw University, equated Kishori Charan Das's stories to an equilateral triangle with the writer, characters and others as the three points that are joined through a complex process of interdependence around a multi-layered essence.
The Kishori Charan Das Sahitya Purashkar 2016 was given away on the occasion to Ranjan Pradhan for Vitamin - a collection of Odia short stories.