A text that makes use—and deliberate misuse—of both British and Indian literary conventions, Six Acres and a Third provides a unique "view from below" of Indian village life under colonial rule. Set in Orissa in the 1830s, the novel focuses on a small plot of land, tracing the lives and fortunes of people who are affected by the way this property is sold and resold, as new legal arrangements emerge and new types of people come to populate and transform the social landscape. This graceful translation faithfully conveys the rare and compelling account of how the more unsavory aspects of colonialism affected life in rural India.

    INTRODUCTION. § l. Religion and mythology. - Religion in its widest sense includes on the one hand the conception which men entertain of the divine or supernatural powers and, on the other, that seme of the dependence of human welfare on those powers which finds its expression in various forms of worship. Mythofogy is connected with the former side of religion as furnishing the whole body of myths or stories which are told about gods and heroes and which describe their chaTacter and origin, their actions and surroundings. Such myths have their source in the attempt of the human mind, in a primitive and unscientific age, to explain the various forces and phenomena of nature with which man is confronted. They represent in fact the conjectural science of a primitive mental condition. For statements which to the highly civilised mind would be merely metaphorical, amount in that early stage to explanations of the phenomena observed. The inteltectual difficulties raised by t