Pitching for the Middle: Essays & Musings

Pitching for the Middle, a collection of twentyfive short essays of which a few are in the nature of musings, is a record of the author’s spirited response over the past decade to the problems and perils, but also the challenges and pleasures of professing English at a middle-level university in India. Interestingly the concerns of the author are not narrowly linguistic, but touch upon questions of cultural literacy. Divided into six sections the book guides the reader deftly through a whole range of issues facing an Indian teacher of English: the need to learn from the West, but also the need to create a space within English for his/her own reality, the idea of communicating without being in thrall to communicative English and, of course, the sheer joy of writing feelingly about literary books (Western, Indian, Odia), about non-literary books (those by Robert M. Pirsig, Robert Scholes, Andrew Delbanco, Rachel Hadas) and about persons (for instance, the late Edward Said during his first and last visit to India in 1997) who have left behind memories. Driven by a need to communicate to the student of English as well as to the lay reader, the book really tries to pitch it in the middle in terms of style. Himansu S. Mohapatra has had his training in literary study and has taught English at Utkal University, Odisha for almost two decades. He is known for his scholarly explorations into Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Fakir Mohan Senapati, Vikram Seth and Aravind Adiga. This book is home to his “occasional”, but by no means insignificant, reflections which have livened up his otherwise “serious” pursuits.