Iconic French literary theorist Gerald Genette defines the epigraph as “roughly as a quotation placed en exergue, generally at the head of a work or a section of a work; literally, en exergue means off the work, which is going a little too far”. Often considered a paratextual element of a work, to use another concept given by Genette, the epigraph is often overlooked by readers too interested in the narrative that most texts offer.

Readers of Sumanyu Satpathy’s excellently researched and highly readable book will miss the epigraph of the book, a quotation from Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620), at their own peril as the short quotation is a pointer to important thematic concerns of the book. Alert to the tight structure of his book, the author returns to the quotation in the later part of the book where he discusses the ambivalent attitude of many Odia writers and poets to print modernity unlike Bacon’s celebration of print in his time.

In this quotation, Bacon talks about three inventions, “namely, printing, gunpowder and the compass” which have “changed the appearance and state of the whole world”. While gunpowder, first used by Babur in...