SOCIAL SCIENTIST of colonial rule but also created the shifts and turns which led to the 're-ordering' of post-colonial Orissa. Simultaneously, by venturing to locate the structures of interaction between the 'elites' and the common people that shaped this period, it questions the subaltern historian's method of dichotomisation of both. POPULAR MEMORY OF QUIT INDIA, FAMINE AND POPULAR PRESSURES: By the beginning of 1943 very few traces of the Quit India Movement were left in Orissa. Laxman Naiko (who was the only political prisoner to be awarded a death sentence) was secretly hanged in the Berhampur jail on 29 March 1943. Before his execution he had declared that he would have been much happier if he had seen swaraj before his death.3 The colonial bureaucracy simplified the logic of peasant and tribal militancy of the Koraput district by talking about how they were 'misled' by the Congress. And, even if we accept the point that some of the political prisoners in the Koraput jail felt that they 'require(d) and expect(ed) punishment'4 it needs to be emphasised that this only symbolised their pathetic acceptance of circumstances. Yet on occasions we also get evidence of anger and frustration at the failure of the Quit India Movement which took the form of individual actions like the burning of an opium centre at Ghateswar (in Bhadrak). Although no political significance seems to have been attached to this act it is difficult to accept that it merely expressed the anger of an 'opium addict' who could not 'get enough opium'.5 Popular memory retained the Quit India Movement as something signifying doom and repression. A booklet of poems composed by a popular poet prophesied the end of the world on 1 August 1943 and began with the lines: 'On the 1st of August, Sunday morning, Kalijuga will meet its doom.'6 A series of rumours circulated in coastal Orissa (July 1943), which were based on astrological reasoning and which predicted that the last two days of July and the first day of August 1943 would be 'really dangerous'. This was accompanied by another rumour in July 1943 that 'Lord' Jagannatha would be soon leaving Puri. These rumours had an extraordinary effect and on the evening of 1 August 1943 the entire population of Cuttack town was out on the streets making offerings at temples to tide over the 'bad' days.7 Similarly the forecast, based on the Oriya calendar, of bad harvests, should be viewed in the context of apocalyptic notions which survived in the