Six Acres and a Third: The Classic Nineteenth-Century Novel About Colonial India. This sly and humourous novel is both a literary work and historical document. 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 arrangments emerge and new types of people come to populate and transform the social landscape.  Although translated from Oriya, none of the author's dig at the unsavoury aspects of British colonialism has been lost.