The languages that become ours

At dusk, as the slanting rays elongate the shadows around the chariot and its wheels tell you the exact time the sun will sink into the Bay of Bengal off the Chandrabhaga beach, you will find it impossible to drag yourself away from the ruins of the temple at Konarak. About 60 km southeast of Odisha's capital, Bhubaneswar, the small temple town is not only a popular destination for tourists but also host to a number of cultural festivals: music, dance and even sand art. On January 13-14, it hosted a poetry festival, named after the legendary “lost” river that figures prominently in ancient literature.

The festival, naturally, focussed on current trends in Odia poetry, which goes back to at least the 15th century when Sarala Das freely translated The Mahabharata into the language under the patronage of Emperor Kalipendra Deva, himself called the Adikabi, or first poet. Since Independence, Odia poetry, led by Guruprasad Mohanty and Bhanuji Rao, arrived at the shores of Modernism under the influence of T S Eliot’s The Waste Land. In more recent time, this aesthetic has been rejected in favour of Dalit, Adivasi, feminist and socialist poetry. Though the language is quite familiar to me, thanks to my Bengali ears, this was the first time I was exposed to the many debates in the literature.

We — Medha Singh, Arun Sagar, Arun Rajendran and I — were at the festival for a panel on contemporary English poetry. Writing in English is not without its pitfalls for Indian poets. Why not write in your mother tongue, is a question often aimed at us as a barb, though Indians have created literature in the language at least since the early decades of the early 19th century. (I’m thinking of HLV Derozio.) Kamala Das answered this question effectively in her poem, An Introduction: “Don’t write in English, they said, English is / Not your mother-tongue... / Why not let me speak in / Any language I like? The language I speak, / Becomes mine.”

Our panel was chaired by Jayanta Mahapatra, the first Indian poet writing in English to win the Sahitya Akademi award for his long poem Relationship in 1981. The author of 27 books of poems, seven of which are in Odia, is also the recipient of the Jacob Glatstein award, the Allen Tate Poetry Prize and the SAARC Literary Award. The Government of India had also conferred the Padma Shri on him, but he returned it in 2015 in protest against the growing climate of intolerance in the country. Equally comfortable in both languages, Mahapatra has no qualms in declaring: “I’m an Odia poet, writing in English.”

Naturally, poets writing in English in different parts of the country have very different concerns — as is evident in the poetry of so many of my peers. The influences are also manifold: of course, Anglo-American poetry, but also French and Russian, Chinese and African, as well literature in our “mother tongues”. While poets of any language in India might come mostly from one geographical region on the subcontinent (Odia poets from Odisha, Bengali poets from West Bengal, Telugu poets from Andhra Pradesh), English poets live and work in different parts of the country. Consequently, their poetry is radically diverse.

This is not to imply that the concerns of Odia poetry — or the literature of any region — are limited by their geographical constraints. On the contrary, local experiences add many dimensions that might prove to be elusive to their big city contemporaries. For instance, the poetry of Hemanta Dalapati cries out for recognition of the trauma of the displaced Adivasi. “In the struggle between Odia and Sambalpuri, the Adivasi languages often get ignored,” he told us in a private conversation. As of the 2011 Census, Adivasis comprise about 25 per cent of Odisha’s population. In the conflict between big capital, backed by the state, and its resistors, mainly Naxalites, Adivasis are the first casualty. Dalapati himself was accused of being a Naxalite supporter and suspended from his teaching, but later reinstated by a court order.

The vivid poetry and debates around issues of gender rights, in a session chaired by poet Savita Singh, displayed how deep feminism had dropped its roots in the language. Discussions around feminism are never too far from discussions around class. Is the feminism of upper- and middle-class women — who have considerable cultural capital, but were traditionally allowed little mobility — different from that of Dalit and proletarian women? While the later had mobility, necessary for their employment in farm lands, their caste and class consciousness infuse the poetry of Pritidhara Samal, Jyoshnarani Bhoi and Garima Nath with an incomparable edge.