“True
poetry cannot be dated and dead, cannot be classified into old and
modern…Perhaps a single poem is being written…by all the poets, in
their variegated splendour.”
—Rajendra Kishore Panda
We reiterate the
limitless omnipresence of good poetry, but here we present an
anthology of selected works of Oriya poets of the neomodern phase,
ushered in by Satchidananda Routroy and other major poets, and
further developed by poets of succeeding generations.
Before we delve
into poetry, a few words about the ooze-point and course-lines of
the flow may be useful.
India is a
multilingual subcontinent. Oriya is one of the ancient and most
developed Indian languages, with a rich legacy of literary
creativity. The Oriya literary tradition is traced to the
fifth-to-eighth century AD. Though the “Charyapadas” subscribe to
a stream of Buddhist philosophy, they are poetry in essence :
allegorical and mystic.
After the
Charyapada period, a mass of texts is not traceable, barring a few
works such as the Chautishas and Sisuveda. But that phase
culminates in the emergence of Oriya Mahabharat by Sarala Das in
the fifteenth century. It is a multi-volume epic, composed in
unique “dandi vritta,” a metre of unevenly-lettered lines
spreading in a natural-playful flow. It is also a treatise
recording snaps of the socio-cultural milieu of the times. The
next luminous event is the Oriya Bhagabat by Jagannath Das,
produced in the sixteenth century. Composed in nine-letter line-rigour
(“nabakshari”), but abounding in natural aphorisms and rare
insight, it is an extraordinary treasure. This period is also
noted for the works of Achyutnanda Das, Balaram Das and others,
which epitomise the streams of metaphysical quests of the poets,
put in evocative symbolism and neat rhythm.
During the
medieval period, erudition and ornate poetics held sway over the
poets which earned them the epithet “Reeti-kavis”. They finetuned
the witty word-play which took rhythmic Oriya poetry to a lofty
height. Upendra Bhanja is the prime figure among other gifted
poets such as Dinakrushna and Abhimanyu Samantasinghar. Towards
the end of the Reeti period, Baladev Rath crosses the
not-so-resilient kavya format, with short poems which glisten with
natural wit and vigour, which have a wide range and variety in
theme and treatment. Gopalakrushna Patnaik and Banamali Das also
adopt their own forms of evocative expression in verse with
alluring aesthetics. So does Salabeg.
Then we find two
great contemporaries who operated from divergent angles : Bhima
Bhoi and Radhanath Ray. The time is the later part of nineteenth
century and beginning of twentieth century. Bhima Bhoi, of tribal
birth, is a gifted poet of spiritualism and rebellion in the
subtlest sense of the terms, a humanist of rare insight. It is
simply unbearable to witness the agonies of human and other
animates, he feels. And he proclaims :”Let my life rot in hell,
but be world saved.”
Radhanath Ray
(1848-1908) is the principal architect of the era of initial
modernity in Oriya poetry. During the later part of nineteenth
century, as in other Indian languages, interaction of the Indian
Muse with the Western perceptions starts in Oriya too. With
Radhanath modern sensibility enters into Oriya literature. The
other noted poets of this period are Gangadhar Meher, Madhusudan
Rao and Nandakishore Bal .
In between the
eras of “initial modernity” and “neomodernity,” we find the
Satyabadi and the Sabuja groups. Gopabandhu Das, Nilakantha Das
and Godabarish Mishra are value-teachers in nation-building, life
and poetry. Baikunthanath Patnaik is the cynosure of the Sabuja
period. Non-Sabuja poets who shine are Kuntala Kumari Sabat,
Mayadhar Mansingh, Ananta Patnaik and Radhamohan Gadanayak.
Satchidananda
Rautroy is the harbinger of the era of “neo-modernity” in Oriya
poetry. As Ramakanta Rath and Haraprasad Das observe, he is the
“principal idiom-maker of modern Oriya poeltry.” He has a wide
range and a world-view. His phenomenal presence is acknowledged by
major poets younger to Rautroy, who have had their own zones since
long. This anthology starts with the poems of Satchidananda
Rautroy.
A rebel and a
romantic, a humanist par excellence, Rautroy has authored numerous
works of poetry. His format is mostly sculpturesque, his
architectonics neat and elegant. A poet almost having a pact with
Time, a poet with macro world-vision and micro attention to
details, Sochi Rautroy’s impact has spanned the entire second-half
of twentieth century Oriya poetry.
Next to Sochi
Rautroy and his peer Ananta Patnaik, it is Guruprasad Mohanty who
is reckoned as an icon in contemporary Oriya poetry. With a poetic
corpus of hardly twenty poems, he virtually gave up writing. The
degree of decadence portrayed in his poems may not be reflective
of the reality of Cuttack and Orissa of his times, even his poetry
may often mirror too much of Eliot in a desi frame, but the free
flowing traits of Guruprasadian lyricism ingrained in his style
captivated generations of readers.
Despite his
anglicized construct in diction and narration, Ramakanta Rath,
especially the early Ramakanta, attracted the attention of critics
and younger poets. He has a unique blend of modernist esotericism,
sardonic slant and a recurring vein of negation turned into art. A
poet of complex man-woman relationship, that borders on oblivion,
he has the power of juxtaposing the physical and the metaphysical
in a deep dark world of realizations. “I am your husband’s
skeleton,” he may tell someone, and “you are my beautiful widow.”
As Jayanta
Mahapatra has put it, no major Oriya poet remained wholly
uninfluenced by Rautroy, but they have taken different courses in
the process of their growth. If Guruprasad remained a “poet of a
season” inspiring generations of poets or Ramakanta gradually
entered into a mellower world of SriRadha, Sitakant Mahapatra,
Soubhagya Kumar Misra and Rajendra Kishore Panda evolved their own
diction, a world very much their own.
Sitakant’s vision
of a suffering world, perpetually in the process of
self-redemption, maintains a strong link with the Oriya tradition
and heritage. The ‘sky of words’ has a link with ‘the speckled
river.’ A lonesome ‘islander’ may be led towards an ‘oceanization.’
If Sitakant and
pre-Sitakant poets tended to be reticent and, often, too
undertonal, Soubhagya Kumar and Rajendra Kishore came up with the
trait of vigour of Rautroy and, in their own individual ways,
charged it with new dimensions and wider connotations. Rajendra
refuses to be ‘classified' : “the male, the rebel, the ascetic,
the child, the lover, the jester alternate” in poetry, says he.
Variegated though, the residual is a positive vision, despite the
presentday oddities. He espouses a humanist cause: “Tender is the
rebellion;” he is “prepared to bloom with the bud or burst with
the bomb, unconditionally," every moment.
Soubhagya is a
master micro-observer, turning even trivia into art, enlivened by
wit and a racy narrative. His earlier swiftness has turned into
sedate subtlety. He continues to take the reader to insightful
stumblings. His ‘blind honeybee’ finds honey-saps even in
unimaginable founts. Soubhagya and Rajendra, each having distinct
‘creationism,’ have one common point : they have inspired their
younger fellowpoets immensely, making them non-hesitant, bold and
have ‘oriented them towards poetic freed-speech’ in handling
complex and unusual themes. The Oriya poetic diction has become
vibrant and resilient in usage and connotation.
Sochi Rautroy’s
lineage is very strong. Sitakant, Soubhagya and Rajendra have many
peers, with their individual strength. The oracular Dipak Mishra
with a strong sense of Clio and other Muses, the automystic
Harihar Mishra with his Puri-Mahodadhi waves, the
esoteric-intellectual Haraprasad Das with his neo-Charyapadic
chants, the creative-errant Kamalakant Lenka with his undying
metameaning ramblings, the poet-Adonis J P Das with his neat and
symbolic articulations, the eternal adventist Pratibha Satpathy
invoking the Lord, Savari-like, or bemoaning the lost child, the
ever serene Sourindra Barik : all of them and many others have
contributed to Oriya poetry. Jayanta Mahapatra, eminent in
Indian-English poetry, has turned bilingual and has published
original Oriya poems in several collections. Devdas Chhotray, the
truant prince-of-romance, continues his search for evanescent
Mallika!
If Brahmotri
Mohanty has left the mossyard long back and has entered the
sanctum, Rabi Singh continues to combat the forces of
exploitation. Brajanath Rath loves both the red and pink colours
of creativity. While Mamata Dash unifies subtle love with divine
grace, Aparna invokes the passionate reality with unhesitant
candour; Giribala’s poetry contains the feministic dissent within
poetic limits. Asutosh Parida is a poet of creative dissent, a
voice of conscience and humanist commitment.
Among the next
generation poets who are both “young and not-so-young,” Amaresh
Patnaik, Haraprasad Paricha Patnaik, Abhaya Kumar Padhi,
Rohinikanta Mukherjee, Aswini Kumar Mishra, Hrushikesh Mallick,
Bhagirathi Mishra, Satrughna Pandab and Aparna Mohanty have
evinced their creative talents in variegated utterances. If one is
a quasi-surrealist, another is village-nostalgic. Another moves
from seerlike chant to populist polemics.
The latest group
of poets who have attracted current attention are the young ones.
Although universal inference is not always desirable, it seems
that they have not absorbed much from their immediate
predecessors. Many of them have taken the mantras from seniors,
looking back to the generation earlier. But some of them have also
looked around, and looked within. The bold approach, the
‘directspeak’ diction, the open-ended observations have been
expanded. And, where all these aspects have been charged with
flashes of vision, the results have been excellent. Among the
emerging voices of this generation are Manoranjan Dash, Akhil
Nayak, Pabitra Mohan Dash, Sucheta Mishra, Basudev Sunani, Sunil
Prusty, Ajay Pradhan, Manoj Meher, Arupanand Panigrahi and many
others. The oozings and cross-movements have been going on. It is
premature to predict the courses of the streams and substreams.
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