Susurrus in the Skull
Rabindra K Swain
Authorspress, 2008
Even today, the situation surrounding English-language writing in Orissa is yet to progress beyond the scattered forays that were witnessed in Calcutta and Madras during the 19th century, when English-educated Indians first began to write in the newly acquired tongue. Today, English-language literature in Orissa is still marked by lopsidedness, with significant disproportion between prose and poetry in favour of the latter. There are today simply not many Oriyas writing in English in the first place; among the miniscule group that is, there is virtually no fiction writer worth the name. For one reason or another, the world of Oriya English poetry has fared somewhat better. There is some irony in the fact that while Orissa is home to one of the finest and best-known among contemporary Indian English-language poets, Jayanta Mahapatra, the now-prominent map of Indian English poetry does not have a strong impression of the state.
Indeed, the non-Oriya readership of India has heard of only four Oriya poets – Mahapatra himself, as well as Bibhu Padhi, Rabindra Swain and the late Niranjan Mohanty, who passed away in July. This paucity inevitably forces one to think in terms of isolated individual voices rather than of a defining tradition or coherent world vision. The problem is compounded by the fact that the limelight continues to elude Orissa, thanks to its being only on the margin of socioeconomic development.
On their own admission, Padhi, Swain and Mahapatra are outsiders to the mainstream English poetry tradition. As Subhashini Kaligotla, poet, professor and editor of the New York-based poetry magazine Catamaran, pointed out in a recent overview of English-language poetry from Orissa, the tradition of these three poets is "a poetic consciousness shaped by remoteness, both physical and metaphysical, from the metros – places such as Bombay, Delhi and Calcutta." The poets themselves will readily acknowledge that the only community they are conscious of is, to quote Kaligotla, "a virtual one or a republic of one".