Poetry in the Odia language, writes poet-translator Pitambar Naik, “has a long way to go and [is a] landscape that hasn’t yet been explored, touched and [is] minimally discussed. Odia poetry is . . . a promise to the future.” It is in this very prodding that Fury Species: Odia Poetry of Resistance (Hyderabad, India: Rehor Publisher, 2023) came to be. Featuring thirty nine poets from the Indian state of Odisha, the anthology is suitably bisected into sections: ‘Not the Raga but the Rage’ and ‘No Reticence but Resistance.’ Translation of poetry from the Odia into English becomes imperative in this decolonial endeavor. As Diptiranjan Pattanaik proclaims in Changing the Terms: Translating in the Postcolonial Era (2000), “The act of translation is central to the formation of an Odia literary canon.” Naik continues: “Let the world know the people in these poems, and how they’ve suffered for centuries.”
In this interview, I conversed with Naik on his anthology on Dalit protest poetry, his manifold creative process in translating Odia-language poets from the margins, and the state of literature among the Dalit-Bahujan, among other things.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): First of all, congratulations on Fury Species: Odia Poetry of Resistance published in October by Hyderabad-based Rehor Publisher, the first anthology of translated poetry from the Odia language. Apart from poetry that carries “the message for the emancipation” of the oppressed, what are other motive forces which prompted the creation of this anthology?
Pitambar Naik (PN): There are prolific writers producing quality literature in Odia and many of them have been translated into English, but many of these translations are abysmal renditions of the source material, and there are simply too few of them. As a result, the outer world is unaware of Odia literature. Translation is a subject that interests few, particularly in Odisha, and those writers who are translated come from the privileged high caste group. We can’t bypass the force of the caste system, which sends shockwaves through every facet of life.
Literature of the suppressed and alienated, the Dalit-Bahujans, has been strategically censored from telling, retelling, and translation. The objective behind the anthology Fury Species was to translate, interpret, and propagate the writings of the oppressed groups from Odisha. This was the driving force that fuelled me to translate many established poets like Basudev Sunani, Akhil Nayak, Kumar Hassan, Sanjay Kumar Bag, Hemanta Dalpati, and others. Fury Species also houses other eminent poets such as Ashutosh Parida, Shatrughna Pandab, Pitambar Tarai, Lenin Kumar, and more who have been prolific in creating progressive literature.
AMMD: I have never seen an anthology with contributors coming from such varied backgrounds. Fury Species’ contributors include filmmaker Surya Shankar Das, linguist Akhil Nayak, scientist Ashutosh Parida, veterinarian Basudev Sunani, lawyer Debendra Lal, and journalist Kumar Hassan. Other contributors hail from the fields of economics, medicine and pharmaceuticals, social work, and folkloric studies. What does this reveal about Odia poetry?
PN: The contributors of Fury Species are all vociferous in their commitment and spirit to raising the voices of Odisha, particularly those of the Dalit-Bahujans. For ages, Brahmins have been dominant in all disciplines, including literature, and that’s primarily because of the inhuman caste system. However, after the advent of philosophers and leaders like Jyotiba Phule, E.V. Periyar, and Dr. B.R. Ambedkar—the crusaders against the caste system in India—and later when the constitution of independent India was formulated, things gradually began to change. People, particularly writers from the lower strata of society, gained space to represent their communities and speak against the rampant injustice, inequality, and alienation in Indian society.
Most of the contributors of Fury Species are from these social backgrounds, whose communities are kept outside the Hindu social fabric, deliberately discriminated against, and enslaved. Writers from the privileged group have deliberately restrained these communities from talking about it. The writers of Fury Species are self-made and have achieved these heights with tremendous perseverance—they have become representatives of their communities, speaking out against the injustice meted out to them. For these people, being admitted to institutions of higher learning itself is a herculean task because of the discriminatory social order, which many of them have achieved. From their studies, they are able to detect the disease in our society and protest the age-old injustice.
AMMD: In the introduction to Fury Species, you intimated your optimism about the future, particularly because of the younger Odia poets. You characterised them as,
“hell-bent on creating engaging, intriguing, and genuinely startling poetry … that centralises on people, their struggles, their plight and their heroism alike in every sphere. They … sing joyfully … protest radically.”
Can you speak about the ethnopolitical and geolinguistic milieu that Odia poets currently face and therefore, write about and write against?
PN: People in India are divided, subdivided, split and walled—ethnically and strategically. There is a huge, three thousand year old gulf between them, which historians opine has been strengthening in every generation. This fabric is unshatterable with the prowess of the caste system that has had a divine sanction since time immemorial. This applies to Odisha, the state I come from.
There are four types of castes in the Hindu social order—Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas. and Shudra. The first three are the dwijas, or twice-born castes, and are most authoritative. According to the Vedas, those of the final caste are called outcastes or untouchables and are fit only for manual work and subjugation to the twice-born dwijas. These stratifications forcefully barred the Shudras from the right to education, property, the possession of weapons, and ultimately from leading a life with the same dignity as others. As a result, the Shudras were reduced to slaves. Except for a few, most of the contributing poets of Fury Species have a painful past and appalling present.
Though many of the contributing poets are first-generation college graduates with no literary backgrounds, they write with power and true spirit to expose the naked truth of the caste system. Unfortunately, the writers from the privileged caste rarely objected to or wrote about the cancer that has enslaved millions of people over the centuries. In the few writings acknowledging the subjugation of the Shudras, those of the upper castes portrayed the underprivileged as victims or sinners, cursed or less than human, and often justified the suffering of the Dalits in their literature. In this sociocultural and linguistic context, writers of the present generation from the Dalit-Bahujan castes challenge bourgeoise, Brahminic, or capitalistic literature and shape their own to speak for their people and their unending struggles. Fury Species is not just a mere anthology of poems, but rather a manual of resistance against those who would cease the momentum of Dalit-Bahujan literature in Odisha.
AMMD: You also wrote about the anthology bearing “witness to the anger and exasperation of poets against suppressive caste system and racial discrimination in India.” This brings to mind a previous Asymptote interview I did with Indian Dalit poet, memoirist, translator, and publisher Yogesh Maitreya who spoke against the caste system that haunts India’s artistic ecosystem. Can you give us a glimpse of what is happening in your country’s literary production?
PN: People from all suppressed castes fall under Dalit-Bahujan, including religious minorities (Christians, Buddhists, and Muslims). As I mentioned before, these people were deliberately restrained from the right to education by the upper caste for more than three thousand years. For many millennia, they were kept from the visions and objectives of art and literature, though their roots lie in the artistic and imaginative architectural finesse of Mahenjo-daro and Harappan civilisations.
As far as literature is concerned, it’s lost its core values, its central ideas, and the heartbeats of literary sensitivity—it’s been derailed from its purpose. Mainstream literature has become shallow, empty but for threadbare caste-based emotions and lores. Caste bleeds into everything: body colour, surname, dialect, capability, family practices. Those who don’t fit the image of the upper castes are barred from art forms like dance, song, and painting on a day-to-day basis.
Literature has even graver complicity in this. For centuries mainstream literature has enjoyed or silently supported the victimhood of the Dalit-Bahujans, assimilating and co-opting writers into Hindu culture. This is the reason the suppressed have come together to create and proliferate a literature of their own. Today they are hellbent on shaping a literature that represents their realities, that delves into the heroism of their communities’ resistance to caste oppression and enslavement throughout the centuries. Their literature is double-edged in nature, both bringing light to their culture and exposing the pseudo literatures that romanticise Brahminism.
AMMD: In a survey on Odia literature published in Indian Literature in the late 50s, Kunjabehari Das, citing poets such as Sachi Routroy, Godavarish Mahapatra, and Sudhansu Sekara Ray, abridges:
“Among the publications, the novel tops the list in popularity. Travel stories come next. There is now an increased demand for books of criticism. But the output of poetry is meagre and the sales disappointing. Poets of the old School have still a large following. The new form and technique of modern poetry seem alien to most of the readers. So it is to be mostly found in the pages of magazines only … Use of new images, depth of thought and suggestiveness are worthy of the high position he has occupied in the field of modern [Odia] poetry.”
In what ways has the current Odia literary landscape departed from this? And where do you think it is going?
PN: The landscape of Odia literature has transformed rapidly since the milieu in which that was written. The universal expression, tone, and sensibilities of Odia literature are gaining momentum and finally reaching a larger audience. Over time, the people from the lower strata are proclaiming and reclaiming their rights, and literature and readership are both gaining more respect within our communities. There are a few pressing issues—first, that readers are far behind in analytical reading, continuing to evaluate literature from the old-school perspective. Novelists are far more established than poets, and modern and experimental techniques in poetry are alien to current readers. Our society isn’t given conducive platforms to hone and chisel our literary potential, and finding apprenticeship in literature is almost nil.
The government is always an obstacle in promoting and safeguarding literature and art. The arts are a threat, as honest expression questions the government and its repressive systems. Except for a couple of literary awards, the government doesn’t encourage nor does it nurture creativity and literary spirit in its people, instead censoring those who dare to dissent. There are many Odia magazines and literary journals (such as Jhankara, Prativeshi, Katha, Navapatra, Akankshya, Akshansha, Viswamukti, Mahuri, Samasamayika, and Katha Katha Kabita Kabita) dedicated to promoting literature, but most of them are pro-government, pro-establishment, and directly or indirectly feed the discriminatory caste system in the name of literature. On the other hand, pro-people journals like Derna, Indigenous Voice, Nisaan, and Nirveda are doing a tremendous job of promoting writers from underprivileged landscapes, who will shape the future of writing.
AMMD: In her article on the Odia Literary Movement published in Language and the Making of Modern India (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Pritipuspa Mishra draws on the coinciding of post-British Empire Odisha and the rise of Odia language and literature. Apart from colonisation and imperialism, what were—and still are—other structural and systemic obstructions against the development of the Odia language and the thriving of its literature?
PN: Beyond the dominant forces of colonisation and imperialism, Odisha is lacking the infrastructure to nurture the growth of our language and our emerging professionals. There should be language and research centres across the state. The government of Odisha should take proactive initiatives to fund libraries and reading centres in every village. Apart from university-level studies—though it’s there in every college and university—there should be constructive endeavours to make Odia a job-oriented language, which is absent in the collective conscience of the people and the government.
Furthermore, many people are opting to enroll their children in convent schools, as the government-run Odia schooling is way behind in terms of quality education and impact. Odisha should adopt a European model of language growth and development programmes, meaning students should be well-trained in language, literature, and creative writing from state primary and secondary schools. Unfortunately, that’s not happening in Odisha. Last but not least, common people should be encouraged to question and develop literature for themselves, in order to interrogate and expose the misdeeds of authoritative groups.
AMMD: Let’s talk about literary translation across classical to contemporary Odia-language writings. Quoting Jayanta Mahapatra from his 1981 article ‘Translating from the Oriya: An Approach’ at Cygnus,
“[I]t is almost impossible to translate poets like Upendra Bhanja or Gangadhar Meher [from Odia to English]. [T]he problem is of language … poets who used language with such powers of magic and devotion that resulted in instilling in readers’ minds a divine and perhaps mystic presence. Neither Upendra Bhanja nor Gangadhar Meher used free verse, and their poems literally sag with the weight of ornamentation and alliterative sounds. Lyrical poetry … was full of words having too many referential allusions, and was more or less ritualistic, with an incantatory tone … Even the later poets … like Radhanath Ray, resorted to strict, musical verse forms … Oriya diction is slow and formal, the sounds of words seem to dig into the mind and meander in the deeper layers of the imagination.”
Can you weigh in on this?
PN: Jayanta Mahapatra so appropriately examines the complexity and idiosyncrasies of Odia poetry. Poets like Upendra Bhanja, Gangadhar Meher, Kabisurjya Baladeb Rath, or Radhanath Roy wrote in intricately lyrical verse, which even scholars had an aversion to translating. The dictions, syntaxes, and styles they employed in their poetry were beyond the understanding of common people, and this complexity led it to be a rather unapproachable or closed form of writing, and thus those texts are hardly translated into English. I think this form is quite difficult to engage with, and Jayanta Mahapatra is right in his concerns. Literature can be nurtured only when it is rich in simplicity and sweet in its depth and ornamentation; as for language, it should be learnable and ever-evolving.
I’d like to talk of another great poet of the Odia language for whom I have abundant respect and from whom I draw limitless inspiration—the saint and poet Bhima Bhoi. His poetic diction, syntax, and experimental forms were abundant in simplicity and radical ritualism. Though he existed little before the poets we have discussed above, his poetic expressions were so rhythmic and rich in ornamental imagery and metaphor that they caught the heart and mind of every reader both of his time and ours. In the way of Bhima Bhoi, modern poets should express their message with a loud, clear, and radical voice, thereby cultivating love and empathy for linguistic, literary, and poetic culture for generations.
AMMD: You were also a contributor to The World That Belongs To Us: An Anthology of Queer Poetry from South Asia (eds. Aditi Angiras & Akhil Katyal, HarperCollins India, 2018). Can you speak about your poem “Banavasi Dhangamajhi” which appeared in that anthology?
PN: I think any deprived and alienated community of the world is my community. The World That Belongs To Us: An Anthology of Queer Poetry from South Asia was a great anthology of poems, of which I was elated to be a part. “Banabasi Dhangadamajhi” is a poem that takes the name of a Dalit man from the Western part of Odisha; this poem depicts how he spends his lifetime under the trauma of untouchability, dreams of escaping his docile life, but can never reach a life without the pain of subjugation and ostracisation. I explored a brave and adamant lifestyle in Banabasi Dhangadamajhi, who goes on to challenge the suppressive structure and the hateful landscape he lives in. I would continue to pen and submit to such anthologies in the future, as well as translate from the Odia language for Indian or international journals.
AMMD: Odia literature has been studied by generations of scholars from Bijoy Chandra Mazumdar to Mayadhar Manasinha to Jatindra Mohan Mohanty. When we speak of the scholarship surrounding Odia literature, who are the influences—Global Majority, South Asian, Indian, and Odia scholars, writers, and thinkers—whose works shaped your philosophy, writings (both critical and creative), and ethos? And in what ways have these people been influential to you?
PN: Well, I am a first-generation writer in my family. I don’t have a literary lineage of any kind. I developed an interest in literature only after my 12th standard and during that time I started reading Odia poetry, short fiction, and novels and started writing in Odia. This lasted only for a few years until I finished my BA studies, at which time I quit writing in Odia. I decided to become a voracious reader of English literature, and it was only after my MA when I began to take writing seriously, seeing my first published English poem only in 2013. During my formative years, books by William Black, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, W. S. Merwin, Seamus Heaney, Lucille Clifton, Emily Dickinson, and Sylvia Plath shaped my thoughts and gave me a foundation for my writing. There are also several versatile contemporary writers like Carl Philips, Kaveh Akbar, Jericho Brown, Danez Smith, Ilya Kaminsky, Tracy K. Smith, and Ada Limon who unceasingly inspire me to write.
To your list, I would like to add critics and scholars Fakir Mohan Senapati, Gopinath Mohanty, Sachi Routroy, Ravi Singh, Akhil Mohan Pattnaik, J.P. Das, Ramakanta Rath, Sitakanta Mahapatra, Manoj Das, and Jayanta Mahapatra—as well as writers and poets like Hrushikesh Panda, Sadananda Tripathy, Bibhuti Pattnaik, Bhima Prusty, Gourahari Das, Ashutosh Parida, Kumar Hassan, Satrughna Pandab, Basudev Sunani, Akhil Nayak, Bharat Majhi, Sanjaya Kumar Bag, and Kshetrabasi Naik. I must also share my thoughts on Odia literature and the current landscape of Odia writings.
For ages, Odia writings have been influenced, dominated, and co-opted by Brahminism. Sadly, for many writers, literature is nothing but the juxtaposition of religion, culture, and Brahminical traditions—heavily loaded with myths, lore, and mythological narrations—and that single definition has intruded the minds and thoughts of many literati in Odisha as well. To be more critical, I see this as a deepening and lethal attack on Odia literature, but there is a ray of hope, lit by the present generation of writers who are rescuing Odia literature from silence— its “saviours.”
AMMD: In your opinion, which works from the Odia, modern or from antiquity, deserve another look—and retranslation?
PN: I would revisit books like saint and poet Bhima Bhoi’s Stuti Chantamani, Akhil Nayak’s Bheda, Sanjaya Kumar Bag’s Birnag Devi, Kshetrabasi Naik’s Dadan, Bhima Pusty’s Jambuloka, Gayatri Saraf’s Itabhatira Shilpi, Kumar Hassan’s Thia Langala, and Satrughna Pandab’s Smaraniya Sataka. I should also add the poetry of Kshetapurana and the short fiction of Barnabodha O. Madhubanka Katha. At the moment, I am happily translating Sanjaya Kumar Bag’s short story collection Birnang Devi and new and selected poems from Manoranjan Sahoo’s books Upadebata, Khali Hatare and Kichhi Kabita Kicchi Narabata.
Pitambar Naik is a poet, writer, and translator born in the Kalahandi District of Odisha in India and currently based in Bengaluru. He is the editor and translator of the anthology Fury Species: Odia Poetry of Resistance (Rehor Publisher, 2023) and author of the poetry collection The Anatomy of Solitude (Hawakal, 2019). A former editor of Minute Magazine and Mud Season Review, he has contributed to The World That Belongs To Us: An Anthology of Queer Poetry from South Asia (Harper Collins India, 2018) as well as in journals and magazines within and outside India like Notre Dame Review, The McNeese Review, JMWW, Ghost City Review, Singapore Unbound, Ellipsis Literature and Art, The Bayou Review, The Indian Quarterly, Eunoia Review, Another Chicago Magazine, New Contrast Journal, Cha: Asian Literary Journal, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Poetry at Sangam, Vayavya, and AzonaL: Poetry in Translation.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (they/them), Asymptote’s editor-at-large for the Philippines, is the author of In the Name of the Body: Lyric Essays (Canada: Wrong Publishing, 2023) and Towards a Theory on City Boys: Prose Poems (UK: Newcomer Press, 2021). Published from South Africa to Japan, France to Australia, and translated into Mandarin and Swedish, their latest works have appeared in World Literature Today, BBC Radio 4, Oxford Anthology of Translation, Sant Jordi USA Festival of Books, and the University of Alabama Press anthology Infinite Constellations. Their lyric essays have been nominated to the Pushcart Prize and their prose poem was selected for The Best Asian Poetry. Formerly with Creative Nonfiction magazine, more of their works can be found at https://linktr.ee/samdapanas.
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