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Welcome to Indian poetry - June 2007

May 03, 2007
Another edition, another language.
Enter Maithili, the seventeenth language on the India domain.
A brief note on context: Maithili is the language spoken largely in the state of Bihar and the eastern Terai region of Nepal (along with Bhojpuri and Magadhi). The name is derived from the word, Mithila, an independent state in ancient times. Often considered a dialect of Hindi and Bengali, Maithili received its constitutional ‘imprimatur’ only recently, when it was officially recognised as an independent Indian language by the Eighth Schedule of 2003 (along with Bodo, Dogri and Santhali). The language has a rich poetic tradition as well as a wealth of prose and drama from the 12th century AD.  

Udaya Narayana Singh works in Maithili and Bengali as a creative writer, and journeys between Maithili, Bengali, Hindi and English as a translator. An English translation of his Maithili poetry, Second Person Singular, was published recently by Katha – an important move by a leading publisher to introduce a marginal tongue into the mainstream.

Rajendra Kishore Panda, the other poet in this edition, is a senior writer in Oriya. He has authored sixteen collections of poetry and received various awards in recognition of his literary contribution.

There are interesting similarities here. For one, the poets hail from two eastern states of the country. For another, both poets celebrate singularity in their own ways. Even while Panda champions the poetry of sedition, he is wary of the ways in which dissent can be collectivised, standardised and co-opted. He quotes a line from one of his own poems: “count me on the ‘opposite side’/ not in the plural but first person singular”. Singh, for his part, values the game of ‘othering’ the self in poetry, and positions himself in the “third person singular” in order to be able to address ‘you’, the “second person singular”!

Both talk in impassioned terms of the sensuousness of language. Panda talks of the ‘creative-intuitive’ impulse by which a poet recovers words from his memory, enabling him to mix words of Sanskrit origin with Oriya colloquialisms. He speaks also of the “passionate engagement in finding a meaning beyond meaning”. Singh invokes language as an alive and sensual presence in his poetry: “subtle,/ ambivalent,/ full of cuss words,/ erotic”.

And finally, both view ‘travel’ as a rewarding but emphatically non-colonial enterprise. Singh sees himself as a traveller with multiple citizenships, viewing translation as “travel between texts, cultures, and two or more times and spaces”. It is by no means, he declares, “a site of conflict”, but “a kinship tool”.

Panda’s view of travel is not one of smug entitlement either. In his poem, ‘The Ambassador’ (translated by Madhav Das; not included in this edition), he writes:

I do not know the country
of which or to which
I’m the Ambassador:
an envoy in peril.
At every stride
I get
more and more exiled.
And every poem:
just a fragile pact
for a transient ceasefire
with Time the Terrible.


The poems here represent strong and engaging pacts with moments in history. Not compromises (for as Singh says, “I have never been worried about the ‘losses’ in translation”), but dynamic creative negotiations. The translators – Rabindra K Swain for Oriya and Singh along with Rizio  Yohannan Raj for Maithili – are primarily responsible for these new “transient ceasefires”.

Listen in.
© Arundhathi Subramaniam
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