Rajendra Kishore Panda

Rajendra Kishore Panda was born in the village of Batalaga in the Sambalpur district, Orissa. (His family was one of the 22,000 that faced the trauma of displacement when 285 villages – including Batalaga — were submerged under the waters of the Hirakud Dam Project in 1956-57.) He holds a Masters degree in Arts from Allahabad University. He published his first book of poetry in 1975.

Contextualising Panda’s work in Oriya letters, poet-translator Rabindra K Swain writes: “In Oriya poetry, Satchidananda Rautroy (1916-2004) is the harbinger of ‘neo-modernity’ and its principal idiom-maker. Rajendra Kishore Panda emerged in his lineage, along with other post-Rautroy major poets: Guru Prasad Mohanty, Ramakanta Rath, Sitakant Mahapatra and Soubhagya Kumar Misra.”

While he disavows allegiance to any single style or artistic credo (“Style is often the other name of self-repetition”), Rajendra Kishore Panda has clearly been inspirational for succeeding generations of Oriya poets. Distinctive for its creative vigour, breadth of vision, unceasing experimentation and inexhaustible linguistic vitality, his work claims for itself the right to “coo or caw or neigh or roar”, depending on the genetic predisposition of the poem in question.

The six selected poems in this edition reveal a surrealist vein, an incantatory cadence shot through with irony and a distinct anti-Establishment sensibility. In 'In Love with Skull', the poet seems fascinated by the ways in which history can be erased and rewritten: “I apply talc/ on its forehead,/ kohl in its eyes;/ I draw a pattern/ on its cheekbone/ and then wipe/ them all clean.” In ‘Amen’, a nightmare vision becomes a caustic critique of a world order as people stand “in queue/ for centuries/ waiting for the visa”. And then comes the apocalyptic clincher: “This is the only road/ to the other world./ Amen.”

In an interview with his translator that accompanies this edition, Panda talks with passion and wit on a range of issues: the poetry of dissent (“the opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude”); his agnosticism (“God in my poetry is an invented one, mostly to quarrel with or to chastise!”); his humanism (“I’ve declared love against all of mankind, unilaterally”); the essentially subversive nature of the poetic enterprise (“count me on the ‘opposite side’/ not in the plural but first person singular”); and his motto for life after his Collected Poems (“Blankness is all”).

He has been translated and interviewed for this edition by Rabindra K Swain (poet, critic and Managing Editor of the literary journal, Chandrabhaga).