LANGUAGE OF HUNGER, ECO-COLONISATION

Devastation of nature and plight of humans have been dominant discourses in poetry and fiction

- KEDAR MISHRA

When I started writing poetry in the late 1980s, I confronted a vast tract of death consciousness and alienation. The poets of my time and my language were talking about something which was not at all familiar to my reality or imagination. Most of them were singing in unidentifiable tunes and their images looked too distant. I found my own language to be absurd, meaningless and hard to crack. Our poets and writers were rich with awards; they had the shining laurel over their head and as a teenager I obviously aspired to be one among them.

I started writing by following the trend. But after writing a few, my poems also sounded alien to me. I could not relate myself with my own poems. It would be pertinent to point out that the Odisha of the 1980s was an unending tale of hunger deaths and distress childselling. Living in the land of hunger, I was singing the song of rootless solitude. Literature of my time was not my own; it had some kind of imported imagination planted in our language. The so-called modernism in Odia literature was a colonial hangover and middle-class hallucination. It had no root in Odia life, livelihood or living tradition.

Odia is one of the ancient languages of India. In a literary tradition of 1,000 years, images were mostly from nature. Life in literature was natural and spiritual. Odia literary tradition was deeply embedded with nature, and poetry was all about the beauty of nature and the struggle of humankind for survival.