In Our Own Voice

Odisha has enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with poetry and has had a long and unbroken tradition of women writing poetry. Women have made significant contribution to the canon of Odia poetry, starting from the fifteenth century to the present. Among women poets of Odisha, perhaps the earliest is Madhabi Dasi, an exponent of Bhakti poetry and a contemporary of Sri Chaitanya. She wrote in Brajboli, Bangla and Odia. Her janāna 'Chakānayan he Jagujiban Srihari' was one of her most popular devotional songs in Odia. Nandabai Chautiśā is another well-known poem composed by a woman from Odisha in pre-colonial times. Several women, mostly from royal families, composed devotional songs and long narrative poems in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Odisha witnessed a burst of feminine creative energy in the wake of Indian Independence which continued undiminished through the last quarter of the century and has reached a fruition in the present, when writing poetry has become almost de rigeur, where poetry reading sessions and publication have become a state-wide quotidian activity. In Our Own Voice: Poems by Odia Women Poets is an ambitious enterprise of the renowned poet, writer and playwright J. P. Das who has painstakingly culled, collected, and translated the creative outpourings of some of these women set far apart in time but geographically rooted in the state. Some of these poems were edited and translated by Das earlier and appeared in two separate anthologies, titled In Other Words (2017) and Under the Silent Sun (1992). He co-edited the latter with the Chicago-based academician Arlene Zide. The present volume contains poems from these collections as well as many other young and vibrant voices. Originally written in Odia language and meticulously translated into English by Das, these poems belong to women writers spanning nearly half a century, who come from diverse walks of life. Some of them are working professionals who hail from the world of corporate and journalism; some are fulltime writers while there are contributions from others who seem to steal time to compose verses in the interstices of their domestic chores. The poems in this volume are rich and eclectic, which range over a variety of subjects, providing a polyphony of voices and a panoply of themes. The writers in this collection straddle different worlds-a little more than five decades separate Banaja Devi and Amiyabala Muni who were born in pre-independent India circa 1941, from the youngest contributors, Tanmayee Rath and Swapnajita Sankhua, born during the pre-reform and post-liberalisation period of India, in the years 1987 and 1998 respectively. Poems collected from such a broad time spectrum would naturally bring an array of thematic concerns and preoccupations. A brief overview of the development of Odia poetry by women over the decades since India’s Independence would reveal that, like all women’s poetry elsewhere in the world, there is a sense of thwarted aspiration and patriarchal oppression in the early set of poets, sometimes coupled with the mildest influence of western modernism, resulting in occasional experimentation.