IN OUR OWN VOICE IBD

Sinopsis

Odisha has enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with poetry and has had a long and unbroken tradition of womenáwriting poetry. Women have made significant contributionáto the canon of Odia poetry, starting from the fifteenthácentury to the present. Among women poets of Odisha,áperhaps the earliest is Madhabi Dasi, an exponent of Bhaktiápoetry and a contemporary of Sri Chaitanya. She wroteáin Brajboli, Bangla and Odia. Her janÄüna 'ChakÄünayan heáJagujiban Srihari' was one of her most popular devotionalásongs in Odia. Nandabai ChautiÅóÄü is another well-knownápoem composed by a woman from Odisha in pre-colonialátimes. Several women, mostly from royal families,ácomposed devotional songs and long narrative poems ináthe eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.áOdisha witnessed a burst of feminine creative energyáin the wake of Indian Independence which continuedáundiminished through the last quarter of the century and hasáreached a fruition in the present, when writing poetry hasábecome almost de rigeur, where poetry reading sessions andápublication have become a state-wide quotidian activity. InáOur Own Voice: Poems by Odia Women Poets is an ambitiousáenterprise of the renowned poet, writer and playwright J. P.áDas who has painstakingly culled, collected, and translatedáthe creative outpourings of some of these women set faráapart in time but geographically rooted in the state. Someáof these poems were edited and translated by Das earlieráand appeared in two separate anthologies, titled In OtheráWords (2017) and Under the Silent Sun (1992). He co-editedáthe latter with the Chicago-based academician Arlene Zide.áThe present volume contains poems from these collectionsáas well as many other young and vibrant voices. Originallyáwritten in Odia language and meticulously translated intoáEnglish by Das, these poems belong to women writersáspanning nearly half a century, who come from diverseáwalks of life. Some of them are working professionals whoáhail from the world of corporate and journalism, some areáfulltime writers while there are contributions from othersáwho seem to steal time to compose verses in the intersticesáof their domestic chores.áThe poems in this volume are rich and eclectic, whichárange over a variety of subjects, providing a polyphony ofávoices and a panoply of themes. The writers in this collectionástraddle different worlds-a little more than five decadesáseparate Banaja Devi and Amiyabala Muni who were bornáin pre-independent India circa 1941, from the youngestácontributors, Tanmayee Rath and Swapnajita Sankhua,áborn during the pre-reform and post-liberalisation periodáof India, in the years 1987 and 1998 respectively. Poemsácollected from such a broad time spectrum would naturallyábring an array of thematic concerns and preoccupations. Aábrief overview of the development of Odia poetry by womenáover the decades since IndiaâÇÖs Independence would revealáthat, like all womenâÇÖs poetry elsewhere in the world, thereáis a sense of thwarted aspiration and patriarchal oppressionáin the early set of poets, sometimes coupled with the mildestáinfluence of western modernism, resulting in occasionaláexperimentation.