Contemporary Odia Poet Kedar Mishra Makes A Mark With Protest Poetry In ‘This Country Is Not Mine’

It is time to talk more of contemporary Odia poets who have emerged as a force to reckon with, those poets in their late forties or early fifties. The age of very senior Odia poets like Ramakant Rath is over. They have got their due critical and popular attention.

These poets in their mid-career of writing have made their mark. Some of them have created voices of their own, and Kedar Mishra is one of them. His latest book of poems titled ‘This Country is not Mine’, published by Black Eagle Books, includes some of his signature poems which have helped him carve a political voice. And this title fits the bill. However metaphysical or personal the poems in this collection may claim to be, their political connotations could not be undermined. In fact, there are certain poems which are based on the pedestal of dissent.

“It is time to harvest darkness”, says the poet with a sweet irony, sweeter than the “sweet poison” that our time is coated with. In that poem “A Time of Sweet Poison”, the poet-narrator feels what better thing is there to be hosted than his own “severed head” as a “flag” from which fall off the “fingers” of his “father and brother”, “the chunks of flesh” of his “mother and sister” as petals of flowers at a time when his “country” is in a celebratory mood. These bodily metaphors carry forward the uneasy memory of the Kalinga Nagar killings over the protest against the landgrab by the industrialists. This poem shall stand as a strong metaphor of memory against forgetting. The “darkness” is the leit motif of this collection. And one forceful poem that reflects this spirit is “Shaheen Bagh” which has acquired the semi status of voice of dissent in post-independent India. In this poem, the poet tries to navigate through darkness of his time to reach light:
We have to reach that garden at any cost
For that we have to brave fire and bullets
And that courage fills your fist
Only for that I am in love with you, forever.

Thus the protest poetry Kedar has envisaged is not just loud bang or raising fists but it is a jugalbandi of love and protest which goes well in love and politics. This sort of amalgamation of apparently contrasting themes is evident elsewhere, in poems like “The Rioters” and “Some Stray Words for Prayer”. Particularly the later poem demands to be read as prayer-poem, where gods and the dear dead are evoked on the same plane in the most endearing terms:
For you
I will sing the way my father sang the Gitagovind
And while I sing
You would stand by me as my mother
And we would stand together, lonely
As an old couple
Before the god we ourselves have created.

This is a promise however uncertain it may sound the poet wishes to leave for his posterity to make this country his own at the risk of sounding contrarian to his claim in the title of this volume. Despite all the stumbling blocks he faces in every step he takes, Kedar feels “a joy of a drop of song amidst hunger” which is nothing but “karuna rasa” that subdues a basically dissenting voice.

But Kedar’s undiluted love, unsullied by any polarisation in politics is best displayed in that stand-alone poem “Mother” which is placed at the end of the collection. It is the poet’s paean to his mother. The poet’s love for his mother enables him to emerge unscathed from the moral rubble of his time. Here are some of the moving lines one can write for one’s mother:

Because of you I exist
As sure as seed exists in the soil
As sure as the naughty fishes
Swim around in endless seas
Because of you my world revolves
Because you are there
I believe there is certainly a God

These lines are a sure indication that what cements this book “This Country is not Mine” is abhiman, not anger. This latest collection should make Kedar Mishra stand in good stead as a contemporary Odia poet.