Prof. Rabi Shankar Mishra (1948-2025) was connected with me in more ways than one. Though primarily my teacher in the MA English class at Sambalpur University (1977-1979), he was my colleague briefly at Berhampur University (October 1984 – April 1985). More importantly, he was my fellow UEA alumnus, and, last but not least, my role model as the successful translator of Fakir Mohan Senapati’s opus Chha Mana Atha Guntha. During his short sojourn in Berhampur, he also passed on to me his delight in the pleasures of companionship over a hearty meal.
His journey to UEA in 1979, the year in which I was finishing my MA, was a milestone event in our student life. I little knew then that I would follow him into the same destination six years later. Not surprisingly he was also one of the three referees – the other two being Prof. JK Nayak and the late Prof. B K Tripathy – who supported my application for the scholarship to get there. In later life he became an elder brotherly figure, kind and soft spoken, but with his Popian wit and Ben Jonsonian humour never far below the surface, ready to erupt at a moment’s notice.
However, my strongest memory of Rabi sir, one that abides, is as a teacher in my MA class. That is when he exerted his most lasting influence. I taught Milton’s Paradise Lost at Utkal University from 2009 till my retirement in 2018. My introduction to epic poetry always began with his crisp and pithy account of the long poem: ‘A long poem is an attempt by the poet to reach beyond the lyric impulse, to go from the local, the particular and the regional to the global, the universal and the national.’
He was the first modern teacher of English I knew. He was modern in two distinct yet related senses. Unlike many teachers of his time he professed a love for modern poetry and was properly unafraid of its complexity. And he was forthright, even iconoclastic in his views. I never thought that I would find an English teacher quite like him in Odisha, much less in Sambalpur University. Youngest among the five teachers who made up the PG Department of English in 1977, the year of my entry into the department, he was naturally expected to take on the onus of mediating to us the brave new – though quite perplexing – world of modern literature. This was a role he played to perfection.
Within a couple of weeks of commencement of classes he handed to each one of the first-year MAs cyclostyled copies of a strange poem called ‘Ode to Tomatoes’, asking us to give our written responses to it in a week’s time. In those days there was no Internet and no Smartphone to turn to for instant information or illumination on any given topic. We had to wrestle to understand the new poem, using our native wit, which, of course, meant that we would assuredly fall back upon our stock responses. This was the very habit that Prof. Mishra’s exercise in ‘Practical Criticism’ was designed to discourage.
Yes, this was our first exposure to ‘Practical Criticism’, the famous I.A. Richards-inspired experiment in reading an unknown poem minus the tag of a poet’s name so that we can be free of the preconceptions and biases which the sight of the poet’s name automatically triggers. In this instance, of course, knowing the poet’s name, Pablo Neruda, would have made the least difference to
our reading, as Neruda was completely unknown to us at that point.
On the scheduled day we presented our interpretations. These were wide off the mark, as was to be expected. We had no training in the words-on-the page kind of reading and would go on our flights of fancy at the drop of a hat. I remembered in my interpretation I had tried unsuccessfully to square this item of nature, tomato, with the Wordsworthian meaning of nature that had been ingrained in us. Finally, the head of the department, the redoubtable Prof. P.K. Pati, who benignly presided over the seminar and openly confessed to being baffled by the poem, asked Rabi sir to shed some light on this obscure modern poem. Rabi sir produced a bravura work of ‘practical criticism’ of ‘Ode to Tomatoes’, one in which the ordinary vegetable became a symbol of ‘natural abandon’ – of abandon, mind you, not piety or sublime yearning – without losing its everydayness. It was a distinctly unWordsworthian take. I knew that I had lucked out in coming to Sambalpur University which had such an impassioned and skilled analyst of modern poetry that had proved to be an Achilles heel for many English teachers. It was entirely fitting that he would teach us T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets in our third semester, which was largely focused on the study of modern British Literature.
As the weeks and months went by, Prof. Mishra’s other gifts as a teacher came into view. We found to our great delight and surprise that not only he had a wide range of teaching interests but that some of his preferences – such as Classicism as a literary movement, Milton and Pope in poetry, Ben Jonson in drama, Satire as a genre, and the Epic and the Essay as literary forms – were distinctly unusual as well. For a young man of thirty, this was remarkable. And it is not just that he would surprise us with his unusual choices within the House of Literature; he would also bring in the contraband items, Politics, History, and Psychoanalysis, into the sealed space of literature. We heard from him about two influential books of that time, the feminist classic Sexual Politics by Kate Millet and Deschooling Society by Ivan D. Illich. He had reviewed the latter in a student-and-teacher-run radical pamphlet called Youth Speaks, being brought out from Sambalpur University.
Prof. Mishra’s enduring scholarly achievements came later with his homeward turn to Odia literature and the attendant obligation to showcase its iconic works through translation and comparative analysis. Six Acres and a Third, which he co-translated with J.K. Nayak, S.P. Mohanty and Paul St-Pierre, is a landmark in the scene of Indian Literature in English Translation. Likewise, his essay on Six Acres and a Third, analyzing the novel in terms of the correlation between the ownership of land and attitudes to language, remains a dazzling performance. The essay was originally written in English and later presented in a suitably altered form in Odia in the little Odia magazine, Samalochana, edited by him. Mention must also be made of his Odia translation of Terry Eagleton’s classic critical monograph Marxism and Literary Criticism. The translation carried a foreword by Eagleton himself.
It is unfortunate that in the last decade of his life Prof. Mishra lived the life of a recluse, shunning public glare. Intellectual pursuits had also ceased to interest him. The death of his beloved wife – Rita nani to us – in 2016 was a traumatic event from which he never recovered. Perhaps it reinforced his sense of the utter futility of life. It is sad for everyone who knew him that this wise, witty and vibrant voice has now been stilled.
(Himansu S. Mohapatra is a former professor of English, Utkal University)