CELEBRATION OF LOCAL: NANDINI SAHU

Nandini Sahu

A Life as a Work of Art by Itself

(A Champu)

Ah Karn! I re-write your epic in pursuit of the eternal questions
of  human condition, to reason your honour, mettle, veracity,
respect, pride, fidelity, reverence, authority, and
of course to establish you as an institution.
And I do so while exhausting both classical and modern
frames of critical questions of masculinity.
I inscribe your life as a work of art by itself.
No shell is old fashioned and
none too ostentatious—it’s you, the real you, oh man! It is
a poem of contemporizing the epics and photographing the man
whose autograph  I am examining
from my multilayered lenses
since it is big enough to house
many of the motivating questions that have been
engrossed in human minds.
Hence this saga, of contemporizing the epic, Mahabharata, to retell
Karn’s tale endorsed by a pluralistic dwelling.
To voice Karn, to createfree-spirited intellectuals
And look at men, as a vital reserve from which
we can induce explorations, bargain answers and envision enigmas,
in our endeavors to fathom modern dilemmas of the retro men.
It is indeed an exercise of maturation and intermission.
In constructing and mounting a new vocabulary for progeny
about the social condition today
and thereby of gambling a distinctive cerebral setting.
Is the antiquity of our rendezvous with the epic of Karn
who speaks to the present, a distant dream? Are the epics
not already a fundamental part of our
folklore and alternative modernities,
our standard metaphors and designs of men, who
hypothetically, presumably  don’t
cry, don’t die, for them now
to merit a singular obligation by me, the poet?
To write for Karn is to democratize man and masculinity,
inviting a dialogue,
from multiplicity of viewpoints, on what wishes
must be achieved for the labor of love.
Taking Karn to oblivion is inane because it contradicts
a rich body of ethical conundrums,
of metaphors about the elaborate play of intentions,
of the density of human affiliations and,
perhaps, of their incongruity
of catastrophe, deception, dedication and burden.
Karn is fated; his forgotten story leaves us disengaged
from our national domain that has had the powers
into its fruition and that is
presented for the world material.
Suppression begins when one stops feeling the foul
and it extends when evil is established as noble.
Let me celebrate Karn, the unsung idol
through this tale of Karn, this work of art, honorable.
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Nandini Sahu is a major voice in contemporary Indian English literature. She  has accomplished her doctorate in English literature under the guidance of Late Prof. Niranjan Mohanty, Prof. of English, Visva Bharati, Santiniketan. She is a poet and a creative writer of international repute, has been widely published in India, U.S.A, U.K., Africa and Pakistan. Dr. Sahu has presented papers on various subjects in India and abroad. She is a triple gold medalist in English literature and also the award winner of All India Poetry Contest, the Shiksha Ratna Purashkar, Poiesis Award of Honor-2015 and Bouddha Creative Writers’ Award. She is the author/editor of thirteen books titled “The Other Voice”(a poetry collection), “Recollection as Redemption”, “Post-Modernist Delegation to English Language Teaching”, “The Silence” (a poetry collection),“The Post Colonial Space: Writing the Self and the Nation”,“Silver Poems on My Lips(a poetry collection), Folklore and the Alternative Modernities (Vol.I),Folklore and the Alternative Modernities (Vol. II), Sukamaa and Other Poems, Suvarnarekha and Sita (A Poem), Dynamics of Children’s Literature, Zero Point, published from New Delhi. Presently she is a Professor of English in Indira Gandhi National Open University [IGNOU], New Delhi. Dr. Sahu has designed academic programmes/courses on Folklore and Culture Studies, Children’s Literature and American Literature for IGNOU. Her areas of research interest cover Indian Literature, New Literatures, Folklore and Culture Studies, American Literature, Children’s Literature and Critical Theory. She is the Chief Editor/Founder Editor of Interdisciplinary Journal of Literature and Language (IJLL), and Panorama Literaria, both bi-annual peer-reviewed journals in English. 

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