प्रेत: प्रपात

अनिमा दास

मूल रचना (ओड़िआ)- रक्षक नायक

अनुवाद - अनिमा दास (कटक, ओड़िशा)

मैं मेघों में रहूँ अथवा सीपों में

हूँ मैं चिर क्षुधित।

कुछ अनावश्यक चिंताएँ

मेरी लेखनी को करतीं नियंत्रित

मलिन व व्यर्थ स्वप्नों के कीर्तन में

उन्मुक्त बछड़े को मुक्त प्रांगण देते हुए

अदृश्य हो जाता है मेरा गमथ

घुल जाता है मुझमें

हिंस्र-नदन...

करता मैं देह-स्वेद परिष्कृत

एवं भाग्य को निंदित।

मेरी गठरी को न करो स्पर्श

यदि यह खुल गई

तुम बन जाओगे एक कहानी 

पुष्पों से न करो मेरे वक्ष को स्पर्श

हो रहा अति उतप्त

मेरे उदर का निम्न भाग...

मैंने लील लिया है

एक विराट अजगर व

एक ध्यानमग्न सन्यासी

पर्वतों पर घिसकर

मेरी जिह्वा हुई है तीक्ष्ण 

निद्रा सी सघन गहराई में

किया है कवलित

पिशाची स्वप्नों को

अभी भी हूँ क्षुधित

अभी भी है मन तृषित

चक्षु की गंदगी सहित 

मैंने त्याग दिए हैं 

अनेक सूर्योदय।

मैं हूँ विषाक्त... चरित्रहीन

किया है मैंने धर्षित

एकाकीत्व में,

आराध्या देवियों के

निरीह इतिहास को....

एकाकी नक्षत्रों को भी

किया है मैंने अपहृत...।

मेरे कथ्य पर करो विश्वास

किंतु मुझ पर नहीं...

मैंने देखा है उत्स 

कलिकाओं के चीत्कार का 

व भौगोलिक फूत्कार का।

जर्जर होकर ले रहा हूँ 

आश्रय...ग्रासित तम में

वीभत्स पवन का घूर्णन बन 

रहा मैं पंचांग में...

कांपती रहीं ...बिखरती रहीं 

अस्थियाँ...

अग्नि बन नाचता रहा

जरायु में.... आयु में।

क्षुधा से होगी...मेरी मृत्यु 

है यही नियति।

वैसे भी भाग्य व क्षुधा हेतु 

मैं नहीं हूँ चिंतित।

प्रेत होकर प्रपात सा

निन्मगामी होना ही

है मेरा धर्म...।

प्रेत का क्या होता है जीवन!

प्रपात का  क्या होता है मरण!

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सेतु, दिसम्बर 2023

Ghashaphula ra Geeta (Odia Novel) by Jnanaranjan Nayak

Ghashaphula ra Geeta (Odia Novel) by Jnanaranjan Nayak

Teerataranga Publications, 2021. Pp 64. ₹ 100/-

Reviewed by Nandini Sahu

***

When I thought of writing a few pages on the novella Ghashaphula ra Geeta (written in Odia, my mother tongue) by storyteller, poet, critic and creative writer Jnanaranjan Nayak from Odisha, I unconsciously traveled back in memory lane. Jnanaranjan is a person who can bring tears in your eyes and make you laugh aloud on your study table, in the middle of reading his stories. Way back in 2005, once he read out his Odia short story ‘Bou’(Mother) to me in my English Language Lab. I was engrossed with listening to his engaging narrative—he is an exceptional narrator, as I said—and then I noticed that tears were rolling down from my eyes; in fact I was flooding with tears. The students entered the Language Lab for a session with me, to see their English ma’am crying!! We have talked several times about that funny, embarrassing yet heartening moment; we have maintained our literary, academic and deeply personal camaraderie since sixteen years. Jnanaranjan is such—a pure soul, a real person, a heartbreaking-breathtaking storyteller.

The novella Ghashaphula ra Geeta has been appreciated by his follow poets in Odisha as a meaningful story set up in rural Odisha. Jnanaranjan is an incorrigible romantic, and this is an unfulfilled, incomplete, unsatiated love story, the plot is recounted from a rural village in Odisha.  A thorough understanding of this story, vis-à-vis the centre-margin perspective as explicated by Postcolonialism, the dichotomy of the centre and the subaltern, will need a reading through paraphernalia like association, comparison, correspondence, isomorphism metaphor, resemblance, morphological homology, iconicity—the tools closely associated with analogy of the story. 

In this novella, I read Jnanaranjan’s centre-periphery equivalence of the village from the following standpoints:

• Village life as a formative empathy of the existential issues, the ethnographic literature springing thereof. 

• Village as an undercooked object, construed as a nostalgia, wistful resurgence, or representation of subjugation.

• Village as accommodation and exile -- a room of idyllic tranquility for the ‘Pantheist’. 

• Village as groundwork of protest--a place where hegemonic authority is quietly confronted. 

• Village as the instinctive soil. 

• Village in skirmish with modernism—though it is not essentially anti-modern or inexorably anti-tradition. 

Ecocriticism is my theoretical tool to understand the narrative of the village here. This kind of Ecocritical approach differs from other critical discourses in the sense that it is not just an intellectual academic exercise where some accepted methods of criticism are applied to the understanding of a text and assessing opinions are moulded. It is the exigent and challenging participation of the author with the subject that creates its distinction meticulously. It is not an objective structure of criticism, which we can interestingly call ‘The Linguistic Turn’ (Literature, Ecology, Ethics) that profoundly hangs on broadening the linguistic properties of a given language, and of Odia language in this case.  Jnanaranjan’s ecological concern here is beyond any political or ideological standpoint, immersed in the books and brooks, thus above any one-dimensional method.

Narrative of the village life is an interesting attribute of Jnanaranjan. His story has touched upon issues like ecological balance, environment and more certainly, human relationships. He is a writer who decorates the spirit of human evolution. Freedom of the heart and soul plays a distinct role in his narrative. Jnanaranjan’s chronicle of the village is associated with village as a phenomenon, offered not in seclusion, but in a miscellaneous milieu of narratology-- a mirror of real countryside, renovation and insurgency as modes of progress, as an epitome and inquisitor, and as reminiscence which is a mode of redemption for the writer. Anyway, it is a rich love story bringing love to its romantic, sacrificing, and helpless best.

Having said that, I would conclude, all the above points/issues/debates can be safely said about almost all the writings of Jnanaranjan. He is the kind of writer who can remain silently active in the conscience of his readers, like Oxygen in water. 

***

Bio:

Prof. Nandini Sahu, Professor of English and Former Director, School of Foreign Languages, IGNOU, New Delhi, India, is an established Indian English poet, creative writer and folklorist. She is the author/editor of fifteen books. She is the recipient of the Literary Award/Gold Medal from the hon’ble Vice President of India for her contribution to English Studies. Her areas of research interest cover New Literatures, Critical Theory, Folklore and Culture Studies, Children’s Literature and American Literature.

www.kavinandini.blogspot.in

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Setu, January 2021

Nilamadhab Kar

Dr Nilamadhab Kar is a psychiatrist, based in the UK. Besides scientific articles in the field of medicine, more specifically mental health; he also writes poems, stories and articles for public education in English and Odia (an Eastern Indian language), which have been widely published. He has authored and edited few medical books, an anthology of Odia poems and two books of translated poems from Odia to English. He is on the editorial board of a few medical and literary journals.

Authors A-Z

Prahallad Satpathy

Dr. Prahallad Satpathy is an accomplished bilingual poet of Odisha. He writes both in Odia and English. To his credit he has three published anthologies in odia. His English poems have been published in many national and international anthologies. He has had represented Odisha Sahitya Academy twice as honorary member.

Authors A-Z