Posts featuring Yogesh Maitreya

The Map of a Million Mutinies: Pitambar Naik on the Odia Poetry of Resistance

Literature can be nurtured only when it is rich in simplicity and sweet in its depth and ornamentation.

Poetry in the Odia language, writes poet-translator Pitambar Naik, “has a long way to go and [is a] landscape that hasn’t yet been explored, touched and [is] minimally discussed. Odia poetry is . . . a promise to the future.” It is in this very prodding that Fury Species: Odia Poetry of Resistance (Hyderabad, India: Rehor Publisher, 2023) came to be. Featuring thirty nine poets from the Indian state of Odisha, the anthology is suitably bisected into sections: ‘Not the Raga but the Rage’ and ‘No Reticence but Resistance.’ Translation of poetry from the Odia into English becomes imperative in this decolonial endeavor. As Diptiranjan Pattanaik proclaims in Changing the Terms: Translating in the Postcolonial Era (2000), “The act of translation is central to the formation of an Odia literary canon.” Naik continues: “Let the world know the people in these poems, and how they’ve suffered for centuries.”  

In this interview, I conversed with Naik on his anthology on Dalit protest poetry, his manifold creative process in translating Odia-language poets from the margins, and the state of literature among the Dalit-Bahujan, among other things.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): First of all, congratulations on Fury Species: Odia Poetry of Resistance published in October by Hyderabad-based Rehor Publisher, the first anthology of translated poetry from the Odia language. Apart from poetry that carries “the message for the emancipation” of the oppressed, what are other motive forces which prompted the creation of this anthology?

Pitambar Naik (PN): There are prolific writers producing quality literature in Odia and many of them have been translated into English, but many of these translations are abysmal renditions of the source material, and there are simply too few of them. As a result, the outer world is unaware of Odia literature. Translation is a subject that interests few, particularly in Odisha, and those writers who are translated come from the privileged high caste group. We can’t bypass the force of the caste system, which sends shockwaves through every facet of life.

Literature of the suppressed and alienated, the Dalit-Bahujans, has been strategically censored from telling, retelling, and translation. The objective behind the anthology Fury Species was to translate, interpret, and propagate the writings of the oppressed groups from Odisha. This was the driving force that fuelled me to translate many established poets like Basudev Sunani, Akhil Nayak, Kumar Hassan, Sanjay Kumar Bag, Hemanta Dalpati, and others. Fury Species also houses other eminent poets such as Ashutosh Parida, Shatrughna Pandab, Pitambar Tarai, Lenin Kumar, and more who have been prolific in creating progressive literature.

AMMD: I have never seen an anthology with contributors coming from such varied backgrounds. Fury Species’ contributors include filmmaker Surya Shankar Das, linguist Akhil Nayak, scientist Ashutosh Parida, veterinarian Basudev Sunani, lawyer Debendra Lal, and journalist Kumar Hassan. Other contributors hail from the fields of economics, medicine and pharmaceuticals, social work, and folkloric studies. What does this reveal about Odia poetry?  READ MORE…

My Absence In Those Words: Yogesh Maitreya on Anti-Caste Publishing and the Dalit Memoir

The metaphorical liberation of the oppressed lies in being the voice, the author, and the producer of their stories . . .

Indian Dalit writer, translator, and publisher Yogesh Maitreya believes in the freeing impulse of literary translation: “a conscious and political decision and process [which can] reclaim the humanness of an oppressed person and make him a free man in the imagination of readers.” He problematises, however, the Anglophone literary production in India, denouncing the Brahminical hegemony that governs it. It comes as no surprise, then, that in Vernacular English: Reading the Anglophone in Postcolonial India (Princeton University Press, 2022), Akshya Saxena sketches Maitreya’s poetry as “self-defense,” operating on “an imperative to write in English” that emphasises language’s function in class and politics. Such writing pursues a continual question: how can the liberated Dalit writer exist within the linguistic imaginary of their former colonial rulers, the British, and the current neoliberal one, the Brahmins? “In writing in English, Maitreya not only takes ownership of a language but also enters a hegemonic discourse that has excluded him,” Saxena adds. It is in this very material condition that Maitreya established Panther’s Paw Publication in 2016, an anti-caste press specialising in original writings in English and translations from Indian languages—especially Marathi and Punjabi, based in the city of Nagpur, Maharashtra. 

In this interview, I conversed with Maitreya on his latest book, Water in a Broken Pot: A Memoir, out this year from Penguin Random House India; his translations of essays and poetry by Marathi-language Dalit writers; the centuries-old oral tradition of shahiri as music, cultural criticism, and poetry; and the archaic ethnopolitical ideologies of India’s caste system, epitomised in literature, literary translation, and publishing. 

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): I love what you pointed out in your essay on the Dalit poet-filmmaker Nagraj Manjule: that the world sees India through the lens of writers from the Savarna upper-caste, such as Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, Agha Shahid Ali, and Pankaj Mishra. For those of us non-Indians in the global literary community, can you tell us how caste is deeply rooted in the Indian worldview and way of life—especially in literary, cultural, and knowledge production?

Yogesh Maitreya (YM): Well, so far, the writers from India who have been writing in English and who are known to the world come out of a class that represents 2 or 3 percent of the total population of India—the Brahminical class, who have had the advantage of being with the British administration and their cultural programs from the beginning. Hence, their command over English as both language and literature is overwhelmingly hegemonic. In their English writings, with borrowed sensibilities from the West, they undeniably percolate caste values, which is rooted in denying many people fundamental human rights and ascribing to a few individuals a superior position in society from the moment they are born. India is a linguistic rain-forest, and English, within it, is the most aspirational season to be in, for several decades now. 

English was an aspiration for me, too. However, I eventually had to consider that if my life—lived and imagined—is missing from this language, then I am essentially either not present in it, or I must have been erased. How come the Indian writers I had read for close to a decade did not communicate any sense or sensibilities of the life that was happening around me in their literature? I thought about it for a while—and then I realised that language is also a matter of confinement, in which some are allowed and made into a subject of intellectual contemplation and fascination, and others are denied their right to exist. This happens when the language is subjected to the practice of a certain class, where the majority of society is not present. As caste always gave privileged position to the Savarna class in cultural, literary, and knowledge production, it has been obvious that they have utterly failed to produce the sensibilities of the masses in their works of arts or literature. In fact, they could never do so because theirs is a life in total contradiction with Dalit-Bahujan masses. There is no desire in a caste society for assimilation. English literature from India by a Brahminical class is the most prominent example of it. 

AMMD: Given the current hegemonies haunting the literary landscape in India, in what ways has the anti-caste press you founded—Panther’s Paw Publication—been an answer? 

YM: Back in 2016, when I had thought of establishing a publishing house from my hostel room in Mumbai, I had a simple vision: to translate Marathi writers into English and publish them. Because Marathi is the language in which I have grown up, it was obvious for me to think of it with English, which came to me as an aspirational language of class, and also an indescribable form of freedom because I had read and seen people (mostly whites) being portrayed as “free” and “intellectuals” in it. I wanted to be both those things, and you can say that I also wanted to see my people, my history, and my emotions as being “free” in English from everything I was taught in caste society. English, excluding the writings of Brahmins and Savarna writers from India, felt much more respectful towards me, my history, and my people—hence why I chose it. I remember the first time I had written and read and recited my emotions in English, I felt a certain amount of separation from the drab life around me, and imagining or translating my life and the history of my people into English felt like a touch of liberation to me. 

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