Kalahandi (poem) - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

"Kalahandi" is perhaps the best known poem of Dr Tapan Kumar Pradhan, the Indian writer and poet, and 2007 it won Kendriya Sahitya Akademi

Sahitya Akademi Award

Sahitya Akademi Award is a literary honor in India which Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters, annually confers on writers of outstanding works in one of the following twenty-four major Indian languagesAssamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri,...

's Indian Literature Golden Jubilee Award for Poetry in 2007. The poem received critical acclaim following its publication in the journal Indian Literature

Indian Literature (journal)

Indian Literature is an English-language literary journal published bi-monthly by the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters. the editor was A. J. Thomas, and Gopi Chand Narang, Sunil Gangopadhyaya and Agrahara Krishna Murthy, inspired by K...

in December 2007.

The Poem

In the shifting shadows of lantern light

Her hollow contours become yet more pronounced

Against the pitch darkness of the impatient man

As he advances she struggles with the suffocating stench

Of empty sacks stained with kerosene smoke

Smell of hooch, of sweat, of flesh, the Man's

Drunken half-smile, look of vague desire, the dark

Hollow of her dry hung elongated breasts, the dark

Gaping cleavages of paddy fields throw a mocking sneer.

Erratic fingers, nails digging into the skin -

Haggard looking crows swooping down in haphazard trajectories.

Twisting of bodies, arms clasping, unclasping

Emaciated naked children fight over a loaf

Of dark bread snatched from a tired dog :

silhouettes of puppets in a drollery

A woman wails by the body

Of husband crushed under a sack of relief rice

his breath, her breath, hot, mingling together :

Dry leaves rustle in the mid-afternoon air.

She cambers up, indifferent, like a crab, in spasms

As the hairy-chested man lunges for a decisive thrust :

Look of tiredness in the eyes,

ready to bite, but unable to move the underjaws.

Her body, breathing, lies exhausted -

A gleam of compromised content in her eyes

Having added two rupees to the forty she earned last

week by selling off her daughter.

Origin of the poem

The poem was first written by Dr Pradhan in his mother tongue Oriya

Oriya language

Oriya , officially Odia from November, 2011, is an Indian language, belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European language family. It is mainly spoken in the Indian states of Orissa and West Bengal...

in 1992. It was subsequently translated by the poet himself into English and got published in Vani Vikas, the literary journal of Utkal University

Utkal University

Utkal University, Bhubaneswar is the oldest university in Orissa and the 17th oldest university in India. It is a teaching-cum-affiliating university that has produced some of the best brains in Orissa. There are at 26 post-graduate departments at the university campus for studies and research in...

in 1994 under the author's pen-name of Helios El Sol. In the words of the poet, the single event that prompted him to write the poem was "a news-item published in the daily Samaja in 1992 which described the story of a poor tribal woman who was compelled to sell off her six-months old child for a paltry sum of forty rupees in the face of starvation..."

Allusions and symbolism

The poem depicts the scenes of squalor, poverty, starvation and economic exploitation poor illiterate people in Kalahandi symbolically through the suffering of a woman being forced into prostitution due to starvation. The poem is notable for its skillful use of stark imagery, symbols and onomatopoeia. For example, the rhythm in the words smell of hooch, of sweat, of flesh, the Man's... is suggestive of the sounds produced during an act of sexual intercourse. The repetition of the words "the dark" at the end of the second and third lines of the second stanza has an allusion to the idea of "darkness" suggested by the word Kalahandi
Kalahandi
Kalahandi, , is a district of Orissa in India. The region had a glorious past and great civilization in ancient time. Archaeological evidence of stone age and Iron Age human settlement has been recovered from the region. Asurgarh offered an advanced, well civilized, cultured and urban human...

, which in Oriya

Oriya language

literally means a "black pot". The imagery is at its best when the dark cleavage of a woman's dry breasts is juxtaposed with the gaping cleavages of paddy fields throwing a mocking sneer. The noted Oriya writer Sashibhusan Rath comments that the stark symbolism in this poem sets it apart from other similar poems, including Kalahandi : Then and Now published by Kumar Hasan in 1980.

Comments and criticism

The renowned Oriya short story writer Bhupen Mahapatra has commented that Kalahandi along with the poet's other poem Equation

Equation (poem)

"Equation" is one of the most original and intriguing poems of Dr Tapan Kumar Pradhan, the Indian writer and poet, and it won Kendriya Sahitya Akademi's Indian Literature Golden Jubilee Award for Poetry in 2007. The poem received critical acclaim following its publication in the journal Indian...

are peerless in their genre in modern Oriya Literature

Oriya literature

Oriya is an official language of the state of Orissa, India. The region has been known at different stages of history as Kalinga, Udra, Utkala, or Koshala. The language is also spoken by minority populations of the neighboring states of Jharkhand, West Bengal, Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh. The...

The Poem

Origin of the poem

Allusions and symbolism

Comments and criticism

See also