Niranjan Mohanty: Revisiting Kalahandi Through Odia-English Poetry

Niranjan Mohanty is an Odia poet who chooses to write in English. This choice seems to have been prompted by his profession. Being a professor of English it perhaps became convenient for him to accept English as the medium of his poetry. Besides being a poet of humanity the flavour of Odisha is quite distinct in his writing. However vast may be his canvas but Odisha conveys a special resonance. The land, legends, music, myths of Odisha have received special attention from him. Though the form he adopts is foreign, the content on the contrary remains quintessentially his own. This form-content disparity does not offer his readers any sense of awkwardness. That sense of divide is never evident. He seems to have successfully bridged the apparently difficult gap. His poetry is incontestably simple but sometimes it appears to be simplistic. This paper is an attempt to express Mohanty’s humanism.