Odisha has enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with poetry and has had a long and unbroken tradition of women writing poetry. Women have made significant contribution to the canon of Odia poetry, starting from the fifteenth century to the present. Among women poets of Odisha, perhaps the earliest is Madhabi Dasi, an exponent of Bhakti poetry and a contemporary of Sri Chaitanya. She wrote in Brajboli, Bangla and Odia. Her janāna "Chakānayan he Jagujiban Srihari" was one of her most popular devotional songs in Odia. Nandabai Chautiśā is another well-known poem composed by a woman from Odisha in pre-colonial times. Several women, mostly from royal families, composed devotional songs and long narrative poems in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Odisha witnessed a burst of feminine creative energy in the wake of Indian Independence which continued
undiminished through the last quarter of the century and has reached a fruition in the present, when writing poetry has become almost de rigeur, where poetry reading sessions and publication have become a state-wide quotidian activity. In Our Own Voice: Poems by Odia Women Poets is an ambitious
enterprise of the renowned poet, writer and playwright J. P. Das who has painstakingly culled, collected, and translated the creative outpourings of some of these women set far apart in time but geographically rooted in the state. Some of these poems were edited and translated by Das earlier
and appeared in two separate anthologies, titled In Other Words (2017) and Under the Silent Sun (1992). He co-edited the latter with the Chicago-based academician Arlene Zide. The present volume contains poems from these collections as well as many other young and vibrant voices. Originally written in Odia language and meticulously translated into English by Das, these poems belong to women writers spanning nearly half a century, who come from diverse walks of life. Some of them are working professionals who hail from the world of corporate and journalism; some are
fulltime writers while there are contributions from others who seem to steal time to compose verses in the interstices of their domestic chores.
The poems in this volume are rich and eclectic, which range over a variety of subjects, providing a polyphony of voices and a panoply of themes. The writers in this collection straddle different worlds-a little more than five decades separate Banaja Devi and Amiyabala Muni who were born
in pre-independent India circa 1941, from the youngest contributors, Tanmayee Rath and Swapnajita Sankhua, born during the pre-reform and post-liberalisation period of India, in the years 1987 and 1998 respectively. Poems collected from such a broad time spectrum would naturally
bring an array of thematic concerns and preoccupations. A brief overview of the development of Odia poetry by women over the decades since India's Independence would reveal that, like all women's poetry elsewhere in the world, there is a sense of thwarted aspiration and patriarchal oppression
in the early set of poets, sometimes coupled with the mildest influence of western modernism, resulting in occasional experimentation.
Chaturvedi, Vinita Gupta: - Vinita Gupta Chaturvedi (b. 1963) is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Delhi College of Arts & Commerce, University of Delhi. She has done her undergraduate, masters and M. Phil studies at the University of Delhi. Her doctoral thesis on the British writer George Eliot was awarded by the University of Lucknow. Her publications include book chapters, articles and reviews in journals. She has recently Guest Edited the May 2021 and December 2021 issue of the Salesian Journal, a publication of SalesianCollege, Siliguri.
Das, Jagannath Prasad: - Jagannath Prasad Das (J.P.) (born 26 April 1936) is an eminent Odia poet, playwright, essayist and fiction writer. He has translated literary works from different languages into Odia and English. He has done extensive research into Odishan art and has published three works on the pictorial arts of the state.His writings have been widely translated into Hindi, English and other Indian languages. He has been a recipient of many awards including Odisha Sahitya Academy Award (1981) for the poetry collection Je Jahara Nirjanata, Central Sahitya Akademi award (1990) for the poetry collection Aanhika, and the Saraswati Samman (2006) for the poetrv collection Parikrama.
