Gods in Filigree: Indian Lyrics of Metaphysics and After

Haraprasad Das belongs to a significant body of brilliant Indian poets who were highly trained in the languages and cultures of the world and were simultaneously and deeply entrenched in the racial and civilizational memories of a shared destiny.  They, in a way, demodernised the Indian reality of the borrowed modernity and decolonised the colonial space. That led to a subtle and slow reversal of the heavily accented idiom of the West by the lyrical metaphysics of the Indian aesthetic quest. Haraprasad perfected a speech rhythm that conveyed the anguish of the time and the hopeful reawakening of the Indian essence in the spiritual recesses of a reluctantly transforming society. It is not easy to translate the poetry of Haraprasad Das because of its complex and multi-layered engagement with the Indian reality. Prabhanjan K. Mishra, a distinguished Indian poet who writes in English as well as Odia, has rendered the poems of Haraprasad Das into English with the twin advantages of knowledge of Odia and that over English. In this English rendering the sensationally subversive triumph of the local over the global in contemporary Indian Poetry by the poet has been maintained.