I meet Akshaya Bahibala in Bhubaneshwar’s Walking Bookfairs, an independent bookstore that he runs with his partner. The store, quite like his work, lies hidden — among eateries and other shops — and only a few venture there. As Bahibala reads out from his works to a small gathering — which he hosts from time to time — his poetic craft reveals itself: a seamless weave of his experiences and observations expressed through metaphors and symbols in colloquial Odia.
Stripped bare
To be counted as a poet or not, is a question that follows Bahibala wherever he goes. Faced with ruthless criticism and charges of obscenity from the conservative, Brahmanical Odia literary establishment, he has been banished from the hall of poets because of his free verse, which deviates from the established poetic diction and depicts the ordinary.
“No publisher accepted my work as ‘poetry’, or as literature, for that matter. They said it was half story, half poetry and not up to the mark,” says Bahibala with a smile. After multiple rejections, he finally decided to self-publish. He has three poetry books and one short story collection to his credit.
Bahibala, which literally translates into ‘bookseller’, a title he gave himself, comes from a modest background. Born in Puri in 1980, he went to government schools in districts all over Odisha. Leaving home at a young age, he travelled to Goa, Kolkata, and other places to earn a living, sometimes working as a waiter, sometimes selling books — taking up whatever work he could find. With his meagre earnings barely enough to meet basic needs, he never thought of taking up writing for a living. “Neither was I studying literature nor was I fraternising with contemporary writers — how could I even dare to dream?” he asks.
The Odia literary sphere has largely remained chained to the canons. By poetry, what is indicated is poetry in standardised form and diction. Bahibala’s writing smashes those expectations.
When Bahibala started putting together his poetry into slim volumes in his mid-30s, his intentions were clear: to shatter societal façades, slice them open to reveal inequalities — and he does all that with a cold-blooded honesty. One of his recurring motifs is, not surprisingly, nudity.
I desire only the body.
The body, and body’s touch.
When I burn in desire, or cry
I search for another body.
Why, you ask?
Because, I cannot touch a soul.
Real utterance
The language in which he captures the “langala deha” (naked bodies) is itself naked — approximating real utterance as opposed to the commonly held view of poetry as terse, abstract lyric.
His poems on the city space are profound meditations on existing inequalities. Through his experience of inhabiting the city’s edges, he interrogates the construction of the centre.
Of the streets
Bahibala takes his poetry to the streets, the source of his art. And he reads them out to the people for whom his poetry is created. “For me, the objective of literature is to find its readers. The ones who I write about must receive what is written. Often, they do not like my poetry even when they can see themselves there, because they are taught to like poetry in a different way. They think of themselves as unworthy of being written about. We have taught an entire class of people to hate themselves,” he says.
Does it bother Bahibala that he is not called a poet in literary circles? “I never wanted to be a poet, in any case. And poets do not do what I do — publish and distribute, run a bookstore or wait at tables. Poets here have historically been Indian Administrative Officers who are imagining the summers of Bhubaneswar as Wordsworth did,” says Bahibala.
Powerful, sharp, urgent, visceral and often harsh, his works are thoughtful commentaries on contemporary life in a city anywhere in India. They are yet to be experienced by a larger audience, as his works await translation.
The writer is a post-graduate student of Comparative Literature in Jadavpur University, Kolkata .
