Some questions about rain

Sailen Routray

The prose poem that ends “Rain Incarnations”, titled “Barsha”, is an appropriate termination to the volume. It deserves being quoted in full. Its first stanza is a quotation from a philosophical tract –

“Whereof you have nothing meaningful to say, it is better to be silent.”/Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus// An empty space can be full of wonder, teeming with words and sound./ Blank paper, a slate, mind free of desire – all filled with possibilities./ Much can be inscribed on them or/ Nothing.”//    

“Rain Incarnations” is a slim book of sixty six pages and carries thirty five translated poems on rain by the poet and professor of politics Bishnu Mohapatra. There were thirty six poems in “Barshabatara”, the original volume in Odia published by Bhubaneswar based publishing house Paschima Publications in 2021, from which these poems have been taken.

The volume’s poems are experiments in many different poetic forms. Poems like “Barsha” and “Antaranga” are really short, and are evocative of classical poetry in bhasha literature. In “Detective”, the poet evokes the lost world of popular crime fiction in Odia, where he makes rain a sleuth in popular write Kanduri Charan Das’s novels. The poem recreates the fantastic, unreal, stylized landscape of this fictional world quite vividly and apparently effortlessly. It is a remarkable achievement, especially for a reader familiar with popular Odia literary culture. In “Rain in the footsteps of Ambedkar”, the poetic walks on the footprints of the political, poeticizing the political in the process.

For the poet, the rain is many things. Sometimes, these multiple identities are proclaimed by rain itself. In the poem “Arrival” rain says – “I am a commoner” (p. 25). In “Rain thinks of Socrates” it shares, “I am not an imitation,/ nor an image of my own being./ I am not a diminished body,/ nor its broken reflection.// You will not find me, even if you look for me./ My ideal form is not in your heaven”.// (p. 29)

The world that rain creates is populated with animate objects – books that have their mouths open, rains whose arrows tips hover over just about touching one’s skin, a world in which rain and the night are lovers, where the rain has a mouth, the night a tongue, and speech a heart, where metaphors are as concrete as objects.

A series of tense encounters also take place between the visual and the aural across the poems – between the scenes that rain paints and the sonic patterns that it engenders. In the poem “Identity” the poet says, “We see nothing”. But how then are the descriptions generated? The answer is hinted at in the poem “Separate” - “It is the sound that I see” (p. 57)

The rain is also a magician. In “Shillong’s Magician” the poet says, “Under a broken roof, eager/ house sparrows perch./ Rain wears its black gown,/ out of its conjurer’s hat/ leap a blue rabbit, then a purple frog/ and a drift of golden bumblebees are set to flight.// Out of its deep pockets rise ribbons of clouds/ one after the other/ one after the other./ In a while the pile of ribbons reaches the sky,/ Rain pockets the moon and vanishes.//” (pp. 42-43)

“Rain” is capitalized all throughout. The point to be kept in mind is that Odia does not have uppercase letters. In Odia pronouns and verbs also carry no gender. In English these do. Therefore, ascribing gender to rain is not only a poetic choice but also a political one. The solution proposed by the translator Aparna Uppaluri to this conundrum is elegant. Depending upon the poem and its micro-world, rain takes on one of the three genders in English - masculine, feminine and neuter. This ends up both approximating the gendered nature of the word in the Odia poems at the level of a volume of poems. It also adds another layer of nuance to each individual poem where rain is masculine, feminine or neuter, depending on the specific context. The engagement, competence and attention of the translator shine through the poems. The translated poems read flawlessly, with the line breaks working perfectly.

The artistic interventions by Gauri Nagpal (who also did the cover art and design of the original Odia edition) are another remarkable feature of this book. She sees her work in the volume as one of “creating a visual atmosphere”. This is a very apt description. “Rain Incarnations” is a beautiful book to a large extent because of the art work by Nagpal. Her collages in the volume are based on photos of light being reflected off water drops. This then became the bases which were transformed through water colour, charcoal, sketches, and digital montages into the images we see in the volume now. According to Nagpal, “the process of drawing each image was like patchwork, wherein, fragments of some images and their deep entanglements create a whole”.

Gauri Nagpal’s art and Aparna Uppaluri’s translations work together to help us intimately visualize the many faces of rain. Reading “Rain Incarnations” has been a very satisfying way to celebrate its early arrival this year.

Publication details of the book under review: Bishnu Mohapatra. 2025. Rain Incarnations (translated into English from the original Odia by Aparna Uppaluri; art by Gauri Nagpal). New Delhi: Speaking Tiger Books LLP.  

Note: A slightly different version of this review was first published in the fortnightly magazine Frontline.