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This collection Maa Patikhol is a selected Dalit poems of poet Pitambar Tarai. His poems encapsulate life-affirming values that spill beyond objective sympathy and humanism. His ideology is not in the first place, a set of doctrines; it signifies the way men live out their roles in class and casteist society. Pitambar believes that all poetry springs from an ideological conception of the world and there is no such thing as a work of art entirely devoid of ideological content. This ideological base makes the poems of Maa Patikhol endearing, lovable, attracting and ennobling with his comic, symbolic, satirical and ironical voices.
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Pitambar Tarai (1959) was born at Mangarajpur, a fishermen's hamlet, in Kujang, on the east coast of Odisha. A mainstream poet of repute, he is also one of the few committed Dalit poets of Odisha. For more than two decades he has been working as a journalist and a social activist, fighting against caste discrimination, and for the people's right over land, forest and water. His published poetry collections include 'Bunde Luha Pithire Samudra', 'Sudrakar Sloka', 'Tarai Sairat', 'Itara' and 'Abhajan'. 'Abhajana' has brought him laurels in the form of Odisha Sahitya Akademi Award, 2011. Although Tarai's primary concern is the freedom of livelihood and expression; equal opportunity to work and education; and safeguarding the fundamental rights of the Dalit, his poems open up to all sections of people with their liberal humanism. He believes that it is not necessary for one to be a born Dalit in order to create a space for the Dalit in literature. He is more inclined to maintain the aesthetic strength of poetry to save it from being reduced to mere statements. In some of his poems he employs a kind of 'sly civility' (Homi Bhaba) to turn the table against the Brahmanical grand narrative. He can be reached at pitambartarai59@gmail.com.
