Niranjan Mohanty, Professor of English at Vishwa Bharati, Santiniketan, passed away on July 28, 2008. He died of a sudden cardiac arrest. He was only fifty-five.

Niranjan Mohanty rose from very humble beginnings in his life as well as in his professional career. After thirteen long years in Aska Science College, he moved to Berhampur University and taught there for eleven years. Just when everyone had thought that he had finally come home, he changed his job again on being appointed to the prestigious professorship in English at the famed Vishwa Bharati, the institution founded by Tagore. He was the first Oriya ever to have occupied the prestigious chair of English there.

Niranjan Mohanty was an Indian poet of established merit and reputation. A prolific writer, he produced more than half a dozen volumes of poetry which include the well-known Prayers to Lord Jagannath (1993), Krishna (2006), and On Touching You. His translations from Oriya into English include The Drawing Master of Digpahandi. He was a prolific translator as well, translating not only from Oriya into English, which is the norm for most English academics, but also between Indian languages. Mention must be made of his fine renderings of the selected poems of the great twentieth-century Bengali poet, Jibanananda Das, which were published by the Kendra Sahitya Akademi in 2006 in a book titled, Nirjhara.

Niranjan Mohanty was a wonderful human being, loved and cherished by his countless friends, students, scholars and acquaintances for the generosity of his spirit, his personal warmth and his great sense of humour. He is survived by his wife, Jayanti, daughter, Mammina and son, Ritwick.

An Oriya poem by Niranjan Mohanty in translation:

Waiting

Since you’d given me word
to come last Saturday
I spent the entire day waiting for you.

For you I embraced the vacant moments
Of the day and even made
The part of your absence mine.

I could never know
whether you’d come or not,
but each day seems like a Saturday.

The tiny leaves sprout as usual in the ….
and the blood-red sun as always
burns itself out in my window
Till the casuarina grove turns desolate

After all
what else could have happened
had you come?

The same sense of restlessness-
from your arrival till your departure.
like a trapped butterfly
slipping out of one’s clutch.

It is, perhaps better this way,
Let each day fill in itself
with your imminent arrival.

Let each day be a Saturday
and as one Saturday comes to an end
you send word
That you’re certainly coming next Saturday.

(translated from the Oriya by Durga Prasad Panda)

Courtesy: Indian Literature—Issue No. 202 (March-April, 2001).

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