A boyhood in Ghess

Ghess looks, at first glance, like hundreds of other settlements scattered across the Bargarh district of western Odisha: paddy fields that flood and dry with the seasons, cattle on the embankments, a flat and unforgiving light through most of the year. It is also the village that produced one of the most improbable literary careers in modern India. Haldhar Nag was born in Ghess on 31 March 1950, into a household with almost nothing to fall back on. His father died while he was still a small boy, and with that loss went whatever chance he had of an ordinary childhood. He left the village school after class three and never sat in a classroom as a student again.

What followed was a long apprenticeship in survival rather than in letters. As a child he washed dishes at a sweetmeat shop, work that occupied roughly two years and paid in leftovers as much as in coins. Later he found steadier employment as a cook at a local high school, a post he held for about sixteen years, preparing rice and dal for children who were receiving the education that had been closed to him. When a loan of around a thousand rupees came within reach, he used it to open a small stationery kiosk beside the same school, selling pens, notebooks and snacks to the pupils. For most of his working life that little shop was his entire economic world, and he continued to hawk roasted chickpeas and similar wares to make ends meet long after his name had become known.

Finding a voice in Kosli

Nag did not come to poetry through books, because books in the language he thought in were scarce. He composes in Kosli, also called Sambalpuri, the speech of western Odisha, rather than in the standardised Odia of official textbooks. That was not a limitation he stumbled into but a decision he defended: the idiom of the region, its proverbs, its work songs and its cadences, carried a music that a borrowed literary register could not reproduce.

His first published piece, Dhodo Bargachh, whose title points to an ancient banyan tree, appeared in a local magazine and was received with a warmth that surprised him. Requests followed, then invitations, then a following. Because his own writing hand was untrained, he worked largely through memory and voice. He composes aloud, holds long narrative poems entirely in his head, and can recite whole works from beginning to end without a page in front of him. Audiences who came expecting a curiosity often left describing something closer to an oral tradition surviving intact into the twenty-first century.

The body of work

Over the decades the output grew into a substantial shelf of verse narratives, many of them retellings that pull regional history and myth back into the spoken language of the villages. Among the best known are Achhia, Bachhar, Lokgeet, Samparda, Krushnaguru, Mahasati Urmila, Tara Mandodari, Siri Somalai, Karamsani, Rasia Kabi, Prem Paechan and a long poem on Veer Surendra Sai, the nineteenth-century rebel whose memory remains powerful across the Sambalpur region. Others take up figures from the epics whose voices are usually left in the margins, and local deities whose stories had circulated orally without ever being fixed in verse.

The subject matter is rarely ornamental. Nag writes about drought and debt, about trees and rivers, about the dignity and the humiliation of manual work, about the moral obligations that hold a village together. A selection of his poems has been rendered into English under the title Kavyanjali, carrying his work to readers who cannot follow the original. Critics in Odisha have placed him in the lineage of Gangadhar Meher, the earlier Odia poet who also rose from an unlettered background, though the comparison flattens the strangeness of a man who never learned to write fluently yet produced epics.

Recognition and the barefoot poet

In 2016 the Government of India conferred the Padma Shri on Haldhar Nag, and the photographs from the ceremony became the enduring image of him: a slight man in a plain white vest and dhoti, entirely barefoot, receiving the award from President Pranab Mukherjee. He had worn nothing else for years, and he did not change for the occasion. The visual contrast between the setting and the man did more to fix him in the national imagination than any anthology could have.

Academic recognition followed a similar arc. Sambalpur University brought his poetry into serious study, where it became the subject of doctoral research, and his collected writings were compiled for scholarly use. In 2019 the same university conferred an honorary doctorate in literature on a man who had left school at the age of eight or nine. His life has drawn documentary filmmakers as well, including a short film in which the poet is presented to a national audience through the narration of the lyricist Gulzar, and he has appeared on screen in Sambalpuri productions and in a Hindi feature released in 2015.

What Ghess gave him

The temptation with a life like this is to reduce it to an inspirational anecdote about a school dropout who won a national award. Nag himself has resisted that reading. His importance lies less in the improbability of the biography than in what he proved about language: that a regional tongue often dismissed as a mere dialect can carry epic-length composition, moral argument and formal beauty, and that a literature does not require literacy in order to exist. He has continued to live in Ghess, in modest circumstances, receiving visitors, reciting on request and adding to a body of work that is now taught by people with far more formal education than he was ever permitted.

For the villages of western Odisha he is proof that their speech is not a deficiency to be corrected. The honorific attached to him locally, Lok Kabi Ratna, marks him as a jewel of folk poetry, and it is a title granted by listeners rather than by any committee. That, more than the medal, is the measure of what a boy from Ghess achieved.