“When I feel I am losing my communication with myself, I start writing poems. Poetry is not only a commotion outside my existence but also a commotion inside me… my only medium is poetry.” Arif Raja
Across the frontiers of continents and tongues, there emerge poets who insist not only on their own presence but also on the shared presence of humanity. One such poet is Arif Raja, a premier voice of contemporary Kannada literature, born in the rural village of Arakera, Raichur district of Karnataka, India. His journey from a primary school teacher to an assistant professor of literature is also the story of a poet who found language not merely as expression, but as survival, an inner dialogue with the self, and a bridge to the world.
Born on 6 December 1983, Arif Raja grew up amid the soil and dust of northern Karnataka. His first poetic cry came with Saitanana Pravadi (A Prophet of Satan, 2006), announcing a fierce, questioning voice. This was followed by Jangama Phakeerana Jolige (The Satchel of a Mendicant Faqir, 2009), Benkige Todisida Batte (A Raiment for Fire, 2013), Nakshatra Moha (Star Infatuation, 2017), and most recently, Ede Halina Pali (The Turn of Breastfeeding, 2022). Each volume widens the scope of Kannada poetry into daring new terrains: erotic, spiritual, political, existential.
For this trajectory, Raja has been recognized with the Da. Ra. Bendre Award (2010), the Yuva Puraskara of Sahitya Akademi (2012), and the Yuva Puraskara Award of Bharatiya Bhasha Parishad, Kolkata (2024). But his true recognition lies in the fact that his poems are no longer bounded by Kannada; they live in English, Persian, Albanian, Spanish, Greek, and other languages.
In a polarized world, Raja has chosen the vocation of a bridge-maker. In 2022, he convened SANGAM: Confluence of World Poets in Ballari, where poets from 23 Indian states and 17 countries came together. And in the celebrated Kannada magazine Mayura, he now curates a translation column, introducing young voices from South Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. For him, translation is not ancillary; it is essential, a way for the Kannada word to converse with Swahili, Spanish, or Persian, and vice versa.
“Extend your joined palms / Children will drop from the sky / Like bombs / Or missiles / Or meteors.”
(“Children Drop Down Here from the Sky”)
In this poem, Raja touches the global wound of war, displacement, and innocence destroyed. Yet he answers with the imagery of fertility, “No Mother there is barren,” as if affirming the earth’s inexhaustible promise even amidst catastrophe. This ability to fuse despair with tender resilience is his multicultural gift: he is never a local poet alone, but a poet of shared humanity.
One of Raja’s striking features is the audacity to bring the human body, its eroticism, its shame, its dignity into dialogue with cosmic and social anxieties. In “Spell,” a woman asserts her breasts as markers of time: one shrunken, one full, belonging to different stages of nourishment. In “Delectable Deluge,” the act of urination in a public place becomes an apocalyptic symbol:
“She unfurled her red petticoat / Like an umbrella / And sat down to pee / In a public place … / The message / About the ultimate doomsday / May have arrived / Just today.”
The intimate and the cosmic, the flesh and the scripture, collapse into one frame. This is Raja’s territory where the small gesture becomes a revelation, where the apocalypse is not thunder from heaven but a red petticoat in the street.
In “An Incomplete Kiss,” Raja returns to the bench of a decade ago. The hurried kiss, left unfinished by social fear, still burns warm. The kiss itself becomes a metaphor for all unfinished desires and censored intimacies in society:
“That bench waits for the moment, / A kiss is able to hoodwink the moral police / and find completion.”
This is where Raja’s poetry moves beyond the private; it names the collective repression of a society, and the quiet endurance of memory that resists erasure.
Likewise, in “Ancestors,” the flapping curtains embody unresolved presences elders returning as children, unsettled legacies haunting the night. His voice navigates between myth and modernity, always aware of the “unresolved.”
Raja’s poetry also interrogates spirituality with irreverence and compassion. In “Buddha Means…,” the image of a slaughterhouse goat’s severed head stares back at the butcher suggesting that enlightenment lies not in renunciation, but in recognizing helplessness and complicity.
In “Half Eaten Apple,” the Biblical fall is reimagined as a marketplace, where half-eaten apples proliferate and God himself is “serving ten sentences for our single offence.” Here, Raja shows himself as both iconoclast and believer, mocking divine authority even while wrestling with its enduring shadow.
The Poet as Witness
But perhaps Raja is at his most haunting when he becomes a witness to fragility, as in “Each Time You Blink”:
“Each time you blink, / my heart’s lamp / is put out and rekindled… / The border wars may end soon, / please wait, my child.”
The poem folds the personal act of blinking into the vastness of border wars, mothers bearing children, and lullabies sung in graveyards. The voice is tender, yet unflinching, acknowledging that even in tragedy, a mother still waits, a child still breathes, a poet still writes.
To read Arif Raja is to walk through fire, love, laughter, and ruins and to emerge with a new awareness of both the frailty and resilience of being human. His poetry refuses neat categories: it is at once erotic and mystical, rural and cosmopolitan, rooted in Kannada yet belonging to the world.
For the multicultural press, Arif Raja is not merely a Kannada poet but a world poet of plurality. His verses travel, not because they are exotic, but because they are profoundly human speaking of children who fall from the sky, of half-eaten apples in the market, of incomplete kisses, of blinking eyes that hold the fate of nations.
If the 21st century is an age of fractures, migrations, and contested identities, then Raja’s poems remind us that poetry is still the deepest bridge we have: a way of keeping communication alive with ourselves, and therefore with the world.
WHAT’S THE COLOUR OF THE MIDNIGHT’S LIPS?
Twice a day, invariably, she goes for a shower.
She rises in the midnight out of the blue
To wear her lip balm.
She looks again;
There’s something she calls to her mind—
Helplessness, anxiety, protest, disease.
She stares, again and again, at the mirror in the eyes,
Flashes a variety of colours—
Deep red, rose, ash blue—
And wears her lip balm.
Her endless bath also occurs
In much the same way, day after day,
Like the last rites of bathing the earth,
Like the storm that makes an abrupt landfall.
Every season is grateful like today’s breath.
They’re for today; they won’t last forever.
-Translation- Manu V Deva Devan
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CHILDREN DROP DOWN HERE FROM THE SKY
Extend your joined palms
Children will drop from the sky
Like bombs
Or missiles
Or meteors
Just lift your hands up to heavens
No Mother there is barren
Beyond seven skies
We don’t know what is or isn’t there
But if you ask for arms
Holding the hem of your sarees
Children will keep on descending
Like immortal fruits
- Translation: H S Shivaprakash
+++++++
AN INCOMPLETE KISS
The park bench,
on which
a decade ago
we used to sit,
may have been discoloured
and dilapidated.
Yet,
the half-kiss
you hurriedly planted on my lips,
filled as you were with
anxious disbelief,
is still warm.
Even now,
That bench waits for the moment,
A kiss is able to hoodwink the moral police
and find completion.
-Translated by: Kamalakar Kadave
+++++++
Ancestors
When doors are shut
The window curtains
keep flapping
All night
What it is
Is unresolved
Those who grow old
And leave the house
May be trying to get in again
Becoming children
True
What it is
Is unresolved
Translation: H S Shivaprakash
+++++++
SPELL
He often
Finds
A breast of mine
Too small.
What he is
Oblivious to is
The shrunk one
Is for one who is weaned,
The larger one
Is for one who
Will feed hereafter!
- Translation: C P Ravichandra
++++++++++++++
DELECTABLE DELUGE
She unfurled her red petticoat
Like an umbrella
And sat down to pee
In a public place
The message
About the ultimate doomsday
That God wrote in Holy Scriptures
May have arrived
Just today.
-Translated by: H S SHIVAPRAKASH
++++++
HALF EATEN APPLE
All she ate was
Half an apple
The rest was to appear in dream
To be fulfilled
But even before that
Hell was created
All pervading Lord
Is our partner
Even in hell
Poor God
Beginning less
All alone
Serving ten sentences
For our single offence
Enjoying the bygone troubles
-can’t he imagine
Where the other half is gone?
Dreams were born
Only when the primeval darling
Cheated on her lover
When market was created
Alongside eternal separation
God can’t imagine this
In his infirm age
When he urinates
The piss spills on to his feet
That the market is now full
Of half-eaten apples
-Translated by H S Shiva Prakash
++++++++
BUDDHA MEANS…
Buddha means:
A bottomless watercan;
Filled up and emptied
Every second
Buddha means:
The severed head of a goat
in the slaughterhouse
And
The image of the helpless butcher
imprisoned in its eyes…
-Translated by: H S SHIVAPRAKASH
++++++
EACH TIME YOU BLINK
Each time you blink,
my heart’s lamp
is put out and rekindled
Who should keep a watch
to ensure
that you don’t slip into sleep?
A time has come
for your mother
to bear you again
in her womb.
The border wars may end soon,
please wait, my child.
This is a fragrant
grave,
why should anyone sing
lullabies here?
-Translated by: Kamalakar Kadave
Arif Raja is a premier Kannada poet. He was born in Arakera village, located in Raichur district of Karnataka, India on 6th December, 1983. He started his career as a primary school teacher and served in the field for ten years. Currently he is working as an assistant professor in an undergraduate college. He has published five collections of poems so far: Saitanana Pravadi (A Prophet of Satan, 2006), Jangama Phakeerana Jolige (The Satchel of a Mendicant Faqir, 2009) and Benkige Todisida Batte (A Raiment for Fire, 2013) Nakshatra Moha (Star Infatuation, 2017) and Ede Halina Pali (The Turn of Breastfeeding, 2022). Arif Raja has been awarded the Da.Ra. Bendre Award-2010, Yuva Puraskara of Indian Academy of Letters-2012, and recently, Bharatiya Bhasha Parishad, Kolkata honoured him by presenting the Yuva Puraskara Award-2024. His poems have been translated into other Indian languages and foreign languages such as English, Persian, Albanian, Spanish, Greek, and more. He worked as the organizer (convener) of the “SANGAM-2022: Confluence of World Poets” world poetry conference held in Ballari in 2022. In this poetry festival, poets from not only 23 states of India but also 17 other countries participated. Currently, in the renowned Kannada magazine “Mayura,” as part of a global youth poetry translation series, he is introducing young poets and conducting poetry translation and interviews from South Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. The translation of Arif Raja’s poems written over the last two decades has been progressing steadily.
Arif Raja can be contacted at:
Mo. No.: + 91 9019893784
E-mail: arifrajapoetry@gmail.com
Address: Arif Raja, Arikera- 584111
Raichur District, Karnataka, India
