Krushna Kumar Mohanty’s “Deśa” (“Country”), published in the poetry anthology Rubi Rāe (Ruby Roy), is a remarkably condensed yet philosophically expansive meditation on nation, geography, history, colonial violence, famine, war, civilization, identity, and the elusive idea of belonging. Rather than presenting “country” as a stable geographical territory enclosed by political boundaries, Mohanty transforms it into a wounded, wandering, gendered, historically sedimented and cosmically displaced presence. The poem’s central figure is simultaneously woman, earth, nation, civilization, refugee, historical survivor and mythic icon. Through startling juxtapositions—guava and silk, famine and pelvic bone, Mongolian face and Nile, Vasco da Gama and the national flag, radium-coloured blood and green earth, Mohenjo-daro and Bhairavī— the poem dismantles conventional nationalist rhetoric and reconstructs the nation as an unstable archive of violence and memory. Its poetics is profoundly dialogic, postcolonial and deconstructive: “country” is never simply one country, but a palimpsest of countries, civilizations, migrations and imperial encounters. The poem’s linguistic texture is equally significant. The transliterated Odia, with its striking hybrid vocabulary such as “pel-bik,” “skrab,” “Maṅgoliān,” “Bhāskodāgāma,” “reḍiyam,” and “triraṅgā,” dramatizes a world in which indigenous linguistic consciousness encounters global historical terminology. Its sonic form, perceptible through the IPA transcription, further reveals how the poem converts phonetic movement into philosophical movement. The present study reads “Deśa” through postcolonial theory, deconstruction, ecocriticism, feminist criticism, Marxist criticism, historical consciousness, cultural memory, myth criticism, psychoanalysis, cosmopolitanism and the philosophy of identity. It also places the poem in dialogue with major works of national and anti-national poetry, including Walt Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing,” Claude McKay’s “America,” Langston Hughes’s “I, Too,” W. B. Yeats’s “Easter 1916,” Allen Ginsberg’s “America,” Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s “Subh-e-Azadi,” and Rabindranath Tagore’s “Where the Mind Is Without Fear.” The study argues that Mohanty’s “Deśa” ultimately moves beyond patriotism and nationalism toward an ethics of planetary memory: the country survives not in flags, borders or monuments alone, but in wounded bodies, archaeological fragments, ancestral memories, rivers, blood, soil and the mysterious persistence of human consciousness.

Santosh Kumar Nayak,"From Fragmented Earth to the Icon of Bhairavī: A Critical, Philosophical, and Postcolonial Reading of Krushna Kumar Mohanty’s “Deśa”(Country)" International Journal of Advanced Multidisciplinary Research and Educational Development, V2(4): Page(584-594) July - August 2026. ISSN: 3107-6513. www.ijamred.com. Published by Scientific and Academic Research Publishing.