As the author of short stories, essays, a memoir and literary criticism, Harekrishna Deka (b. 1943) has stretched the boundary of all these genres. But he is a poet first. Deka started off as a poet in the fifties and quickly configured an evocative idiom to meet the constellations of his thought in the decades that followed. In 1987, he received the Sahitya Akademi Award for Ān Ejan (‘Another Person’, 1986), a collection of poems. Around this time, he started writing short stories as well. His prose carries the musicality and cadence of his early poetic expressions. This is particularly true of his first novel Āgantuk(‘Strangers’, 2008). But with Jātrā (2013), his second novel and the most recent one, the writer seems to have surpassed this preoccupation. In fact, there is a remarkable turnaround in his writing especially in the formal attributes of the corpus: Deka’s recent poems have parted ways with the conventional verse patterns by steadily appropriating a prosaic mode for close to a decade now.
Jātrā: Ekhan Asampurṇa Upanyāsar Bāraṭā Adhyāy translated into English as Yatra: An Unfinished Novel marks a significant departure from the well-worn path of Assamese fiction by eluding the totalizing tendencies of the form.