JAYANTA MAHAPATRA’S POETRY_TMBhaskar

CONTEMPORARY RESEARCH IN INDIA (ISSN 2231-2137): VOL. 2: ISSUE: 3 20

JAYANTA MAHAPATRA’S POETRY: A CRITICAL STUDY

T. M. Bhaskar, Department of English, Andhra Pradesh Residential College, Vijayapuri South, Andhra

Pradesh

Tradition, a mythic consciousness and the Orissa landscape play a large part in Mahapatra’s poetry....The local

touches form an essential part of a wider and more complex poetic fabric. --- K. N. Daruwalla

Now Indian poetry in English has established itself

to such an extent that the poems of many Indian English

poets are being published in England, America, Canada,

Australia, Newzealand and many other countries of the

world. Not only this they are recognised as established

Indian English poets and many foreign writers and critics

have written articles, criticism and books on their poetry.

Jayanta Mahapatra, Nissim Ezekiel, Shiv. K. Kumar,

Kamaladas and K. N. Daruwalla are known as great

modern Indian English poets in many countries of the

world. Indian English poetry has an individual existence. It

is Indian in every sense. Abidi says:

The fact that Indo-Anglian poetry is Indian in

context and sensibility and English only in form and

language goes in favour of the genre as a distinctive body

of poetry1

It is beyond doubt that Indian poetry in English,

both by virtue of its quality and its bulk, has established

itself as a major expression of Indian sensibility. Indian

poetry in English has aroused interest among lovers of

poetry all over the world. Nayantara Sahgal, one of the

celebrated Indian novelists, once remarked that English

language was not a barrier for her. She admits:

It is true that invaders had come to India and

effected conquest, but they had been absorbed by her and

had become Indians2

Jayanta Mahapatra is undoubtedly one of the

foremost poets writing in English today. Undeniably, he has

made an original contribution to Indian English poetry

within a fairly short span of time. The metaphors and

symbols of culture that build Mahapatra’s visionary world

are characterised by pain and suffering, memory and loss,

hope and possibility of redemption. While the idiom of his

poetry is governed by an acute awareness of the cultural

and socio-political ethos of his native place, his vision

transcends all natural boundaries to achieve a universal

significance. Mahapatra’s poetry is steeped in an authentic

individuality of perception, expression and tone.

Madhusudan Prasad says:

His is distinctively unsentimental voice, now

conversational, dramatic, lyrical, prosaic, questioning,

searching but always strikingly unpretentious and powerful3

His themes are varied ranging from sex to nature,

from the religious to the superstitious, from the Meta

physical to the mythical, from the personal to the

impersonal. But whatever his themes, there is a profound

brooding, meditative quality like that of the saint that holds

the reader hypnotised. Above all, his sensibility, absolutely

uncontaminated, always remains authentically Indian. His

poetry is rooted deeply in Indian socio-cultural heritage. His

verse collection includes:

Close the sky(1971)

Ten by Ten(1971)

A Rain of Rites(1976)

The False Start(1980)

Relationship(1980)

Life Signs(1983)

Temple(1990)

He has translated Oriya poems into English and

has also edited Chandrabhaga, a literary magazine. His

works reveal how he examines his environment, his

personal desires and various human relationships. Local

realities lead him to investigate the depth of one’s feeling

and possibilities of language representing them. Jayanta

Mahapatra is concerned with creating words capes of

images and symbols that transform the local into the

universal. He contributed quite a good number of poems

written in English to various foreign magazines... The

Critical Quarterly, the Sewanee Review, the Kenyon

Review. In fact the recognition as a poet confers the award

on him. Though a late starter, he made up this late start by

producing ten volumes of poems during a period of fifteen

years. Success and recognition came from abroad. His

other volumes came in quick succession. A Whiteness of


Bone (1992), Shadow Space (1997), Bare face (2000),

Random Descent (2005). The poet puts down no shutters

and puts on no blinkers. He has an open mind and perhaps

a willing ear in choosing the themes for his poetry. A poet’s

response to the lands cape of his country, his sense of

tradition and culture of the land of his birth and may other

factors go together to make him assume an identity of his

own. Judith wright observes:

Before one’s country can become an accepted

back ground against which the poet’s and novelist’s

imagination can move unhindered, it must first be

observed, understood, described as it were, absorbed. The

writer must be at peace with his landscape before he can

confidently turn to its human figure4.

It is beyond doubt that Mahapatra deeply rooted in

the Orissan soil. Places like Puri, Konark, Cuttack,

Bhubaneswar from as it were a quadrangle in the

landscape of his poetry. Legends, history and myths

associated with these places immensely interest Jayant

Mahapatra and from the nerve centre of his poetry. He has

written several poems focusing on Puri---- the great sacred

place of lord Jagannath, the presiding deity of Orissa. For

the Hindus, Puri is one of the four well-known places of

pilgrimage. Mahapatra depicts with a touch of subtle irony

and pathos the incongruities in the religious landscape of

India. The real landscape becomes a symbol, a suggestive

image in his poetry. This is seen:

White-clad widowed women

Past the centres of their lives

Are within to enter the great temple.

Their austere eyes

Stare like those caught in a net

Hanging by the dawn’s shining

Strands of faith-

(Dawn at Puri)

In the same poem, the poet underlines the

importance of Puri and what it means to the Hindus in our

country. This is the place where widows long for breathing

their last lest they should attain salvation.

Her last wish to be cremated here twisting uncertainly

like light on the shifting sands.

(Dawn at Puri)

The poet observes a large number of widows

wearing white garments, those who have passed their

middle age and are therefore elderly women. The only

thing that sustains these women is their religious faith and

the hope which is born of it. They all stand up in a group,

looking timid and having no confidence in themselves. The

poet’s mother, who is getting old, had said that her last

desire in life is that after her death she should be cremated

here. This is the place where all the pious people wish to

be cremated. In Indian summer, Mahapatra reveals true

Indian sensibility through auditory and visual images. The

poem illustrates Mahapatra’s authentic Indian sensibility in

a remarkable manner, although some other poems in this

volume as well as in succeeding volumes illustrate it

remarkably. The poem is about the sober drabness of an

Indian summer, where heaviness hangs on everything

around. The poet picks out a few characteristic aspects of

a heavy Indian summer without any comments. The reader

is left to form his or her own conclusions. Structurally

skeletal, the poem is exceptionally eloquent.

Over the soughing of the sombre wind

Priests chant louder than ever

The mouth of India opens.

Crocodiles move into deeper waters.

Morning of heated------

Smoke under the sun.

The good wife lies in my bed

Through the long afternoon;

Dreaming still, unexhausted

by the deeper roar of funeral pyres.

(Indian summer)

The religious cry of India resounds even above

the sounds of the echoing the resulting winds of summer.

This refers to the religious faith of the country irrespective

of what comes and what goes. The poem offers a few

pictures which are by no means interconnected, though

they are supposed to occur in summer in this country or in

Orissa. The picture of priests chanting louder than before,

and this indicating that it is India’s mouth which has opened

and which is reciting sacred verses. Crocodiles move into

deeper water, because in summer, there is much water in

the river than in winter. With the advent of summer, the

rains add to the water flowing in the river, and so the

crocodiles feel more comfortable because of the deeper

waters into which they can move. The funeral pyres

referred to here are the many deaths taking place outside

but this does not disturb the house wife in any way---. She

is taking respite from the heat of the summer by resting on

her bed undeterred. This shows that life goes on for the

living despite the dead. Hunger selected from A Rain of


Rites, is a hard hitting poem about the degraded condition

of people living in utter poverty. It is one of the most

remarkable poems of Mahapatra. It depicts the tragic

compulsions which abject poverty can impose on a man.

This poem describes the life of a poor fisherman who, in

the face of extreme poverty drives his daughter to

prostitution much against his conscience. The word hunger

has been used in a double sense: It means the acute

desire for food or for anything to fill the belly; the second

sense is the desires for sexual gratification. The persona

has the sexual desire while the young girl desires food to

avoid starvation. The authenticity and the universality of

‘Hunger’ come from the very fact that it ably recreates a

down-to-earth world out of the imagined one. The poem is

based on a true incident. The images used in ‘Hunger’ (A

Rain of Rites 44) are a happy blending of the literal and the

metaphorical. The poem, with its vivid details and resonant

images is a severe indictment of a social reality where

hunger for food drives one to cater to another’s hunger for

sexual gratification. This poem is a deeply moving, mordant

satire on India’s hopeless economy. The penury of the

fisherman-father compels him to let his fifteen-year-old

daughter resort to prostitution for earnings. Every word is

studded properly, contributing remarkably to aesthetic

effects and emphasizing the voice of silence. The very

stanza is strikingly poetic:

It was hard to believe the flesh was heavy on my back

The fisherman said; will you have her, carelessly,

Trailing his nets and his nerves, as though his words

Sanctified the purpose with which he faced himself.

I saw his white bone thrash his eyes.

(Hunger)

Dhauli written in just four stanzas of four lines

each is seething with the pain as he visualises the after

math of the great battle fought between Ashoka and the

ruler of Kalinga more than thousand years ago. Dhauli was

the scene of the bloodiest battle which ended in Ashoka’s

victory and resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands

soldiers butchered on both the sides. The battle field was

filled with the butchered and mutilated bodies which gave

an open invitation to jackals and foxes to feast upon. In the

poem the poet has packed history, philosophy and religion

to drive home the ultimate truth and the meaning of life.

The poem recreates a painful phase of Indian history when

King Ashoka, after having fought the wars of kalinga, felt

awfully shocked at the blood-shed in Kalinga and took a

solemn vow to abstain from violence. The poet feels that:

The measure of Ashoka’s suffering

does not appear enough.

The place of his pain peers lamentably

from among the pains of the dead.

(Dhauli)

Prostitution which is an important theme in Indian

literature, finds expression in some of Mahapatra’s poems.

The evil of prostitution results from economic disparity and

social injustice. While treating sex and love, Mahapatra,

unlike Kamaladas, Shiv .K.Kumar and Pritish Nandy who

have expatiated at length on such themes, never tickles

our baser instinct, nor does he indulge in sentimental

whispering raving or blathering. His treatment of sex is

indisputably delicate, unsentimental, restrained and above

all realistic. The Whore house in a Calcutta Street is a

precise, realistic and highly communicative, although the

poem suffers from looseness and logorrhoea with which

many of Mahapatras poems are infected. The poem begins

with the instruction to the protagonist how to find a whore

house in a Calcutta street and ends with prostitute asking

him to leave her for she is in hurry to receive new

customers. Lust yields place to commerce and the

message becomes quite clear. The poet also learns about

the sorrowful plight of prostitutes. The concluding part of

the poem is really remarkable:

You fall back against her in the....... light,

Trying to learn something more about women

While she does what she thinks proper to please you?

The sweet, the little things, the imagined,

Until the statue of the man within

You’ve believed in throughout the years

Comes back to you, a disobeying toy

And the walls you wanted to pull down

Mirror only of things mortal and passing by

Like a girl holding on to your wide wilderness,

As thought it were real, as though the renewing voice

Tore the membrane of your half-woken mind

When, like a door her words close behind:

‘Hurry’, will you? Let me go, and her lovely breath thrashed

against your kind

(The whore house in a Calcutta Street)

Grandfather is a deeply moving poem. Starving,

on the point of death, Chintamani Mahapatra, the poet’s

grandfather embraced Christianity during the terrible


famine that struck Orissa in 1866. But at the same time the

grandfather died metaphorically as a Hindu. The diary of

Chintamani Mahapatra becomes the only communication

link between the poet and his grandfather. Jayanta

Mahapatra tries to know and visualise the circumstances

which resulted in his grandfather’s death as a Hindu. His

grandfather is a dominant figure in his family poems. In this

poem, Mahapatra dives deep into his family history and

reflects the basic issues of his life including change of

religion. With a sense of agony and disgust, the poet

directs his volley of questions to his grandfather, only to

regret it in the end. The poet rightly asks:

What did faith matter?

What Hindu world so ancient and true

for you to hold?

(Grandfather)

The poet wishes that he knew his grandfather

more than what his diary tells. It means the poet desires to

know the true cause which forced the grandfather to take

such a big risk, and it looked like when one was faced with

death, to understand what kind of loss of dignity led the

grandfather to do what he did. The poet rightly feels that it

is no use to hold our ancestors responsible for the change

of faith and regrets:

We wish we knew you more,

We wish we knew what it was to be, against dying,

To know the dignity

(Grandfather)

Although the poems like A Day of Rain, The Rain

Falling and After the Rain indicate Mahapatra’s tendency to

thematic repetitiveness they configurate his alternating

moods. For instance ‘Rain’ in these poems acquires a

metaphorical dimension that leads the poet into his own

self and triggers of a chain of thoughts. These poems form

the peculiar frames out of which the poet peeps at nature.

In A Day of Rain, the poet paints some delicate images

with his deft handling of well-culled words exuding lyrical

fervour:

Once again, it has been a day of rain

And I hear the flutter of light feet

On the warm earth excited wings

Loosening from the dark. There’s

A summer hiding away behind the hills,

a haunting dream whose meaning

always escapes me

like the sad shut tufts of.......

hanging there tame and weeping

for the lost touch

(A Day of Rain)

No Indian English poet has written so many

poems on rain (Rain Poems) as Mahapatra has done.

‘Rain‘is favourite metaphor. His well-known poems rain

poems are In a Night of Rain, A Day of Rain, The Rain

Falling, After the Rain, A Rain, Four Rain Poems, Rains in

Orissa, Another day in Rain, This is the season of the old

Rain and Again the Rain Falls, apart from a number of

poems which indirectly deal with this theme. The rain

accelerates the desire in man and women for a physical

union. This is common in traditional Indian literature. Rain

fuels the desire in a man for a sexual union. It also gives

him hope for a better tomorrow. In The Rain Falling the rain

sparks of a chain of ideas in the poet.

Rain that falls silently in a July sky

Catching in your trembling skin

Pearls of fire

Wet pigeons’ voices on the naked ledge

A hand longing for love in the dark

We build our dreams richly in these

How can time be silent?

When there are only words in which we live,

When they make

The nearness of water and earth speak?

(The Rain Falling)

Thus, J. Mahapatra has given a new dimension to

Indian English poetry with his themes and experimentation.

Notes:

1. S. Z.H. Abidi: Studies in Indo- Anglian Poetry, Prakash Book Depot, Bareilly, 1987, P.14

2. Nayantara Sahgal. “ The Spirit of India”, The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 192, No.4, Oct.1953.p.167.

3. Madhusudan Prasad: Contemporary Indo-English Verse, Male poets, Ed. A. N. Dwivedi, Prakash Book Depot, Bareilly, P. 90

4. Quoted by Devindra Kohli, ’Landscape and Poetry’, The Journal of Common Wealth Literature. 13: 3, April 1979:54.

JAYANTA MAHAPATRA’S POETRY_TMBhaskar

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