CONTEMPORARY RESEARCH IN INDIA (ISSN 2231-2137): VOL.

2: ISSUE: 3

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JAYANTA MAHAPATRAS 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 Mahapatras 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 Mahapatras 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. Mahapatras 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 ones 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

CONTEMPORARY RESEARCH IN INDIA (ISSN 2231-2137): VOL. 2: ISSUE: 3 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 poets 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 ones country can become an accepted back ground against which the poets and novelists 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 dawns 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

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the hope which is born of it. They all stand up in a group, looking timid and having no confidence in themselves. The poets 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 Mahapatras 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 Indias 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

CONTEMPORARY RESEARCH IN INDIA (ISSN 2231-2137): VOL. 2: ISSUE: 3 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 anothers hunger for sexual gratification. This poem is a deeply moving, mordant satire on Indias 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 Ashokas 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

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awfully shocked at the blood-shed in Kalinga and took a solemn vow to abstain from violence. The poet feels that: The measure of Ashokas 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 Mahapatras 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 Youve 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 poets grandfather embraced Christianity during the terrible

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

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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. Theres 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. Rainis 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.