Jayant Mahapatra’s poems explore the influence of local realities in creating the

depth of one’s feeling and sensitivity. ‘Hunger’ is a poem about the degraded
condition of people who live below the poverty line. The poem explores the
degradation of humanity in poverty when the next meal is doubtful. Hunger can
make one compromise on moral values, human relationships and
companionship. This is the underlying lesson of the poem.

Jayanta Mahapatra’s poem ‘Hunger’ is a famous poem written on a unique

theme. The poem clearly says about the need for food, and the appetite for flesh
and sex, both animal desires. The poor fisherman’s daughter, driven by poverty,
is offered for the sexual gratification of the Prufrock-type visitor. The woman’s
desire for food cannot be met in normal circumstances. She belongs to a poor
father who is in no position to provide for her food. The visitor, apparently a
man burdened by passion and guilt at the same time, must have her to release his
tension, but cannot overcome the usual pricking of his conscience. Mahapatra’s
poetry also has references to the story of Kubuja, the hunchback, who was cured
by Krishna in the famous and popular ‘Krishnaleela’ stories. Mahapatra makes
an ironical inversion of the expression ‘chips on the shoulder,’ suggestive of pride
and overconfidence, as opposed to the nervous sexual energy of the young man.
The old man’s offer is unscrupulous, but treating it as evil would be missing the
point of the poem; for, the economic compulsions are already a part of the
context, intended to work as an ironic supplement to the young man’s overt
sexual drives. Critics have commented on the use of women as figures of
patriarchal fantasies and make victimization in Mahapatra’s poetry. The girl has
absolutely no comment over the matter; her growing age has only made her
eligible for male lust. Providing sex to give the family some kind of monetary
support was not her idea in the first place.
The poem is meant to demystify life in the so-called red-light zones (most such
zones have little or no light at all). The sex drives of prostitutes or women making
a living out of sex are often exaggerated and misrepresented. Tucked away in the
southern coast of Orissa, Gopalpur-on-sea is a small town thronged by tourists
for its sunny beaches, shallow sea and quiet nights. Women from fishing
community, who generally sell fish in the local market, sometimes double up as
prostitutes, catering to the visitors. The woman bathes in clean water before
approaching the customer, trying hard to remove the fish-stench in order to
gather another kind of stench which cannot be sniffed, only felt.
The poet had originally suggested in a note that the incident could well have
involved him or somebody like him. There is no need to dig up biographical
records to verify the identity of the man looking for sex and fearing it; this
search and the inherent fear is universal.

The poem “Hunger” describes a certain experience of the protagonist (poet

speaker) with a fisherman’s daughter. The fisherman’s financial stringency had
compelled him to use his teenaged daughter as a prostitute in order to earn
some money and to keep himself and his daughter going. The protagonist
contacted this fisherman in order to have sexual gratification with the fisherman’s
15 years old daughter. The fisherman took the protagonist to his shack close to
the seashore to have sexual pleasure with her. She opened her legs. The poor
fisherman’s daughter, driven by poverty, is offered for the sexual gratification of
the Prufrock-type visitor. The woman’s desire for food cannot be met in normal
circumstances. She belongs to a poor father who is in no position to provide for
her food.
This poem has a lot of psychological interest. The visitor, apparently a man
burdened by passion and guilt at the same time, must have her to release his
tension, but cannot overcome the usual pricking of his conscience. The sense of
guilt is emphasized when the protagonist says that the soot from the oil lamp
repeatedly entered the spaces of his mind.

It is usually seen that men who are not satisfied with their married life or are not
married or are divorced, go to brothels and give money for their own pleasure. It
has become a business now, especially in India. Saying India a poor country will
be an understatement. India now is not just poor by money, but poor by morals.
The basic moral of a human being to realize that women are responsible for the
creation of a new generation is wiped off our minds. It is a shame that we have
forgotten women are not toys meant for sexual gratification or satisfaction of
men. They are the creator of the entire human race.

The poem is meant to demystify life in the so-called red-light zones (most such
zones have little or no light at all). The sex drives of prostitutes or women making
a living out of sex are often exaggerated and misrepresented. Tucked away in
the southern coast of Orissa, Gopalpur-on-sea is a small town thronged by
tourists for its sunny beaches, shallow sea and quiet nights. Women from fishing
community, who generally sell fish in the local market, sometimes double up as
prostitutes, catering to the visitors.

The poem also deserves praise because of Mahapatra’s highly commendable

choice of words and his skillful arrangement of words. For instance, the
word “thrash” has metaphorically been used. Then there is the originality of the
line: “my mind thumping in the flesh’s sling.” There is also the sentence :

“Silence gripped my sleeves,”

One of his poems that earned a lot of fame is ‘Hunger’. This poem impressed Bernard Young, the American poet, so
much that he ‘quoted’ the whole poem in The Hudson Review. The poem presents two kinds of hunger – one
(physical) leading to the fulfillment of other (sexual). The theme is quite obvious, so let me focus on what I like about
this poem.
The poem primarily has two structures of images: flesh related and poverty related; hunger emanating from the flesh
and that from poverty. What makes the poem impressive is the way these images entangle one another, some
abstract, all building the irony of the two urges. The vividity of the images build a word portrait of the place,
graphically relating the manners of the three characters.

The fisherman, the father who pimps his daughter, is careless in his offer of the girl: “as though his words sanctified
the purpose with which he faced himself”. I think the poet craftily pushes the reader to question the very ideas of
sanctity here. The utter hopelessness in the life of the fisherman and his daughter is such that it words like sanctity
would be meaningless there. The values have no ‘purchase’ in so utterly degraded a human plight.

The image of wound is prepared to by such images as ‘the bone thrashing in his eyes’, ‘mind thumping in the flesh’s
sling’, ‘burning the house’ ‘body clawing’. The actions indicated in these image portray the human effort that is rather
desperate, fruitless and hurting. The wound image gathers them all together in a place where the combined force of
all these previous images together hits the reader hard and jump him/her out of complacency. It must be borne in
mind that the tourist searching for sexual gratification implicitly holds the place of the audience as the reader is a
voyeur like the tourist.

The soot image, a customary suggestion of sin, alerts us to how the blackness of the predicament of the father
pimping his daughter is a condemnation not of the father but of the society where such a tragedy comes to pass. The
soot covers the shack of the fisherman, but it is the tourist’s mind on which the poem sees the soot. Thus, like Blake
who said the presence of a whore in society is a curse of the marriage system, this poem questions the justness in
society from which sanctity has disappeared.

Through “Hunger” and “The Whorehouse in a Calcutta Street” Mahapatra has successfully depicted the
‘commodization’ sex and personal relationship in this modern era. In “Hunger” sex and personal relationship is at
stake for suppression of the greatest hunger that is Poverty

The poem makes for a pleasurable reading evoking sensuality. It has some flow .The fisherman is trying as much to
rid himself of the burden of an adolescent daughter as the fish of his net. Even offering her to be an object of pleasure
is no consideration for the poor father.The so called hunger as perceived by the poet could be viewed both ways-
erotically or with distaste depending on the reader’s attitude.In fact. that may be the beauty of it all leaving little room
for any comment except that……..her readiness was a little too abrupt or was she that besotted !

 Through the last lines of the poem, Jayanta Mahapatra has shown, how the girl has become a commodity in this
post-modern era and how her body is being advertised even by her own father for the suppression of poverty. The
narrator could not but surprised hearing a father’s “exhausted will”. He becomes the saviour for the suppression of
their “Hunger” and he did only through the exchange, having gratified his own Sexual “Hunger”. Actually in this world
of comodization, everything can be gained only after exchanging the things having same value. The last two lines
express the forbidden intercourse between an immature girl and the highly matured narrator. So her legs are “wormy”
which should not to be consumed. But it is our natural instinct that we always have the attraction for the forbidden
things. The narrator is no exceptional. Whenever the narrator is having pleasure with the girl, the situation is just like
a fish, who has been caught into the net, is trying to get rid. But there she can do nothing except being consumed…
Hunger is one of the thoughtful poems ever written by Jayanta Mahapatara who is not merely an imagist, but a
realist, a feminist, a modernist, a post-modernist and what not apart from being a nihilist, an existentialist and an
iconoclast. Photography is his hidden love. Light and darkness the shades of his delving and he interprets in the form
of sun rays falling and retreating so the images of life a study in silhouettes and shadows. Poems come to him as
photo-negatives. Nothing is what it seems to be and what seems to be is nothing.
A poet whose subject is physics here describes in what it has been left untouched. Flesh trade and woman trafficking
is the point of deliberation. How the situations of life, impoverished circumstances force one to be at the crossroads of
life? The small fisher girl is the mute artist of the poem whereas there lie in some main protagonists. The father and
the customer, their indirect exchanges add to the poem and make it gloomier. A woman’s life, who knows it, what it in
her palm lines? Where was she born, where will she go away? The crisscrosses of her fate-lines, who to foretell and
predict it?
Thought the poem is of a confessional slant, we are not sure of who the unknown listener is in the poem with whom
the fisherman is talking for an exchange of money.

Hunger is not about the hunger of the belly, but of the body, the fulfillment of sexual lust and desire. Though for the
belly, one does it all, is the truth which cannot be ignored. The poem starts with a discussion held in between the poor
fisherman and the authorly persona who is there as a visitor whereas the weak feminine persona stands by as a mute
spectator of all that happening in between as a business transaction for the body.
Drawn by flesh and blood contact and possessive love, man-woman relationship story, give and take gesture,
attraction and repulsion often met in love, the speaker goes to the beach with a view to having to quench the thirst,
the fire engulfing him. There on the beach the fisherman tired of dragging the nets, with the retarded muscles and
daytime labour, often failing to catch fish, drawing froth and foam, resorts to selling his small, tender-age daughter.
While drawing the nets, he asks the customer if he will like to have which he awaits to be with so eagerly. The
discussion started in a casual way gets the final nod for relationship and business.
Thereafter the poet follows the fisherman; his mind gets trapped into the net of relationship. Silence grips the sleeves.
There is no question of homeward return journey back home. On the one hand the sleaze keeps him engaged while
on the other old fisherman having a tryst with the nets, but drawing nothing. The sprawling sands the canvas on
which the images are life lie in drawn realistically.
The situation changes and the scene shifts where the persona frolics with identity and imagery. In the dark, just as a
no-man he goes into. Suppose we that the wind is he with the days and nights before. Palm fronds scratch the body
and the soot from the dimly burning oil lamp blackening it all with the cast shadows cast over and the flickerings
strange.
The poet hears him say that she is just fifteen. He may feel her, take to his sensitivity. The poet enjoys the
relationship. The wormy legs opened tell of the perennial feminine wounds they have been suffering since the ages.
She feels like a fish slithering and turning inside. The poet not only feels the hunger, but quenches his thirst.
The story is very painful. It has many a thing to say. How do the fisher folks labour and what do they get? Secondly,
the sea is furious and claiming too. Many drown in and the boats capsize. But still they take the risk of taking on.
The other thing is, still the body is sold. How developed are we? And they keep selling for the stomach, the fire of the
belly, as hunger knows nothing, no norms, no morality and ethics.
The last is Jayanta Mahapatra is sexual too as because the intricacies of human relationships twitch him for an
expression.

Hunger by Jayanta Mahapatra is one of the darkest, dreadful, and daring poems I have read in
recent times. Originally published in 1976 as the part of the poem collection, A Rain of Rites, Hunger
established Mahapatra as one of the superstar poets in the Indian English literature world. The poem
explores the themes of the sex trade, poverty, and emotional vacuum. In Mahapatra's own word, "In
“Hunger” I was writing from experience." But, he never commented, whether the protagonist was he,
himself, or somebody else.

The twenty-one line poem or rather say twenty-one line story has three characters: the narrator, the
old fisherman, and his young daughter. Moreover, like a good short story, Mahapatra does not
spend many words, and introduce the themes straight away: "It was hard to believe the flesh was
heavy on my back./ The fisherman said: Will you have her, carelessly."

The fisherman is ready to let the narrator have sex with his fifteen-year-old daughter in exchange of
few rupees. Though the real tragedy does not lie in the transaction but in the casual acceptance of
the transaction. How easily, the fisherman said: "My daughter, she's just turned fifteen…/Feel her."
and how unaffectedly, "She opened her wormy legs wide."

Whereas, the narrator deprived of the emotional support, i.e., love, and womanly warmth, despite his
aversion, have sex with the young girl. But it is then he "felt the hunger there,/ the other one, the fish
slithering, turning inside."

Hunger talks about the three types of hunger and how they feed on each other. The first hunger is of
food, the second is of sex, and the third is of emotions. The fisherman and his girl were poor and in
order to kill their hunger of food, father sold his daughter to satiate the hunger of the narrator
(society).

On another hand, the narrator was deprived of emotional support, so he stooped down to buy the
flesh (or warmth) of a young girl. But in the end, he realized the hunger of young girl is much greater
than the hunger of his. But, in the real world, nobody thinks in that way, and they lust after the flesh
of the young girl. They (and might the narrator, himself) come back to feed on the hunger of the girl.

The poem is an unapologetic commentary on our society, i.e., how a girl of fifteen, who should be
given a safe environment to live, is used for satiate the hunger of so-called moralistic, heartful,
civilized society