Sahitya Akademi

Jayanta Mahapatra: The Poet of the Soil

Author(s): Syamsundar Padihari
Source: Indian Literature, Vol. 51, No. 3 (239) (May-June 2007), pp. 168-176
Published by: Sahitya Akademi
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 LITERARY CRITICISM

Jayanta Mahapatra: The Poet of the Soil

Syamsundar Padihari

English Poetry after 1970 is called Poetry Today. The critic C.N.
Srinath says on the poets of the period. "Coming to the Indian Poetry
Indian
Today one finds him enjoying the bliss of ignorance." Such a poet is
neither concerned with his personal surroundings nor with his social

boundary. The pollution in Indian politics and its horror has. grasped
the common man's heart. Life has become devastated and inconsistent.
The moral degradation and social indiscipline have contaminated the human
mind. There is a great difference between life and livelihood. The poetry
of Today stands in this background. The main conflict is between the

personal and its immediate significance with the relationship of the self
with the external world. The basic problem with modern poetry is the
relationship of the self with the other, the distance felt by the consciousness
between being aware and what one is aware of.
Jayanta Mahapatra is a famous Indian English poet, deeply rooted
in Indian ethos. He stands tall among the many rootless Indian English
language poets. His deep patriotism, humanism and nostalgia for the lost
glories of his race stir Mahapatra's listless, enslaved compatriots. He is
a true poet of-the soil. He is a gifted poet fascinated by the Indian heritage,

myths and legends. It-is undoubtedly quite useful for us to examine the
poetry of Jayanta Mahapatra against the broad perspective of Indian

Poetry written in English particularly, in the post-Independence phase. An

important characteristic of such poetry has been its emergence as different—

though written in the English language—from the mainstream of English

literature, English themes and ideas and the English sensibility,. Indian
English poetry undoubtedly forms part of Indian literature. It is Indian
in sensibility, Indian in choice of themes and ideas and English only in
language. It is rooted in and stems from the Indian milieu and environment,
culture and tradition, landscape and mindscape. Mahapatra's themes fit
this description.

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 Mahapatra seems closer to the modernist movement of the first
half of the last century with its open-ended form and reliance on recurring

symbols to provide coherence to non-linear, fragmented structures. Mahapatra's

persona is of an estranged, distanced, sensitive artist rather than that of
an invisible or playfully prominent post-modernist author. As in modernist
writers, there is less importance on the material world and more emphasis
on subjective memory and the inner self, the psychological, in contrast
to the post-modernist's emphasis on almost totally self-enclosed art forms.

Mahapatra's is an elite art, aimed at a small, discriminating readership.

His poetry takes the past into its orbit, infuses it with the present and
looks forward to the future. It at once encompasses the history, the myths
and embodies a vision for the future. Hence it defies the exact terminology
'modern' and 'postmodern' for it is imbued with the sense of

contemporaneity that includes both modernism and post-modernism. As

a literary artist he obtains the tradition and enriches it with his individual
talent. He has been successful to a great extent in bringing a native tradition
alive in his poetry.
In Mahapatra's poetry, personal feelings are intensified as the poet
questions the existence of the self; the other often takes the form of
local society, and especially Hindu culture, ritual and spirituality, symbols
and the past from which he has been alienated by his grandfather's
conversion to Christianity and his own English language education. In
this poetry everything is problematic, put into doubt, as Mahapatra observes
his environment and listens quietly, sensitively to his inner feelings, the
sources of his poetry, bringing momentary perceptions of relationships
and fleeting images of contrast. The poems appear a continuous relation
of aspects of the isolation, loneliness, solitude, alienation of the self from
external realties in a world without apparent purpose. This is the existential
dilemma of most modern literature. While Mahapatra's world is filled
with personal pain, guilt, remorse, hunger, desire and moments of renewal,
his environment is filled with symbols of belief by the ordinary lives
of the people of Cuttack, the temples, the Hindu festivals, the ancient
monuments. Poverty, deprivation and prostitution recur in his verses. "All
these things happen around me," he says, "I can't ignore them and write
about the 'better' things of life - about the lives of the upper classes.
I have got friends in the lowered stratum of society. I can be a lot
more free with them than with other poets who bear such burdensome

egos on their shoulders."

It will appear to anyone that he is a poet with a high level of

fidelity to his native environment. A poet's positive response to his

geographical as well as cultural surroundings plays a significant role in

SyamsundarPadikari/169

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assuming a mask of the personal. It is a sort of supra-mundane identity
developing from physical identity. By virtue of his birth and up-bringing
Jayanta Mahapatra is firmly rooted in the landscape of his native land
Orissa. The important places of his state, Cuttack, Puri, Bhubaneswar
and Konark, the Chillika lake, its legends, history and myths, its tradition
and culture, it's past, present and future, have been integrated into his
mental landscape. These places in Orissa are not only politically or

commercially important, but they are important also in terms of the rich
heritage of the people. The tradition of Orissa, her history and culture
and what is more, her historic past, have been associated with these places,
from which his poems have Originated. Mahapatra has given ample evidence
of this awareness in many poems, particularly in "Evening in an Orissa

Village," "The Orissa Poem," "The Indian Poems," "The Indian Way,"
Dawn and so on. In reply to the citation of the Award of
at Puri"
the National Academic
of Letters(Sahitya Akademi), he said:
To Orissa, to this land in which my roots lie and lies my past
and in which lies my beginning and end, where the wind knees over
the grief of the river Daya and where the waves of the Bay of Bengal
fail to reach out today to the twilight sou) of Konark, I acknowledge

my debt and my relationship."

"Relationship," Mahapatra's Sahitya Akademi Award-winning mas
terpiece, tells of his quest for his roots. The quest for roots is a prominent
trend in modern Indian English Poetry. Notable Indian poets writing in
English also display this trend in most of their poems. One can cite,
for example R.Parthasarathi's poem "Home Coming." Similarly Mahapatra's

"Relationship" draws upon a wide variety of material connected with

Orissa's landscape, myth, history and culture. He looks at Orissa's past
and is pained to find its contrast with the present. With a nostalgic mind
he recalls the panorama of Orissa's heroic past and realizes that this past,
to which the river Daya was a witness, has become only a myth. Once
a heroic and militant race, it is now no more than a mere memory,
for, its successorsproved to be unworthy of keeping the glory of their
ancestors afloat and drifted away from their ideals. The present reality
to which the river Daya was a witness is the sad consequence of a decline
in not only our past heroism and valour but in our perennial values of
life. He writes:

It is hard to tell now

What happened to the anxious skies
How the age-old proud stones

Lost their strength and fell

And how the waters of Daya

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 Stank with the bodies of my ancestors

My eyes close now

Because of the fears that moves my skin.

The poet laments the downslide because he feels and rightly says
'he is an integral part of everything that Orissa is identified with. He
has a strong sense of belonging which accounts for his nostalgic tone.
In Relationship he refers to the Barabati fort of Cuttack which is now
in ruins, a symbol of vanquished dynasties.
The poet is at a loss to understand how the successors of such

great ancestors have become so unheoric and unworthy of their pre

decessors. An awareness of the contemporary situation brings the poet
into a state of despair. He is aware of the changing contours of

contemporary life and composes poems out of it. He depicts the

contemporary situation of law and order in the 1980s. The anti-national
activities in the Punjab in the name of Khalistan and the Bhopal Gas

tragedy are narrated in his poetry. With a tone deeply imbued with pathos,
the poet observes that life has lost its charm as it is beset with danger
and uncertainty.

I can hear the broken voice of the night

crying in my hands, bloody and black,
and carrying with it the joint smells
of flowers well past their best..

(Dispossessed Nets P-49)

Mahapatra presents the contemporary life in order to learn the anguish

and predicament of modern man. He relates the past with the present.
The past is brought alive for a moment of 'broken empires' and 'of
vanquished dynasties'. This nostalgic harking back to the past overwhelms
the poet.

Now I stand among the ruins,

Waiting for the cry of a night bird

From the river's far side
To drift through my weariness
Listening to the voices of my friends....
With the smells of the rancid fat of the past.
(Relationship)

The poet now

standing among these ruins, drifts through his
weariness, listening to the voices of his friends and 'writing poems' with
the smell of 'the rancid fat of the past.' The present would be better

SyamsundarPadibari/171

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understood, appreciated and endured in the light of the past and one
would learn how to live from other people's lives. Mahapatra's conception
of man's relation to what he perceives brings him face to face with

history and myth when his 'self is discovered in the act of attention
The interaction between 'self' and reality - the reality that eludes but
includes man-form the bedrock of Mahapatra's poetry, which, for him,
is the exploration of myths and it is linked with the world of art and

sculpture. Hence, he continues his quest for an 'essence divine' and for

'grace' in relationship between man and man, man and god and god,
men and sculptured art.

Mahapatra seems to have the conviction that tradition is a continuity

and one has to understand the present in terms of the past and the

past in terms of the present. In an article published in the Literary Criterion

(Mysore) he writes:

Relationship is a product of dreams; has the mundane

speak of the demands of a pilgrimage, threatened by
the living Oriya past, by raging hunger and a persistent
sexuality. In brief,we can say that there is in the thematic
framework of Relationship something which appears to
be a fine blend of myth and vision.

There is a profound sign of introspection in his poetry. The poet

has tried to create a symbol establishing a deep thematic relationship between
the inner world with the outer world. "Orissa Landscape," Evening in
an Orissa Village," "Dawn at Puri" etc., are the representation of his
own native place. Mainly Puri on sea is represented as a real lively character
in his poetry. Temple, priest, beggar, fisherman, now all these material
truths have become accelerated in his inner consciousness, that they are

gradually converted into intellectual symbols and images in the heart.

At Puri the crows

The one wide street

Lolls out like a giant tongue
Five faceless lepers move aside
As a priest passes by
And at the street's end

The crowd thronging the temple door;

A huge holy flower
Swaying in the wind
Of greater reasons."

(Taste for Tomorrow)

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 Here the tone of humanism of a sympathetic, poetic hero is reflected.
The assemblage of deformed, leprous beggars in the Bada Danda
communicates the pain and poverty of life. They turn aside at the approach
of the pandas and priests. The Singhadwar becomes over-crowded and
sonorous with temple bells. One can visualize the directness of the scenery
of Puri temple and Bada Danda. This poem is presented with sharp
satire and humanism. K. Ayyappa Paniker says about Mahpatra's poetry:
"An examination of the recurring images in Mahapatra's poems reveal
that he is an Oriya to the core. The sun of the eastern coast of India
shines through his poems. The eastern, sea sends its morning wind through
them; Mahapatra, a child of the sun and the sea, delights in invoking
the god of fire and the god of water in poems like "Sunburst," "The
Exile," "India Summer Poems," "This stranger," "My daughter...."
Love doesn't have any existence in today's life. Only burning passion
is involved. The woman becomes the victim of the commercial, passionate
instinct of exploitation. Her freedom is affected. She is to put up with

everything after becoming a wife. She maintains a mechanical life. She

neither has emotion nor any interest. Only a fatigued, tired, exhausted
and tasteless life is her world. As if she herself is a mechanical creation,
though a wife, but a prostitute on the other hand. She is forbidden to
see her face in the mirror.

The good wife

lies in my bed
through the long afternoon

dreaming still, unexhausted

by the deep roar of funeral pyres
In the darkened room
A woman can't find her
Reflection in the mirror.

Engaged in love, the husband and the wife avoid the summer heat
and float in the dreamland. It is a nice way to remain fresh and unexhausted
even though outside the room there blows a severely hot wind carrying
the burning intensity of funeral pyres. The poet gives a hint about two

types of heat—the one outside the room due to the strongest sun-rays
and the other in the married couple inside the room.
'Love' and 'passion' in Mahapatra's poetry are chiefly opposite to
that of Ezekiel, Kamala Das and Shiv K.Kumar. There is no deficiency
of feeling in Ezekiel's sceptical style; there is the sick mentality in the
poetry of Kamala Das and lack of feeling of a unique soul in Shiv
K.Kumar's poetry. The poetic hero, who had been to a whorehouse to

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study more about woman is suddenly turned into an image. The body
becomes absolute. He fails to be involved in the sexual act. Rather, the

identity of a generous humanism and firm social consciousness are found.

You fall back against her in the dumb 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 rhroughout 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 wildness
As though it were real, as the recurring voice

Tone the membrance of your half-woken mind

When like a door, her works close behind:

"Hurry, will you? Let me go,"
and her lonely breath thrash against your kind.

(The Whorehouse in a Calcutta Street)

He is completely vanquished by the mismanagement, disorder,

uncertainty and instability in Indian politics and by the pathetic condition
of the common man in India. He has presented the ruined state of
the Indian environment and poverty in an artistic way in the form of
a satire of the contemporary socialism and of its leaders in his poem
on the twenty-fifth Anniversary of the Republic of India.

Do we want to feel the ground

give way beneath us ?
This is a barren world that has been .
Prowling round my room,

Epidemics in the poisoned air,

Dusty streets stretching away
Like disgruntled socialists.
(The Twenty-fifthAnniversary of a Republic)

In "A Country" Jayanta Mahapatra presents the picture of hunger

and starvation in the countryside of India. The poem records the sorry

plight of the people even after Independence. Struggle and fighting could
not change the condition of the people. He sometimes visualizes and
thinks about the condition of his own country. He broods over the sorry
state of his mother land. He sings:

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 Sometimes at night when all voices die
my mind sees earth, my country
to accept sacrifice, the loss of friends,
and sons who vanished suddenly in seventy two.
However much I provoke and curse
I am unable to force an answer out of you.
Wherever I try to live,
In pious penitence at Puri
Or in the fiery violence of a revolutionary
My reason becomes a prejudiced sorrow
Like socialism.

Mahapatra wants to become a socialist. But he cannot understand

others and himself too. He is puzzled. It is the great sorrow of the

poet.
Relationship establishes a sense óf relationship between self and the
other. The personal emotion of the poetic self is chiefly tied very profoundly
with the environmental surroundings, tradition and totality of life. Mahapatra
has realized the heart-beat of the dead artists in the stone- carving art
and sculpture of the temples in Orissa. He has also made an interaction
with stone-carving and inscriptions. He has established the relationship
between man God and eternity of time unlike Keats' 'Grecian Urn'. In
this context, the critic Prema Nandakumar has said: "Lyrical in intensity
but epical in comprehension, Relationship is real achievement, for here there
is neither 'waiting' nor 'false start' but triumphant arriving" (Iyengar and
Prema Nandakumar -P -
777). That means the complete perfection of
the poet is realized in the poem. The journey of the poetic hero has
come to an end successfully, there is neither 'waiting' at the preliminary
session nor 'falsity' in the mid-term.
If we lookat from Relationship to "Life Signs", we can observe
the wide range of the individual state of emotion to the universal level.
Mahapatra has presented his own experiences and impressions on the
relationship with poetic words. Can a poet express himself in a poem?
"Will a poem of mine be the only answer?" He says about the value
of words— "Words have value only if one is not alone" and "No
words are promises." That means the words become meaningful in a

complete and appropriate environment.

When you are seated on the golden throne

balanced on your authentic family,
trusted friends , children and the country
from which you cannot cut yourself loose,
then perhaps the fabulous road is laid out
in front of you
decked with words."

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 As a poet, he has to fight with words. He is to choose words
and to unfold words out of a handful of words. But as a common
man, he is very much conscious of the excessive implication and lack
of words.

Yet I only know

this word which lets me survive inside,
this liberal ethic
is one long error of experience.

The language and emotion of MahapgtVa happen to be so beautifully

emerged, it creates an excitement of passion and emotion in the mind

and heart of the readers, for which he becomes prominent among Indian
English poets and also the most discussed in the field of international

poetry. To my mind, Jayanta Mahapatra is considered as one of the best

Third World poets of our time who himself is the unity of his work.

References

Relationship—]ayanta Mahapatra
Indian Writing in English—K.R. Srinivasa Iyengar.
New Indian English Poets & Poetry—Raghukul Tilak
Indian Poetry in English Today—Ed. Pritish Nandy
Modern Indo - English Poetry—Bijoy Kumar Das
Jayanta Mahapatra's Relationship: A Critical Study—S.K. Padhi

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