Elements Of Indian ness In jayanta Mahapatra’s Poetry

Jayanta Mahapatra was born in 1928 and is known as a creative

poet not only in India but abroad also. Strangely speaking, he started writing
poetry rather late, he got his special reputation and place in the realm of
English poetry. His first book of verse, Close The Sky, Ten by Ten brought
out in 1971, which undoubtedly made him a distinguished poet on the
contemporary commonwealth literary scene. He is kept with eminent Indian
English poets like Nissim Ezekiel, Ramanujan and R. Parthasarthy. He is
widely read and discussed despite the fact that his poetry if difficult to
understand for complexity, obscurity and allusiveness. He is sometimes
compared with Shiv K. Kumar and Keki N. Daruwalla for creating images
and learned vocabulary. He followed indigenous tradition to English
language; however he creates a new Indian English idiom, too. He won the
first ever award by the National Academy of Letters for his book of verse,
Relationship in 1981. He got the Jacob Glatstein Memorial Award for his
poems published in Poetry in 1975. All these awards proved his originality
that he learnt from profession of teaching physics at Ravenshaw College,
Cuttack. He did not read much poetry in his life, so was less influenced of
other poets in his thinking and temperament. In an interview with N.
Raghavan he very frankly admitted the fact:
You see, I haven’t read much poetry in my life. As a matter of
fact, I haven’t read any poetry until I started writing myself. No, not even
poets like Eliot or Whitman or Tagore. I was trained to be a physicist. But I
have veered away from physics in a way.1
His other volumes being brought out in quick succession
include Svayamvava and other poems(1971), A Father’s Hours (1976), A
Rain of Rites(1976), Waiting Dispossessed Nests(1986), Selected
Poems(1987), Burden of Waves and Fruit(1988), Temple(1989), A
Whiteness of Bone(1992), Shadow Space(1997), Bare Face (2000) and
Random Descent (2005). His poetry was praised in all nook and corner of
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the world, from Chicago to Victoria, from Manchester to Melbourne. For his
great achievement Govt. of India conferred on him with Sahitya Academy
Award. He is also one of the cases who got admired abroad before being
attended at home for elements of Indian ness that he poured in his poems.
His poetry has its own life, which shows a continuous
development in theme and technique. He remains aware and conscious in his
poetry writing; he looks before and after and revises again and again to
produce an effective and meaningful piece of work. His poetry is replete
with resonance of Orissa local sight and scene, way of life and above all the
significance of Jagannath temple in the life of people. We come across ironic
reflection about love, sex and sensuality in his earlier poetry and that of
social and political events in the latter poems. He has his dauntless and open
mind and a willing ear which help him choose theme for his poetry before he
acclimatizes language. In his poetry the theme of Indian ness has been very
forcefully presented being selected from different nook and corner of the
country. The landscape of our country, its culture and tradition loom very
frequently. He became a successful poet because of his self identification
and his acute sense of knowing his surrounding in particular and India in
general. Judith Wright observes the same fact in the words
“Before one’s country can become an accepted background
against which the poet’s and novelist’s imagination can move unhindered, it
must first be observed, understood, described as it were observed. The writer
must be at peace with his landscape before he can confidently to its human
figure figures”2
Now we should take Indian elements one by one into account
that he raised in his poetry. He described Indian landscape, season and
environment in the poems like Dawn, Village, Old Places, Summer, A
Twilight Poem, Appearance, Silence, Indian Summer Poem, Evening,
Evening Landscape by the River, The Captive Air of Chandipuron Sea,
A Country, On October Morning, The Wind, etc. In these poems he
presented his internal moments of desire, despair, guilt and illumination with

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the slight touch of imagination. He reminde of the past glory of our country
and ancestors In the poem “The Captive Air Of Chandipuron Sea” he raised
the past to ask question
And what is it now that scatters the tide
In the shadow of this proud watercourse?
The ridicule of the dead?
Susurrant sails still whisper
Legends on the horizon: Who are you,
Occupant of the silent sigh of the conch?
The ground seems only a memory now, a torn
breath,
and as we wait for the tide to flood the mudflats
the song that reaches our ears is just our own.
The cries of fishermen come drifting through the
Spray,
Music or what the world has lost.3
He praised nature for its beauty, but very bitterly criticized it as well
in the poem, “Story at the Start of 1978” for the damage of property and the
loss of life by the great cyclone in Andhra and Orissa coasts in 1978.V. A.
Shahane makes a subtle remark on the description and criticism on the great
destruction by the cyclone in the poem in the words
“ Mahapatra invokes with vivid details the atmosphere of that savage
storm, and the wind plucking the jasmines with its fierce and destructive
darkness, the palm leaves screaming the epics in their sleep, the wind with
its horrible speed causing great havoc, the storm as the great killer of men
and animals.4
It is rightly said that he gets his sensibility sharpened by the landscape
to use it reveal hard realities being faced at present in the country. His
“Dispossessed Nests” brings out wails of shattered human heart. Being
deeply anguished of the recent past marked with bloodshed, violence and
ongoing destruction he thought that death and fall are all pervasive. The

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nation suffered shock of violent Khalistan movement and Bhopal Gas
tragedy, so to him, life has lost its charm moving round sense of danger and
uncertainty. The poet thus writes:

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.5

The theme of death has been very frequently dealt with for its
religious and spiritual significance. Mahapatra described it as a deliverer,
because it reminds us of the past, makes us dream of the future and
conscious of the present. Further he is interested in describing charm and
beauty of rain. There is no other poet to have written as many rain poems as
he. He took rain as a metaphor to contemplate on physical union in man and
woman. Rain has been described in varieties of mood I “In a Night of Rain”,
“The Rain Falling”, “A Day of Rain”, “A rain”, “After the Rain”, “Four Rain
Poems”, “Rains in Orissa”, “Another Day in Rain”, “This is the season of
Old Rain” and “Again the Rain Falls”.
Jayant Mahapatra is concerned with contemporary situations prevalent
in India and day-to-day problems encountered by common native people. He
has raised contemporary issues in the poems named “A Mansoon Day
Fable”, “The Lost Children Of America”. In his poem the theme of time has
been dealt with very forcefully, too. The concept of time has been a very
general theme of discussion in American and British literary works as well.
Mahapatra seems to be influenced of T.S.Eliot in his concept of time, that is,
time has a circular motion of which present is the central point of past,
present and future. He does not think that it moves in linear direction from
past to present to future. It does not move as does an arrow without any kind
of repetition of movement. In contrast, it repeats itself in the sense that past
is alive in present and shapes the future. He takes the present moment as the

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focal point of time, which is a repository of past, present and future. In the
poem entitled “Today” he brings all the experience of his past years on a
particular day and sees the future through it.
His collection of poems leads us to the elements present in Indian
society of which concept of Indian ness is conceived. Love, death, tradition,
ritual, culture, etc. form basic core of Indian life and Indian sensibility. He
has a wide breadth of understanding of Indian way of life that helps him see
Indian temperament. The starting point of his understanding of Indian ness
lies in “Rain of Rites” and finish point does in “Relationship”. Because there
is no decline of variety, continuity and sensibility, he remains champion
among veteran English contemporary poets. His poem is the product of
interaction with harsh reality of life and so it remains difficult, complex,
illusive and obscure. He used images to deal with complex world The reader
has been given full freedom to exercise his mental faculty for unfolding
hidden theme. His poem needs an argument for proper understanding, so he
himself states that “a seemingly obscure poem does in its content, contain
the hidden voice for its ultimatesunderstanding.”6 Now we can say that he is
highly dependent on symbol and imagery as a technique that is owing to his
being influenced of the imagist movement and specially by Eliot and Ezra
Pound. He begins with an image or a cluster of images or an image leads to
another. Use of image is a starting point to travel into a region of darkness of
mind where he has never gone before.
He is a culturally aware personality believing in the fact that knowing
Indian ness means knowing local, regional, traditional and religious folks
and systems of life. His poetry is rooted in tradition of Orissa, because he
admits that the entire territory of India spills with ancient temples and their
ruins and Puri has been focal centre of Orissa’s cultural and religious life.
The images that he uses are the consequence of affiliation of local and
national cultural and religious life. His prominent images include sleep,
twilight, phantom darkness, half light of rain, the pallor of dreams, the
granite eyes needed to see the stones throb, etc born out of the influence of

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Eliot’s “The Hollow Man” and Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium”. He borrows
instances and allusions from natural world and Hindu mythology which
make his poetry obscure to understand. In this way his poetry advances in his
skilful execution of myth, images and symbols. Bruce King makes a
noteworthy remark in this regard: “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 life of people of
Cuttack, the temples, the Hindu festivals, the ancient monuments. The poems
are varied attempts to bridge an epistemological, phenomenological gap to
know, be part of enclose, experience---”7
Jayanta Mahapatra did not believe in any rigorous metrical device, or
in any regular stanza form, or in any rhyming scheme. He faced the world
and kept his findings very honestly and sincerely through imagery, symbols
and myths. He recreated the past in modern sense. He did always try to go
into roots of Indian culture and tradition where real India lies. He makes an
inward journey to search for Indian identity as was done by A.K.
Ramanujan, R. parthasarthy and Kamala Das.No doubt, he set his poem in
the background of Orissa, and he never lost his touch with Indian ness. He
did not have any obsession of any native cultural preoccupation despite the
fact that his poem is woven into golden triangle of Cuttack, Puri and
Bhubaneswar. He was mostly concerned with lighting on socio-political
situations to have been casting a great effect on Indian masses.
He was always frank and candid in focusing on country’s elusive
reality. There are so many poems including “The Quest”, “Defeat”,
“Heroism”, “Bazaar Scene”, “The Unease of Quiet Sleep”, “About My
Fafourite Things” where he has made a huge cultural study of Indian society.
He was very worried of people of Kalahandi district of Orissa, so his poetry
is described as “indicative text” by Raymond Williams. Pointing out features
of his poetry he says that “My writing would go on to portray cultural values
native to Orissa, not to other regions of India. And perhaps I have done just
in my poetry.”8 At another occasion he made pronouncement that he is

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basically “an Oriya poet who incidentally writes in English” and his poetry
could be treated as “translations”9. On the above mentioned facts we can say
that he is a bilingual poet, who feels on Oriya but writes in English, like
Kamala Das, Manoj Das, who write in both their mother tongue and in
English.
In his poetry we come across lively description of Orissan culture
mixed up with Indian myths taken from the epics and topography. For
example, he took myth of golden deer from the Ramayana, that of Putana
from the Mahabharata and that of the Himalaya peak being supposed as the
abode of the gods. He took resort to myths, history, and legends in his
poetry; because he believed that they help him understand his environment
and his self in true perspective. To understand present and to apprehend the
future he took help of his poetic self. He used images, symbols and allusions
to dip into unconscious region of his mind where actual life lies. Actually
life is governed by “the unconscious--- which in more ways than one acts
like a power generator---”10 As a theme of relationship with family nembers
and outsiders has been a typical Indian one, he dealt with that kind of
relationship with parents and friends in “A father’s Hours”. He noticed that
agriculture has been a major occupation of most of Indians; he collected over
powering rituals centring round the lives of people in Orissa in “A Rain of
Rites”. To him, rain is a motif influencing the lives if Indians especially in
rural India. It is a powerful regenerative force which associates him with
images of “unfulfilment”, “unhappy memories”, “deprivation”, “thwarted
sexuality” and “repetitive rituals observed by people”. In his “Waiting” we
come across images of earth and stone; we love the earth where we are born,
play on and with it and enjoy its abundance. It is a tentative beginning of the
real spiritual growth which is always present in the psyche of Indian.
Some of his poems may help us a lot conclude him as a true Indian
representative poet. In “Life Sings” he made an endless search for meaning
of life being made of several great void groans. His “Dispossessed Nests”
goes through process of creation on the buried horrors of the recent past such

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as merciless killing in the Punjab and the gas tragedy in Bhopal. These are
all reflections on the chaotic life being faced by innocent people of India.
Now we have all proof to say that he has touched upon all the major issues
and themes prevalent in Indian society. He had his own deep reflective mood
to deal with Indian themes using his own private symbols and opaque
images. Finally, he has his own existential, skeptic attitude to the universe
which helped him make English language with semantic possibilities of his
own Indian or more especially Orissan culture.

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 References

1. “Inner View: Jayanta Mahapatra Talks to N.Raghavan,” Tenor 1,

June 1978, 60.
2. Quoted by Devindra Kohli “Landscape and Poetry”, The Journal of
Commonwealth Literature, April 1979, 54.
3. Jayanta Mahapatra: “Selected Poems”, New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1987, 59.
4. V.A.Shahane: “The Naked Earth and Beyond, the Poetry of Jayanta
Mahapatra”, Perspective on Indian Poetry in English: New Delhi,
Abhinav Publications, 1984, 149.
5. Jayanta Mahapatra: “Dispossessed Nests”, Jaipur, Nirala
Publications, 1986, 49.
6. Jayanta Mahapatra : Tonor No. 1, June 1978, 61-62.
7. Bruce King : “Modern Indian Poetry in English”, Delhi : Oxford
University Press, 1987, 206
8. Jayauta Mahapatra : “Mystery as Mautra : Letter from Orissa”,
word Literature Today, 1994, 288.
9. Vilas Sarang, Quoted ed. : “Introduction”, Indian English poetry
since 1950 : An Authology, Bombay : Disha, 1990, 32
10. Jayanta Mahapatra : “Face to face with conten porary poem”,

Journal of Literary Studies, ed. P.N. Das, Bhubaneshwar : Deptt. Of

English, Utkal University, 1983, vol. 6 no. 1 and 2, 17.

Naveen Kumar Jhas

Lecture in English

R.A.G.S.College

Ahalyasthan

K.S.D.S.U. Darbhanga
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