Jayanta Mahapatra, the first Indian poet writing in English to receive the Sahitya Academy Award for his book of verse, ‘Relationship’ in 1981, passed away on 27th August at the ripe age of 95.
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Jayanta Mahapatra, the Odia-speaking doyen
of Indian English poetry, is known more as a pioneering voice in Indian English
poetry with a dozen titles in his name.
He was a physicist by profession and
taught physics for about three decades at Ravenshaw College, Cuttack. Yet, having
endowed with deep intelligence and sensitivity towards emotions, and believing
that “Poetry [is] the science of human emotions” he wrote poetry with the eye of a scientist delving too far into the unknown and unchartered domains of the
living on the planet. Though claims to have “stumbled into poetry like a blind
man who couldn’t see what was ahead of him”, Jayanta Mahapatra by “revealing
himself” through his poems, indeed created a strong bond with his readers.
His major poetic volumes are: Close the Sky,
Ten by Ten (1971), Svayamvara and Other Poems (1971), A Father’s Hours (1976),
A Rain of Rites (1976), Waiting (1979), The False Start (1980), Relationship
(1980), Burden of Waves and Fruit (1988), Temple (1989), Bare Face (2010),
Random Descent (2021) and Noon (2023). “In his poetry, both theme and technique go
together as he experiments with language poem after poem in trying to acquire
inwardness with it. He is capable of using English language with passionate
precision that helped him to establish his identity as India’s foremost poet in
English” (Das, 2009).
He is a great imagist—as he exploits
imagery and imagism like Ezra Pound, poems come to him as images and
reflections and the reader would go on seeing them like a passenger gazing out
of a moving train’s window. His images emanate from the exterior world of
phenomenal reality and the surrealistic world and also the way these two worlds
are related. As MK Naik Observed, image is the primary pigment of his
poetry—indeed, it is almost his characteristic way of reacting to experience
and also recording it. In the poem, "Evening
Landscape by the River", we encounter his landscape imagery that is steeped
in melancholy: “This is the kind of
sadness which closes the eyes / Here the memory of faces of the dead never
appears.” His images being highly evocative and haunting work wonders in
his poetry.
He is equally powerful in myth-making. He
weaves personal and private myths. As claimed by him in an interview, it is the
“land of Orissa”—its “traditions, myths and the history”—that sustained his
poetry by affording him “new outlooks and ideas”. It is his weaving the words
around the local mythology that afforded his poetry “an accord with the social
order, and of harmony with the universe”. Studded with such myths which carry social,
moral and religious force, his poems directly speak to the readers about the
essential humanity.
The moment I think of Jayanta Mahapatra, his
poem “Dawn at Puri” —-the symbolic
and metaphoric poem—-along with Hunger
strikes to mind at once. The poem takes us to the Puri beach and the pilgrims visiting the Jagannath temple on the shore every day. Amidst the “Endless crow noises”, the poet notices “White-clad widowed women / past the centers
of their lives / … waiting to enter the Great Temple” hoping to acquire
peace—a faith so sacrosanct. “Their austere
eyes / stare like those caught in a net / hanging by the dawn‘s shining strands
of faith”. All this subtly hints at what they have withstood and what else
remained in the lives of these “nameless
women”. Then his gaze suddenly shifts to the beach again where “the smoky blaze of a sullen solitary pyre”
reminds him of his aging mother’s “last wish
to be cremated here” to acquire eternal bliss, which to the poet appears “uncertainly like light / on the shifting
sands”. These lines speak of the realities of existence and the vagaries of
life. The “endless crow noises”, the “solitary pyre” burning on the beach are
such powerful imageries that are sure to knock us inwardly. The “skull in the holy sands” reminds us of
our very existence and its end—indeed the very path that we have to tread. It
is a poem of faith and doubt that is sure to transfix the reader in between.
"Hunger" is another poem
of Jayanta Mahapatra that simply hits your conscious hard. For, it depicts
bitter truths and hard realities of life. A fisher man, as his “white bone thrash his eyes” and
believing that “the purpose with which he
faced himself” affords sanctity to his words, asks the visitor, “will you have her [?]”. The lustful
persona “followed him across the
sprawling sands” with “the flesh [that]
was heavy on my [his] back” and entering the hut that “opened like a wound” heard the
fisherman saying, “My daughter, she’s
just turned fifteen… / Feel her. I’ll be back soon, your bus leaves at nine”.
In that “flickering dark”, the hunter
extinguishes his hunger as the hunt “opened
her wormy legs wide”. Thus the poet,
perhaps, gives an answer to the hunter’s hunger for ‘flesh’ and the hunt’s hunger
of the belly. It is really difficult to believe if this can happen. The skies
may crash over the offering of the father of his own daughter to prostitution but
the reality is that the brutal exasperation and desperation of the fisher man
to sustain himself and his lean daughter with “the fish slithering, turning inside” on that sea beach could perhaps,
find no other way. This is yet another reality of the human life: the flickering
hope and burning aspirations taking us nowhere. The poem that is brutal in its
precision of despair rattles the reader depicting life’s bitter truths and
stark realities that are very hard to swallow.
His poems also echo philosophical
elements: In the poem "Exile", we witness a realistic component: the
mouldy village; the hills charred by the blazing Sun; the corpses burning on
the funeral pyres; ashes hurled by the wind settling on skin; the old, ailing parents;
the squalid town; and the long-haired priest of Kali into which the philosophy
of the poet subtly creeps in: “It is an
exile / Between good and evil / Where I need the sting of death.” Thus, he
accomplished a fine blend of realism and surrealism in this poem.
"Listening to a Prayer" is another interesting poem that figured in his A Rain of Rites collection of poems which appeared from The University of Georgia Press, Athens, USA, published in 1976. In it, the bell placed in front of the “stone cuts” trembles hearing pains and wishes “of countless people” calling on the gods to pray and worship. “The temple square” was so jam-packed with people that “the wind / has nowhere to go”, and so settles on poet’s shoulder. Thus, there was “neither a silence/ nor an answer”—an answer to the trembling of the bell. Does the poem, slicing through the myth of “stone cuts”, suggest to bhaktaas supplicants to look for god inside their hearts and meditate on it silently?
Jayanta Mahapatra expounded a wide spectrum of themes—human relationships, social problems, love, sex, marriage, morality, human nature, and mother nature—using excellent language that matches the significance of the idea being elucidated. His style of elaborating themes in his poems, the originality in articulating the subject, use of the most appropriate words and phrases to portray images enabled Mahapatra to become one of the leading Indo-Anglican poets and win many accolades, both internationally and domestically.
Here it is in order to say that this physicist-turned-poet striking a functional harmony between Mysticism and Science enquired, questioned, investigated the life around him, and came up with striking verses that show the promised land on the other side of the wilderness.
Besides being a poet of repute, Jayanta Mahapatra was also a
distinguished editor of a literary magazine, Chandrabhaga that was published
from Cuttack. I never met him but feel I know him through his poems. Somewhere
in 2010 when we requested him to write a couple of poems for publication in our
newly started The Icfai University Journal of Commonwealth Literature, this
poet instantaneously honoured us with two poems, viz., "Winter in a City"
and "A Growing Ground". And the
correspondence that we did have with him made us experience his infinite grace
and humility, recalling of which causes Goosebumps even today.
We pay our humble tribute to this truly generous and
magnificent poet who left for his heavenly abode on August 27, 2023, leaving behind
the “world that dances only to darkness.”
Enlightening to know about him
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