Contemporary Literary Review India | eISSN 2394-6075 | Vol 6, No 1: CLRI Feb 2019
A Brief Study of the Imaginative World in Jayanta Mahapatra's Poetry
Srikanth Ganduri | University of Hyderabad, India.
Abstract
Poetry is notably concerned with human experiences. Poems are constituted of lifestyles; they belong to lifestyles, and exist for lifestyles. Poems are a sort of revelations in which the poet expresses his willingness to come back to terms with himself as a person and as a poet. Poems are records of expertise to be shared. Poets consider or think they usually move along their recorded observations, moves, ideas and emotions to the readers. The present study titled “A Brief Study of the Imaginative World in Jayanta Mahapatra's Poetry” thrives on these converging factors to establish that a creator as self has a couple of selves the trauma and worry touching on social injustices, disharmony, and ecological imbalances . This paper tries to analyse and throws light on the character and social reality of human life. The paper titled "A Brief Study of the Imaginative World in Jayanta Mahapatra's Poetry" attempts to define the poet's self, society and the truth of each with reference to selected poems.
Key Words: revelation, thrives, trauma, disharmony, ecological
Poetry of the Post-independence additionally by no means escaped the attacks of targeted skeptic critics. Establishing with Nissim Ezekiel, even the exceptional of post- Independence poetry used to be criticised as poor imitations of Keats, Tennyson, Hardy and Eliot. It is believed that critical Indian English poetry came to be written not immediately after Independence but in the Nineteen Sixties and after. Post-independence Indian English poetry has proved more and more amazing, diversified, responsive to these instances. It has acquired a specified character and has learned its own voice. The voice is learned by using the poet’s genius for intimately registering the idiom of his own world. English Poetry in India, at present makes the English language more malleable to change readily and naturally. The poets draw their issues, with conscious efforts, out of the wonderful historical Indian tradition. The collage of concrete pictures derived from the multi-dimensional aspects like science, economic system, geography, philosophy, psychology, ethics, scriptures and many others vindicates the practical traits that pervade modern day poetry. It's on this context, the researcher feels that a study needs to be undertaken on Jayanta Mahapatra who has carved a niche for himself in Indian poetry in English by merging the inward and outward modes of expression.
Jayanta Mahapatra was born on 22nd October, 1928 in Cuttack, Orissa. His father, Lamuel, used to be a sub-inspector of main colleges. He belongs to a middle class Christian loved ones. His grandfather, Chintamani, embraced Christianity in the course of the devastating famine in 1866 that shook Odisha which drove him to the verge of death. Sooner or later he staggered into a mercy camp run by the white missionaries in Cuttack. He was once furnished with food and refuge, in return for which he used to be persuaded to become a Christian, to which he yielded. As a result Jayanta Mahapatra was a Christian by inheritance and upbringing although he imbibed so much of Hindu tradition. The poet as a single man cannot recreate the society via his poetic composition. The poet, through his difficult poetic medium, cautions the persons as a prophet that each one will not be proper with the world. Poetry can now and then be priceless in offering solutions or responses to questions which the self asks. Poetry is a harmony of the self and outside. Whether these provide a reply is problematic to assert. However the urge to confess, and unburden oneself can tie the poet’s impulses to the neighbourhood and contribute to a sharing of human voice. Rather a few of Jayanta Mahapatra’s poems have recorded his private history the place the poet makes an inward experience and establishes his link with the past. He attributes this trait to three brilliant modern day Indian English poets particularly A.K Ramanujan, R Parthasarathy and Kamala Das.
Mahapatra’s writing is a prized heritage of the humanity. He has transcended the obstacles of place and the process of harmony beyond. The Social fact in the selected Poems of Jayanta Mahapatra is undertaken in an effort to analyse and verify whether or not the twin aspects of poetry, the inner and the outer forces have influenced the proposed writer within the making of his poetic composition. Being an Indian, Jayanta Mahapatra wants to glorify the importance of Indian poetry in English.
Hailing from Odisha, Mahapatra has made an enormous contribution to Indian English poetry with his experimental topics and native poetic idiom. Poverty, prostitution, patriarchy, crime , and the folk’s pleasure and discomfort of Odisha gradually portray and tune his poems and become his emotional and spiritual self. He portrays human situations mostly and India in particular highlighting the communally debilitating issues such as corruption, social discrimination, communal disharmony, ecological imbalance etc.
The person who is born into a precise socio cultural milieu inherits effortlessly and unconsciously through the accrued knowledge of earlier generations in the type of traditions, legends and myths. Myths are the robust embodiments of mans goals and aspirations which provide him with beliefs and help him set his pursuits in a adverse world that continuously threatens man's existence. They play a vital role as the old socio-cultural and heritage of Orissa. Human psyche acquires its form out of the affect of the previous experiences.
The internal self of Jayanta Mahapatra has been woven with his childhood and his poems are their outcome. His poems disclose the poet’s strong attachment along with his childhood experiences a lot with the Oriya fairy testimonies, myths, legends and the high-quality Indian epics. The poet remembers the flash of feelings of the whispers of loneliness that surround him. His heart turns into heavy on the sight of his mother now, transformed in appearance. The poet feels the affliction of his father’s loss of life in another method similarly his contemporary poet, R.Parthasarathy, in his poem “Obituary” presents an identical quandary in his family and the transformed look of his mother after his father’s death.
Mahapatra varies in most cases and recalls his strong emotional attachment and friendly relationship with his father. He imprints his high recognition for his father as, he recollects in one of his poems he recollects of his father who is a teetotaller and vegetarian and takes bath twice a day, once at daybreak, the other earlier than his night obeisance to Lord Shiva in the temple.
From the poems of Mahapatra we find that the poet is very firmly rooted in the soil of Orissa. There is a quadrangle landscape formed by means of Puri, Konark, Cuttack and Bhubaneswar. We study an exceptional deal about the legends, history and fable associated with these places. Puri in Orissa is considered to be a sacred location for the Hindus. They fervently worship Lord Jagannath, the presiding deity of Orissa." Dawn at Puri " and " Main Temple Street" are the poems that underline the value of Puri and what it means to the Hindus. Widows desires to spend their last days at Puri founded on the religion that, it will fetch them their salvation. The poet expresses this sentiment that the last desire of a widow is to be cremated here.
This poem is not a collection of mere observation, a place here, a character there, an un-strenuous meditation or two, inevitable landscapes, but a determined, integrated set of selections built into the theme. For the poet, the Odishan landscape is the objective setting of his mental evolution, the phases of which get mixed up with the lyrical vocabulary of a humanist creed. (Das, 40)
The main inspiration behind relationship arises is his confrontation with the existential affliction with his prodigious self. A poet’s immediate and spontaneous response to the landscape of his nation, his experience of culture and culture of his land and lots of different explanations collectively define his identity. Before taking history as the launch pad of imagination a poet must imbibe the soil, it's spirit, culture and pulse of it's tradition which will set ablaze his flight with truth of the heart.
Mahapatra expresses a way of rootedness in the Oriyan soil. Relationship is the torch-bearer which sets his poetry into the mainstream of the contemporary Indian English poetry with the portrayal of the contemporary and modern spirit of increasing disillusionment which transparently unfolds his quest for identity and roots.
The twelve part epic poem Relationship is a sublime lyric of rootedness, alienation, loneliness and his personal guilt.The poet’s attention of the feel of the past arouses in him the question who he was. The involvement with the self and the society runs through Mahapatra’s Relationship. Like Walt Whitman in his Song of Myself Mahapatra may not brazenly declare that he's “colossal‟ and that he “comprises multitudes‟. However the underlying current of this claim and the poet’s profound hindrance is with the group, the society to which he belongs.
The recollected misplaced moments for the poet revitalise his present and creates an atmosphere of awe and wonder. With the memories of the earlier, the poet involves phrases with the present. Most of his emotions in his poetry reflect his past which is obvious in A Whiteness of Bone. They are elegiac in tone and temper. The poet associates himself with areas of the land of his origin, rain, father, the Mahanadhi and plenty of other features of life that influence the poet’s sensibility. Within the early days of his poetic profession we come across Mahapatra as a poet of love. Mahapatra’s early poems converse about his frustration in love. When he was ten years old, he fell in love with a woman. The love poems were released in his two of the earliest volumes, Close the Sky Ten by Ten and Swayamwara and Other Poems (1971). Mahapatra’s intimate passion for conjugal love is expressed in the poems of these two volumes. Mahapatra himself says in an editorial in Adolescence Times, "My early poems were exercises in a way, written mainly to please myself." (CA 227)
Thus many of the poems of Mahapatra are a search for the self. The search for the self gives a sign of continuity to his poetry. Memory helps the poet delve deep into the depths of the past that enables his search into the self. With the aid of memory he tries to discover his own roots, and find solace from the burdens of the present. The past redeems him from the fear of being faceless; from the fear of aging and death; from the fear of the changing scenario in the present. The poetic world of Mahapatra reiterates the concept that one should journey into one’s own self in order to cope up with the outer world without exploiting others and their resources.
To understand the natural surroundings one must understand oneself. In order to understand oneself one must travel inside oneself. Mahapatra’s poetry, according to Bhat “makes the reader look inwards, question himself about life, its significance uncertainity and so on leading him to process of personal discovery”. (Bhat 274)
Mahapatra strongly believes that personal discovery will supply a character with adequate courage to face the society and can toughen man and equip him stumble upon social evils. It will pull him out of his trapped drawback and inspire him to narrate himself with the external world. Close relationship with himself and nature will turn him inward and make him gain knowledge of the basis rationale of his inner conflicts and teach him the approaches to overcome them. Such an emotional undertaking will heal the injuries of today and will allow exploring the possibilities of constructing a promising future.
Mahapatra’s commitment to the locale is much like that of Whitman’s nineteenth century, Robert Frost’s New England, WB Yeat’s Sligo and Nissim Ezekiel’s Bombay. Cuttack, Bhubaneswar and Puri form the historical past of Mahapatra poems. A poet writes in regards to the surrounding wherein he lives. His poetry serves as a link of his experiences. A broader look at his poetry permits us to realize that poet’s challenge is not best to paint the snapshot, but additionally to remind men and women of their past, their roots and the benign nature that moulded and shielded them.
The poems integrated in Shadow Space (1997) and Bare Face (2000) illustrate the modes of soreness and grief. The poet assimilates his position as a man or women and as a poet in the outer world. In these volumes Mahapatra brings to the skin, the bare face and the shadow space of man or woman’s dwelling in the ultra-modern world. Mahapatra’s trouble from the opening has been to seize the nuances involved in creative writing. The stress of forces outside himself are heavy that the poet feels dissatisfied and doubtful of his poems when you consider that he starts realising that the forces outside create fissures in the ideals which he held high. The compelling demand of the external world on the poet and poetry drives him to paint the blackest face of woe and discover a new path both for the poet and his poetry. An inner need compels the poet to articulate concerning the forces of disorientation in the true existential circumstances, sharpening his protest towards these forces, which dehumanise, contributors leading them to an utter experience of helplessness.
The poems in these volumes articulate a lot of this. We realize that the creative expression of the poet has undergone plenty of changes that it has turn out to be much less metaphoric, less circuitous, and less indirect than it used to be in his prior volumes. Similes employed in these poems are customary and hanging. The language has assumed an intimate informality and an unalloyed simplicity. The tone of voice is more frank and open.
The spontaneous fertility of his metaphors and their profuse drift define the strength of Mahapatra’s poetry. These poems look to explain how Mahapatra has lived the truth with the sensibility of the historic and mythical past. They engagingly and eminently define the connection between the poet and his place.
The poet makes a euphoric get together of the relationship between the poet and his place after securing and opening his identity. He starts to search for which means in a situation that has became meaningless. He begins watching severely at his own place, people, at his own self, his own idiom and medium. There's an undertone of soreness and suffering that springs from the poet’s belief of society that makes the poems weak causing bleakness and dampness which ends up in helplessness and misery. It appears that the real world can't be redeemed or saved from its present decadence. The poet was totally desirous about his relationship with his own situation when he acquired the award for his poetic accomplishments. But he is also painfully aware of a sense of defeat that occupies the shadow-house of his heart. The poet admits this experience of defeat within the poem Living in Orissa (Shadow Space).
Anything here, perhaps fatal spirit. whatever that recollects the centuries of defeat. To live here, antlered in sickness and disease, in the past of uncomprehended totems, and the split blood of ancestors one would wear like an amulet. (Mahapatra SS 1)
The spirit of the poet will get drained when he feels the burden of the defeated history and the burden of various ailments. The poet expresses his dejection in this poem. In spite of the feel of despair and grief, he is attached to the area in which he lives. It is the love of the land that offers him sustenance to withstand anything is dismal or unsavoury about his place. The poet’s problem has been to narrate the person self to its history, to the burden of history and to the fleeting nature of time. The sector would not open up its relationship with the character self. The man or woman has to negotiate it and generate curiosity in figuring out the dead and the living, the past and the gift concerning the world.
As Mahapatra strikes from early to later poetry, a transformation within the remedy of issues is noticed that the poet adheres to an unassuming form devoid of any experimentation. His ideas are anchored in lots of other modes of dwelling. The poet experiences at large the intricacies of life which makes it whole. He identifies himself along with his roots and his childhood expertise. He upholds the complexities of a sensitive and time bound man: his alienation, his suffering his developing experience of frustration even as he gets older fast, his perpetual worry of death and the inevitable triumph of time over him.
The poet seems to obtain and collect an awareness of the remarkable instances that social, devout and political problems find expression in his latter poetry. The poet appears to be realising that he's huge and involves multitudes. The entire range of human experience concerns, now not a fraction of it.
The self-sure tone and imagination and prescience of the poet makes approach for an extra profoundly felt dwelling place. The poetic inspiration of Mahapatra springs from his individual world and the poet is unrepentant, as he feels that his poems are for himself extra rather than for the reader. He desired to make feel of the life which was once mendacity in fragments earlier than him. He was advised to seek solutions for himself, trying out his feelings by way of putting them in opposition to the materials of the poem he knew he ought to write. His poems don't excuse themselves as verbal pictures translating into a couple of layers of meaning. Mahapatra grants a continually changing skyline in his poems. He creates a poetic universe which is fully Indian.
The poet looks at the world and is hurt by way of the despair around and he finds it tough to hold silent about it. He becomes a poet by means of advantage of what he sees or hears and that it starts off evolving the mystifying system of the poem. Passion for writing poetry is activated when the poet is compelled by way of the urge to realize the world he lives in and recognize his possessive self. The topics are frequently parts of the topography of his possessive psyche; he explores his own feelings with painstaking and more often than not painful honesty however in no way loses sight of their universal participation.
Conclusion
Mahapatra’s poems are addressed to that team of readers who're inclined to take pains to encounter the experiences which might be held captive inside the framework of the poem. With their possess respective experiences guiding them, the readers must unravel the mysteries of Mahapatra’s poetic production. Mahapatra generously incites the reader’s involvement within the expertise of the poem. Mahapatra’s poems don't have any message expressed in well-phrased forms. The satisfactory force of Mahapatra’s poetry lies within the poem itself. Making the readers seem inward, question themselves about existence, its importance, uncertainty and so forth lead them into a process of personal discovery.
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