Jayanta Mahapatra

It pains us to see that some teachers and scholars under the pretext of meeting him take the interview with him and get photographed with to release it on the internet which is but a gross violation and repudiation of morality and ethics. How does their morality permit them to do it? Had the poet himself introduced, it would have been good, but they like to be photographed with him as for to get a breakthrough. I do not want to belittle anyone, but the gravity of the matter is as such that I cannot help without taking it. |

Dawn at Puri A dawn at Puri, near the Jagannath temple, the complex lit with the glow and glisten together with the queues of the worshipers, waiting for their turn to enter the Great Temple and to offer their prayers and offerings, most of them the white-clad widows, hopeless and helpless, past the centre of their lives with nothing to be left with, just kept up and held by piety and faith in the Lord, the Creator, Preserver and Destroyer of life, into whose hands is this poor life of man and to Him only she can say the things of hers in whispers.With the austere eyes, they looking like the fish caught in the net at dawn break like the shining strands of faith. Frail light like frail faith dazzling around, moving on to focus on a mass of crouched faces, the leprous shells leaning together and here lies the pathos of life expressed in the lines, the dark despair and dejection of man combined with anxiety raising the eyebrows of doubt and suspense with regard to the Scheme of Things and that too against the backdrop of the rock-built temples. Again, the light shifts to the burning of the pyre on the holy sands, the smoky blaze of a solitary pyre burning on telling of a life lived or worth to be lived. But the wish of burning on the holy sands purifies it the forlorn inner will with nowhere to go and confide in, no solace or refuge to be found or given anywhere. Who knows what it is in whose lot? Similar had been the wish of his aging mother if she might have or had it been, as willed she, the wish of every aging mother to be cremated here as Puri is the gateway to heaven, but faith is faith, life, life. Frail faith like dazzling and shaky light keeps shifting.

It pains us to see that some teachers and scholars under the pretext of meeting him take the interview with him and get photographed with to release it on the internet which is but a gross violation and repudiation of morality and ethics. How does their morality permit them to do it? Had the poet himself introduced, it would have been good, but they like to be photographed with him as for to get a breakthrough. I do not want to belittle anyone, but the gravity of the matter is as such that I cannot help without taking it.

As a poet, Jayanta is first of all an imagist then a linguist, a photographer, a dreamer, a visionary, a thinker; a realist, a feminist, a modernist, a post-modern; a historian, an ecologist, an environmentalist; an Odia first then an Indian and an internationalist; an existentialist, an iconoclast and a symbolist. As a teacher of physics, he has drawn from light and darkness theories. Poetry is physics and physics his poetry. Poetry to Mahapatra is the geography, sociology and archaeology of Orissa and Orissan places. A professor of physics, he sees the pinda-dana continuing sand the asthi-kalasha being immersed into the holy waters to reach to the conclusion of matter and mass.

'Evening Landscape by the River' and ' From Temple' by Jayant Mahapatra are missing from this poet's archives here.

But one should not forget it to put it before that he is very, very personal and private in his writing of poetry as because these arise out of his own brooding and reflection confiding int hem so. As a poet he is one of vacant reflections and broodings. The image of Gandhi hangs over and he has not forgotten the Gandhian myths and principles comparing and contrasting them with the values and ideals of modern men and their society.

The Rathyatra recurs time and again and he cannot forget the festivity connected with the the gala ceremony and the sea of people offering prayers and moving with, the mammoth crowd following the chariot seating Jagannatha, Balabhadra and Subhadra.

A poet of Udaygiri, Khandagiri, Konark, Puri, Bhubaneswar, he is historiographer and is connected with racial and ethnic things of the community dwelling for ages and ages. The defeat of Kalinga, the Ganga kings, the Kharvelas, all these he talks of indirectly referring to art and architecture.

A professor of physics who has physics in the classrooms has switched to poetry after evincing an interest in photography and deriving from light and darkness chapters. As the sunlight drizzles, fades and keeps changing and shifting from the dawn-break to the noontime to the twilight so is faith frail and shaky and in between light and darkness lies it the matter of the universe and the particles.

He is not only an imagist concerned with mere imagery but is a mythicist, a feminist, a realist, a modernist and a post-modernist too. in his poetry one may find the journey from colonialism to post-colonialism, from modernism to post-modernism and beyond. But we must keep it in mind that word-play and imagery are the things with which he has started the poetic journey of his life.