Jayanta Mahapatra: A Total Evaluation Poem by Bijay Kant Dubey

Jayanta Mahapatra for whom poetry was a journey from photography to imagery and word-play, physics to poetry and meant it not what he revealed through the lines.

A poet of Odisha, Odia folks, populace, landscape, rural space, he is first an Odia then an Indian and then a world poet making his presence felt overseas, internationally.

Instead of being a Christian, he is a temple-lover picturizing the Konark, the Jagannath, the Khandagiri, the Dhauli, the Asokan edicts by the Daya river, taking the flight of imagination and historical purview.

A teacher who has taught physics in classrooms amazes us with his linguistic, manneristic verses, poetic imaginary and visionary glide, personal and private reflections.

II

Love, sexuality, intricacy of relationships, coquetry, poverty, hunger, backwardness, underdevelopment, form the crux of his poetic base, a poet so down to earthly realities. Gender bias, inhuman dowry system, poor status of women, human pity and misery twitch him for an expression.

A poet Mahapatra was neither a post-colonialist nor a post-modernist but has been branded, but when he started had not been sure of as it was shaky and evolved in due course of time as this is a case with many of the Indian writers.

To sum up is to say that his is a journey from imagery and word-play to myth and mystery and historicity to rural studies, development studies to Gandhian studies to women studies to bare realism.

III
Jayanta Mahapatra as a poet is of the nameless woman, a village girl showing her hand to a palmist; of the scavenger woman going with her wheelbarrow at morn, of the fisher girl living by the hut of the sea beach.

He is a poet of dawns breaking, crows crowing, mornings so serene and full of serenade and silence, horizons lurking around, noondays full of heat and humidity and siestas taking us, evefalls so full of eerie silence.

During the parching heat of summer when the earth dries and cracks with the fissures and crusts, he takes us to mango orchards smacking of the smell and the women sitting there to collect and pass time.

But while taking the siesta at his country home, he hears the chants of the mantras into the temples and the muffled voices of Upanishadism and Vedism doing the rounds, he also hears the people burning bodies on the river beds but the good wife unaware of all that taking place unawares.

IV

Jayanta Mahapatra is first an image-maker then a myth-maker and from there a feminist, a bare realist who is concerned with development and welfare more than the midnight freedom and the celebration of the jubilee. Welfare of women concerns him most, especially the plight of women folks and their sustainability conditions.

Communal harmony, unity in diversity, national integrity, Gandhian values and Gandhigiri in a vis-a-vis style, holding dialogues with strike him most. The doors of dreams keep unfolding and the poet goes about taking glides. How to bring it back lost virtues and human goodness? A regional historian, he looks to the lineage of the Odia kings and dynasties to hold up.

Who can but about Konark, how the chariot of it, when was it, how were the temple-builders, sculptors, architects and kings who made them? Erotic sculptures and figurines in dharma-artha-kama replicas denoting love, sex and devotion just tell about the flower of poetry chiselled in stone.

V

A poet of relationship, his relationship is unbreakable with Orissa and the Oriyas, it is his land of birth and nativity and he cannot cut his bonds of connection, relationship with Oriya myth, mysticism, society and culture just like Rupert Brooke, Thomas Hardy and D.H.Lawrence and above all, Walt Whitman and his Leaves of Grass.

A Wordsworth he talks of the sea walks taken, hills and hamlets, sunrises, moonrises, groves, loves made and lost just these are in Tintern Abbey, Lost Love, The Solitary Reaper and others. A Keats he is a poet of beauty and finer sensibilities.

The dark daughters, he sees them as sculptures and figurines embossed on the temple walls and panels, columns of stone as those the replicas, motifs denoting our life-philosophy, purpose of living. He sees them and thinks of his relationship with them, filial and feminine virtues drawing him to delve deep into the stories of relationship.

VI

To read him is to be remembered of the Calcutta whorehouse and the women in the shadows, to read with pain the strange story of the fisherman's girl. To read him is to tell about the cemetery at Balasore, the scorpion, the lizard and forgotten marble graves and gravestones of the British perished as for the outbreak of cholera and other burials just like Gray's Elegy.

To read Mahapatra is to talk of Hardy's love for Wessex, Lawrence's for Nottinghamshire and where can he go leaving Orissa, Puri, Bhubaneswar, Cuttack and so on? His heart dwells it not anywhere barring Orissa and Orissan landscapes. The rathyatras, the charm and festivity connected with the bizarre idols made from wooden logs and sanctified he has not forgotten to see Jagannatha, Balabhadra and Subhadra during their outing and the pious pull with which the cart or chariot is drawn.

The dawn at Puri, the pyres burning, the endless crows making a noise on sea beach adjacent to the temple and the belief connected with the earning of punya and entering of the Swargadwara, how pathetic is it to read the lines tinged with imagery, pain and pathos, the road of devotees waiting to enter the Great Temple, the widows past their age and attraction, what to say it about?