The Poetic Art, Concept And Style Of Jayanta Mahapatra Poem by Bijay Kant Dubey

The Poetic Art, Concept And Style Of Jayanta Mahapatra



To open the book of criticism to read Jayanta Mahpatra is to come to know
That he is first and foremost an Oriya writing in English
Rather than an Indian,
One of coastal Orissa, its topography and cartography
And he doing the mapping of it,
Marking the lands bordering and banking the sea,
Going with the mariners daring, venturing deep into
To give a hearing to what the waves say to.

A poet of its temple towns and cities, picnic spots and sea beaches,
Tourist centres,
Lakes, rivers, woods, seashores and other water bodies
With herons, storks and swans;
Places of pilgrimage,
The Jagannath Puri temple, the Lingaraj temple,
The Konark Sun temple;
A marker of the Rathyatra, the Chariot Festival ceremony
With the statues of Jagannatha, Balabhadra and Subhadra
Being rounded
In all festivity and the mammoths of crowds.

A professor of physics, he is a poet of light and darkness
And the coming shadows cast before,
The dawn-light and the dusk, the midday and the nightfall
When the bats begin to fly out,
Of the Indian summers and siestas,
The rural folk sitting in the mango orchard,
The mother and the daughter
And the daughter combing the hair of her mother
And in the meantime, a mango falling.

As a poet, he is but an imagist and poetry is in imagery,
The light falling on the cobweb of linguistic words
Dazzling as the mist-laden and shining gossamer
In the morning time
And the frail light playing with
And with his imagery comes it the flight of imagination,
The flutter and flight of the wings,
Herons, storks and swans
To different water bodies
And from it he finds his visionary power and poetic brooding.

A poet historical, sociological, feministic, barely realistic,
Modern and post-modern, colonial and post-colonial,
He is not only classical, but romantic,
Private and personal, dreamy and lyrical,
Artistic and architectural,
Mythical and mystical,
Symbolical and verbal
Where poetry is but motif.

A poet so abstract and searching, he is existential and nihilistic,
Full of so much so absurdistic in vain waiting and yearning
And poetry a study in absurdism,
Nihilism, existentialism,
A strange vacuum prevailing upon
And the shadow space he marking over.

Where does light come from breaking,
Where does it return back to,
Is faith so,
Frail and just confided in,
The temple is there, but the solitary pyre burning
On the beach adjacent to,
If the temple lotus to be reckoned with,
Why the beggars at the door of the temples?

Apart from the seamy side of his picturization, there lies untold tales
Of poverty, hunger, backwardness and underdevelopment,
Human misery and pathos,
The inhuman dowry system and its torture,
Domestic violence, loot, plunder, corruption and unemployment,
Unnatural death, murder and killing,
Terrorism and bombardment,
Which the poet is not at all happy to see them at all.

In the earlier works of his, such as in Close the Sky, Ten by Ten,
Svayamvara and Other Poems, A Father’s Hours,
The quest for poetic theme and textuality contines in,
But in the books following thereafter, I mean,
A Rain of Rites, The False Start,
His poetical style blossoms it
And he turns to Temple and Dispossessed Nests
For bare realism and hardcore realities
And in the rest to feminism
Apart from being primarily imagistic and linguistic.

As about Waiting, it is a book of Orissa,
Its historicity and historicism,
Dhaulagiri and Khandagiri,
Oriya history, myth, culture and tradition,
The temples supported by
The nondescript hamlets and their folks,
Folk dances, songs and paintings.

But in Relationship, for which he receives the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1981,
The poet tells about his relationship with Orissa,
The land of birth and nativity
And rearing,
In a tell-tale style,
Narrating and gliding, floating and flowing
By being seated on a ship too.

And in the latter, Shadow Face, Bare Face and Random Decent,
A different Mahapatra is there,
Barely realistic but drawn by feminism
With the angst, anxiety and ailment of the age
Seconded by a strange bewilderment,
Marauding the poetic self.

Apart from, people charge against that fleeting imagery and netting word-play
Deter the readers from understanding him
And that he has written for the foreign audience,
Keeping not the native readers in his mind,
A poet so imagistic and linguistic,
So terse and tedious, so obscure and obtuse.

A recipient of the Padma Sri Award from the Govt. of India,
He has now come a long way
To make us feel his presence
And to carve a niche for himself,
As the for things tendered to humanity
To be held aloft and kept by posterity.

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