Jayanta Mahapatra Poetry Analysis

India, a country having a rich and profound faith in existing religious perspective, feels the divine presence of God in every living or even non-living entity. Various religious bodies in India exemplify the multiplicity of the forms of God, yet maintaining the ‘essential’ feature of His being ‘one’. These multiple forms of God can further be witnessed in the whole country in the form of the worshipping of various gods, goddesses, planets, trees or even stones, symbolizing His own being in almost all the parts of India, which interestingly represents true Indianness. Almost every intellectual individual, including artists, poets, writers, musicians, sculptors, priests, have been inspired and influenced by this theory to such a level that all

The soul in every individual living being is considered to be a representation of God Himself. This sense of belongingness to India has greatly influenced poets like Jayanta Mahapatra.

Jayanta Mahapatra’s poetry revolves around India and its culture. The landscapes and myths of Orissa form a major part of his poetry as he is naturally affected by them due to his birth and childhood spent in Orissa. What is noteworthy in his poetry is that he doesn’t try to create Indianness in the mention of traditional Indian images of tigers, snakes, snakes-charmers, jugglers, crocodiles etc., but he is sensibly Indian. This sensibility and maturity is best seen in his poems about Orissa, where he creates the level of universalism by dealing extensively with the local and regional themes. Poems like ‘Orissa

Similarly, other poems like ‘Bazar 3 P.M., Orissa’, deal extensively with the state of Orissa, again representing India. The prostrating woman, the crawling people, the tired Rickshaw Puller, are not merely Oriyan, but Indian also. In the ‘Indian way’, the poet presents them in a typically idealized Indian manner. The lover buys a lotus for her and makes an ‘oath’ that he would not even touch her before marriage, though he would not hesitate to do the same to the ‘other’ one, the whore. The lotus romanticizes the beloved, and the hypocrite Indian male mentality, and his double standards stand exposed, revealed by his approach that he would not hesitate to touch the other woman, but he would not touch his lotus-woman before the wedding night.

The theme of poverty, hunger and starvation which characterize the lot of the Indian poor constitute a major part of Mahapatra’s poetry. S. Viswanathan aptly mentions, “Mahapatra’s sensibility is both Indian and modern and his response to the scene is authentic and credible. The rendering of Indian Vignettes, whether it is of a village landscape as in “village” or that of a city or town street scene as in “Main Temple street, Puri”, “Dawn at Puri”, or “Sunburst”, is invariably an