Rains and Rites: Mahapatra

By Bijay Kant Dubey  

A Rain of Rites by Jayanta Mahapatra opening with the first poem named Dawn and continues on with the poems, as thus, Village, Old Places, These Women, A Missing Person, Samsara, Five Indian Songs, A Rain of Rites, A Rain, The Exile, Listening, Summer, Ceremony, Main Temple Street, Puri, The Whorehouse in a Calcutta Street, The Sentence, A Twilight Poem, Appearances, Myth, Four Rain Poems, A Dead Boy, Moving, Silence, Dawn at Puri to the poems, Listening to a Prayer, Sunburst, On the Bank of the Ganges, Girl Shopping in a Department Store, A Tree, Indian Summer Poem,

The Ruins, Evening, Idyll, The Bare Arms in Packing Cases, Ikons, I Hear My Fingers Sadly Touching an Ivory Key, Somewhere, My Men, Hunger, An Old Country, The Desert under the Breath, Hands, Of Armour, This Stranger, My Daughter, India, The Landscape of Return, The Face, The Faces, The Tattooed Taste, Now When We Think of Compromise. A poet neither of rains nor of rituals, he is of a guilty consciousness, marking the malignant purpose in the nun’s eye, in the dark room, a woman searching her reflection, this is the samsara, a business of man, gods and priests and the worshippers, at land’s distance, there lies a mouldy village, resting rawly against the hills, the charred ruins of sun, the long-haired priest of Kali, putting the plucked and stolen jasmines of his villa, whose door never closed he as per his father’s instructions, as for to be put into the goddess’ morning eyes.

In the poem, Myth, the poet catches the incantation of the drift of years and the chants, the long years as the incense, man as worshipper coming and going, the same old and brassy bells laden with memories tolled and the scene recurring again with the same meditational sadhu in sadhna telling of the sanctum lying on the fringes of Annapurna and Dhaualgiri or elsewhere pointing to, but the poet dares not enter into the temple as myth keeps changing the track of, shifting from hand to hand, eye to eye, the offered, crushed and dried leaves and flowers smiling at him, maybe it that the bearded and saffron-man may ask f he a Hindoo or not. A poet so imagistic, he just keeps playing with words, frolicking with thoughts, ideas and images, coming as converted imagery, pure and distilled, but unexplainable, just as the scenes and sights continue to be, art-pieces seen on the canvas, how to describe them, how to penetrate into something very artistic?

The phantoms of time talking in whispers in the haunted houses

"Is there anybody there?" said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grass
Of the forest's ferny floor;
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller's head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
"Is there anybody there?" he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller's call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
’Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head:--
"Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word," he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.
----Walter de la Mare in the poem, The Listeners

Jayanta Mahapatra as a poet is very much like the Walter de la Mare of The Listeners, Sea Fever of John Masefiled and Look, Stranger of W.H.Auden. The poem, The Listeners evokes the same sense of wonder, suspense and astonishment which Mahapatra seeks to infuse in his poetry. The phantoms of time talking to or unresponsive even after knocked by the unknown horse-rider in the woods or listening to from the haunted house and the horse meanwhile champing grass from the turf add to the suspense and curiosity of ours in Walter de la Mare’s poem The Listeners and similar is the case of Mahapatra when he talks of life and vegetation under the shadowed space, slipping through the doors of dreams.

Mahapatra’s Burden of Waves And Fruit as a collection of poems contains in Rains in Orissa, Another Day in the Rain, Events, Winds of Spring, Summer 1983, Summer Afternoons, A Rain Poem, The Voice, An Evening By The River, Trapped, A Time, At Shivaji’s Fort At Panhalla: Looking Across the Western Ghats, River, Shapes By the Daya, A Startled Sun, Twilight, An October Morning, Ann, 30th January 1982: A Story, This Is The Season of The Old Rain, Harvest, A Letter To Kazuko Shiraishi in Tokyo, Stone, May, Of A Dawn, Love Fragment, Song of The Bones, The Wind, Days, Sunday, A Summer Afternoon, Burden of Waves And Fruit, The Life, Stand By, Memory, Dust, Again The Rain Falls, The Dawn of A New Year, It’s My Room Once Again, The Hour Before Dawn, Waiting, Of This Evening, An afternoon, The Skies of Night, Talking of Death, The Looking Glass, Why I Am Afraid To Die, The Year’s Last Evening.

It is difficult to tell about a book of poems and that too an Indian English poetry text, not easily available in the markets, generally self-published and out of stock, frankly speaking, they often sell not, if acquainted with the writer, you will get a copy and if not, you will not get the text of even R.Parthsarathy’s Rough Passage and Mahapatra’s Relationship so easily, as flimsy in their assessment, even the libraries may not contain in forgotten and lost copies of the missing and unknown writers, even now Kolatkar’s Jejuri is not available. What to say of Nissim’s the first book of poems? I smile on hearing the urban pseudo-research scholars, the bluff master scholar and the bluff master guide, all saying great-great in their slangy expression.

Burden of Waves And Fruit which appears from Three Continents Press, Washington in 1988 is no doubt a good work written in the same style, the same expression which he often clutches with and strides along, the imagistic style, the imagistic portals of his and there is no change in Mahapatra and his visionary glides, dreamy flowing and glides, imagistic delving and dwelling upon and by dipping into the waters of nothingness, a poet of the space, the void and the vacuum all around. The things of the sub-conscious and the unconscious level take hilarity and wave around, a centre full of hibernation, there is nothing as concrete, but wavering in thought and idea, image and reflection, emotion and feeling, a neurotic man’s poetry is it, a half-addict’s smiles lie therein, a patient of insomnia thinking within and smiling within is the case with this writer with the base of physics, physics as his subject and he coming to poetry via physics, not literature.

The negatives of the photos are the things of his and he working in the studio to reflect upon, a play with light and shade, just like silhouettes, an artist pencilling images, the images of life similar the case with this writer of writer of physics, experimenting with the Big Bang theory, thinking about the origin of the universe, the space, the solar and lunar bodies, the limits of the skyline, a poet of nothingness, a poet existential and iconoclastic, making and breaking, joining and splitting.

Jayanta Mahapatra does not remain stuck to one theme, one title, he often goes slipping from his themes. A desperation pervads all trhough.

Why I Am Afraid To Die 
A thin wind.
Sands of the river where water floods and goes.
This rain shaking loose the old spelled earth.

My love for you is a selfish love,
wing of decit. .
Now to defy you with defencelessness
for a while,
dumb when you are so near.

What mystery did the sands conceal?
Walking through empty streets
the wind drops on my shoulder.
Any way across this earth, over the water?
How can one look when there is nothing to see?

Here all around, 
whatever it’s called, sky or wind ---
its beautiful mouth,wide open.
(Burden of Waves And Fruit, Three Continents Press, Connecticut, Washington, 1988, p.58)

Jayanta is a blank and to do blank thinking is the idle job of the poet. To be with him is to dip in nothingness, existentialism and skepticism. Poetry to him is a series of vacant thinkings, with nothing to do, nowhere to go. Optimism not, but pessimism too move side by side in his poetry.

Twilight
An orange flare
lights the pale panes of the hospital
in a final wish of daylight.
It’s not yet dark.

In the children’s ward
under a mothe’r face,
the dead,always so young.
Water startles in the river’s throat.

Its cry:
a plea to share in its curse?

Somewhere, this twilight shall fall
and hide the whiteness of jasmines
about to bloom.

Newly-lit lamps
in the houses across the street
make me look out at the wet August evening
that holds up the vast unknown
in such small delicate hands.
            (Ibid, p. 23)

'Rains In Orissa' is a poem of coastal Orissa and its landscapic scenery. The eco-centric description is picturesque enough. Time, the sense of it is very strong in him and he cannot without relating to it.

Rains In Orissa
The sky’s face expressionless.
An oriole call echoes away in the sullen grayness,
the book of earth throbs with the light of things.

A pond heron floats warily in a rain pool.
Its face a mask, it pauses for another look around.
Grass everywhere is huge and moves forward to kill.

The fallen water stores a strange, cold darkness.
A yearning spreads through the vast blur of air.
Something like moss wells in the day’s green eyes.

How time sticks on to the face of this light.
And a graceless hibiscus is swallowed by its shrub of silence.
And lashes of wind give death back to the wild weeds.

Old fireflies invade.
Our efforts to escape turn to mud.
Then, the fatal touch of inaction like this country’s history (p.7)

A skyful night full of stars and the moon too takes him to vacant and reflective questionings of the self. Jayanta Mahapatra is a poet of some existential delving and he got it not through philosophy or literature, but through his study of physics, a study of light and darkness chapters. The poet may grow over the years, but his style will not change it, as the adage says it, style is man.

The Skies of Night
Sometimes there is this night,
a sudden sound wakening me from my reverie.
It is speaking my name maybe,
proclaiming something before the final hours,
a moonlight which raves as a delirious child
or some stubborn black root
screaming out of a cracked wall of memories.

It is as though something lies ahead of me,
a grave task I have to perform,
that lures my blood to war.
Or does the sharp blade of time I hold
turn in my bewildered hand?
What sound is it, growing from within,
that feels the false quiet of repose?

I know I am powerless to reveal myself.
Nor do I know how to hold my silence.
Perhaps the voice which returns at nightfall
and lies sleepless with me in my bed
knows it is too late to talk of peace.
My cries merely slide down its walls.
The lies give way beneath me. (Ibid, p.55)

A Rain of Rites and Waiting
Listening to a Prayer
“Stone cuts deep
A bell trembles,
touched by the pain
of countless people.

Across the temple square,
the wind
that settles on my shoulders
has nowhere to go:
neither a silence
nor an answer”
-----Jayanta Mahapatra in the poem, ‘Listening to a Prayer’ from A Rain of Rites collection (A Rain of Rites, The Univrsity of Georgia Press, Athens (USA), ibid, p. 29)

India
“In an impressive map of lime-washed childhood
can one straggle out,
shift the brutal bones of its boundaries?

The Siva linga,
the rhythmic susurrus of chants on wrecks of petals,
the cage suspended in every father’s just eyes.

Small patient birds here sing in the drawn-out summer twilight,
then fall silent to the night.
The trembling of dreams is everywhere, like the wind.

When we learned dumbly to grow,
we felt of ourselves abandoned in the wilds, in things not real,
full of the mysterious fog that excites the shadows of the spirit.”
----- Jayanta Mahapatra in the poem, ‘ India’ from A Rain of Rites collection
(Ibid, 50)

A book of poems, as such A Rain of Rites, brought out by the Univ. of Georgia Press, Athens (USA) , in 1976 carries it forward the imagistic portals. It’s difficult to say what he takes up and what he means, as it means not what he says, just goes on viewing, without any comments. You cannot summarize what he has as the meaning is not and the words turning on, without anything to reveal, just the things in a flux. Nothing is concrete, everything in a flux, floating and passing, so much abstract and condensed, with blank thinking and reflection. Dawn is the first poem to begin with, later taking on Village, A Missing Person, The Whorehouse in a Calcutta Street, Myth, Dawn at Puri, Hunger. Summer, Silence, Main Temple Street, Puri, Listening to a Prayer, Indian Summer Poem, Samskara, A Rain of Rites, tell of his poetic escapades. So deep in time, consciousness and flux, they take their own recourse as for reflection and shedding of light, so inner and internal. The lonely countryside dotted with the nondescript villages shaded by the bunyan and peepul trees, the mother and the daughter sitting in the mango orchard, the missing person and her image haunting. 

The title poem too likewise where the meaning is not, just the word-plays and fleeting images of the things in a constant flux, always coming, always passing. Most probably rains of the coastal region and the rites performed in the rock-built temples, but the mud-built houses the tales of his. They made the grand temples for faith’s sake and to house in the deities, not for themselves and the masons and architects remaining anonymous. The rock-built temples are splendid and grand, an example of architectural and sculptural excellence, but the beggars still visible at the entrances of the temples. Faith and doubt seem to put him into a conflict, if faith be so strong, why doubt seems to be lurking in, leaving the scope for?

The benefit of doubt befits him and he goes on revelling, dwelling and delving with the light, faith so frail, darkness enveloping and encompassing it all. The cattle coming back at twilight, drinking water from and returning back, the darkness enveloping the countryside just lie with the flickers of the oil lamp burning for sometime.

At The Burning Ground 
“The dead ones draw close, looking over
the edge along the river bank
where a new pyre fames high; the river 
curls sluggishly in thick smoke,
two grey wood pigeons as though half-awake
grope around like new ashramites in Rishikesh.
The spell of vermilion burns the flesh,
fires embroider the banyan bark of the mind.
All dead faces appear the same;
is it their silence which flashes on the water,
stands in triumph to my gesture of defiance?

I gaze long at myself in the river,
unable to make out thoser features
with which I am familiar;
only an unexpected darkness
that lives alone under the stone
is able to carry me home,
as though I had never grown up:
impertinent, wild child,
who would have to be taught his lesson.” (Waiting, ibid, p.33)

A son of the soil, an Oriya by birth and rearing, his mind can go nowhere barring Orissa, the Orissan scenes, sights and landscapes, rivers, hills, sea beaches, forests, lakes, bird sanctuaries, historical sites and scenery. The Morning I, The Morning II, Nightfall, A Country Festival, Taste for Tomorrow, The Earth of July, Bhubaneswar, Way of the River, Song of the Past, The Faith, Thirst, Thought of the Future, Orissa, Song of the River, Konarka, Dhaulagiri, Waiting, A Summer Night, The Temple Road, Puri, Afternoons, Learning to Flow Free in the Chariot Festival at Puri, At the Burning Ground, Dusk, Sun Worshipper Bathing, Sanskrit, Shrines, At a Ritual Worship on a Sunday Afternoon, Servility, Bazaar, 5 P.M., Old Earth, The Indian Way, Rain Sense, On What to Build Then, The Beggar Takes it as Solace, Living, Among the Trees, Fragments, in follow-up to them. A Poem to Mahatma Gandhi, Story at the Start of 1978, Sky, Strike Your Secret Earth, The Stranger, Movements, Walking Home at Night, etc. are the poems of their trend, type and tenor. A poet of poverty and hunger, belief and disbelief, faith and doubt, human lust and greed, twitches of the selfish body, things in a flux and indifferent time, he follows the track of his own.

Between the fear of losing you
and the losing
this body
of your words
opens and shuts doors
into
that time waiting behind

I attempt to fit mine
in words
that never belong to me
like the gentle rain’s quality
to the hard earth’s calling
between those fattened seconds
growing upon my needs
----Jayanta Mahapatra in the poem, Between (Svayamvara & Other Poems, Writers Workshop, ibid, p.22)

The voices 
in the darkness
of the summer night
belonged
to the flowers
falling
over the earth.
I heard them not.
Nor did the night,
voiceless
in winged flight,
suffer
love’s caress.
----Jayanta Mahapatra in the poem, Love’s Caress (Ibid, p. 14)

Whiteness of Bone, which appears in 1992, is a major poetical work of Mahapatra, the poet to be reckoned with, substantial and typical, as his Mahapatran poems are in reality , an exercise in word-play and imagistic turning, vacant thinking and random reflection. One from Viking, Penguin Books India, New Delhi, the work consolidates the poetic base of the poet with a foothold of his own, taking poetry, silence, waiting, time, light, truth and doors. His style is the same what it was, playing hide and seek with lyricism and imagism, light and darkness the matters of his revelation as there is nothing to be thematic, poetry is silhouettes, oil paintings, poetry vacant thinkings. Silent In The Valleys is the first poem to begin with, giving way to the poems, such as All The Poetry There Is, Afternoon, Shadows, Light, House, A Death, In An Orissa Village, The Dispossessed, Bone of Time, Summer Afternoons, The Time Afterward, To A Young Girl. The Hill, In The Darkness of The Night, Doors, Farewell, Dawn, Red Roses For Gandhi, Song of The Homeless Girl, as the poems appear to be thematic outwardly, but are never, never so and one may not write a line about as for to substantiate it. While reading Mahapatra, one needs to keep in mind that The ‘Dawn’ poem of A Rain of Rites is different from the ‘Dawn’ poem of A Whiteness of Bone, there are similarly many poems pertaining to waiting, rains and rites, morning, noontime, evening, nightfall, summer and so on. A poet of relationship, with his relationship with the land of his birth and nativity, he is very, very private and personal in the use of his imagery and reflection, imagistic and linguistical which making him postmodern and postcolonial.

Jayanta Mahapatra’s The False Start, which appeared in 1980 from Clearing House, Bombay, begins with A Day of Rain poem, followed by more, such as Suppose, Today, Absences, The Gift of Night, Poem For Angelia Felston, Another Evening, Last Sadness, The Gradient of Dreams, Through The Stone, Woman In Love, A Sailboat of Occasions,

Bound, The Secret, Slum, Pain, The Rain Falling, After The Rain, Time Drawing In, The Mountain, The Storm, The Rising, The Accusation, A Sense of Adventure, Shadows, A Sense of Obvious, The Moon Moments, Ash, The Day, A Kind of Happiness, The Day After My Friends Became Godly And Great, The Years Down, The House, The Retreat, Tonight I Hear The Water Flowing, The Hour From The Window, Steps In The Dark, the poems one by one to continue with again, The Door, The Abandoned British Cemetery At Balasore, India, The Evening That Is To Come, Measuring Death, A Certain Refrain, the poems figuring in to confirm it that he is absurd, existential, a poet of the void, the shadowy space, who to answer his questions, what is this world, why are we here, what the purpose of living, what does it stay here, who is what, who can but say it?

A poet of Orissa, singing of Orissan landscapes, fields and fallows, the azure of the skies meeting the lands somewhere, coming close to, the sea, the rivers, the hills and the beaches, the tourist spots and centres. A poet of Orissa, its cartography and topography, its demography, he maps the natural wealth and resources of it, demarcating the areas of the coastal state of India. Puri, Cuttack and Bhubaneswar, the hub of his poetry, moving from one temple to another, from the Jagannath Puri temple to the Lingaraja temple to the Konark Sun temple. Existential, nihilistic and reflective, he is a poet of waiting, absurdistic, writing the poetry of the absurd, as nothing is what it seems to be and what it seems to be is nothing and our life a study in useless waiting.

A poet regional, historical and sociological, he is many-faceted, as because his base is not one of literature, but of physics, trying to delving deep into light and darkness, where does it flash upon from , where does it retreat back to?

A poem named ‘Pain’ from The False Start may be chosen as for to dwell upon:

The dark tree that stands
over the fields of my blood
has failed to leaf and bud.

Why must it cut across my blood?
I must try to understand it well.

Pursued over and again
by the sky’s heights,
it holds itself fast to the mist of time,
giving my mind little rest, small shelter.

Where are the inessential leaves
that commanded the heart,
disturbing those clouds which only are
the secrets of the sky?

When will my eye return,
that has been swallowed by the sky?
What ceremony
veils its world? (The False Start, Clearing House, ibid, p.30)

Jayanta Mahapatra's waiting is an absurdist waiting, as the characters keep waiting in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, who is Godot after all, why do the tramps wait for?

Similar is the case with Jayanta Mahapatra's poems dealing with time, wait and futile turn up, an absurdist drawing from existentialism and nihilism as the space full of vacuum, nothing is nowhere and man alone in the cosmos. Jayanta Mahapatra is a poet of waiting, waiting for uselesslessly as all our todays and tomorrows have shown it to be, who waits for what and which is what? Whatever be that, let us begin with Jayanta's Waiting, a collection of poems written against a historical backdrop of penetration. Though the collection appeared from a small press, it begins with The Morning-I, telling of a morning in the stride and clasp of a sweeper girl with human excreta and while on the other, in the second morning poem, a starkly naked Jain monk calmly walks down the road determined. At The Burning Ground, Dusk, Fragments, A Poem For Mahatma Gandhi, Sky, The Stranger, are the poems of a type. But many of it, dealing with Orissa the land of his birth and nativity, more specially Puri and Konark and there is nothing more to find thematically, just personal and private reflections abound, those of the physics class and its theories of light. A Country Festival, Taste For Tomorrow, Bhubaneswar, Orissa, Konark, Dhaulagiri, The Temple Road, Puri, Learning To Flow Free In The Chariot Festival At Puri, are the Orissa-relating poems. Published in 1979, Waiting is one in the same tread of the Mahapatrean poems, a poet of bewitching silence, he just sees life in the intricacies of relationships, conspiring against with the fickle mind always in a flux, the moments as bubbles appearing on and vanishing, nothing as mementoes or memorabilia to tell of, everything but in the dustbin of time to be cleaned again.

Jayanta Mahapatra’s Shadow Space, published for first time in 1997, opens with Living In Orissa poem, followed by Landscape, A Hunt of Grief, 1992, Heroism, Trying To Keep Still, The Shadow of Day, Widow, Saving Ourselves, Illness and others to tell the story of same kind and narration as they mean it not, what he says and what he means. Abstract and reflecting, he is a poet of light and darkness, random descent and random reflection, nothing is what it seems to be and what it seems to be is nothing. There is nothing as that exists and this forms the poetic base of the poet, the vacuum writ large over the space infinite. Bazaar Scene, Possessions, Aftermath, Season, Still Life, June Rain, Village Evening, The Quiet, Greeting, Raining, Cloak of White, Defeat, Shadows, Octave, Walls, Denials, The Fear, Enterprise, Awe, Afterward, Life, Ashes, Late, The Stories In Poetry, telling the tales in their own way, what the poetic tale, what the poetic truth, the poetry of nothingness that he writes, life but an absurd waiting, that he relays to. Abstract thought, blank mood, vacant thinking, pervade the poetic spirit of the poet, the colours of loneliness that he sees and feels, the toy clockwork of poetry, what makes one wait, a brief history of losses never to be written, obscure face, the blue sky hanging above his palms, shadows can never open their mouths are the things of his reckoning. His is a poetry based on suppositions, a lot of proposition, a lot of conjecture is therein and the poet contradicting and contrasting, Comparing and presenting, laughter always on the lookout for grief is similar to Hardy’s happiness is but a bubble in man’s life and Gray’s obscure destiny of village forefathers, childhood sitting in shadow to remember and to see the changed appearances.

Jayanta Mahapatra is a poet of just suppose you and had it been; just think you, had I been not, what would have happened, had you been not, what would it have? Why does the sun shine everyday? Why does it radiate and glow down daily? Where do the retreating rays or beams go to? The things of astrophysics continue to hold its sway over him. Who can say about the sunrise and the sunset as we seek to know about light and shadow?

I am afraid of the loneliness
I would share with you.
Some time
you must tell me,
so that I may know:
have you made me unjust?
As I complete the picture of a man
who calls his dog, pets it,
to make such things of life his own,
I hear again and again
a small explosion.
I try not to think of it at all,
but it keeps sounding
like a blare of my heartless laughter.
----Jayanta Mahapatra in the poem, A Poem To Mahatma Gandhi (Waiting, Samkaleen Prakashan, ibid, p. 55)

Freedom by Jayanta Mahapatra

 By: Bijay Kant Dubey

What the others have left he seems to be describing, taking up for an evaluation, a re-evaluation  as for what did we promise at the time of the attainment of freedom and what we got, how have we stood up to the promises made and pledged? Now the time for realization has come, the time for re-assessment. The tales of freedom, who to tell it? The situation is just like the radio talk of George Bernard Shaw broadcast over the BBC, London in which the dramatist seeks to know what it is freedom, who a freeman and how the types of freedom. Are we free really? Who can be free? So is the case herein. To see it in other words, it is but Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. It is not the talk of Jayanta Mahapatra, but of every conscious human being, what have we for the widows, daughters and poor people? What have for the hopeless and the helpless? What have we for the desperate and the devastated? The  answer which but every conscious being will say, we have done nothing  for them. We have done nothing for those who expect it from. We do not think the women are in a better state even now. Many live below the poverty line. Still now many go half-fed, half-clothed. Many do not have the cots to sleep on. The small hutments, mud houses, they leak it badly during the rainy days, so shivering with cold during the wintry days and so full of humidity during the summertime.

The poet starting the poem in the likewise manner says it that he feels it at times his country’s body floats it into the river. He just imagines about to suppose that if sinks down or keeps floating the river, what will it happen? Just like a boat it will keep floating. The  things will remain half-submerged, hidden from wide view as it happens during the rainy days with the flood warning when the villages go under water and the people run for rescue centres if any in the suburbs

Left alone, he grows into a half-disembodied bamboo whose lower part is sunk into the bank. In this context we may hear the Tennysonian lines as said in The Brook,

For men may come and men may go,
But I go on forever. 

From the river-bank the poet notices it all, the river and the people, the boats and the boatmen floating on the waters.

Here old widows and dying men cherish for to be free from. But the body does not freed so easily. Only prayers cannot give them all.  What will a life of inaction give to? Does God hear the prayers of the inactive? God is in action. Blind faith cannot lead us far. Blind faith cannot give us food. God helps those who help themselves, is the thing of reckoning.

Children too talk of freedom nurturing and nourishing the dreams of it in an ideal way, thinking highly of it, upholding noble ideas. But they know it not what it is freedom. What the meaning of freedom? Freedom is just an imagination, a thought and an idea. Can you say, what do you understand  by it? What do I? Are you free? Am I free? Do you not encroach or infringe upon someone’s rights? Practically we are not free. Theoretically and idealistically we are free. Freedom is that which one feels it after reading ‘Where the mind is without fear’. Khushwant Singh’s columns too speak of freedom and liberty even though does he mazak with us, comic, caricature and joke.

At times, as I watch,
it seems as though my country's body
floats down somewhere on the river.

Left alone, I grow into
a half-disembodied bamboo,
its lower part sunk
into itself on the bank.

Here, old widows and dying men
cherish their freedom,
bowing time after time in obstinate prayers.

While children scream
with this desire for freedom
to transform the world
without even laying hands on it.

In my blindness, at times I fear
I'd wander back to either of them.

In order for me not to lose face,
it is necessary for me to be alone.

Not to meet the woman and her child
in that remote village in the hills
who never had even a little rice
for their one daily meal these fifty years.

And not to see the uncaught, bloodied light
of sunsets cling to the tall white columns
of Parliament House.

In the new temple man has built nearby,
the priest is the one who knows freedom,
while God hides in the dark like an alien.

And each day I keep looking for the light
shadows find excuses to keep.

Trying to find the only freedom I know,
the freedom of the body when it's alone.

The freedom of the silent shale, the moonless coal,
the beds of streams of the sleeping god.

I keep the ashes away,
try not to wear them on my forehead.

On the one hand the pontifical and hypocritical ones talk of being over religious, but while on the other the people lie underdeveloped, hungry and distraught, so devastated in their life. The hamlets tell of their poverty, illiteracy, underdevelopment, living below the poverty line under miserable conditions. What does freedom mean to them?

But the sunsets glowing around the white pillars of Parliament House tell it otherwise taking to different panorama of life. Who are sitting therein? Who not? How the stories of it? The stories of people and the lands? How the story of the house? Who made it and when? And who leased it? Is it of the architects and masons? Or, of time? Is it of lawmakers or of people and their representatives? Who represents whom? How direct narration, indirect narration? Their voices sometimes echo and re-echo it in the house, but the people fail to hear it. The voices of agony, anguish, distress, bruise, distress, trouble, tribulation, struggle, suffering, pity, pathos and loss, a few can hear and overhear it.

In the new temple built near it, the priest knows what freedom is, but God seems to be hiding as an alien. How peculiar is the concept? How the oblique approach of the poet? What is religion? Where is God? Which is what and what is whose? Is God Daridranarayana or in kangal-bhojana? This too is a point of deliberation which but Adi Shankaracharya felt it once as Shiva showed him in the form of.

Each day he thinks of being light, hopes to be enlightened with, but darkness seems to be enveloping in. Darkness leaves him not alone and with the excuses it seems to be escaping each and every time.

An idea, a thought has both negative and positive aspects. The Gita too says it, ‘Annad bhavanti bhutani’, ‘The world is created from food or the things from food’, translate you as thus.

Do you want to see the land with the eyes of the unfed and the uncovered people? Try to know from them who have not been fed well. The eyes will tell a saga of life. The hungry stomach and the thirsty lips will tell the story of life as felt and experienced, trouble and tribulation faced and borne.

It is a different poem so indifferent in thought and idea, image and reflection. To quote in the words of William Wordsworth, we have grown too much worldly as the world is too much with us. But apart from all this, nothing can cut the base of existentialism, nothingness and nihilism. What are our institutions for? What is our purpose? What do we want? Do the humans not err? Are we sincere? What is the thing that is not intentional? The every work that do we is but self-tending.

Have we not heard, ‘To err is human, to forgive divine’?

The only freedom he has known it in life is but the freedom of the body. Putting the anti-thesis the poet says in the manner of G.B.Shaw, but Donne too says it but in a metaphysical way in Death, Be Not Proud.

To be religious is not to be blind to logic and reason. To be metaphysical is not to too much superstitious, mythical and mystical, unnecessarily supernatural. Along with karma, dharma too is important. To be a karmayogin too is a thing to be reckoned with. Only to talk about the sleeping gods is not good at all. Smearing the forehead with the ash, he does not want to look over religious and mystical. Rather than being hypocritical and pontifical, he wants to go in his own way.

To talk to, revert to freedom and its tale is to be back to the children, widows and poor people and to hear from them the tales of their hard life. So, rather than losing one’s face one needs to be silent. Why to say them all? Why to critique in a discerning way if the people like it not to hear the candid stories of freedom, liberty and independence?

Who is a legislator, who a lawmaker? What was he? What had  he been when he was not? We do not want to discuss these. Who knows rule and regulation in what way we cannot say it. Something one learns from the chair.  After all we are human beings full of errors and omissions, failures and foibles. Are we for law? If we are asked to say keeping the hands on the Gita, can we?

Law and justice? Are these the voice of the heart? Is law not a document? Say, who is for justice? Is justice not compassion? Who is a judge? Is he not a man? Who is whose? Who a criminal? Why is he a criminal? Is he a man or not? We do not understand. How the Jurisprudence of God we do not know it, it is beyond the comprehension of human mind!

Is the court for litigation or reconciliation? Or should, there be some acquittals? The lapses of law, how to compromise with? Something needs to be borrowed from dhamma.

I too thought it similarly while celebrating the fifty years of India with some thinking which I kept ruminating. What have we for the widows, women and children? For the poor daughters of India? What did we for the old men? For the addicts? Did we ever think of making rehabilitation centres? Did we ever about the making of the old man houses? Could we eradicate poverty? Could we do away with hunger?

Such a thing it is in political science and its theories and the consequences of historical movements. Democracy, equality and fraternity, good is the message of the French revolution, but what did we do to the king’s family, the Bolshevik revolution, the Russian revolution, we appreciate it for socialism, uniting the labourers of the world, admiring the dignity of labour, but what did we do the Czar family? Democracy turned into a chaos and socialism in proletariat dictatorship.

The jurisprudence of law is something different, is but the metaphysical side of it. Situations, circumstances and times keep changing. Everything does not remain the same. The  chariot of time keeps it rotating. What we see it today will not be tomorrow. What it seems to be is nothing and nothing is what it seems to be. The charkha of fate too keeps spinning. What one will become none can predict it. Not even the astrologers and palmists. Do they know their fate? The history of land, the history of time, the history of man, we know it not. The history of the house the house-builders know it well, but we take it not their version, we just enter into, take the version of the kings and their people, we mean the courtiers. Such an anti-thesis it is in George Bernard Shaw even though he may be a propagandist, a monotonous talker. Such an aspect it is in  George Orwell’s Gandhi and elephant shooting essays. Such a thing it is in John Galsworthy. Read them and say you. The  British historians of constitutional history will enlighten upon the topic in hand.

But there is something to learn from R.K.Narayan’s An Astrologer’s Day, Oscar Wilde’s The Model Millionaire, O.Henry’s The Last Leaf, Leo Tolstoy’s Three Questions, A.L. Tennyson’s Ulysses, Samuel  Brecht’s  Life of Galileo, K.A Abbas’ The Refugee, Lady Gregory’s Rising of The Moon and so on. Freedom is not of human rights activists or freedom fighters. Freedom is not in charters. Freedom is in the sense of being free; freedom is in the understanding of mass and matter. How to take liberty with the idea is the main. Nissim Ezekiel’s The Patriot and Night of the Scorpion too teach about the clarity of thought and idea.

It is better to be alone and to confide in reckoning. The flight of imagination has always lured us and has a charm of its own. To confute and contradict is not at all good all the times. But the thoughts keep swaying and images swapping positions and places. Allen Ginsberg too lessons it otherwise as for what the digressed and lost generations have given in as for spiritual thirst and search for knowledge abandoning material pleasure. Freedom is not what you think, what I think. Freedom is an experimentation with liberty and while experimenting with, if one fails, the other may make a way for. It will right to conclude the poem with Rousseau’s line:

“Man is born free but everywhere is in chains.”

What the others have left he seems to be describing, taking up for an evaluation, a re-evaluation  as for what did we promise at the time of the attainment of freedom and what we got, how have we stood up to the promises made and pledged? Now the time for realization has come, the time for re-assessment. The tales of freedom, who to tell it? The situation is just like the radio talk of George Bernard Shaw broadcast over the BBC, London in which the dramatist seeks to know what it is freedom, who a freeman and how the types of freedom. Are we free really? Who can be free? So is the case herein. To see it in other words, it is but Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. It is not the talk of Jayanta Mahapatra, but of every conscious human being, what have we for the widows, daughters and poor people? What have for the hopeless and the helpless? What have we for the desperate and the devastated? The  answer which but every conscious being will say, we have done nothing  for them. We have done nothing for those who expect it from. We do not think the women are in a better state even now. Many live below the poverty line. Still now many go half-fed, half-clothed. Many do not have the cots to sleep on. The small hutments, mud houses, they leak it badly during the rainy days, so shivering with cold during the wintry days and so full of humidity during the summertime.

The poet starting the poem in the likewise manner says it that he feels it at times his country’s body floats it into the river. He just imagines about to suppose that if sinks down or keeps floating the river, what will it happen? Just like a boat it will keep floating. The  things will remain half-submerged, hidden from wide view as it happens during the rainy days with the flood warning when the villages go under water and the people run for rescue centres if any in the suburbs. Left alone, he grows into a half-disembodied bamboo whose lower part is sunk into the bank. In this context we may hear the Tennysonian lines as said in The Brook,

For men may come and men may go,
But I go on forever.

From the river-bank the poet notices it all, the river and the people, the boats and the boatmen floating on the waters. Here old widows and dying men cherish for to be free from. But the body does not freed so easily. Only prayers cannot give them all.  What will a life of inaction give to? Does God hear the prayers of the inactive? God is in action. Blind faith cannot lead us far. Blind faith cannot give us food. God helps those who help themselves, is the thing of reckoning.

Children too talk of freedom nurturing and nourishing the dreams of it in an ideal way, thinking highly of it, upholding noble ideas. But they know it not what it is freedom. What the meaning of freedom? Freedom is just an imagination, a thought and an idea. Can you say, what do you understand  by it? What do I? Are you free? Am I free? Do you not encroach or infringe upon someone’s rights? Practically we are not free. Theoretically and idealistically we are free. Freedom is that which one feels it after reading ‘Where the mind is without fear’. Khushwant Singh’s columns too speak of freedom and liberty even though does he mazak with us, comic, caricature and joke.

At times, as I watch,
it seems as though my country's body
floats down somewhere on the river.

Left alone, I grow into
a half-disembodied bamboo,
its lower part sunk
into itself on the bank.

Here, old widows and dying men
cherish their freedom,
bowing time after time in obstinate prayers.

While children scream
with this desire for freedom
to transform the world
without even laying hands on it.

In my blindness, at times I fear
I'd wander back to either of them.
In order for me not to lose face,
it is necessary for me to be alone.

Not to meet the woman and her child
in that remote village in the hills
who never had even a little rice
for their one daily meal these fifty years.

And not to see the uncaught, bloodied light
of sunsets cling to the tall white columns
of Parliament House.

In the new temple man has built nearby,
the priest is the one who knows freedom,
while God hides in the dark like an alien.

And each day I keep looking for the light
shadows find excuses to keep.

Trying to find the only freedom I know,
the freedom of the body when it's alone.

The freedom of the silent shale, the moonless coal,
the beds of streams of the sleeping god.

I keep the ashes away,
try not to wear them on my forehead.

On the one hand the pontifical and hypocritical ones talk of being over religious, but while on the other the people lie underdeveloped, hungry and distraught, so devastated in their life. The hamlets tell of their poverty, illiteracy, underdevelopment, living below the poverty line under miserable conditions. What does freedom mean to them?

But the sunsets glowing around the white pillars of Parliament House tell it otherwise taking to different panorama of life. Who are sitting therein? Who not? How the stories of it? The stories of people and the lands? How the story of the house? Who made it and when? And who leased it? Is it of the architects and masons? Or, of time? Is it of lawmakers or of people and their representatives? Who represents whom? How direct narration, indirect narration? Their voices sometimes echo and re-echo it in the house, but the people fail to hear it. The voices of agony, anguish, distress, bruise, distress, trouble, tribulation, struggle, suffering, pity, pathos and loss, a few can hear and overhear it. In the new temple built near it, the priest knows what freedom is, but God seems to be hiding as an alien. How peculiar is the concept? How the oblique approach of the poet? What is religion? Where is God? Which is what and what is whose? Is God Daridranarayana or in kangal-bhojana? This too is a point of deliberation which but Adi Shankaracharya felt it once as Shiva showed him in the form of.

Each day he thinks of being light, hopes to be enlightened with, but darkness seems to be enveloping in. Darkness leaves him not alone and with the excuses it seems to be escaping each and every time. An idea, a thought has both negative and positive aspects. The Gita too says it, ‘Annad bhavanti bhutani’, ‘The world is created from food or the things from food’, translate you as thus. Do you want to see the land with the eyes of the unfed and the uncovered people? Try to know from them who have not been fed well. The eyes will tell a saga of life. The hungry stomach and the thirsty lips will tell the story of life as felt and experienced, trouble and tribulation faced and borne. It is a different poem so indifferent in thought and idea, image and reflection. To quote in the words of William Wordsworth, we have grown too much worldly as the world is too much with us. But apart from all this, nothing can cut the base of existentialism, nothingness and nihilism. What are our institutions for? What is our purpose? What do we want? Do the humans not err? Are we sincere? What is the thing that is not intentional? The every work that do we is but self-tending.

Have we not heard, ‘To err is human, to forgive divine’?

The only freedom he has known it in life is but the freedom of the body. Putting the anti-thesis the poet says in the manner of G.B.Shaw, but Donne too says it but in a metaphysical way in Death, Be Not Proud.

To be religious is not to be blind to logic and reason. To be metaphysical is not to too much superstitious, mythical and mystical, unnecessarily supernatural. Along with karma, dharma too is important. To be a karmayogin too is a thing to be reckoned with. Only to talk about the sleeping gods is not good at all. Smearing the forehead with the ash, he does not want to look over religious and mystical. Rather than being hypocritical and pontifical, he wants to go in his own way. To talk to, revert to freedom and its tale is to be back to the children, widows and poor people and to hear from them the tales of their hard life. So, rather than losing one’s face one needs to be silent. Why to say them all? Why to critique in a discerning way if the people like it not to hear the candid stories of freedom, liberty and independence?

Who is a legislator, who a lawmaker? What was he? What had  he been when he was not? We do not want to discuss these. Who knows rule and regulation in what way we cannot say it. Something one learns from the chair.  After all we are human beings full of errors and omissions, failures and foibles. Are we for law? If we are asked to say keeping the hands on the Gita, can we? Law and justice? Are these the voice of the heart? Is law not a document? Say, who is for justice? Is justice not compassion? Who is a judge? Is he not a man? Who is whose? Who a criminal? Why is he a criminal? Is he a man or not? We do not understand. How the Jurisprudence of God we do not know it, it is beyond the comprehension of human mind! Is the court for litigation or reconciliation? Or should, there be some acquittals? The lapses of law, how to compromise with? Something needs to be borrowed from dhamma.

I too thought it similarly while celebrating the fifty years of India with some thinking which I kept ruminating. What have we for the widows, women and children? For the poor daughters of India? What did we for the old men? For the addicts? Did we ever think of making rehabilitation centres? Did we ever about the making of the old man houses? Could we eradicate poverty? Could we do away with hunger? Such a thing it is in political science and its theories and the consequences of historical movements. Democracy, equality and fraternity, good is the message of the French revolution, but what did we do to the king’s family, the Bolshevik revolution, the Russian revolution, we appreciate it for socialism, uniting the labourers of the world, admiring the dignity of labour, but what did we do the Czar family? Democracy turned into a chaos and socialism in proletariat dictatorship.

The jurisprudence of law is something different, is but the metaphysical side of it. Situations, circumstances and times keep changing. Everything does not remain the same. The  chariot of time keeps it rotating. What we see it today will not be tomorrow. What it seems to be is nothing and nothing is what it seems to be. The charkha of fate too keeps spinning. What one will become none can predict it. Not even the astrologers and palmists. Do they know their fate? The history of land, the history of time, the history of man, we know it not. The history of the house the house-builders know it well, but we take it not their version, we just enter into, take the version of the kings and their people, we mean the courtiers. Such an anti-thesis it is in George Bernard Shaw even though he may be a propagandist, a monotonous talker. Such an aspect it is in  George Orwell’s Gandhi and elephant shooting essays. Such a thing it is in John Galsworthy. Read them and say you. The  British historians of constitutional history will enlighten upon the topic in hand.

But there is something to learn from R.K.Narayan’s An Astrologer’s Day, Oscar Wilde’s The Model Millionaire, O.Henry’s The Last Leaf, Leo Tolstoy’s Three Questions, A.L. Tennyson’s Ulysses, Samuel  Brecht’s  Life of Galileo, K.A Abbas’ The Refugee, Lady Gregory’s Rising of The Moon and so on. Freedom is not of human rights activists or freedom fighters. Freedom is not in charters. Freedom is in the sense of being free; freedom is in the understanding of mass and matter. How to take liberty with the idea is the main? Nissim Ezekiel’s The Patriot and Night of the Scorpion too teach about the clarity of thought and idea. It is better to be alone and to confide in reckoning. The flight of imagination has always lured us and has a charm of its own. To confute and contradict is not at all good all the times. But the thoughts keep swaying and images swapping positions and places. Allen Ginsberg too lessons it otherwise as for what the digressed and lost generations have given in as for spiritual thirst and search for knowledge abandoning material pleasure. Freedom is not what you think, what I think. Freedom is an experimentation with liberty and while experimenting with, if one fails, the other may make a way for. It will right to conclude the poem with Rousseau’s line:

“Man is born free but everywhere is in chains.”

 

 

 

 

Relationship: Jayanta Mahapatra

 By: Bijay Kant Dubey

Relationship, The First Volume of Indian English Poetry To Fetch Jayanta Mahapatra The Sahitya Akademi Award For 1981

Relationship is the first volume of Indian English poetry writing to fetch Jayanta Mahapatra the award for creative writing in poetry and he is the first Indian English poet to be awarded with it. But to discuss it is to know about the institution of the Sahitya Akademi award. Since when is it given to? Were there any awards before it? Were there no Indian writers of Indo-Anglican verse? The answer is definitely yes, there were some to get it. Many did not get a chance. Many felt it not encouraged. Many used to write in their diaries, but never liked to open and claim at that time. Whatever be that, let us be with it. It is also a fact that the books of Indian English verse used to be out of print and out of stock. Most of the writers were unknown. This was also true with regard to Jayanta Mahapatra. The book shops and book stalls flatly used to deny with regard to the procurement of books and used to express annoyance. Even the books were not available in College Street, Calcutta. Even at Patna the volumes of Indian English poetry could not be traced.  

When I asked about the journals, the magazines stall-sellers saw me with wonder and asked to tell the names of some more dead magazines. The teachers were also not adapted to Indian English tradition and were critical of. Just the slender anthologies of Indian English poetry were before us counted on hands, ones or twos. To get the books of Sarojini is to search antique book shops or the libraries of Nehru’s time. Who will go to National Library, Calcutta to dust the racks or shelves? Even in the eighties modern Indian English poets were just evolving poets and poetesses rather than what they are today. Do not intermix the things of the photo-copier machines’ time with that of the smart phone and the computer. Nissim Ezekiel got the Sahitya Akademi Award for Latter-Day Psalms in 1983, Keki N.Daruwalla for The Keeper of the Dead in 1984, Kamala Das for Collected poems in  1985, Shiv K.Kumar for Trapfalls in the Sky in 1987, Dom Moraes for Serendip in 1994, A.K.Ramanujan for The Collected Poems in 1999,  Adil Jussawalla for Trying to Say Goodbye in 2014. 

But we cannot who have and who have not? Who should have? Something is also not in awards and prizes. Lawrence Bentlemen too was a good poet. K.D.Katrak too was no less than in his innovative writing. The modern Indian English poets were not popular since the start, they have taken time to develop and the world too has taken time in knowing them. Had the UGC not pressurized, these could not have been included, had the Ph.D. programme been not made compulsory for career advancement! At that time Ph.Ds. done on Indian things and topics used to appear as Indian language Ph.Ds. The problem lay not with the British-text schooled professors, but with the standard and quality of Indian English verse too as it was derivative, imitative, parodied and copied, a study in minor voices and slender anthologies. The publishers too used to refuse to publish. I myself heard it and the talks passed through my ears when one research student wished to do his Ph.D. on Arun Kolatkar in the nineties as suggested by one Indian-matter inclined guide, the varsity head of the department in a dilemma hesitated if to approve the synopsis as because Kolatkar had not so many books then. 

Even in M.K.Naik’s book he talks of collecting the stray poems of the poet and publishing in  a book format. We too were not accustomed to reading Indian English verses. The high-powered specs-wearing olden time professors schooled during the British period had no interest at all in these slender anthologies and puerile parodied stuffs. Frankly speaking, Indian English verse is a study in private and personal collections. The poets are here but self-styled poets and poetesses. The other thing too is this that it is easy to work on Indian topics as for the dissertations rather than the British stuffs.

What it pains us most in reading Indian English poetry is this that there are no critical texts as for to analyze them. There are no critics of it. The fresh research students pose as the critics of Indian English poetry who are in reality the novice fellows as well as the learners of such an evolving genre of literature. Here whatever your write will be accepted. There is none to contradict your theory. The biographical details too of the nondescript practitioners whose whereabouts are unknown and obscure are quintessential as for discussing their poems. If you are able to access and approach the poet, you will definitely turn into a critic here.

I searched for the books of Jayanta Mahapatra, but could not find them, even wrote to Prof. P.Lal who too responded with the proposal of photo-stating the materials and sending them after the payment of charges as required for the research. Somehow I got the address of Mahapatra and he was kind enough to send me the books. Similar had been the case with Daruwalla. But Nissim Ezekiel asked to write to Oxford Univ. Press, Delhi, but the books too were out of stock. It took time in corresponding with, getting the reply by post, sending of the M.O.

Relationship is a long poem consisting of a few pages, not so many in numbers, but is in continuation of his relationship with Orissa and the Oriya space, culture, history, myth, tradition and mysticism. Here he grappling with the topography and cartography glides with map and map-making, telling of his connection with the land of his birth, rearing, education and growing up. Just with the visionary glides and escapades he keeps on rolling and gliding, sometimes on the boat with the boatmen, sometimes with the sailors on the ships sailing on the sea and sometimes by the shore seeing the sea shores. The Oriya landscape with the rivers, forests, hills, lakes, sea beaches, historical sites, hamlets, exotic flora and fauna he binds them into a whole to weave the myth of his own delving to take the visionary flights. The Ganga kings, who to tell about? Who there to tell about the Konark Sun temple? How the sculptures and figurines of it inscribed upon the walls? What are they indicative of? What the motif behind? The tourist spots and destinations pleasurable and refreshing, where does mind get lifted to? The wooden statues carved out of fresh wood and placed in the Jagannath temple so bizarre and grotesque lift us from our busy schedule to see the Rathyatra and the gods and goddesses on outing, the chariot pulled by the mammoth of crowds following, held by reverence and piety, looking back in wonder and astonishment, devotion and religiosity and so full of festivity, mirth and joy. To read Jayanta Mahapatra is to feel that the history of Delhi is not the history of India. The history of Bihar and the U.P. is not the history of Indian politics. While doing his M.Sc. from Patna Univ., he would have definitely felt the caste system prevalent in Bihar.

The poetry-work, Relationship appeared in 1980 from the Greenfield Review Press, Greenfield Center, New York 12833, USA. With an extract from Whitman’s Song of Myself before the start of the poem, the small book opens up in its way opening the avenues of thought and idea, dream and vision; widening the spectrum and horizon of our delving. Relationship as a work cannot be analyzed, paraphrased and annotated as because so many abstract things have been assimilated into the poetic texture of the poem delving deep into Oriya land, cartography, history, art, culture, society, tradition, belief and heritage and living. How the people are, how the land is, how their living, how their language! How their deity, belief-system! His language is so metaphoric and mythic here reminding us of the Irish myth and mysticism of W.B.Yeats. What is this Orissa? How the stories of it? How to express his love and gratitude for the motherland, the place of his nativity is the question! It is Orissa which is his love; it is Orissa his dream and imagery and with it he sleeps and awakes and arises from slumber.

Wearing the mythically embroidered bespangled coat of Yeats, he starts the tale of Orissa and Orissan myth and mysticism engaging his inner space:

“Once again one must sit back and bury the face
in this earth of the forbidding myth,
the phallus of the enormous stone,
when the lengthened shadow of a restless vulture
caresses the strong and silent deodars in the valley,
and when the time of the butterfly
moves inside the fierce body of the forest bear,
and feel the tensed muscle of rock
yield to the virtuous water of the hidden springs of the Mahanadi,
the mystery of secret rights that make up destiny;”
( Relationship, The Chandrabhaga Society, Cuttack, Second Indian Edition, 1999, p.9 ) 

A poet he can show what it is in regional history and how have we kept our histories ignored. What more do we know about our histories? Just others’ versions we hear. We do not have our standpoint. We could not take a note of that. The replica of the Konark Sun-temple is the replica of his poetry; how the wheels of it, the wheels of the chariot and how the horses of Suryanarayana! Who made the Konark Sun-temple and how? Who were the architects? Who the forgotten masons? Just like the vagabond Whitman he wants to gloss over with his visionary stance. His leaves are not the leaves of America, but of Orissa. Plucking the green grass blade, Mahapatra like Tennyson wants to pipe and sing a song. Yeats’ An Acre of Grass not, but the whole panorama and landscape of coastal Orissa is the dream vision of Jayanta Mahapatra.

 The last lines of the poem take us to a different pedestal of make-believe dream sequence:

Is anything beyond me that I cannot catch up?
Tell me your names, dark daughters
Hold me to your spaces

In your dance is my elusive birth, my sleep
that swallows the green hills of the land
and the crows that quicken the sunlight in the veins,
and the stone that watches my sadness fly in and out
of my deaths, a spiritless soul of memory
(Ibid, p.38 ) 

Who are these dark daughters? Are these the poor toiling masses of our agrarian countrified society? Are these the poor daughters of India whose tales of pity and pathos we often hear it? Are these the tears of Sita and Yasodhara falling from their feminine eyes and cheeks? Are these the dark daughters of the temples working as devadasis or yoginis? Are the priests and the middle men okay? Are the astrologers and palmists and soothsayers true to their kindred souls? Scholasticism is good, so is classicism, but where do we go to finally? Can we detach ourselves from our bare realities and earthly connections? Can we close our eyes from seeing the trouble and tribulation of the common masses? Does hunger not malign us? Are the people not living below the poverty lines? What man does not do for the stomach?

Down the memory lanes, where does he want to go? Where is he going?  What does the poet mean to say it? Is it his day dreaming or night dreaming? In a vision where does he want to lapse into? Does he want to identify his self with the self of the motherland? Here his stand is mythic and mythological, so full with the flight of imagination, dreamy glide and slide, so full of generalizations.

Divided in twelve, each section tells a tale of own. The first is grappling with myth and mysticism, the making of the land, the drift of time and the phallus stone overshadowing it all. Against the backdrop of the sea and its hazards, dark forests and dark myths of creation, he tells the tales of life and this living of ours, that of the Oriyas. There is something of Riders to the Sea of J.M.Synge in it.

The second is autobiographical but written in the form of a reverie as Dream Children by Charles Lamb is. Marking the grave of his mother, he ruminates over the passage of time as which becomes what in course of time, how memory and reminiscence play a role in human life and the images keep shifting like the sands of time.

The third starts with the first rains washing the lands and stones, sin and blood and here lies in the story of the Daya river on whose banks the Kalinga and the Ashokan armies clashed. The imagery is one of The Waste Land and The Rime  of The Ancient Mariner. There is something of the Tower of Silence imagery when we think of the skeleton remains, bodies cleansed of rotting flesh. The penance of Bhagirath and the doing away of the sins of the sons of Sagar come to the mind as and when we sit to discuss it.

The fourth tells about his imagistic meanderings and loiterings. What he means to say it is not clear. The burden of peace, how to take to? Voices of children have always wronged.

The fifth as an ode to sleep though is not is all about the soothing flight of imagination, the visionary glide taken, the dream dreamt through, with the help of imagery and reflection, nostalgia and remembrance. If sleep is soothing, where will it land, all know it.

The sixth is again a glide in which he speaks of the gathering of clouds, rains and the Ganga kings and their ruins. None to  say where he goes from where.

The seventh is all about who stands where, who is for what if the notions keep shifting, images keep swapping places. The ideas are not clear here. If one searches Jayanta Mahapatra  for meaning, one will be at wit’s end.

The eighth is all about his connections with stones, the stones of history and archaeology, geography and architecture. It is the Konark Sun-temple that he discusses it here indirectly in a visionary style of rambling. The sweep and glance of Mahapatra is splendid.

In the ninth starting from the myth of happiness he lurks around  shuttling in between dreams and imagery.

The tenth is a door relating poem in which he speaks about stumbling upon the peepul tree and the meditational connect. Slipping through the doorways and planks, one can glimpse the outward world. The doors of dreams keep unfolding and opening new avenues of thought and idea. Just lie you by the door and go on seeing the ways.

The eleventh starting with the mirror mirrors it all happening underneath the consciousness layers of his heart.

The section twelve is about the dark daughters of the temple complex, of the countryside whose trouble and tribulation keep it swapping, taking forms, bearing fruits. None strove to know what it ailed them, their spirit and self. His style is folklorish and mythical as he keeps telling in a tell-tale way of deliberation. The dark daughter, why are they? What the cause of their darkness? Are they dark really or are affectionate daughters? Can daughters be dark? And even if are, what that to? What is it the myth of darkness, is it of the Dark Goddess? There is something of the Lingam-Yoni motif, the Prakriti-Purusha concept and the Shiva-Durga story indirectly relayed through the dream vision. But the base is one of proposition and supposition; the mythic base and he taking visionary flights. What we see as things is but mass and matter and the shapes keep changing. What it is today will not be tomorrow. The human mind is always in a flux. So are the fleeting images and impressions of life.

Sometimes we ask ourselves if Relationship is Kubla Khan of Coleridge and he writing under the impact and so is Mahaptra too here under the charm of dream sequence but without taking anything. Where will the parachutes of imagination will land them to, God knows it. Jayanta Mahapatra as a poet likes to silhouette and in his poetry imagery plays an upper hand with faith being so shaky and frail. The pencil images do not remain the same as they change it from time to time.

A Missing Person :Mahapatra

By: Bijay Kant Dubey 

Jayanta Mahapatra is first a poet of Orissa then an Indian writing in English of a national standard famous world-wide, but he was famous even before we recognized him as his poems appeared in the journals before our acknowledgement and acceptance of his poetry and saw the light of the day. He is a poet who draws and derives from imagery, myth and mythicism, history, art and culture and society. A muffled overtone of Vedism, Upanishadism can be heard in his poems.

Apart from that he is a poet of nothingness, empty skies, shadowed reflections, silhouettes, solitary landscapes and so on. Not even that he is in some way a historian of Orissa as he tells about the temples and historical sites of the place together with the geo-political status and nowhere can we find a description of its rivers, lakes, forests, cities, hamlets, hills and rural scapes and spaces as has in his poetry.

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.  

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, dazzles, brightens, 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.

A poet of Udaygiri, Khandagiri, Konark, Puri, Bhubaneswar, he is a 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 Kharvel kings, all these he talks of indirectly, referring to art and architecture. The Rathyatra recurs time and again and he cannot forget the festivity connected with the gala ceremony and the sea of people offering prayers and moving with, the mammoth crowd following the chariot seating Jagannatha, Balabhadra and Subhadra.

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 in them  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.

Today India is free, but the poet wants to know, what have we for the poorer and weaker sections of society? How have we grappled with poverty and unemployment? So as a result of that, hunger, poverty, starvation, underdevelopment, backwardness, moral depravity, mental perversity and so on find an expression into the poetic texture of his poetry. What it pains him most is the poor condition of women. What is it in the fate of a woman? What the palmist is reading from the frail hand of the poor and small Indian girl? The crisscrosses of her fate who can it about? To read him is to feel what we have for the widows, women and poor daughters.

Apart from all that, he is so privately reflective when he takes up or deals with the intricacies of relations and bodily twitches and sensuality. As a poet, Mahapatra is not only Wordsworhtian, Keatsian and Yeastsian, but Lawrentine too as the pulls of dark consciousness and bodily love have not left him behind.

Who the missing person is? An Indian rural woman.

She cannot speak the name of her husband, but the tattoo on the hand telling it all.

In a lightless house, what to speak about her personality?

In the dark room, can she see her image in the mirror?

But she also has an independent soul and body which we do not.

A Missing Person

In the darkened room

a woman

cannot find her reflection in the mirror

waiting as usual

at the edge of sleep

In her hands she holds

the oil lamp

whose drunken yellow flames

know where her lonely body hides

 

A Missing Person as a poem is completely an image; a photograph snapped and cleaned with the image cast over paper. In the dark room a woman cannot find her reflection in the mirror. She is waiting as well as is feeling sleepy and drowsy which is but quite natural for a woman.

Into her hands there is an oil lamp burning dimly whose yellow flames know it where she hides her body, where she rests.

This is the crux of the poem said so symbolically and imagistically. The whole poem is an image, a portrait of a woman, an Indian woman, a village woman, her activity, her life and routine together with many things, said or unsaid, described or undescribed.

How were the villages of ours? How had it been our countryside, far flung at secluded places away from roads? The people were even unable to burn oil lamps. Where would they kerosene from? They used to burn somehow. Most of the houses used to lurk in darkness. What would one do in mud and thatched houses? An Indian woman just could know her master and none the else attaching so much importance. He was almost like God to her. She was not even allowed to speak the name of her husband. As a silent persona she used to pass her days without any name or fame. Sometimes the tattoo used to tell about the name of her husband with the hand shown to.

Whatever be that, A Missing Person is symbolic, imagistic of an Indian woman leading her life without any entity of her own. The house is her boundary, periphery; the area of her working which but she cannot trespass it. To wait for the master, the return of his is the end of all. 

Exhausted with daylong labour, she feels drowsy in the poor oil lamp light, but instead of that waits for his return. The dark room, flickering yellow flames of the oil lamp, the lonely body, etc. are but the images.

A countryside rural space Indian woman without name or identity living in a nondescript Indian village where the people go half-clothed, half-fed living below the poverty line, without light, books or modern resources, living an agricultural life is the chief attraction of the story here. Just after when it is dark the whole village lapses into a slumber for want of resources and availability of things. Those who have not lived in villages will not come to feel it how life is hard therein.

It is true that she is an Indian woman without any personality of her own, without any entity or identity of her own. In the room dark where there is no light how to see her face in the mirror? So, what can will she do?

But one should keep it in mind that she is also after all a body, a soul. She too has a personality of her own. She too has a space of her own which we allow her not to use. But the light swaying knows the swerves of the body, the swerves of the spirit. Why to throttle her liberty? How not to liberate her to some extent? We could not think all that. We could not feel about all that. Let her have her own existence. She has also a heart to feel. She has also a mind to speak.

An Indian village woman living a life without any personality and identity of her own is the thing of deliberation. How the Indian women have lived in the nondescript villages, passed their days in utter neglect, poverty, hunger, underdevelopment, scarcity of food and resources? But apart from a body, she is also a soul and a spirit. She has also a soul, a spirit of own which but we do not know it.

There is really some outstanding merit in the poetry of Jayanta Mahapatra which but he exposes them indirectly the evils and wrongs of our society. We have not given rights to the women which they deserve it as human beings. We have deprived them of their rights. We have suppressed and oppressed them for centuries. But they too are men, human beings. They too have separate bodies and souls and spirits. This but we do not know it. A feminist, a realist he can really light upon the darker areas, what it ails our society and its set of odd and awkward, irrelevant morals which have become obsolete and utterly inhuman.

What is love, lost love? Can it be not of remembrance and memory?

How the emotions and feelings of it, the sympathies of bonding and affection?

Time flies, but memories remain, the mementoes of it.

The pages from an old diary, an album of old photographs.

The residues of meaning remain it here.

Of that Love

Of that love, of that mile 

walked together in the rain, 

only a weariness remains.

I am that stranger now

my mirror holds to me;

the moment's silence

hardly moves across the glass.

I pity myself in another's guise.

And no one's back here, no one

I can recognize, and from my side

I see nothing. Years have passed

since I sat with you, watching

the sky grow lonelier with cloudlessness,

waiting for your body to make it lived in.

How beautiful is the line when the poet starts with ‘Of that love’ walked together, shared together just as a discussion going on, fragrant with the remembrance of the days of sweet love and loving and the exchange of words made cordially conjuring upon the mind’s plane and he switching over to confide in. Such a poem it is difficult to come across and see, such a poem it is difficult to mark as the style of expression and the art of presentation are so bold and prominent. One can hardly write such a text so full of sweet memory and remembrance plodding through the corridors and lanes and by lanes of memory reflecting and brooding in his way with so much dreamy sequence and impact to be exerted.

Only weariness remains and this the extant of that, only repentance remains it that it could not. This is but the residue of meaning what it lingers on with as a remnant of all that happened, gone or past.

'Of that Love' is a remembrance, a sweet memory of that love which but existed once, of that love which bound both of them into an emotional bonding, sympathetic bond, but that love is gone perhaps, where is she now? He just remembers. It can also felt for someone whom one loves by heart and soul. The poem is so much subjective and objective too.

The poem is just like a dramatic monologue of Robert browning, the poem is just lie the Lucy poem of Wordsworth. It is also a fact people turn into strangers in course of time failing to recognize each other. How does time fly away? How do the memories remain it here? Man grows old. Things get lost. But memories leave you not.

He has now turned into stranger as he sees it in the mirror of time and reflection. The moment’s silence hardly moves over the glass. What had thought and what did it happen, take place? How had he dreamt and how did it happen? The turns of events, how to take to? How do the things take a turn?

The story does not stop it here, finish it, close it. No one is back here one who has gone. None can he recognize after a gap of time. From his side he sees it nothing. Everything has but come to a close. The story is finished now. Years have gone since he saw, watching the sky grow lonelier with cloudlessness, and waiting for her body to make it lived again.

The poem is just one from a diary remembering and thinking and going through what it happened once. Time has slipped, years have gone away, only the memories and reflections remain with to go by.

I said---Then, dearest, since 'tis so,

Since now at length my fate I know,

Since nothing all my love avails,

Since all, my life seemed meant for, fails,

Since this was written and needs must be---

My whole heart rises up to bless

Your name in pride and thankfulness!

Take back the hope you gave,---I claim

---Only a memory of the same,

---And this beside, if you will not blame,

Your leave for one more last ride with me.

My mistress bent that brow of hers;

Those deep dark eyes where pride demurs

When pity would be softening through,

Fixed me, a breathing-while or two,

With life or death in the balance: right!

The blood replenished me again;

My last thought was at least not vain:

I and my mistress, side by side

Shall be together, breathe and ride,

So, one day more am I deified.

Who knows but the world may end tonight?

               ----Robert Browning in The Last Ride Together

That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,

Looking as if she were alive. I call

That piece a wonder, now; Fra Pandolf’s hands

Worked busily a day, and there she stands.

Will’t please you sit and look at her? I said

“Fra Pandolf” by design, for never read

Strangers like you that pictured countenance,

The depth and passion of its earnest glance,

But to myself they turned (since none puts by

The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)

-----Robert Browning in My Last Duchess

Myth, whose myth, where’s?

The myths of life, snow-capped peaks of mountains and the caves of sadhus meditating

How the mystery of Nature and creation bewitching it all?

How the myths embroidered with motifs?

Where to now? Annapurna and Dhaulagiri.    

An Odia Christian, how could he write such a poem, we wonder, wonder!

A professor of physics, how could he envisage such a poem!

Myth

Years drift sluggishly through the air,

is a chanting, the long years, an incense.

Face upon face returns to the barbed horizons

of the foggy temple; here lies

a crumpled leaf, a filthy scarlet flower

out of placeless pasts, on the motionless stairs.

                                                  Old brassy bells

moulded by memories, dark, unfulfilled,

to make the year come back again

a recurring prayer.

                                                  The stairs seem endless,

lifelong,

                    and those peaks too, Annapurna, Dhaulagiri;

uncertain, impressive as gods.

                                                  I dare not go

into the dark, dank sanctum

                    where the myth shifts

swiftly from hand to hand, eye to eye.

                                                  The dried, sacrificed

flowers smile at me. I have become;

                                                  a diamond in my eye.

Vague grieving years pit against the distant peaks

like a dying butterfly

                                                  as a bearded, saffron-robed

man asks me, firmly:

                                                  Are you a Hindoo?

Myth is but a Yeastsian poem making us elucidate what a myth is, how the base and context of it, taking us to relate it in an archetypal and customary way. What is it held as a type symbolic of and representing the content?

Myth as a poem is actually a myth of Dhaulagiri and Annapurna, the snow-clad mountain peaks and ranges, Himalayan sights and scenery and the mythic ice connected with that. Trekking the routes to, he treks the stories of Hindu myth and mysticism coming down to us since times immemorial. The years which seem to be passing almost look like a chanting going, continuing for and the long years gone and past seem to be the incense burning around and the scent coming to as carried by the wind, its wisps and whiffs. Such is the mythical aroma and perfume doing the rounds. Here lies a crumpled flower, there lies a crumpled flower and leaf. The face after face which it seems to be hanging over tries to look into the landscape taking them to the barbed  horizons of the foggy temples. But the old brassy bells moulded by memories, dark and unfulfilled make the years come back again appearing to be a recurring prayer. The stairs to trek and go along appear to be long and tiresome and tedious, enough time to take in bearing the hazards and perils of the journey to be undertaken. The peaks themselves are as impressive as the gods appear to be speaking and the environment as if it were a place of godliness. What to say about the place? He dares not go into the dark and cold sanctum sanctorium where the myth seems to be shifting from hand to hand, eye to eye. There the dried flowers appear to smile at him again the moment he changes into a diamond. Vague grieving years pit against the distant peaks like a dying butterfly when a bearded, saffron-robed man enquires him if he is a Hindoo. The situation is just like that of Yesudas of South India, a classical singer whether to be allowed in a temple or not.

Myth is definitely one of the greatest poems ever written in the history of mythical poetry cutting the ice of Himalayan wisdom and meditation taking the readers to Dhavalgiri and Annapurna. If it is not called poetry, where poetry will be found? In this context Eliot’s reference to the gathering of black clouds over Himavant and the reference to Meru by Yeats dance before the eyes. The caves, places, scenarios, panoramas, mountains, caves, etc. are as such that these themselves with the pristine Nature fill a sense of purity and serenity within ourselves. The lookers, visitors feel appalled to see the scenery and sights.