Cognitivism and Behaviourism

Link: http://nishancperera.com/2011/01/31/cognitivist-vs-behaviourist-paradigms-points-of-convergence-and-divergence-by-nishan-perera/ 

Is cognitivism and behaviourism two different world views or do they explain the same phenomena from different lenses?

Introduction

This paper attempts to highlight points where the cognitivist and behaviouristic paradigms converge and diverge from a learning, education technology and instructional design point of view. In discussing this, the author is wondering whether these two paradigms offer entirely different world views in explaining the discussed concepts or do they attempt to explain the same phenomena from different lenses.

Ertmer & Newby (1993) cites empiricism and rationalism as two opposing positions on the origins of knowledge that has shaped many of the learning theories during the first half of the century. Empiricism “takes the view that experience is the primary sources of knowledge” while rationalism “takes the view that knowledge derives from reason without the aid of the senses” (Schunk, 1991 as quoted in Ertmer & Newby). The influences of these epistemologies are seen within the paradigms under discussion.

The most basic difference between cognitivist and behaviourism would be that the latter claims the creation of observable changes in behaviour (Mergel, 1998) as the cornerstone in learning, and education technology and instructional design is used to support this notion. Cognitivism focuses on the learner’s mind (Mergel, 1998) in explaining learning, and educational technology and instructional design is used to strengthen this association. Cognitivists attempt to build mental models through representation and behaviourist focus on the stimulus response process in the classical condition perspective and the use of an antecedent, operant and consequences through a process of reinforcements in the operant condition process. Do these differences make these viewpoints entirely different paradigms/different world views or are they really trying to focus on different parts of a common process?

The following sections will attempt to take a closer look at some of the concepts associated with learning, education technology and design in unfolding this question.

Learning

Learning has been defined in various ways, but universal agreement of any single definition does not exist (Ertmer & Newby, 1993). This is mainly due to the fact that different paradigms define learning through their own perspectives. In understanding learning more closely, concepts such as how learning occur, factors that influence learning, feedback process, the role of memory, the concept of knowledge, the view of an expert, is discussed below.

In terms of how learning occur, the cognitivist stresses the acquisition of knowledge and internal mental structures as important parameters of learning which is closer to the rationalist epistemology (Ertmer & Newby , 1993). It focuses on the conceptualization process and addresses issues of how information is received, organized, retrieved by the mind (Ertmer & Newby, 1993). Gardner (1987) highlights how symbols, rules and images are represented between input and output action for learning to take effect. The emphasis is not so much about what learners do but how they acquire, organize and retrieve information (Ertmer & Newby, 1993). As for the behaviouristic perspective, learning occurs with the changes in the form (law of effect, Skinner 1954) and frequency (through reinforcements, Skinner, 1954) of observable behaviour. Learning is accomplished when a proper response is demonstrated to a specific stimulus (Ertmer & Newby , 1993)  in the case of classical conditioning and voluntary behaviour shown through the interaction of an antecedent , operant and a consequence for the operant conditioning principles.(Wise, 2010). No attempt is made to determine the structure and the mental process associated with it.  (Ertmer & Newby, 1993). If one considers the input, process and the output of events, the cognitivist focus mainly on the process that takes place (in the mind) while the behaviourist emphasises on the output and the input components and treating the process as a black box.  This may be considered as the main difference, a point of divergence between the two paradigms. This may suggest that behaviourism would have a tendency to ignore the existence of the mind, conciseness or even deny the active participation of the learner in the process, but it is a false characterisation. Behaviourist following Skinner’s view “do not deny the notion of consciousness, mind” and accepts it as “private events but has a problem in stating that mental activity causes behavioural activity” (Quoted by Wise, 2010). The above discussion does not suggest that these two learning theories are entirely different world views but it seems like an attempt to explain different parts of the input, process and the output model in the context of how learning takes place. With regard to this assertion, the author would state that the two paradigms would converge with the intention it attempts to explain different components of a common learning process. 

In terms of which factors influence learning, behaviourists claim that “environmental conditions receive the greatest emphasis. The most critical factor is the arrangement of stimuli and consequences within the environment” whereas cognitivism “emphasizes the role that the environment plays in facilitating learning” (Ertmer & Newby, 1993). The divergent point would be the treatment of the environment as a focal starting point under behaviourism while considering it as a facilitator in the cognitive movement. But the fact that both pays attention to the environment and the context in different degrees, could this be treated as an opportunity for these views to converge considering the environment as a common incubator for learning to take shape?

The emphasis placed by feedback, Ertmer and Newby (1993, page 60) states that “Many of the instructional strategies advocated and utilized by cognitivists are also emphasized by behaviourist, yet used for different reasons. An obvious commonalty is the use of feedback – behaviourist use feedback (reinforcement) to modify behaviour in the desired direction while cognitivist make use of feedback (knowledge of results) to guide and support accurate mental connections”. However, Wise (2010) states that “I would add that a behaviourist justification relates to the need for the learner to associate the reinforcement with the operation they performed, whereas a cognitive justification refers to the efficiency of giving feedback while the problem/attempted solution path is still in the working memory of the learner. From a behaviourist position, if the feedback isn’t immediate, it is useless; but from a cognitive position, it is just less efficient”. (Wise, response to a statement made by the online moderator of the class online discussion, week6). This sounds like an efficiency verses an effectiveness argument with regard to the use of feedback by both paradigms. The author would like to claim that this is an attempt to explain the phenomena of feedback from different points of view than presenting feedback as an entirely different process.

A key difference between the two views would be the concept of memory. Behaviourist “typically does not address the concept of memory although acquisition habits are discussed and  little attention is given how these habits are stored and recalled” while memory is given a prominent role in cognitivism since “ learning results when information is stored in  memory in an organized and a meaningful way”. (Ertmer & Newby, 1993). This does not highlight that memory is disregarded by the behaviourists but this concept is not addressed. A point that relates to this would be the concept of knowledge. Knowledge in the behaviourist perspective is a “repertoire of behaviours” while in cognitive perspective it is related to as “mental models of the world with abstract representations such as, schemas/scripts” (Wise, 2010, Classroom Material). In this context, is knowledge something that one acquires or is it something that relates to “legitimate peripheral participation”? (Safard, 1998). It is clear that in the cognitive paradigm, knowledge is considered to be an acquisition process since “learning is stated as an act of gaining knowledge”; it stresses “the individual mind and what goes on in it” (Safard, 1998). The acknowledgement of existence of the mind and memory in the cognitive domain will further provide a basis for this point of view. However, in the behaviourist realm where the repertoire of behaviours which is equated to knowledge, how could knowledge be acquired in the absence of a discussion of a mind or memory? If one uses the deductive methodology to argue this point, can the behaviourist point of view of knowledge be explained through the participation metaphor? Safard, 1998 states that “the participation metaphor does not relate to knowledge, concepts but introduced a noun as knowing which indicates action”. Therefore can we dismiss the participation metaphor and claim acquisition? Safard, 1998 goes on to state that

“One may oppose the classification of learning theories as purely acquisitional or participational. The act of acquisition is often equivalent to the act of becoming a participant. It would be a difficult argument to consider these as separate or mutually exclusive. Theories can be classified as acquisition oriented or participation oriented only if they disclose a clear preference for one metaphorical ingredient over the other”.

So in this context, while it is clear that the cognitivist paradigm relates more to acquisition, the behaviourist paradigm cannot be clearly classified as acquisition or participation, then they can converge or diverge depending on the strength of each case.  

As for the concept of an expert, to achieve the state of being an expert, one needs to move from a lower level to a higher level performer in a given field, profession (Wise, 2010,). The National Research council (2000) presented six principles that would differentiate a novice from an expert. These reflect on knowledge acquired and seem to suggest expertise from a more cognitive view. If we relate to an expert from a behavioural perspective, an expert could be one who does something with fewer errors, does it faster meeting the benchmarks, ability to discriminate between effective and efficient actions (EDUC932, Class Discussion). If we consider this, expertise could be viewed from a behaviourist perspective since an expert could also build complex behaviours. Thus, the notion of expertise would be common to both cognitivist and behaviourist although it is built differently.

Reviewing the facts so far that converge and diverge the two paradigms for a learning point of view, it seem to suggest that both cognitivism and behaviorism has attempted to explain learning from different lenses rather than pronouncing to be extremely divergent world views that explain learning.

Education Technology

Saettler (1990) states that it is difficult to pin down to one definition of what education technology is, since it is intertwined with various historical, philosophical and psychological perspectives. He highlights several paradigms of education technology. They are namely the physical science or media approach to technology which identifies educational technology with media that aid instruction. The communications approach to technology, “focus shifts to the entire process of communicating information from the source to the receiver from mere media” (Saettler, 1990).

In further looking at education technology through any of the above paradigms of technology, one can draw on differences of how education technology is used both in cognitive and behaviourist realms.

Anderson et, al (1995) highlights how cognitivist could use media such as computers in building cognitive tutors using principles such as production rules, communicating goal structures, problem solving, maximising working memory, providing immediate feedback on errors etc. (8 Principles of building cognitive tutors). The whole focus of using media in the cognitive movement is to allow students to assimilate knowledge by creating representations to acquire and internalizing knowledge through the provision of feedback.

Skinner (1954) also advocated the use of teaching machines to support learning using behaviouristic principles. The argument to use such media in this movement would be to manage the sheer numbers of contingencies of reinforcement used to shape as well as to strengthen the observable behaviours created through stimuli. Keller’s(1968) principles which represents behaviouristic learning concepts presented using computer based media (Math Emporium) is another example of how computers as media could be used to “develop a skilful program which moves forward a series of progressive approximations to a final complex behaviour” (Skinner, 1954). The emphasis on shaping or successive approximations to achieve desired behaviours (Case & Bereiter,1984) was the focus in using media which contrasted from the cognitivist use of media to provide clear information, thoughtful practice and informative feedback (Reighluth, 1999) to support learning.

It is clear that behaviourist and cognitivist application of technology is somewhat different. However, this difference is not on the way they believe how it would impact learning but on how it is applied to the different input, process and output stages of the learning process. So are these differences significantly divergent or is it more about an application to different parts of the same equation?

Design

Instructional design theory “offers explicit guidance on how to better help people learn, develop, a knowledge base that guides educational practice” (Reigeluth, 1999). Perkins as quoted in Reigeluth, 1999, highlights “theory one”, guidelines of what instruction should be to foster cognitive learning. Perkins state that a good instructional design theory in the cognitive realm should provide “clear information” about the goals, expected performance of instruction, include “thoughtful practice” to provide a learner to engage actively in the learning process, “informative feedback” to provide “thorough counsel to learners about their performance” and “strong intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to learners”.

In contrast to the above, Case & Bereiter (1984) highlights behaviouristic design guidelines to start with “identifying the potential reinforces”, “identify the desired behaviours ”, “describe the initiate behaviour of the learner”, “define the series of behaviours”, “move students through a sequence” and “reinforce behaviours”.

A closer look at the above will highlight some points of convergence and divergence between the cognitive and behaviouristic instructional design practice. Both paradigms highlight objectives of instruction, but the behaviourist highlight what the “person does” than what a cognitivist would highlight what a “person achieves” (Case & Bereiter, 1984). The behaviourist emphasize “on a sequence of activities leading to the final outcome where each successive behaviour representing a small modification of the preceding one” (Case & Bereiter, 1984). Gegne (1984) is suggesting a hierarchical task analysis which states that “a higher order intellectual skill is based on lower level skills” (on an on) seem to suggest a parallel with the behaviourist realm. Although Gegne states that this process is not linear in the cognitive realm, the fact of a progression seems to be an idea that both cognitivists and behaviourists could share in the instructional design process. Also the work of Gegne (1984) in introducing cognitive behaviourism as a solution to overcome the weakness of some of the principles of behaviourism in instructional design theory is another example of how these two paradigms could be used together in instructional design theories.

Also for the purpose of comparison on a more micro level of instruction, setting learning objectives in both realms are compared and contrasted in this section. In setting learning objectives, both in the behaviouristic and in the cognitive realms “refer to the learning outcome and not the process of getting there” and the “objective refers to the student and not the instructor”. However, behavioural objectives tend to be more “observable and specific” and “pre-requisite and successive criteria would be more clear and specific” than cognitive objectives.   (Quoted by Wise, 2010). Also cognitive and behavioural objectives set at the lower level tend not to be that different while at the higher levels, setting them for these realms tends to have varying levels of difficulties (Class Discussion, week 6). The author is raising the question whether both cognitive and behaviourist objectives could be combined in designing a given instructional activity?

Once again while the differences between both the cognitive and the behaviouristic realms are evident in instructional designing theory, are these differences significant enough for these two approaches to be categorised as two different paradigms?

Conclusion

As stated in the introduction, the objective of this paper was an attempt to highlight how both cognitivist and behaviouristic paradigms converge and diverge in the areas of learning, education technology and in instructional design. There were situations that some differences were highlighted and also some situations where these realms found common ground to some degree. In articulating this view, the main question that the author raised was whether both cognitivism and behaviourism are different world views/paradigms or do they attempt to explain the same phenomena from different lenses? It was the attempt of the author to argue supporting the assertion that both cognitivism and behaviourism attempts to explain the input, process and the output elements that is associated with the human learning process from different angles using different language, than presenting themselves as two different world views as painted in some literature. Neither of these views will truly converge nor will be considered as divergent since it explains different parts of the same process. Wouldn’t it be beneficial if these views are used to explain learning, technology and the design from a more wholistic point of view than merely compare and contrast them which will explain two sides of the same coin anyway?

References

Anderson, J., Corbett, A. T., Koedinger, K. R., & Pelletier, R. (1995). Cognitive tutors: Lessons learned. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 4(2), 167-207

Case, R., and Bereiter, C. (1984). From behaviourism to cognitive behaviourism to cognitive development: Steps in the evolution of instructional design. Instructional Science, 13, 141-158.

Cook, S. & Brown, J. S. (1999) Bridging epistemologies: The generative dance between organizational knowledge and organizational knowing. Organization Science, 10(4)381-400.

Edmonds, G. S., Branch, R. C., & Mukherjee, P. (1994). A conceptual framework for comparing instructional design models. ETR&D 42(4), 55-72.

Ertmer & Newby. (1993), Behaviourism, cognitivism, constructivism: comparing critical features from an instructional design perspective. Performance Improvement Quarterly, V6 (4)

Gardner (1987). The mind’s new science: A history of the cognitive revolution. USA: Basic Books. Chp 2.

Keller (1968). Good-bye Teacher…, Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 1, 79-89.

Löwgren & Stolterman (2004). Thoughtful Interaction Design: A design perspective on information technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (Preface & Introduction)

Molenda, M. (1997). Historical and philosophical foundations of instructional design: A North American view. In R. Tennyson, Schott, F., Seel, N., and Dijkstra, S. (Eds.) Instructional design: International perspectives (pp. 41- 53). NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates

 National Research Council (2000). How people learn: brain, mind experience and school. Washington, DC. National Academy Press. Ch 2.

Reigeluth, C. (1999). What is instructional-design theory and how is it changing? In C. Reigeluth (Ed) Instructional-design theories and models, Volume II. NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Saettler, P (1990), The evolution of American educational technology, Information Age Publishing, 1990

Safard, A. (1998) On two metaphors for learning and the dangers of choosing just one. Educational Researcher, 27(2), 4-13.

Skinner, B.F. (1954). The science of learning and the art of teaching. Harvard Educational Review, 24(1), 86-97.

Wise, A (2010), EDUC932, Class notes, PowerPoint Presentations and Discussion Points

Dreamer Meets Revolutionary

Dreamer Meets Revolutionary

by 

Raza Naeem pays homage to the man he calls “Pakistan’s Gramsci”, the writer Syed Sibte Hasan

From the Journal The Friday Times. For original click on the link: 

Among friends - Sibte Hasan, Dr M. Sarwar and Faiz Ahmed Faiz

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31 July marked the 99th birth anniversary of the pioneer of the Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA) in undivided India and of the Communist Party in Pakistan – Sibte Hasan. Like Antonio Gramsci, the Italian thinker and activist, Hasan endured repeated jail terms, first during his sojourn in the US, and then in Pakistan in 1951–55 and again during the Ayub regime. Both thinkers chose to write in their native language: Italian for Gramsci and Urdu for Hasan. Both Gramsci and Hasan were concerned with producing organic and original theories, applying Marxist concepts to their material realities rather than the other way round. Chances are that Pakistan’s younger breed of comrades knows their Gramsci, but not their Sibte Hasan.

Despite Sibte Hasan’s iconic stature in the Subcontinent, very little is known about him: neither he nor some of his closest comrades, such as Faiz Ahmed Faiz, wrote anything about him. Sibte Hasan was born in Azamgarh, India, in 1916 and graduated from Aligarh Muslim University. He embarked on a distinguished journalistic career, serving the Pioneer (Lucknow), National Herald (Allahabad) and the Bombay Chronicle besides the Urdu daily Payam of Hyderabad, Deccan. He was also the editor of the renowned literary journal Naya Adab and the Lahore weekly Lail-o-Nahar. His initiation into socialism began while he was a student. In his preface to Moosa se Marx Tak, which has for decades served as the bible of Marxism for thousands of left-wing activists in the Subcontinent, he admits: “I learnt the first principles of socialism from the prominent revolutionary historian the late Dr Muhammad Ashraf. Those were the days when the English were dominant in the country and the entry of socialist literature was totally prohibited.”

Sibte Hasan, the dreamer

In 1951, along with other comrades, he was arrested in the trumped-up Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case and remained in prison until 1955. He was rearrested after Ayub Khan assumed power. After his release, he worked for a time with Ferozsons, later moving to the Eastern Federal Insurance Company as director in charge of publications and publicity. This gave him the time and opportunity to devote his energies to writing. Owing to his significant works in Urdu – Moosa se Marx Tak (From Moses to Marx),Adab aur Roshan Khayali (Literature and Enlightenment), Pakistan main Tehzeeb ka Irtiqa (The Evolution of Culture in Pakistan), Inqilab-e-Iran (The Iranian Revolution) and his sole English work, The Battle of Ideas in Pakistan, Hasan became a pre-eminent popular intellectual associated with progressive and secular ideas in Pakistan.

Earlier in April this year, while on a visit to Karachi, I accompanied a comrade to meet Naushaba Zuberi, Sibte Hasan’s daughter, in an attempt to piece together the latter’s life in the city he made his permanent home. Sibte sahib changed many homes throughout his life, but never owned one. Then, in 1975, his daughter and her husband built a house in Gulshan-e-Iqbal and asked Sibte sahib to stay with them. He spent 11 years here and, as per his request, the house had no partitions or boundary walls in order that his grandchildren might come and go freely. He lived in two rooms: one for studying and the other a bedroom, and tended to his mehndi and haar singhar plants in the garden. As a rule, he refrained from accepting dinner invitations and would only make an exception for someone’s wedding or to call upon a sick comrade in Landhi or Korangi. Interestingly, said his daughter, given that he anticipated arrest at any time, Sibte sahib always kept a carton of milk and a packet of tea by his bedside and had instructed her to go to his friend Tariq Suhail’s house if ever he was arrested.

Gramsci

Pakistan’s younger breed of comrades likely know their Gramsci, but not their Sibte Hasan

After Sibte sahib’s death, Zuberi turned the house in Gushan-e-Iqbal into a library and even appointed a librarian for it. When no one came to visit, she was heartbroken and sold the house in 1988, Sibte sahib would not have approved…

Following his release from prison, Sibte Hasan wrote prodigiously. From current affairs to anthropology, and from the history of Marxism to a people’s history of Pakistan and the roots of Islamic fundamentalism and secularism in the country, he wrote in simple Urdu. During the Cold War, when most communists in the country were divided between their loyalties to either Beijing or Moscow, underground, in jail or executed, Sibte sahib was one of the few intellectuals and activists who courageously opposed military dictatorships uncompromisingly and, through his works, tried to sow the seeds of progressive thought in Pakistan, be it Marxism or secularism.

The Evolution of Culture in Pakistan, which was published exactly forty years ago, is one of his seminal works, but surprisingly ignored even by those on the left. Sibte sahib’s intent in writing the book was nothing less than what Gramsci had similarly intended for the Italian national condition in his Prison Notebooks: to ascribe a central role to culture in explaining the people’s history of Pakistan. He writes, “There is great fanfare about culture these days in Pakistan […] There is no denying that culture plays a very important role in shaping and construction of personality, but the negligence which has hitherto been shown towards cultural problems, whether these discussions would contribute to remedying it, no one can tell.”

In Sibte Hasan’s hands, the narrative of our cultural evolution becomes a history from below

Unlike Gramsci, however, Sibte Hasan spent considerable time discussing the definition of culture: “The system of meaningful creativity and social values of any society is called culture […] Therefore language, instruments and tools, methods of production and social relations, way of life, the arts, knowledge and literature, philosophy and wisdom, beliefs and magic, manners and habits, rituals and traditions, the behaviour of love and family relations, etc., are different manifestations of culture.”

From this definition, Sibte sahib moves onto the synthesizing elements of culture, which for him, form the basis for all the new and old cultures of the world. These are physical conditions, instruments and tools, systems of thought and feeling, and social values. Hasan adopts a wide panorama enveloping the ancient cultures of the Indus Valley, the Aryans, the Greek, Saka and Kushan influences, the Arabs, Turks and Iranians, and the rise and decline of Mughals before concluding with a reflection on Mughal culture in the mirror of its Western contemporary.

A number of things stand out in Hasan’s analysis. First, as mentioned before, this book came out in the mid-1970s when the democratic government of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was in power and there was much debate on the definition of Pakistani culture among both the left and the right. Sibte sahib wrote about the evolution of Pakistani culture in a detached manner – one not given over to emotion but tracing a 5,000-year-old civilization in a scientific manner. In his hands, the narrative of our cultural evolution becomes a history from below, a people’s history, rather than a mere chronicle of the exploits and adventures of kings and rulers and palace intrigues.

Sibte Hasan helped found the Progressive Writers Association

Second, Sibte sahib’s account painstakingly establishes the fact that the Subcontinent’s history has been a history of the separation of religion and politics. For example, one of the most powerful kings of the Mameluk dynasty in Delhi, Ghias-ud-din Balban, would say openly that matters of state were subject to national convenience rather than to the laws devised by theologians. Sibte sahib writes, “It is correct that the rulers used religion for the benefit of their class and did not find anything wrong with using the services of maulvis, pundits and clerics, but they were unwilling to accept religious representatives as their masters.”

The third distinctive feature of Hasan’s work is the space he devotes to popular movements of the Subcontinent. One is the Bhakti movement, which is usually dismissed as a “Hindu” movement, but was in reality a joint movement of lower-class Hindus and Muslims. The other popular movement, which Sibte sahib treats as more than a historical footnote, is the Roshaniya movement founded by the ‘Pir-e-Roshan’ Bayazid Ansari during the reign of Mughal emperor Akbar. Despite leading an egalitarian movement, says Sibte sahib, “Historians and religious scholars too have presented Pir Roshan’s character in a very biased manner and tried to prove him an infidel, heretic, dacoit and even a robber. His historical greatness should be reviewed in the light of the longstanding enmity between the Mughals and Pakhtuns. The Pakhtuns never accepted Mughal suzerainty; in fact, where and whenever they had an opportunity, they used it to rebel.”

Women, too, have their fair share in Sibte Hasan’s narrative, especially the present underdevelopment of women and the growth of brothels in the Subcontinent under the influence of Muslim notables: “Upper and middle class women were paralyzed because of purdah. Dancing and singing, which was considered a sacred prayer in Hindu society, was deemed as the forbidden tree among Muslims thanks to the cleric’s fatwas. And thereby Muslim notables began to patronize the dancing and singing establishments. This is how this sacred art became a source of entertainment for the full-bellied and for the satisfaction of lust in the cities.”

The Mughal period also comes alive in these pages and Sibte sahib gives more credit to this era for leaving a lasting influence on the region than many are willing to do. One of his great achievements in the chapter on the rise and fall of the Mughals is the way he has treated Aurangzeb, the last major Mughal emperor. Historians either usually depict him as a fundamentalist successor to the four caliphs or a cruel tyrant who showed no mercy to his own father, brothers and progeny in his quest for unlimited power. Despite being a committed secularist, Sibte sahib refuses to take sides, rather describing the man and his times as they were.

Writing about the celebrated battle of ideas between Aurangzeb and his learned free-thinker brother Dara Shikoh, he writes: “If Aurangzeb won and Dara Shikoh lost in this civil war, it was because such was the need of the times. Regarding the charge that the sharia-compliant Aurangzeb betrayed his brothers and put his aged father in prison, in the period of personalized rule, this was the norm everywhere regardless of West or East. To shed the blood of father and brothers for throne and crown was not really a new tradition and had Dara Shikoh won out, he would have treated Aurangzeb in the same manner as the latter with the former.”

One of the most crucial arguments of the book is the thesis that the chief blame for the decline of the Mughal Empire and subsequent British domination in India lay with the scientific and commercial short-sightedness of the Mughals. Very much like their Ottoman contemporaries, even as farsighted a ruler as Akbar refused to either set up the printing press or even to learn more about it, justifying this historic blunder by arguing for the inferiority of machines in relation to his calligraphers, fearing it would leave them unemployed. In a moving and lyrical passage, Sibte sahib writes, “We should search for the main reasons of the decline of Mughal culture in their self-sufficient society, which did not find the need for invention and innovation; in those instruments and tools which had not changed since centuries; in that feudal system which did not have space left for further progress; in that authoritarian personalized rule in which the authority to decide the fate of country and nation belonged to the king and the nobles, and the ruled had no right of representation at any level.”

When the book was published in 1975, forty years ago, it immediately set off a debate in South Asian Marxist circles regarding the social conditions in India before the arrival of the British, and what impact the latter’s development had on modes of production. Since this was the first time such a thesis had been presented in Urdu, it drew in eminent Pakistani intellectuals such as Safdar Mir, Muhammad Ali Siddiqi and Hamza Alavi.

2016 will be celebrated as the birth centenary of Pakistan’s greatest Marxist thinker. Throughout his life, he was respected in all circles despite his Marxist affiliations; his death was widely condoled by all shades of political opinion, including political parties and heads of state. Yet his seminal works are not widely known or taught in the so-called heartlands of Urdu or outside a tiny minority of dedicated leftists (they are certainly lapped up enthusiastically elsewhere in Pakistan, in Sindh, Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhuwa). Translation would certainly play a pivotal role here for the many people who still do not have access to Sibte sahib’s work. None of the eleven books he wrote in Urdu have been translated into English to date.

At a time where demagogues and opportunists have taken up the mantle of “public intellectual” and appeal to a middle-class youth hungry for change – rather than the modest and soft-spoken man born nearly a century ago – the challenge he has thrown to us in concluding The Evolution of Culture in Pakistan still remains:

“… what will be the fate of our national culture and regional cultures in the era of this industrial culture?”

The author is a social scientist, translator and critic based in Lahore. The translations in this essay are his

- See more at: http://www.thefridaytimes.com/tft/dreamer-meets-revolutionary/#sthash.wITy2J5h.IFATvZkV.dpuf

Chaos Theory

Link https://web.archive.org/web/20130805120146/http://www.imho.com/grae/chaos/chaos.html

Chaos Theory: A Brief Introduction

What exactly is chaos? The name "chaos theory" comes from the fact that the systems that the theory describes are apparently disordered, but chaos theory is really about finding the underlying order in apparently random data.

When was chaos first discovered? The first true experimenter in chaos was a meteorologist, named Edward Lorenz. In 1960, he was working on the problem of weather prediction. He had a computer set up, with a set of twelve equations to model the weather. It didn't predict the weather itself. However this computer program did theoretically predict what the weather might be.

Figure 1: Lorenz's experiment: the difference between the starting values of these curves is only .000127. (Ian Stewart, Does God Play Dice? The Mathematics of Chaos, pg. 141)

One day in 1961, he wanted to see a particular sequence again. To save time, he started in the middle of the sequence, instead of the beginning. He entered the number off his printout and left to let it run.

When he came back an hour later, the sequence had evolved differently. Instead of the same pattern as before, it diverged from the pattern, ending up wildly different from the original. (See figure 1.) Eventually he figured out what happened. The computer stored the numbers to six decimal places in its memory. To save paper, he only had it print out three decimal places. In the original sequence, the number was .506127, and he had only typed the first three digits, .506.

By all conventional ideas of the time, it should have worked. He should have gotten a sequence very close to the original sequence. A scientist considers himself lucky if he can get measurements with accuracy to three decimal places. Surely the fourth and fifth, impossible to measure using reasonable methods, can't have a huge effect on the outcome of the experiment. Lorenz proved this idea wrong.

This effect came to be known as the butterfly effect. The amount of difference in the starting points of the two curves is so small that it is comparable to a butterfly flapping its wings.

The flapping of a single butterfly's wing today produces a tiny change in the state of the atmosphere. Over a period of time, what the atmosphere actually does diverges from what it would have done. So, in a month's time, a tornado that would have devastated the Indonesian coast doesn't happen. Or maybe one that wasn't going to happen, does. (Ian Stewart, Does God Play Dice? The Mathematics of Chaos, pg. 141)

This phenomenon, common to chaos theory, is also known as sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Just a small change in the initial conditions can drastically change the long-term behavior of a system. Such a small amount of difference in a measurement might be considered experimental noise, background noise, or an inaccuracy of the equipment. Such things are impossible to avoid in even the most isolated lab. With a starting number of 2, the final result can be entirely different from the same system with a starting value of 2.000001. It is simply impossible to achieve this level of accuracy - just try and measure something to the nearest millionth of an inch!

From this idea, Lorenz stated that it is impossible to predict the weather accurately. However, this discovery led Lorenz on to other aspects of what eventually came to be known as chaos theory.

Lorenz started to look for a simpler system that had sensitive dependence on initial conditions. His first discovery had twelve equations, and he wanted a much more simple version that still had this attribute. He took the equations for convection, and stripped them down, making them unrealistically simple. The system no longer had anything to do with convection, but it did have sensitive dependence on its initial conditions, and there were only three equations this time. Later, it was discovered that his equations precisely described a water wheel.

At the top, water drips steadily into containers hanging on the wheel's rim. Each container drips steadily from a small hole. If the stream of water is slow, the top containers never fill fast enough to overcome friction, but if the stream is faster, the weight starts to turn the wheel. The rotation might become continuous. Or if the stream is so fast that the heavy containers swing all the way around the bottom and up the other side, the wheel might then slow, stop, and reverse its rotation, turning first one way and then the other. (James Gleick, Chaos - Making a New Science, pg. 29)

Figure 2: The Lorenz Attractor (James Gleick, Chaos - Making a New Science, pg. 29)

The equations for this system also seemed to give rise to entirely random behavior. However, when he graphed it, a surprising thing happened. The output always stayed on a curve, a double spiral. There were only two kinds of order previously known: a steady state, in which the variables never change, and periodic behavior, in which the system goes into a loop, repeating itself indefinitely. Lorenz's equations were definitely ordered - they always followed a spiral. They never settled down to a single point, but since they never repeated the same thing, they weren't periodic either. He called the image he got when he graphed the equations the Lorenz attractor. (See figure 2)

In 1963, Lorenz published a paper describing what he had discovered. He included the unpredictability of the weather, and discussed the types of equations that caused this type of behavior. Unfortunately, the only journal he was able to publish in was a meteorological journal, because he was a meteorologist, not a mathematician or a physicist. As a result, Lorenz's discoveries weren't acknowledged until years later, when they were rediscovered by others. Lorenz had discovered something revolutionary; now he had to wait for someone to discover him.

Another system in which sensitive dependence on initial conditions is evident is the flip of a coin. There are two variables in a flipping coin: how soon it hits the ground, and how fast it is flipping. Theoretically, it should be possible to control these variables entirely and control how the coin will end up. In practice, it is impossible to control exactly how fast the coin flips and how high it flips. It is possible to put the variables into a certain range, but it is impossible to control it enough to know the final results of the coin toss.

A similar problem occurs in ecology, and the prediction of biological populations. The equation would be simple if population just rises indefinitely, but the effect of predators and a limited food supply make this equation incorrect. The simplest equation that takes this into account is the following:

next year's population = r * this year's population * (1 - this year's population)

In this equation, the population is a number between 0 and 1, where 1 represents the maximum possible population and 0 represents extinction. R is the growth rate. The question was, how does this parameter affect the equation? The obvious answer is that a high growth rate means that the population will settle down at a high population, while a low growth rate means that the population will settle down to a low number. This trend is true for some growth rates, but not for every one.

Figure 3: The bifurcation diagram for the population equation. (James Gleick, Chaos - Making a New Science, pg. 71)

One biologist, Robert May, decided to see what would happen to the equation as the growth rate value changes. At low values of the growth rate, the population would settle down to a single number. For instance, if the growth rate value is 2.7, the population will settle down to .6292. As the growth rate increased, the final population would increase as well. Then, something weird happened. As soon as the growth rate passed 3, the line broke in two. Instead of settling down to a single population, it would jump between two different populations. It would be one value for one year, go to another value the next year, then repeat the cycle forever. Raising the growth rate a little more caused it to jump between four different values. As the parameter rose further, the line bifurcated (doubled) again. The bifurcations came faster and faster until suddenly, chaos appeared. Past a certain growth rate, it becomes impossible to predict the behavior of the equation. However, upon closer inspection, it is possible to see white strips. Looking closer at these strips reveals little windows of order, where the equation goes through the bifurcations again before returning to chaos. This self-similarity, the fact that the graph has an exact copy of itself hidden deep inside, came to be an important aspect of chaos.

An employee of IBM, Benoit Mandelbrot was a mathematician studying this self-similarity. One of the areas he was studying was cotton price fluctuations. No matter how the data on cotton prices was analyzed, the results did not fit the normal distribution. Mandelbrot eventually obtained all of the available data on cotton prices, dating back to 1900. When he analyzed the data with IBM's computers, he noticed an astonishing fact:

The numbers that produced aberrations from the point of view of normal distribution produced symmetry from the point of view of scaling. Each particular price change was random and unpredictable. But the sequence of changes was independent on scale: curves for daily price changes and monthly price changes matched perfectly. Incredibly, analyzed Mandelbrot's way, the degree of variation had remained constant over a tumultuous sixty-year period that saw two World Wars and a depression. (James Gleick, Chaos - Making a New Science, pg. 86)

Mandelbrot analyzed not only cotton prices, but many other phenomena as well. At one point, he was wondering about the length of a coastline. A map of a coastline will show many bays. However, measuring the length of a coastline off a map will miss minor bays that were too small to show on the map. Likewise, walking along the coastline misses microscopic bays in between grains of sand. No matter how much a coastline is magnified, there will be more bays visible if it is magnified more.

Chaos - Figure 4: The Koch curve (James Gleick, Chaos - Making a New Science, pg. 99)

One mathematician, Helge von Koch, captured this idea in a mathematical construction called the Koch curve. To create a Koch curve, imagine an equilateral triangle. To the middle third of each side, add another equilateral triangle. Keep on adding new triangles to the middle part of each side, and the result is a Koch curve. (See figure 4) A magnification of the Koch curve looks exactly the same as the original. It is another self-similar figure.

The Koch curve brings up an interesting paradox. Each time new triangles are added to the figure, the length of the line gets longer. However, the inner area of the Koch curve remains less than the area of a circle drawn around the original triangle. Essentially, it is a line of infinite length surrounding a finite area.

To get around this difficulty, mathematicians invented fractal dimensions. Fractal comes from the word fractional. The fractal dimension of the Koch curve is somewhere around 1.26. A fractional dimension is impossible to conceive, but it does make sense. The Koch curve is rougher than a smooth curve or line, which has one dimension. Since it is rougher and more crinkly, it is better at taking up space. However, it's not as good at filling up space as a square with two dimensions is, since it doesn't really have any area. So it makes sense that the dimension of the Koch curve is somewhere in between the two.

Fractal has come to mean any image that displays the attribute of self-similarity. The bifurcation diagram of the population equation is fractal. The Lorenz Attractor is fractal. The Koch curve is fractal.

During this time, scientists found it very difficult to get work published about chaos. Since they had not yet shown the relevance to real-world situations, most scientists did not think the results of experiments in chaos were important. As a result, even though chaos is a mathematical phenomenon, most of the research into chaos was done by people in other areas, such as meteorology and ecology. The field of chaos sprouted up as a hobby for scientists working on problems that maybe had something to do with it.

Later, a scientist by the name of Feigenbaum was looking at the bifurcation diagram again. He was looking at how fast the bifurcations come. He discovered that they come at a constant rate. He calculated it as 4.669. In other words, he discovered the exact scale at which it was self-similar. Make the diagram 4.669 times smaller, and it looks like the next region of bifurcations. He decided to look at other equations to see if it was possible to determine a scaling factor for them as well. Much to his surprise, the scaling factor was exactly the same. Not only was this complicated equation displaying regularity, the regularity was exactly the same as a much simpler equation. He tried many other functions, and they all produced the same scaling factor, 4.669.

This was a revolutionary discovery. He had found that a whole class of mathematical functions behaved in the same, predictable way. This universality would help other scientists easily analyze chaotic equations. Universality gave scientists the first tools to analyze a chaotic system. Now they could use a simple equation to predict the outcome of a more complex equation.

Many scientists were exploring equations that created fractal equations. The most famous fractal image is also one of the most simple. It is known as the Mandelbrot set (pictures of the mandelbrot set). The equation is simple: z=z2+c. To see if a point is part of the Mandelbrot set, just take a complex number z. Square it, then add the original number. Square the result, then add the original number. Repeat that ad infinitum, and if the number keeps on going up to infinity, it is not part of the Mandelbrot set. If it stays down below a certain level, it is part of the Mandelbrot set. The Mandelbrot set is the innermost section of the picture, and each different shade of gray represents how far out that particular point is. One interesting feature of the Mandelbrot set is that the circular humps match up to the bifurcation graph. The Mandelbrot fractal has the same self-similarity seen in the other equations. In fact, zooming in deep enough on a Mandelbrot fractal will eventually reveal an exact replica of the Mandelbrot set, perfect in every detail.

Fractal structures have been noticed in many real-world areas, as well as in mathematician's minds. Blood vessels branching out further and further, the branches of a tree, the internal structure of the lungs, graphs of stock market data, and many other real-world systems all have something in common: they are all self-similar.

Scientists at UC Santa Cruz found chaos in a dripping water faucet. By recording a dripping faucet and recording the periods of time, they discovered that at a certain flow velocity, the dripping no longer occurred at even times. When they graphed the data, they found that the dripping did indeed follow a pattern.

The human heart also has a chaotic pattern. The time between beats does not remain constant; it depends on how much activity a person is doing, among other things. Under certain conditions, the heartbeat can speed up. Under different conditions, the heart beats erratically. It might even be called a chaotic heartbeat. The analysis of a heartbeat can help medical researchers find ways to put an abnormal heartbeat back into a steady state, instead of uncontrolled chaos.

Researchers discovered a simple set of three equations that graphed a fern. This started a new idea - perhaps DNA encodes not exactly where the leaves grow, but a formula that controls their distribution. DNA, even though it holds an amazing amount of data, could not hold all of the data necessary to determine where every cell of the human body goes. However, by using fractal formulas to control how the blood vessels branch out and the nerve fibers get created, DNA has more than enough information. It has even been speculated that the brain itself might be organized somehow according to the laws of chaos.

Chaos even has applications outside of science. Computer art has become more realistic through the use of chaos and fractals. Now, with a simple formula, a computer can create a beautiful, and realistic tree. Instead of following a regular pattern, the bark of a tree can be created according to a formula that almost, but not quite, repeats itself.

Music can be created using fractals as well. Using the Lorenz attractor, Diana S. Dabby, a graduate student in electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has created variations of musical themes. ("Bach to Chaos: Chaotic Variations on a Classical Theme", Science News, Dec. 24, 1994) By associating the musical notes of a piece of music like Bach's Prelude in C with the x coordinates of the Lorenz attractor, and running a computer program, she has created variations of the theme of the song. Most musicians who hear the new sounds believe that the variations are very musical and creative.

Chaos has already had a lasting effect on science, yet there is much still left to be discovered. Many scientists believe that twentieth century science will be known for only three theories: relativity, quantum mechanics, and chaos. Aspects of chaos show up everywhere around the world, from the currents of the ocean and the flow of blood through fractal blood vessels to the branches of trees and the effects of turbulence. Chaos has inescapably become part of modern science. As chaos changed from a little-known theory to a full science of its own, it has received widespread publicity. Chaos theory has changed the direction of science: in the eyes of the general public, physics is no longer simply the study of subatomic particles in a billion-dollar particle accelerator, but the study of chaotic systems and how they work.

Mahapatra: Bijay Kant Dubey

Jayanta Mahapatra (1928-) As A Poet

Among the exponents of modern Indian English poetry, as such Nissim Ezekiel, Purshottam Lal,  Keki N.Daruwalla, Shiv K.Kumar, Adil Jussawalla, Kamala Das, Shiv K.Kumar, Dom Moraes, Pritish Nandy, Arun Kolatkar, Dilip Chitre and a host of others, whom we presume to be the harbingers of modernism, Jayanta Mahapatra is definitely one of those who have furthered it with one collection after another.

Before discussing Jayanta Mahapatra and his poetry, one should keep in mind that Jayanta is first of all an Odia poet of Odisha then anything we say about him from the identity point of view. First, he is an Odia then an Indian, a regional then national and then international one by one. If we discuss as a poet, he is but an imagist and poetry is image-making. The other most important thing we have forgotten about him is this that he is professor of physics, not of literature and poetry comes to him through physics, via it, not properly, but through the channels of light and darkness theories, astrophysics and metaphysics.

There are so many things in his poetry and it is not easy to discuss him at a stretch and this is for which he is called complex and tedious one; a poet whose poems it is difficult to analyse and paraphrase. He is abstract that the lines mean they not exactly.

As a poet he is historical and the history, art and culture of Orissa have influenced him greatly and he just represents them. The Ganga Dynasty kings and the Kalinga Empire we have forgotten them, just the history of Delhi cannot be the history of India.

As a poet, he is of human hunger, want and scarcity which he has felt in the wide Indian countryside.

A realist he is down to realities and it can be marked in several of his poems when he speaks of the fate-lines of the girl, the poverty of the fisher girl, the defeat of Kalinga and the sun-burnt hamlets of the country. In the poem, Temple, he carries the same age-old story of hunger. The things are just the same; only the shapes keep changing with time.

A feminist he has written keeping in view the poor fate of the country girl, atrocities inflicted upon the Indian women folk doing household works namelessly without any credit given to her as for home-keeping. The tales of Indian backwardness, poverty and un-culture, illiteracy and un-education, how to say to? The woes of a developing third-world nation, none, but those who  live and suffer can know it well. In his long poem, Temple, he has resorted to rape and violence, basing on news items. What it maligns us is the gang-rape of the girl child and dumping of her beyond recognition.

A romantic, he is Wordsworthian, Keatsian, as and when he talks of mornings and evenings, dawns and dusks, noondays and midnights. A poet of the place, he is Lawrentine as for his references to Cuttack, Puri and Bhubaneswar and Hardyian too as they have referred to Nottinghamshire and Essex.

Silence is the prime thing through which the images germinate in a vacant mood of reflection. Sights and scenes are to see, pictures and images. Though silence is the main thing or crux of his poetry, but instead of it, there are ingredients of it. The silence of mornings and evenings, middays and midnights, dawns and dusks, daybreaks and twilights is one aspect while the silence of the solitary and secluded countryside with the hamlets and thorps against a backdrop the another thing of deliberation. At noonday the solitary pyres burning, the cremation work going on, voices resounding and the wife yawning and taking a siesta oblivious of all, tell of another bewitching silence.

 A poet of the sea, he describes it otherwise in terms of J.M.Synge’s Riders to the Sea and livelihood, the rituals going on in the aftermath of the cremation, as such the asthi-kalasha and the panda-dana.

Sexuality is another bewitching and intriguing aspect of his poetry which is but the Lawrentine quality.

A poet of the country, he tells of the mud-housed and straw-thatched hamlets and thorps scattered across a vast stretch of land.

Jayanta Mahapatra had not been a modernist, post-modernist but has become as for the specialties inherent in his poetry naturally. Generally, we call him modernist or post-modernist, or post-colonial as for his handling of the theme and the grasp and grip over the language, the grip over it. 

Silence is the key-word of Jayanta Mahapatra; the key-board and he keeps tapping them to play with words, juggling as a juggler, solving word-puzzles and cross-words. A ludo or chess player of words, he gives a tougher fight in coming to terms with him; his poetic words, sentences and stanzas and those stanzas are the stanzas of nothingness, existentialism, what it seems to be is not and what it seems not is to be. In a word, the gist of which is, his poetry borders on the  theme of nothingness and meaninglessness, nothing is what it seems to be and what it seems to be is nothing. Apart from a poet of silence, he is very much bewitching and intriguing. Against the backdrop of all this, the conspiracies and whispers of silence can be marked in the whorehouse and fisher girl images and pictures.

Eco-centric quality is the cardinal feature of his poetry. The sea, lakes, rivers, hills, water bodies, turtles, forests, empty spaces, vacant moods ns minds and the blank sheets of paper-like feeling possess the poetic self of the writer and he longs for an expression in them.  The poetry of Jayanta Mahapatra is eco-centric and environmental-friendly as and when the talks order on the theme of nothingness, existentialism and he shows us through the morning and the evening, their incessant coming and going, the passage of time. Solid mass or mater remains the same. Just the shapes of the things go changing and this is what he says, communicates and relates to in his poetry.

Linguistically rather than thematically, he goes on keeping us on the tenterhooks. His language is more powerful than being poetical and literary simply as because his is a language of science, that of physics and secondly he is a Christian too and thirdly he has studied in convent schools.

There are so many reasons for it.

Word-play is one of the bewitching characteristics of Jayanta Mahapatra and many struggle to catch the rhythm of his lines in order to mean them, but meaning is not in between the lines, just the images lie in. The images of the vacant skies, sunny and silvery with the spaces blankly lifting us and of the landscapes solitary and secluded, the herons and storks flying over a vast surface, these baffle and perplex us in grappling with.

For the foreign audience, not the Indian readers, some say it, he has written his poetry as had been famous before or in contact with them even before being recognized here. The foreigners too appreciated and admired him as for the bare details of India and the intriguing facts, cramming and compressed. The tales of hunger fascinate them; the tales of want and scarcity, moral depravity and corrosion.

The poems of Jayanta Mahapatra are the lyrics of silence which but a few have come to realize it. He is a poet of silence and his poetry the poetry of silence which is but one phase of his creative dimension.

There is Vedic incantation, Upanishadic recapitulation in Jayanta Mahapatra. The prayers, hymns and psalms recited in the Jagannatha temple can be overheard in his poetry and this is the mantric quality as well as incantation of his poetry. Such a thing is Vedic, Upanishadic and Puranic which it is available in him indirectly. The wooden frame from which the idols are made and changed every nineteen years is another time of festive celebration.

To read him is to know that he is a professor of physics turning, converting the matters and materials of physics into poetry. His base is of physics, not of literature, more especially poetry. He has come to understand and comprehend poetry just through physics. It is the theories of physics which tell of the history of the world in a different way seen through the creation of the universe and the theories doing the rounds.

He is a poet of the dark daughters whose trouble, tribulation we have failed to comprehend which is in other words the myth of feminism, how have we neglected our daughters, how have we treated them? Our patriarchal bias has ruined it all what good it was in us. The inequality and empathy with which we see our daughters hurts us, not only us, but the good and thinking people of the world. Such a thing struck it Derozio and he wrote The Fakir of Jungheera and it benumbed Pandit Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar.

He is a poet of Orissa, his mind one of it, his heart and soul. His mind can go nowhere except Orissa. His heart still beats for the rathyatra, the chariot festival of Puri.

His poetry is a departure from the conventional norms, rules and regulations of verse and he takes liberties with the fancy and imagination of his type, dream and reflection, leaving any a question asked and unasked, answered and unanswered.

This too is a fact not to be suppressed that fame came knocking at his door as there was a dearth of poets and he had been famous with his just Close the Sky, Ten by Ten and Svayamvara and Other Poems. Herein thought and meaning are not, juts image and word-play, abstract brooding and vacant thinking. On the chess-board of silence, he plays his moves tactfully with so much word-play and intrigue.

Waiting is without any doubt a book of Orissa, Orissan history and culture. Written against a historical backdrop, it stands for its crystal and contradictory imagery, surreal expression, change and shift in styles and transitions of thought, idea and imagery. The frequent references to Puri, Cuttack, Konark and Bhubaneswar make it an Oriya poetry-work.

The False Start contains in his famous Balasore elegy just to be placed by the side of Gray’s Elegy. A poem it startles us with its vivid imagery and clear-cut poetic conception and description. There is no ambiguity herein. Luckily, he is so meaningful here as that no one can doubt it that he is meaningless elsewhere. A poet of images, imagery and imagism, he has dealt with poetical themes, but he stuns us here.

A poet of rains and rites, he is very ambiguous as because he has little to do with the rains as it is a common phenomenon of the coastal area. Poetry to Mahapatra is an album of photographs and you just keep seeing them rather than asking him; poetry to Mahapatra is images fleeting and captured into the camera.

Close the Sky, Ten by Ten, Dialogue Publication, Calcutta, 1971,

Svayamvara and Other Poems, Writers Workshop, Calcutta, 1971,

A Father’s Hours, United Writers, Calcutta, 1976,

A Rain of Rites, University of Georgia Press, Athens (USA), 1976,

Waiting, Samkaleen Prakashan, New Delhi, 1979,

The False Start, Clearing House, Bombay, 1980,

Relationship, Greenfield Review Press, Greenfield, New York 1980,

Life Signs, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1983,

Dispossessed Nests, Nirala Publications, Jaipur,1986,

Selected Poems, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1987,

Burden of Waves and Fruit, Three Continents Press, Washington, 1988,

Temple, Dangaroo Press, Sydney, 1989,

A Whiteness of Bone, Viking Penguin, New Delhi, 1992,

The Best of Jayanta Mahapatra, Bodhi Publications, Calicut, 1995,

Shadow Space, D.C. Books, Kottayam, 1997,

Bare Face, D.C. Books, Kottayam, 2000,

Random Descent, Third Eye Communications, Bhubaneswar, 2005,

The Lie of Dawns: Poems 1974-2008, Authorspress, New Delhi, 2009,

Land, Authorspress, New Delhi, 2013.

Relationship, is a story of his relationship with the land of his birth, nativity and historicity of art and culture. With an Oriya mind and heart, he sings of Orissa, the Orissan scenes and landscapes and it is the book for which he has won the Sahitya Akademi award in 1981. 

His poetry is the poetry of silence and on the dashboard of it, he keeps uploading the images. A photographer of the rock-cut temples, he goes picturing the sculptures and figurines in love, war and devotion, telling of sociologically, dharma-artha-kama-and-moksha.

From the sea beach he sees the dawn flashing, the evening descending upon and enveloping the area, the solitary pyres burning.

The things of the dark consciousness the poet explores about through the nocturnal flight of imagination.

The poem Dark Flight may be quoted in:

The sky darkens. The afternoon wind

drifts through the streets of the old city

and wrecks the images on the placid river

that holds the sudden terror

of a man falling into its chilly depths.

My eyes are getting used to the dark.

From time to time 

my father comes at me       

with outstretched arms of judgement

and I answer from no clear place I am in.

If I could get up and move about,

seeking the quick swifts in the halflight in the rain,

trying to feel the wind on the wings

that overcome the earth. In a dream 

I hear someone’s laughter and it’s

no longer the same. In a wind

that carries the smoke and the fear,

the slow, doubled voice of wings 

we are always afraid to hear.

( Prevalent Aspects of Indian English Poetry, Edited by H.S.Bhatia, Sita Publications International, Khanna, Punjab, 1983-84, p.28)

What he feels, what he thinks and what he puts down on paper, it is not easy to grasp, express that as because he is so psychological and internal. The exterior not, but the interior at work is the chief property of the poet.

Loss is one of the poems which deserve to be mentioned:

Outside the house, the trees have grown.

Tonight a dark wind drops down

through the congested leaves

and the fidgets on the steps leading to my door:

it has a lonely voice

of tides spilling up over the beaches of our dreams.

The grass going bare unknown under our feet,

the pigeons sailing across the uneven heart,

the acres of water lying beyond our thirst:

each a key that refuses to turn in  a lock.

Nothing

that memory concealed with ominous heights.

Now when I open the door

is it the green grieving wind which pushes through

and disturbs the things hanging on that instant

or is it the breath of someone once loved

trying to shake something out of the mind?

(Modern Trends in Indo-Anglian Poetry, , Edited by H.S.Bhatia, Sita Publications International, Khanna, Punjab, 1983-84, Reprinted: October, 1982, p.15)

Illness as a poem can be read for our interpretation:

The wind veers. Suddenly, around me

in the darkness of evening.

The old cottage has taken on

a comfortable look,

the afternoon sun’s warmth

has seeped in through my shirt.

But this body

thrown up on its own thoughts.

Of warm water, clean sheets on a bed,

a naked whiteness thrust into summer,

swelling of mangoes and cashews.

Now, twilight.

And the brazen wind

just trying to talk about itself.

I try to touch things.

No one has come yet to turn on the light.

(Bridge-in-Making, Editor Pronab Kumar Majumder, January to April 1999, 24^th Number, p.8-9)

     

The myths of Jayanta are the myths of Orissa and the Oriyas; the folktales doing the rounds in his poetry. The myths of the dark daughters are but feministic and archival, historical and sociological.

As a poet Jayanta Mahapatra is Wordsworthian and Yeatsian, but first of all Ezra Poundian. Imagery and myth-making are the chief priorities, properties of the poet which he excels in profoundly. Rains of rites and rituals are the things of deliberation rather than pattering rains of the coastal area. The monsoon wedding is not the theme of Jayanta Mahapatra nor do the showers of Shravan or Bhadra month of the Hindu calendar. Jayanta is very confused in his art and craft of poetry-writing as the poems come to him as word-puzzles, cross-words and he likes to frolick with word-play.

A poet of summer, he can tell of the scent of the mangoes, raw and ripening, leafy green and sour, yellowish and ripe. A poet of summer, scorching heat and no respite from, he can suggest of passing the day under he shade of the mango groves. But side by side in that sweating can tell   of conjugal love; wet man-woman relationship.

Who does not know Jayanta Mahapatra, a modern Indian English poet who has received many coveted prizes and accolades world-wide? Let us see how he weaves poetic images and myths privately and personally.

To discuss Jayanta Mahapatra is to come to know it that he is first of all imagist than anything we presume about him. First of all, an Odia by identity, he is a poet of Odisha, the and of his birth and nativity and thereafter anything else we think about him. In a writer like him, there are so many aspects and perspectives to be perused.