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The foundation of modern Indian English Poetry in the post-independence period is believed to be laid down fundamentally by the trio of A.K. Ramanujan, R. Parthasarathy, and Jayanta Mahapatra. The trajectory of modern Indian English Poetry has been one of mimesis to reclaiming one’s identity, and from there celebrating it. Contemporary poets such as Nissim Ezekiel, Kamala Das, Arun Kolatkar, and Dilip Chitre engage with a conundrum of an identity crisis, claiming the English language and writing for a purpose beyond retaliation to the colonizers. They wrote in the times when a volatile nation was in its nascent stages, moving on the path of modernity while connected to its orthodox customs. There is a collective acknowledgement of the idea of mimesis of the western style of writing being effete for the Indian audience. Hence, the poets attempt to bring forth a sense of ‘Indianness’ or familiarity with the Indian spatial and temporal coordinates in their act of writing.

The concept of ‘Indianness’ is as elusive as the identity of ‘God’ as an entity and might require another paper to delineate. Thus, we will have to content ourselves with the idea that there is a visible shift in Indian English Poetry that facilitates the rise of autobiographical, natural, and socio-cultural elements in the works of these eminent poets. Where Jayanta Mahapatra roots his poems in the locale of Odisha, Ezekiel and Kolatkar capture the city of Mumbai, erstwhile Bombay, in their poems. The cultural significance of Puri, Odisha, or Mumbai has been delineated in the poems of these writers. The paper specifically looks at Jayanta Mahapatra and his works.

The man from Cuttack, Odisha, Jayanta Mahapatra was born into a Christian family. He was bullied in school and led a rather alienated life, living vicariously through reading and later, through writing. He wrote and published poetry in the latter half of his life and became the first poet to win a Sahitya Akademi Award for English poetry and a Padma Shri (2009). He has published twenty-seven works of poetry of which seven are in Odia. Apart from poetry, he has written essays and memoirs as well. However, the paper limits itself to analyzing Mahapatra’s poems. The poems in Collections such as Close the Sky, Ten by Ten (1971), A Rain of Rites (1976), Waiting (1979), Burden of Waves and Fruits (1988), and Land (2013) are some of his renowned works that dramatize the rural landscape of Odisha and explore the symbolism of nature, culture, and death. According to Dilip Chitre, Jayanta Mahapatra:

…is traditional in his poetic bias despite the contemporariness of his articulation. His verse is free and moves slowly and smoothly. It is almost languid in its metaphysical poise until suddenly he transforms elemental visual images of Indian nature and traditional rural life into memorable metaphors. Mahapatra is what the Indian poet writing in English is supposed to be: an interpreter of a unique, complex, and exotic culture through its landscape and people (Rukhaiyar, 150).

His poems are pregnant with symbolism and imagery ranging from rain to trees, from violence to death. The idea of death and decay is reiterated in his poems taking from the history of the land he was born in. “Jayanta Mahapatra dedicates his poetry to the ancient glory and contemporary plight of Odisha” (Subrat Kumar Samal, 16). The land of Odisha, erstwhile Kalinga, witnessed the horrors of the Kalinga War (261 BCE) where over one lakh people died due to the wrath of Emperor Ashoka. The bloodshed was unparalleled and it propelled Ashoka to relinquish arms and violence and move on the path of Dhamma. The land has also been a victim of one of the most horrid famines in the pre-independence days. The 1866 Famine of Odisha was called by Bidyut Mohanty in his book A Haunting Tragedy (Routledge, 2021)by the same name. The British exported over two hundred million pounds of rice to Great Britain while over a million people, one-third of the population of Odisha died from hunger, cholera, malaria, or poverty. The injustice that had occurred under colonial misgovernance brought impetus to the national movement (Dréze, 2022). However, the loss of loved ones had to be suppressed and the dilapidated families could only continue with their lives that were intricately woven with the land and the nature that surrounded them.

This interconnectedness of the people with land and nature forms the microcosm of Mahapatra’s world. He presents the readers with the vulnerable and naïve world of the people of Odisha who find themselves to be affected by the larger socio-politico-cultural upheavals that torment the place. The macrocosm of the cultural, social, and political domains brings violence, restraint, and death. This juxtaposition of the microcosm with the macrocosm is dramatized and immortalized by Mahapatra through his works, thereby making him ‘the bard of Odisha’. “He can be termed more as a regional poet as it is his birthplace, Odisha which is generally the subject of his poems. Though the poet’s national sentiments can be viewed in many of his poems, still nothing inspires him more than Odisha” (Subrat Kumar Samal, 238).

The reverence that Mahapatra provides to the land of Odisha in the past is countered by his despair of the present state. The progression is captured by him through the utilization of myths, stories, and symbols. The poet grieves the present Odisha that struggles with socio-cultural constraints such as poverty, child marriage, dowry, and identity crisis. The land gradually moves towards dilapidation and ruin, exemplified by the imagery of death and decay in his poems. The concept of death is different for different cultures. Mahapatra was born in a Christian household, however, his poems have a constant reference to Hinduism and its cultures, symbols, and concepts. Hinduism believes in the Transmigration of Soul and death as a liberator from ‘Maya’ or illusory material world to attain ‘Moksha’ or liberation.

In “Dawn at Puri”, Mahapatra explores the relationship between fear, death, and religion. The fear of loneliness, alienation, and death often subjugates people towards following certain religious customs or believing in religion and its practices. The ‘holy’ temple of Jagannatha Puri emanates faith in the dejected subjects. The imagery of “a skull on the holy sands” represents death. In Hinduism, crows are perceived as ill omens. The loss of lives is projected through the many “widowed women” who seem to be caged like “caught in a net” who seek to enter the Great Temple with the faith that god can cure the pain that they are subjected to. However, the wait to enter the temple is extrapolated to their waiting for death which is the only means of their liberation from this world. The lines, “her last wish to be cremated here/ twisting uncertainly like light/ on the shifting sands” (The Best of Jayanta Mahapatra 29) simultaneously immortalizes Puri as a holy place where people believe to find redemption or ‘Moksha’, according to the Hindu mythology, and brings to the fore the temporary nature of life and land itself, with the cremation happening on “shifting sands”. This idea of impermanence is reiterated, much like P.B. Shelley’s “Ozymandias”, in Relationship. Mahapatra writes:

It is hard to tell now
what opened the anxious skies,
how the age-old proud stones
lost their strength and fell,
and how the waters of the Daya
stank with the bodies of my ancestors;
my eyes close now
because of the fear that moves my skin (Relationship 14).

The poem refers to the Kalinga War and compares the past glory of Kalinga with the present deranged condition of the people of Odisha. He offers a deprecating take on the progression of the land that is gradually inching toward decay, stagnation, and death. A long work, it employs the imagery of a “restless vulture” and “bury[ing] the face/ in this earth” (9) among many to heighten the idea of death. Vultures are specifically associated with death in Zoroastrianism where the bodies of the people are fed to vultures. The impermanence of life heightens the need to form an identity that is whole.

After being a witness to the Independence struggle and the deep sense of identity crisis that loomed largely, not only on India as a nation but also on every Indian, Mahapatra in “A Country” invokes visual and auditory phrases to voice this angst. He writes:

Sometimes at night, when all voices die
my mind sees earth, my country –
to accept sacrifice ...

…
Wherever I try to live,
in pious penitence at Puri
or in the fiery violence of a revolutionary
my reason becomes a prejudiced sorrow
like socialism.
And not understanding myself,
Not understanding you,
like the still strange shapes of hills in the distance,
I, too, listen to the faraway wailing of hyenas
aware of the dying countryside around them,
tortured by hunger and the reek of decay in the air
after the age-old myths have been told all over again (Life Signs 29-30).

The dying voices provide silence, another potent theme in his poems, that aids the poet and this nation in confronting an identity crisis. The wailing hyenas and the “dying countryside” of hunger and decay, both resonate with the dilapidated condition of the city of Puri which seems to be caught in “age-old myths” that act as barriers to modernity, progress, and life.

The angst that the poet feels arises out of a fragmented self. “The Ruins” is a metaphor for the city and the poet himself. The “chipped fingers, the thin crack/ running slant along the brow” delineates a ruined “work of art” that is both the painting and his poem. He writes, “[nothing] that is whole/ speaks of the past. Or lives./ Or can form into a word.” (36) There occurs a significant shift in his perception of the fragmented identity that he and this nation possess. The ruins are an extrapolation of the emptiness that the poet himself experiences. However, it is this decay of the sense of ‘whole’ that provides words for the poet to weave into poetry thereby, facilitating the movement of the poet from identifying a distorted self to celebrating it.

The poems titled “Twilight”, “A Twilight Poem”, and “Evening” offer the metaphor of life inching towards darkness and death. The “orange flare lights” provide “a final wish of daylight”. The “darkened ledge…fills one with dense exile” amidst “the day-long cries of forbidding crows”. In “Evening”, Mahapatra writes, “[something] stands by the door for which I wait:/ like a smell that lingers of a dead cow’s entrails/ the day’s crows have dragged up to the skies” (A Rain of Rites, 37). The crow imagery recurs in “Taste for Tomorrow” as a symbol of dilapidation and an ill omen. The “faceless lepers” insinuates their diseased condition of them, inching towards death. In “Evening”, the ‘dead cow’ and its stench symbolize the decaying land that is being kept in the confines of the past by its rituals. Yet, there is hope for a new day as it is “not yet dark” and the “newly lit lamps” offer respite and faith for a new dawn, reiterating the concept of circularity of life and rebirth. The invocation to Goddess Kali with the phrase, “The one wide street/ lolls out like a giant tongue” (The Best of Jayanta Mahapatra 36) is another reference to Hindu mythology as Goddess Kali is also called Samhara Kali, possessing the power of death and destruction only to pave way for a renewed order.

The poet utilizes the concept of rebirth from Hinduism in his poems thereby, referring to the circularity of life and death. However, for him, certain elements of the city are above this circularity. Death and decay become a microcosm for the macrocosm of culture and myth.

Easy on the eye, the rains of temples everywhere,
defeat the tale of memory and dream

………………………………………….
Where stones have been lost and won
to reappear inside our separate births. (Waiting 8)

The stones of Puri have a historical significance that precedes this generation and lives in the memories, dreams, and lived realities of multiple individuals through ‘separate births’. The land remembers the atrocities, the violence, and the horrific deaths that occurred throughout history. This memory lives, despite the death and decay that haunts Odisha. According to Mahapatra, the memory, the myth, and the cultural roots reappear in the local stories, and are narrated by ‘the bard of Odisha’. It is through these that the land and its people, including the poet, can be liberated from this cycle of life and death.

The enormous body of work is a labyrinth of Mahapatra, entrapping the reader along with the pain and suffering of the people of Odisha. It is through the use of myth, cultural associations, and storytelling that the pain and history of violence can be mitigated. The shared history would bring salvation and rebirth in a land that reeks of death and dilapidation. The select poems that find reference in this paper form a mere entry point into a world of words that simultaneously reveal the death and decay haunting the land, and also conceal within it, faith in a new order, a new dawn that reaffirms the circularity of life and cycle of rebirth. The degeneration that looms over the mythical and mystical city of Puri, also paves way for life, for a retelling of history, and for recreating the present. “Jayanta Mahapatra like W.H. Auden is unable to explain the mystery of life and death” (Subrat Kuma Samal, 10) however, he surely knows how to indulge in it with the power of the written word.

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