The Mahapatra Muse

JAYANTA and Sitakant Mahapatra are two thoroughbreds who have kept up withPegasus these many years. Their devotion to the muse has been single-minded. They havenever deviated into other genres. The fruits of their labour differ, but don’t theyalways? Sitakant has been translated into many languages. He has won the Jnanpith,something that Jayanta cannot aspire to. The logic can’t be faulted. Why should thebrown sahibs be encouraged to indulge in their Anglo-Saxon idiosyncrasies? The sons of thesoil, linguistically speaking, should inherit the earth. Unexceptionable.

Both poets write with their heart, sometimes with the heart on the sleeve. The Orissalandscape and way of life comes alive in both volumes. Jayanta rightly contends that he isan Oriya poet who, by accident, writes in English. And as if to offset this handicap hehas now come out with a volume of verse in Oriya. Jayanta’s verse is ruminant, and sointroverted that it borders at times, on the edge of neurosis. Sitakant’s verse isoutgoing, buoyed on a current of empathy and sentiment.

There was a time when reading Sitakant in English was a bit of a chore. Thetranslations were imperfect. The lines would drip with sentiment. In every fifth poemsomeone would be shedding tears. Midway through some mundane account of life in a villageyou would be ambushed by massive hyperbole. Much of that is gone. The poetry is sharp andneat and surprises with a classy turn of phrase on every other page. "How generous ofthe sea/to call at my door for its dues! to remember an obscure name/in its unendingledgers." Later in the poem (The Mist) sea-surrounded objects become"immaculate with eternity". And the gentle touch is visible—" the hushof  your absence spreads/in the fragrant moonlight".

One of Sitakant’s strong points is the way he paints poverty—" a harvestof dreams/in a shrivelled ribcage," or "a little jungle of neglectedthatch". Poignant vignettes are strewn across the book, and some remarkable poemslike The Empire and The Night. The imagery is clean and crystal clear:"A jet tears through/the blue slate of the sky/a tiny line of chalk". Tribalsdance "hand on hip, interlocked despairs/in rhythmic fury".

Both poets are maharathis and need to be judged by high standards. Sitakant usesthe larger-than-life gesture (on his grandmother’s death he says: "I looked upat the sky where/she had become another star"). English poetry carries thisunderstatement business too far. But overstatement is also risky. In Flowering Time hewrites: "I strained to decipher... if the ceremony of water/explains the fire ofpain." Sounds good but I am straining to decipher what it means. In Your Village hewrites: "Starlight breaks the pitcher of silence/grieving wombs all begindancing." We will let that pitcher of silence thing pass, but what of those dancingwombs? Then there are apostrophes to death and Bhubaneswar. He descends from the stark tothe sentimental. A "burnt blackened scarecrow" of a mother sheds "tearslike a tired cloud" for her dead child. That tired cloud is a let-down.

Jayanta Mahapatra’s selected poems are well chosen, and are preceded by anacademic introduction by the editor, P.R. Raveendran who seems to see all poetry in thecolonial/post-colonial paradigm. As an article on Jayanta it could be considered passe. Asan introduction to the best of Jayanta it is less than satisfactory.

Most of his best poems are here— Dawn at Puri, A Rain of Rites, Hunger,Grandfather, Total Solar Eclipse, Temple and the Lost Children of America. Inthe last one he talks of the hippies, "who rejected their own land" and whodon’t ask the usual questions—" Why is my skin so brown, my birth notfinal?/Why do I clean my arse with my hand?/Why do I seek a virgin woman for my wife?/Whydo I grovel before that grote sque god of bitter wood?"

One realises with a start that there is a lot of violence in Jayanta Mahapatra’spoetry. In the above poem you come across "the priest’s pomaded jeancladson" raping the "fourteen-year fishergirl" behind the shrine and her rapeby four policemen "dripping of darkness and of scarlet death". In DispossessedNests we have a "torso/looking about for its missing head" and "tworipped out eyes/shaking their tears". Repeatedly the poet comes up against "thesenseless refrain of hate". Chelammal, in the poem Temple is both a modernShakti and an actual woman who killed herself due to poverty. In her "unendingattrition of pain", she says: "O solemn Ayodhya skies!/O savage dens ofShiva!/Let me not awaken/the meaningless tears of rage and hate/when you fumble at thecatch of my consciousness/before you cut the heart out of my body/and nights scour mywomb/with the ashes of solitude."

Jayanta broods over the "darkness whose meaning escapes our children". Andagain, "somewhere, beyond the high Himalayan ranges, a lost man wears his darknesslike a sleep". Dream is another motif running through his work. Much of his poetrycan be taken as a dream-state, as he tackles "the dream-dark of the present" andof the past. He says in Temple: "Only when you dream reality begins". Andhis poetry has a dreamy sub-surface music which haunts the ear.

One comes across linguistic contortions. A story is "chewed on by the vultures ofa country’s leaders". "The evening wind trembling the glazed waters,"when what he means is making the glazed waters tremble. But the final impression is thatof being face to face with a consummate poet, as "the burden of understood thingsbillows upward like smoke," and he progresses "surrounded by the loves" hehas grown up with. The same can be said for Sitakant.