Land called home

Much high quality Indian English poetry was produced in the mid-1970s. R Parthasarathy’s Ten Twentieth-Century Indian Poets published in 1976 is the best representative anthology of that period. All the poets included (except perhaps for Gieve Patel) went on to forge their own distinctive styles: Nissim Ezekiel, A K Ramanujan, Arun Kolatkar, Kamala Das, who are no more. No other anthologist has been so accurate in identifying poets who would thrive. Jayanta Mahapatra, one of the poets included in that earlier collection, is one poet who has flourished. He began writing poetry quite late, at the age of 40, but he has more than made up for lost time. Land, a collection of his poems published this year, is his 19th book.  

Mahapatra began to be noticed as an emerging poet in the 1970s through his publications in international journals such as Poetry, The Hudson Review, and The Sewanee Review, and continues to be published in such places today. More recently he has been published in The New Yorker. His magazine publications in the UK, US and Australia brought him recognition there, and consequently he found a publisher for his books, as well as invitations to read poetry. International anthologies like The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry have included his work. In this regard, Mahapatra is a lone ranger who looks first to be published in magazines and journals before collecting his poems into book format. In 2009, seven poems published in The Sewanee Review won him the Allen Tate Poetry Prize. He had won prizes much earlier, too. His career as a published poet began with the publication of the same number of poems in Critical Quarterly. In 1975 he received the Jacob Glatstein Memorial Prize for his eleven poems from Poetry magazine. 

“Puri opens like a maw in the mind. You seem somewhat afraid to be there, yet one time or another something drags you without your knowing. All the time you feel its large heart pounding on, beyond you, in the immediate darkness – not beating for its own, but for those millions who come here every year, once at least before present lives end.” 

Lord Jagannath, residing in the Puri temple, is the centre of Odia consciousness. Mahapatra first gained critical attention through his powerful poems about the city, such as ‘Dawn at Puri’ and ‘Main Temple Street, Puri’. The precision of these poems made them memorable: 

At Puri, the crows.
The one wide street
Lolls out like a giant tongue.

Especially intense are Mahapatra’s poems written in the mid-1970s, depicting Puri the Jagannath temple and Lord Jagannath, collected in such volumes as A Rain of Rites and Waiting. Readers and critics in the US were alerted to the making of an Indian poet in English, someone trying to speak of his locale and milieu in a tongue other than his own.

Most Odias, irrespective of religion, find themselves magnetically drawn towards Lord Jagannath at Puri. Perhaps a factor behind the rise and prevalence of this consciousness is the role of a Muslim devotee of Lord Jagannath, Salabega, who is said to have been born in 1607 to a Muslim father and a Brahmin mother, and whose bhajans to the Lord are still familiar to many Odias. There may be an element of crisis of belief in Mahapatra’s poetry as he was born into a Christian family, but some critics dwell inordinately long on this fact. There is a poem called ‘Grandfather’ in Life Signs which includes a note: “Starving, on the point of death, Chintamani Mahapatra embraced Christianity during the terrible famine that struck Orissa in 1866.” But culture is more important to Mahapatra than religion. He has imbibed the cultural practices of the predominantly Hindu society he grew up in. Biography-hunting scholars read too much religious crisis into isolated poems like ‘Grandfather’. poems. In order to dispel misconceptions about the supposed conflict in his mind, the poet emphatically stated to a curious interviewer in The Hindu: “Christianity is something I learnt at my mother’s footsteps… But Hinduism is a part of me too… That’s my inner self, and my inner self may be totally Hindu.”

The first poem in Land, ‘Under the Drift of Mild Moons’, introduces us to his world of “brooding valleys”… “with featureless dungcakes dry[ing] in the drowsy air” where “hunger and stars go past to taste our sleep”, and where “silent gods cast handfuls of light/to net the shadows of our nonchalant lives”. But these are the same gods, as he later puts it in ‘Village Mythology’, who “could betray life with small embraces”. The poet disapproves of a godhood that fails to mitigate human suffering, a recurring theme of his poetry. 

The poet engages with his land most lucidly in ‘Uneven Mercies’, which forms the pivot of the book. Had it not been for Mahapatra’s deft handling of the conflicting worlds, a poem of such political nature could have ended up as propaganda. There is a baffling mixture of empathy and irony in the poet’s apologetic refrain, “I am afraid this is my land”. By the end of the poem, this oratorical line is embedded in our psyche. The poet knows that he sounds “unkind to be talking like this”: “blood of the unjustly killed/never cries out”, daughters are given to “rape”, “infants are killed before they are born” and “people are obsessed with religion and power”. Mahapatra has long since shifted his focus from a closed self to the public domain. With age, he is becoming more and more public in his poetry. All these signs of his “land” portend an ominous future where he can only:

feel the pleasures of men,
men who write the story of India
with the feet of epics smeared with blood.

With such people inhabiting his world the poet hesitates to claim it as his own. Yet there are moments when he secretly lays claim to it, with the kind of claim that only the landless can have to the land they cultivate.