‘Inscape’ is the coinage of the great poet, G.M. Hopkins: Capturing inner spaces and landscapes of distinction that constitute our moral geography can be prompted both by the mystical and the non mystical realization of the oneness of beings. Hopkins was a Jesuit priest and for him inscape signified a mystical illumination or insight into the underlying order and unity of creation. Jayantada is a physicist by training and the first fact that draws my students towards him is his non-mystical search for the atom of truth which Virgil beautifully metaphorizes as the “drop of tear in the heart of things”.
Truth in our tradition has always been the fist to fight with. What makes our position precarious as truth-seekers today is that we are confronted not with a white lie, like that of a white man’s burden, or with any such clean-shaved binary as that of the Immoral Other, but with some other kind of truth, say half-truth of the Western world, so aptly reflected in the tight-lipped, uppish, “I am your boss, I wish you well” kind of a typical Yankee attitude.
Every year I build my first lecture around this central perception that the “ immediate present” in this unipolar global village smells of a pound-shop deodorant, cheap deodorant and to grant it a natural aroma, a thousand indigenous cultures must be allowed to bloom Jayantada was the first among the Indian English poets to realize this and make the best out of the moral geography of the land he hailed from, the land of Odissi and Konark , river Daya, and Lord Jagannath, the battle of Kalinga and also of high voltage Conversions around which he wove a great poem like “Grandfather”. It talks about the innate dilemmas of a drought-driven man who bartered his Faith for Food. A man driven by drought and deprivation has no time to weigh his options. His first ‘priority’ are food and words of assurance, kind and serene, and whoever offers these is the real angel. But at a later stage it hurts his ego to visualize himself as someone bartering away his religious identity for something as mundane as food. Subtly the grandson reads the inner conflicts in the blank pages of the grandfather’s incomplete diary entries. The rain beats outside the window, and the imagined reality of the years of Great Famine, the years of dearth and death, strikes a fierce contrast in the mind of the grandchild trying his best to capture grandfather’s dilemma.
Boys and girls in the class, all 18 or 19 at best, find it easy to identify with the sensitive grandchild, but explaining grandfather’s humane conflicts becomes much more difficult today, when under the spell of blatant fundamentalism goons like Dara Singh go on killing even innocent missionaries who don’t force their Faith on hungry Adivasis. They woo, yes they do. But every creature on the earth has the right to woo and cajole. Rape is a crime but wooing is not My students know this and ask me questions difficult to answer, “Why does grandpa have the qualms of conscience? Like Faustus he did not sell his soul to the devil, he only fell for the kinder godmen who gave him food and shelter and the dignity of being when others closed their doors?”
Anamika in The Beacon: Picks In The Bin and Other Poems:
Most of them who pose such questions are students from the minority but I am happy to report that some of them are from the mainstream religion too. As a teacher of literature it gives me great satisfaction to find their sympathies reaching far and wide. In today’s context the dilemmas of the new convert portrayed in ‘Grandfather’ reads as politically incorrect, but when have major poets like Jayantada cared to be politically correct always. On a deeper thought I somehow convince my students that the ideal situation in a democracy is this each-other factor when the minority views things from the perspective of the vast amphitheatre of mainstream beliefs and customs and the mainstream visualizes things from the perspective of the minority and the subaltern.
All his life this good Samaritan called Jayant Mahapatra tried hard to maintain a proper ecology in his linguistic environment, to keep alive what is essentially humane and aesthetic from erosion and obliteration. Often he views things from the lens of collective memory and liberally he draws from old epics, the Hindu mythology and ancient philosophical tenets. In early sixties, researches in the fields of physiology, anthropology, linguistics, genetics etc. had recently established a vital link between the self and the environment. Explorations of men’s past and its vital links with his present were adding new expressive, referential and connotative dimensions to almost all literary ventures. As an academic, Jayantada was aware of all public debates. The lining of an old myth with new retellings was a familiar device to re-change the battery of tradition which earned each culture an individual stamp. Most of the Indian poets writing in English were trying their best to route their modernity through the deshaj and the mythopoeiac: Arun Kolatkar, Dilip Chitre, and many others. What earns Jayantada a distinction over others is the splitting of the myth into mini-narratives, lined up with symbols and telling images. Never does he follow a regular narrative. Other Indian English poets have a special yearning towards narrative structure, but Jayant feels that no single narrative could absorb the stresses and strains of a culture so discontinuous and accumulative. And he finds that diary entries, stray reflections, dreams and soliloquies could be more useful in tracking a repeatedly engaged, non-guaranteed movement towards an explanatory tale.
Keenly aware of the fact that poetry, of all the verbal acts, is the earliest and has close links with music and dance, sound, rhythm and images- he evokes sound bytes and word pictures lying deep in the Oriya psyche, pictures evoking the memories of someone like the Fisherman in “Hunger” the archetypal man living with Nature and also with himself and his immediate kin. These memories are benevolent, as well as bitter and terrifying, memories of hard struggle to survive, of birth and death, wars, famines and destructions of all kinds, destructions dealing with hunger, with the usual hunger, and the unsatiated sexual and physic hunger.
Most of his poems are arduously organized not so much around single central principles, as around pairs of mutually defining thematic opposites like those of earthy and celestial, temporal and spatial, human and non-human, decay and regeneration, bond and salvation, rain and drought, libidinal hunger and the real hunger, the rooted and, the vagabond, the vagabond like the tourist in ‘Hunger’ who wants to fill his loneliness with the non-committal conjugation with a 14 year old child prostitute whose father acts as her pimp and whose legs open like a wound. Linking this up with the question of trafficking of girls and flesh trade in general raises a fervent debate in the class, and when I say that the girl in the poem is younger to them all by at least four years, a strange rage roars wide into their young hearts.
Even in his longer poems, the story breaks up in bits and parts like the broken bones of the people brutally killed in wars and public movements. Even provoke war and brutality of the worst order die by their side. Jackals feed upon their genitals, the symbol of prowess and male valour is sucked in by the jaws of Time (‘A Country’). The symbol of regeneration is always .the feminine consciousness of women like the Naxalite girl and Chelamman, in Kali-like rage against atrocities of all kinds, who kill and destroy only to regenerate:
And now an ogress,
Transformed into a lovely woman,
Her poisoned nipples.
The Mokoha centres of her own martyrdom
Awakens the woman of the mind
Seeking the light in hidden knolls
Where the red hearts of rocks stop beating,
Where the year’s hysterical winds pass by (Temple, 48).
Degeneration precedes regeneration. The angry woman degenerates into a Pootana, breast-feeding ill -will and venom, till the Time Babe (Baby Krishna) leaps up and sucking all negative strains from her, awakens the serene ‘woman of the mind’ in her old venomous form.
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When a modern poet like Jayant Mahapatra chooses the long poem as a medium what he actually has in mind is an ambitious catch at the seascape of his time and locale. In a society no longer unified by a single, generally accepted code of values, identifying and synthesizing the various voices and strains of a culture in the epical manner emerges as a real challenge. To meet this, Jayantada authenticates the narrative by the direct appeal of his own experience and emotions, hence the merging of identities, the mystic and the historic, the real and the surreal.
All his texts, like human memory, are multilayered and even a quick deconstruction titillates all layers: rhetoric logic and silence. ‘Time is the real protagonist, the psychic labyrinth from which one cannot escape. Time is the substance we are made of, Jayantada reiterates this in each poem, and on the lines of Borges, he is almost heard saying, “Time is the river which sweeps you along, but you are the river, it is the tiger that destroys you but you are the tiger, it is the fire that consumes you but you are the fire. This world, unfortunately is real, you unfortunately are trapped up in troubled times”. As I say this, my own students challenge me: “ Ma’am, but all times are troubled times. Golden age is a myth. “But myth is not a myth in poets like Jayantada. It is a gateway to Reality, the pattern of human consciousness in its eternal quest of the Perfect and the Immaculate “, I smile, and they smile too, for they know by now that to read poets like Jayantada is to understand, question, know, forget, erase, deface, and repeat the endless prosopopoia that we Indians are deeply soaked in.
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Note: The Beacon would like to thank A.J. Thomas for arranging this tribute.
Anamika has seven collections of poems: Galat Pate Ki Chithi, Samay Ke Shahar Mein, Beejakxar, Anushtup, Kavita Mein Aurat, Khurduri Hathelian, Doob-Dhan and Paani ko Sab Yaad Tha. As a poet, she is specially noted for her insights into the modern women’s psyche and also for her delightful, intertextual chit chat with archetypal figures like the Ten Mahavidyas, Bhamati, Sita, Radha, Ratnawali, Ahilya, Amrapali and other Buddhist nuns, Meerabai , Bahinabai, Rabiya Faqueer and other Bhakt and Sufi poets Her poems have been translated into English, Russian, Norwegian, Japanese, Korean, Malayalam, Bangla, Oriya and Punjabi. Her fictional work Ainasaaz, built around the life and times of Amir Khusro, has won wide acclaim. Her other fictional works and memoirs include Pratinayak, Awantar Katha, Ek Tho Shahar Tha, Ek Tha Shakespeare, Ek The Charles Dickens, Dus Dware Ka Peenjara and Tinka-Tinke Pas. Her collection of essays, Sahitya ka Lokpaksha.
Anamika in The Beacon
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