topics: |  critic | poetry | indian-english

* There is a door in the heart of man which never opens.  Or if it does at
* times, we are not aware of its opening. When it does, it goes on to reveal
another world -- a world where time falls away, and space grows; perhaps the
self fills with vastness and light.  p.1

About the poem "Hunger"

The poem is based on a true incident; it could easily have happened to me
on the poverty-ridden sands of Gopalpur-on-sea.  Often have I imagined
myself walking those sands, my solitude and my inherent sexuality working
on me, to face the girl inside the dimly-lit, palm-frond shack.  The
landscape of Gopalpur chose me, and my poem to face perhaps my inner self,
to see my own debasement, to realise my utter helplessness against the
stubborn starvation light of my country. p.20

(see Hunger in Selected Poems by JM)

Contents

Acknowledgements
Freedom as Poetry: The Door
An Orissa Journal: July to November
About "Hunger" and Myself
Mystery as Mantra
Summerdusts and a Scent of Mangoes
The Inaudible Resonance of English Poetry in India
Recent Commonwealth Fiction: Writing from Three Different Cultures
A Poet First of All
The Voice in the Ink
The Moving Horizon: Visiting America
Acceptance Speech on Receiving the Sahitya Akademi Award for Realtionship, 1981
Face to Face with the Contemporary Poem
Our Escapist Art
An August Day in 1942
Publishing in India: An Overview
Translating from Oriya: An Approach
A Symphony in Stone
This Sadness is Mine Also
A Book from My Shelf
Letter from Orissa to The Hudson Review
Of the Lowly Potato: Indian English Poetry Today
A Note on Ayyappa Paniker;s Poetry
Cuttack: Smoke and a Sunset of Rivers
Stranger than Brothers: Writing at the Edge of Anonymity
Land to Land: A Moon in our Eyes
The Door
Hedging the Heart: To What is the Poet Responsible?
By the Way
Silence: Poetry's Last Word
On the Mountain with Allen Ginsberg
Containing the World that Contains Us
The SAARC Writers: Suffering from Our Poetry
The Absence of Absolutes
Slow Swim in Dim Light: The Quest for Modernity in Poetry
Mirror of a Mirror
A.K. Ramanujan: A Tribute
Time in the Poem


links: critique by R. Kasthuri Bai

Other reviews

Callings of the Oriya heart : review by Rabindra K Swain

from himal magazine

Mahapatra first received recognition abroad. In 1971, editors from the
premier British literary journal Critical Quarterly, upon accepting seven of
the then unknown poet’s works, told Mahapatra that they were publishing poems
from an Indian for the first time in the magazine’s 15 years of
publication. Five years later, in the US, Mahapatra received a major award
from Poetry magazine, which was followed by the publication of his collection
A Rain of Rites by the University of Georgia Press. That same year, he was
invited back to the US to attend the prestigious Iowa International Writing
Program. His magnum opus, Relationship, a long poem that deals with the rich
cultural heritage of Orissa, was also eventually published in the US in
1980.

A lifelong college physics professor in Orissa, Mahapatra indeed acquired a
stupendous appetite for reading early in life. Preliminary influences
included H Rider Haggard and R M Ballantyne, as well as the French novelist
Roger Martin du Gard’s Jean Barois, which he recalls “showed me how to be
true to myself more than any dogmatic teaching of religion can … I could go
on to question the existence of God, whom my parents had taught me
scrupulously to believe in.”

Literary nakedness

Although long recognised as a writer in English, Mahapatra did not become a
bilingual poet until well into the 1980s. As with Arun Kolatkar and Dilip
Chitre, however, that evolution was not unappreciated, and his five volumes
of poetry in Oriya have subsequently won him many followers among young
Oriya-language poets. When Mahapatra first turned to the language, however,
he was treated by his fellow Oriya poets as an outsider. This was
uncomfortably similar to how he had long been sidelined for “the criminal act
of writing in the colonial language.” After long years of writing
English-language poems – that too, successful ones – he found that he still
was not reckoned as a poet among his own people, who largely did not know
what he was doing in his English poetry. At that time, whatever readership
was there for this type of work was mainly confined to academics. As such, he
decided to try his hand at Oriya. After writing a few poems, he discovered
that what he was doing in Oriya – speaking of the common people, the
marginalised, in a language intelligible to them – he could not have managed
in English. Even if he had succeeded in doing so, he now admits, it would not
have been communicable through English.

When Mahapatra deals with this experience in a piece titled “The Absence of
the Absolutes”, his stance is one of both self-defence and apology. In an
attempt to understand his own turn from one language to another, from the
acquired to that of the mother tongue, he finds a lot that he could not have
seen at that time: “I could now talk to the man in the street … I used
simple, colloquial words because my vocabulary in Oriya is severely limited …
But I spoke with a literal nakedness.” He admits that his Oriya poems “did
not have the sophistication of the English ones. They were different,
complementary. Maybe these were the poems that revealed the naked truth in
naked language, stripped of all exaggerated aestheticism … But my writing in
Oriya was a blow in self-defence. I had dropped my masks.” On these and other
matters, Mahapatra’s sense of humility is great. Though he began as a poet by
writing relatively self-indulgent pieces, Mahapatra soon began to deal
increasingly with social issues. In Door of Paper, we find several essays
that tell of “the sadness of his land”. Indeed, Mahapatra always obeyed the
callings of his heart, which made his poetry subjective. He says, “As a
writer I do not pretend righteousness. Only this I am aware of – that a
writer should, first of all, be honest to himself and to his readers.”