SHRI VAISHNAV VIDYAPEETH VISHWAVIDYALAYA

TITLE-Jayanta Mahapatra

SUBMITTED BY-Garima Sharma

ENROLLMENT NUMBER- 1709BAHNEL02385

B.A. (hons.)English Literature

 JAYANT MAHAPATRA
Jayanta Mahapatra is an Indian English poet. He is the first Indian poet to win
Sahitya Akademi award for English poetry. He is the author of popular poems
such as Indian summer, a missing person and Hunger, which are regarded as
classics in modern Indian English literature. He was awarded Padma Shri, the
fourth highest civilian honour in India in 2009. Jayanta Mahapatra can be called
the major voice among the second generation of modern poets.

Born in 1928, in Cuttack, belongs to

a lower middle-class family. Had his
early education (from Kindergarten
to Cambridge classes) in English
medium at Stewart school, Cuttack.
His discipline is physics and he is
Reader at Ravenshaw College,
Cuttack Though his poetic art
bloomed as late as 1971, with his
first two collections of poetry
coming out simultaneously — Close
the Sky, Ten by Ten and
Swayamvara and Other Poems, his
career has been fast moving and his poetic output considerable. Jayanta
Mahapatra began writing poems rather late in comparison with his
contemporaries. But this late beginning does not in any way distort his
achievement. His poems have appeared in most of the reputed journals of the
world. He received the prestigious Jacob Glatstein Memorial Award (Chicago)
in 1975
His other volumes are A Rain of Rites (1976), A Father’s Hours (1976), Waiting
(1979), The False Start (1980) Relationship (1980), Life Signs (1983) and the
most recent one Burden of Waves and Fruit (1986). Mahapatra has the singular
distinction of having been published widely abroad in journals like Westerly,
Quadrant, (Australia) Kunapipi (Denmark) Dalhousie Review, Toronto South
Asian Review (Canada) and TLS, Critical Quarterly (UK). He won the Poetry
Award of International Who’s Who in Poetry in 1980, and the Jacob Glashen
Memorial Award instituted by Poetry, Chicago in 1975. His translations (from
Oriya to English) bear the stamp of his originality too.
Mahapatra is a poet of landscape and mostly, his poems are but a kind of search
for peace in the natural essence. He is a poet who begins with some sort of image
(or group of images) and then follows the lead to make it into a poem.
Mahapatra’s poetry is the product of various tensions — the rationalist, the
teacher of physics finding his roots in the tradition of the country, the Christian
trying to decipher the meaning of Hindu myths, rites and rituals, an analytical
mind reconciling with ancestral beliefs, and above all, an Oriyan writing in
English. What emerges is an intensely meditative, introspective, dialectical
hyper-serious poetry.
To conclude, Jayanta Mahapatra is one of the finest poets in India writing in the
English language. He is often put in the league which contains the poets like A.
K. Ramanujan. His poems mostly talk about the grim realities of India or the great
landscapes, the geographical beauty our country has.

HUNGER
It was hard to believe the flesh was heavy on my back.
The fisherman said: Will you have her, carelessly,
trailing his nets and his nerves, as though his words
sanctified the purpose with which he faced himself.
I saw his white bone thrash his eyes.

I followed him across the sprawling sands,

my mind thumping in the flesh’s sling.
Hope lay perhaps in burning the house I lived in.
Silence gripped my sleeves; his body clawed at the froth
his old nets had only dragged up from the seas.

In the flickering dark his hut opened like a wound.

The wind was I, and the days and nights before.
Palm fronds scratched my skin. Inside the shack
an oil lamp splayed the hours bunched to those walls.
Over and over the sticky soot crossed the space of my mind.

I heard him say: My daughter, she’s just turned fifteen…

Feel her. I’ll be back soon; your bus leaves at nine.
The sky fell on me, and a father’s exhausted wile.
Long and lean, her years were cold as rubber.
She opened her wormy legs wide. I felt the hunger there,
the other one, the fish slithering, turning inside.
  Introduction
The poem 'Hunger' by Jayanta Mahapatra, a well-known poet from Orissa, India,
depicts two kinds of hunger. One is the hunger of food and another is the hunger
for sexual gratification. Hunger poem by Jayanta Mahapatra is about the idea of
hunger that at the beginning of the poem is that of sex and sexual desire but in
the end, transforms into hunger of stomach that leads the people to do
anything.
The poem consists of 4 stanzas having 5 lines each. There is no set rhyme
scheme. The poet uses a number of literary devices to describe the events that
led from one hunger (sexual) to the other (physical).

 SUMMARY
The first few lines of the poem tell us about a man and a fisherman. The
fisherman is volunteering the man to his place for a deal. The man feels the flesh
on his back is too heavy. It seems like he is holding a huge burden of something
inexplicable and its better to drop off the load. The fisherman is talking about
some girl. He asks the man to 'have' her. He says it very carelessly as if he has no
concern for the girl. As if the girl is some toy to play with. But his words very well
explain his purpose. He is hungry and he needs money to buy food. He is
dragging his nets behind him. He glares his white teeth but his eyes reflect his
misery.
The man is continuously faced with a weight upon him, symbolizing the weight
of guilt and regret. Though he follows the fisherman across the shore, he feels a
thumping tension in his head. He could take this moment to refuse the offer and
turn back. Maybe now if he turned back he could escape the trap and guilt he is
caught in. But he remained silent. The fisherman's desperation seemed to
increase.

When he reaches the fisherman's shack, he sees it is a lean-to(a building sharing

one wall with a larger building, and having a roof that leans against that wall)
and was dark inside except a lamp with a flickering flame and the walls are
covered with soot, collected for a long time, which kept catching the poet's eyes.
The fisherman then reveals that his daughter has just turned fifteen and the
readers realize that the girl he was talking about is his daughter. He asks the
poet to 'feel' her. Here 'feel' refers to the fulfillment of his sexual desires. The
poet is shocked with the truth and sees through the fisherman's wile. He is a
father who is using his daughter's body to earn money for food. The poet looks
at the young girl, who is 'long and lean', her age can be easily judged by her
cold rubber-like skin and she looked malnourished. When she opened her
'wormy' thin legs wide, as if ready to serve as a sexual slave, the poet felt the
hunger, the hunger for food which drove this father-daughter into this
business.

 CRITICAL APPRECIATION
In the course of the poem, we can vividly feel the pain and anguish of the father
as also the guilt of the narrator. Depicting the tragic compulsions which abject
poverty can impose on a man, this poem describes the plight of the fisherman.

Interestingly, it’s not just the father who is constantly fighting his conscience,
but the narrator as well. Yet the narrator is moved to perform the sexual act to
gratify his sexual hunger, starkly burdened by his guilt. The tragic irony is that
this sexual act in a way sanctifies the ‘purpose’ (brings provender and food for
the fisherman) and on the other hand, it satisfies the sexual appetite of the
narrator. No doubt the poet depicts the predicament of the fisherman and
condemns poverty, there seems to be a hint that one may to resort to any means
of survival.

It is the fisherman who contacts the speaker walking along the beach to lure him
to have sex with his daughter, telling him that she is very young, just turned
fifteen. Of course, these words arouse sexual urges in the speaker. The speaker,
though feeling guilty inward, is overpowered by his sexual urge and follows the
fisherman to his shack. It is the sight of the shack and the conditions prevailing
their it and its inmates that convey the speaker about the miserable plight of the
fisherman.

Mahapatra uses a few words to suggest much more than what the words literally
mean. The speaker’s mind feels heavy; he realizes that he is doing something
wrong, but the fisherman’s words have aroused sexual desire which becomes
more and more intense as he follows him to the shack. As they approach, the
fisherman opens the small gate which is represented by a wound and tells the
speaker to ‘feel her’; he goes away promising to return after some time.

When the speaker enters the shack, neither does he ask the girl anything nor
does she speak a word. The only thing she knows is that the stranger who has
stepped in is a customer. The speaker looks at her and she opens her legs wide,
inviting the speaker to perform the act.
The most striking feature of the poem is the realistic portrayal of the three
characters and their behavior. The only person who speaks is the fisherman and
the rest of the characters, i.e. the narrator and the girl remain mute, though they
do act.
The narrator walks behind the fisherman, feeling guilty as well as feeling an
intense sexual urge. The fisherman knows what his daughter has to do and she
acts mechanically, by opening her legs.

Mahapatra has succeeded in conveying many things in a short poem by the deft
use of words which carry both literal and metaphorical expressions. The poem
is a consummate work of art where the words seem to gain life and speak to the
readers in many voices.

 CONCLUSION
Mahapatra wrote many poems on the themes of poverty, hunger, starvation,
sexual exploitation and bestiality of males. Hunger by Jayanta Mahapatra
reveals the plight of a fisherman who can’t make both ends meet. The
poignancy of the situation is that ‘hunger’ imposes tragic compulsions – the
poor father kills his conscience and entices clients for his daughter, who has
become a prostitute. Jayanta Mahapatra's poetry not only explores the
influence of local realities in creating the depth of one's feeling and sensitivity
but also stretches the possibilities of language to represent them.