Jayanta Mahapatra

Jayanta Mahapatra (1928 - Present) is one of the most widely known Indian English poets of the modern period. As a poet he is very sensitive and his

poems deal with every kind of emotions and most of his poems centers round man-woman relationship.

One can sense the presence of Orissa in his poem. Mahapatra is the first Indian English Poet to receive the Sahitya Academy Award in the year 1981.

Writing Style:

As a poet he is very sensitive and his poems dealt with every kind of emotions- pain, love, sadness, death, faith and so on. The sense of alienation which Mahapatra always felt as a child from his mother can also be reflected in his works.

Poetry is an expression of one’s emotions and feelings and Mahapatra used it as a tool to express himself. His concern to bring a change in the society can be seen in his poems such as ‘Hunger’ which shows how poverty detaches one of any humanly feelings; ‘Dawn at Puri’ which shows the hypocrisy of the priests and so on. One can therefore sense the presence of Orissa in his poems.

According to critics Dipak and Pradeep Chaswal,

He admits that the setting, background and sensibility in a poet’s work should be rooted in his soil.

Mahapatra’s style of writing is very obscure and vague.

The readers are expected to interpret in any way possible; there is no one single way to interpret a poem. This is how a true poet functions. 

He is a poet of human relationships and most of is poems centers round man-woman relationship. 

There is also a sense of Indianness in his writings.

Life:

He was born on 22nd October, 1928 to a lower middle class family of Lemuel Mahapatra and Sudhansa Mahapatra.

Mahapatra began his early formal education in an English medium school named Stewart School at Cuttack.

He completed his masters in Physics and started his profession as a teacher in 1949.

 He served in various Government colleges of Orissa and retired from his job as a teacher in 1986.

Mahapatra began writing poetry at the age of thirty-eight, quite late as compared to other poets. 

His name is included among the three founders of

Indian English poetry, the other two being A.K Ramanujan and Nissim Ezekiel.

Literary career and work

The sense of alienation which Mahapatra always felt as a child from his mother can also be reflected in his works. 

Poetry is an expression of one’s emotions and feelings and Mahapatra used it as a tool to express himself.

His concern to bring a change in the society can be seen in his poems such as ‘Hunger’ which shows how poverty detaches one of any humanly feelings;

‘Dawn at Puri’ which shows the hypocrisy of the priests and so on.

One can therefore sense the presence of Orissa in his poems. Mahapatra’s style of writing is very obscure and vague. 

There is no one single way to interpret a poem. This is how a true poet functions.

There is also a sense of Indianness in his writings. According to critics Dipak and Pradeep Chaswal, He admits that the setting, background and sensibility

in a poet’s work should be rooted in his soil.

The name of his first collection of poems is Svayamvara and Other Poems(1971) followed by other collections like

Close the Sky Ten by Ten(1971),

A Father’s Hours(1976),

A Rain of Rites(1976),

Waiting(1979),

Life Signs(1983),

A Whiteness of Bone(1992),

Shadow Space(1997),

Bare Face(2000), Random Descent among others.

 He has written a short story titled The Green

Gardener (1947) and also edited a literary magazine, Chandrabhaga.

The collection of his poems in Oriya is 

Bali (1993),

Kahibi Gotii Katha (1995),

Baya Raja (1997),

Tikil Chhayee (2001),

Chali (2006), 

and Jadiba Gapatiayy (2009). 

Mahapatra had also translated in English from Oriya and Bengali.

Some of his translated works include Countermeasures: 

Poems (1973), 

Wings of the Past:

 Poems (1976), 

Verticals of Life: Poems (1996),

 Discovery and the

Other Poems (2001),

 and A Time of Rising (2003).

Awards and achievements

Jayanta Mahapatra has been showered with many prestigious awards for his appraised works in the field of literature. 

He has been awarded Jacob Glatstein Memorial Award (1975), Allen Tate Prize (2009), SAARC literary

Award for the year 2009, Padma Shree Award (2009).

 In the same year he has also been awarded an honorary doctorate by Ravenshaw University on 2nd

May.

 Jayanta Mahapatra is the first Indian English Poet to receive the Sahitya Academi Award in the year 1981