Poeming Odisha: Revisiting Jayanta Mahapatra

The relationship between Odia Poetry in English and Jayanta Mahapatra is the relationship between architecture and its architect, between sculpture and its sculptor. In other words, the origin of Odia Poetry in English lies in Jayanta Mahapatra's poetic oeuvre. It is Mahapatra who indeed has given birth to the domain. It is again he who has nurtured it all through to its maturity. If a single figure who has been existentially linked to the Odia Poetry in English right since its very inception and has been moreover, an eyewitness to its entire history, it is none other than Jayanta Mahapatra. Then who is Jayanta Mahapatra and what is the identity of this patriarch of Odia Poetry in English? If any singular label that is most ubiquitously applied to Jayanta Mahapatra is his being an Odia poet writing in English. Besides this monism of identity, he is nowhere to be assumed as a poet of some specific theme or concern. To ascribe particularities concerning his content is perhaps to narrow his poetic output. Though Odisha appears recurrently in his poetry, it would not perhaps be sensible to declare Mahapatra as a poet whose canvas solely permits anything quintessentially Odia. Besides, he has dealt with multiple themes, issues, concerns, commitments, etc. His is a vignette or a spectrum of plenty. In Mahapatra, more interestingly, the form is foreign but the content and the thought are incontestably his own. Such an obvious discrepancy is so skillfully managed by Mahapatra that the readers relish the beauty of the borrowed and the savior of the indigenous. This paper looks at how Mahapatra poems Odisha, his microcosm for the world, with special reference to a few of his poems wherein Odisha emerges as a major trope.