Life & Background
Jayanta Mahapatra was born in Cuttack in 1928 into a Christian family converted three generations earlier, a background that left him permanently conscious of standing slightly outside the Hindu Odisha he wrote about. He took a master's degree in physics and taught it in colleges across Odisha for nearly four decades, beginning to write poetry only in his late thirties. His first collections appeared in the early 1970s, and Relationship won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1981 — the first time it went to a poet writing in English. He edited the literary journal Chandrabhaga. He wrote in Odia as well as English in his later years. In 2015 he returned his Padma Shri in protest at rising intolerance, one of a number of writers to do so. He died in Cuttack in 2023 at ninety-five.
Hunger
A short poem in which the speaker, walking on a beach at dusk, is approached by a fisherman offering his fifteen-year-old daughter. The speaker follows him to a hut, past the sound of the sea, feeling the man's words and his own hunger as separate things that have met. Inside, the fisherman speaks about the fish not netting and the wind, then says he will wait outside and that the girl is fifteen. The speaker is left with the girl in the dark room, aware of her body, the smell of the fishing nets, the flapping of the door, and his own participation in what is happening. The poem ends on his sense of a hunger that is not his own and cannot be satisfied by what he came for.
The poem is the most anthologised of his work and is built on a deliberate double meaning: the buyer's appetite and the seller's destitution are the same word, and the poem refuses to let the speaker occupy any position of innocence or of judgement. Mahapatra's characteristic mode is elsewhere quieter — the temple town, the river, monsoon light, the stone of Konark and Puri, silences he does not resolve — and his diction is spare, hesitant, and often deliberately syntactically incomplete, so that meaning is left suspended. Relationship, his long poem, works his relation to Odisha's landscape and myth as a single extended meditation, and critics generally place him with Ezekiel, Kolatkar, and Ramanujan in the generation that made Indian English poetry local rather than derivative.
Why Mahapatra Matters
Mahapatra is one of the central figures of post-independence Indian English poetry and the first English-language poet the Sahitya Akademi recognised, which is a standard fact and a standard question. His work is the strongest available case for a regional Indian English poetry — deeply rooted in Odisha's temples, rivers, and poverty rather than in metropolitan or diasporic experience — and Hunger is a fixture on syllabi for its treatment of poverty and complicity.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- Close the Sky, Ten by Ten1971
- A Rain of Rites1976
- Hunger1976
- Relationship1980
- Life Signs1983
- Dispossessed Nests1986
- Shadow Space1997
- Random Descent2005