Question

Critical analysis of poem dhauli by jayanta mahapatra

Answer 1

Jayanta Mahapatra is an Indian English poet whose poetry springs from deep personal memories and experiences. While receiving the Sahitya Akademi Award he said “to Orissa, to this land in which my roots lie and lies my past and in which lies my beginning and my end”. To Jayanta Mahapatra Orissa is a paradise, his place for great fascination and pride. Jayanta Mahapatra writes poem which combine modern as well as Indian traditional thought. His poems seem as if all of these are his own personal life encounters. He uses language in a very vast way; he uses English idioms for Indian text. He shows his love for Orissa in many poems like myth, grandfather but he finds English language more comfortable than Oriya. His poems also show women in a helpless and objectifying light. A major example of power of male and sexuality is seen in his poem ‘Hunger’.’ Grandfather ‘and’ dhauli’ both talk about the historical Orissa; the wars fought in ‘dhauli’ and the aftereffects like famine in ‘grandfather’. Jayanta Mahapatra gives all his focus to Orissa and motherland things. His area is limited only to his experiences and history. Jayanta Mahapatra‘s poetry appears to be very difficult because of its contrived style.

In ‘Hunger’ the poet has opened theme of hunger in three different ways; hunger for food, hunger for solitude and sexual hunger. The speaker, the girl and the fisherman are all trapped like fishes in the net of hunger. Speaker is a loner and wants peace of mind and heart but he thinks the way to peace will be satisfying his sexual needs. Fisherman or the girl’s father pushes the young girl into prostitution and becomes the one to get all her customers. One reading can be to sympathize with the father but in my viewpoint the father is shameless old hag who instead of doing some work takes the easy way out to use his daughter. The poet shows that the fisherman feels guilty for doing it but is guilt feeling enough for his crimes? How can he even swallow the rice that comes from the money by selling his daughter? At such a young age the girl loses her budding life and innocence. The girl is cold as rubber or her compassion with the rubber could mean the lose elasticity of her vagina because of continuous sex. The poem shows different perspective of how hunger affects people. All three are caught in the web of unsatisfied hunger of solitude.

Dhauli is a historical poem; its time is the one when war of kalinga was fought and the time immediately after that. Oriya soldiers massacred on the banks of river Daya, their blood flowed through the river Daya and their corpses were scattered on the battlefield to be torn by vultures, wolves and jackals. The poem also challenges masculinity and sexual power of the soldiers when he says “buried into dead hunger with its merciless worms guided the foxes to their limp genitals” the image of the foxes gnawing at the limp genitals of the soldiers is a powerful evocation of the limitations of male sexual power. Poem is also ironic in the sense that it calls cicadas voiceless however cicadas have very shrill voices. Poet says Ashoka repented and went in the search of dhamma (dharma) but he never pleads for forgiveness for the mindless butchering and blood bath he was responsible for in all the rock edicts that were installed by him in Dhauli.

Grandfather is a poem reflecting nostalgia. The poet is bursting with questions as to why his grandfather embraced Christianity and to seek answers he turns to his long dead grandfather and his diary; diary which is stained yellow by the dye of time. In this poem Jayanta Mahapatra reveals the struggle of his wounded psyche to come out of its cocoon. The speaker is haunted by the invisible spirit of his grandfather he calls his grandfather a board that has helped him and his children to grow and move ahead. He asks his grandfather what were his conditions at that time how afraid and hungry was he; how coward was he to leave his own family behind who stayed in the blurred part of his heart. He asks about the nature the rivers the trees the wind the animals and compares how all those images were empty just like his own stomach. Mahapatra seems to have grasped the intensity and dimensions of the terrible crisis faced by grandfather. The poem questions validity of religion. Is religion more necessary than food? Is religion or god more important than life of a living being? The poet reconstructs this imaginary debate in the mind of the grandfather and the reader. Poem is critique to some state imposed social order which feeds people but at the cost of their lives.

Answer 2

Dhauli has a war setting, the persona is trying to convey his feelings and experience of the war, he achieves this through giving us a descriptive analysis of those who died and were buried as a result of war, the persona proves that he is indeed narrating by bringing us to the present where he says that Ashoka is still lamenting out in his grave. The author uses imagery by saying " blood spilt ground" The author of this poem wanted to convey a message and lesson on the effects of war which he achieves.

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