Feminist Concern in the Selected Works of Jayanta Mahapatra

The recipient of the very first Sahitya Akademi Award for English poetry for his anthology Relationship in the year 1981, Jayanta Mahapatra is a physicist by profession and at heart he has always been a poet. He has almost touched every emotion of the mankind through his poetry. The touch of the culture of the Orissa state can be seen largely in his poetry as he belongs to that region. If we talk about him being feminist or not, then the answer can directly be a “yes”. He has been an observer of the trauma and sufferings that women face in the contemporary Indian society. It pisses him off that women have to go through traumatic experiences on a daily basis just to survive in society which is driven by men. In his poems like, “Indian Summer”, “Logic”, “The Whorehouse in a Calcutta Street”, “Dawn’, “A Missing Person”, etc. he paints a picture of Indian women in different roles and how they still have to struggle in their day to day life and how their lives become pathetic in the social set up India which is patriarchal in nature. The present paper aims to analyze Mahapatra’s poetry through the lens of feministic concern and how his poetry makes people understand the situation of women around.