Guru Prasad Mohanty’s ‘Kalapurusha’ – A Perspective

This is the Birth Centenary year of eminent Odia poet Guru Prasad Mohanty (Born: 1924 – Died: 2004) who was a trend-setter in ushering in modernism in Odia poetry. We publish a brief study of his poetry ‘Kalapurusha’ on the occasion of the centenary year.

It is part of popular legend among Odia poets, critics and readers of Odia poetry how Kalapurusha (lit. Time Personate or Death Personate) came to be written. As the story goes, there was a bet between two of the major poets of Odisha, Guruprasad Mohanty and Radha Mohan Gadanayak in the early fifties. Both of them were admirers of Eliot (Mohanty more so) and both had read The Waste Land. While Gadanayak believed it was impossible to recreate such Modern poetry in Odia, Mohanty disagreed. Eventually, the latter took it as a challenge to recreate The Waste Land in Odia and came up with the long poem Kalapurusha (1955) that later became a part of his Sahitya Akademi award winning poetry collection, Samudra Snana (lit. Bay Bath) (1970). Kalapurusha is not only considered as the first single Modern Odia long poem, it is also held as “harbinger of new poetry” in Odia. But it has also received severe criticism from Odia critics for imposing a “Western” sensibility that is foreign and rootless. In this paper, I look at those criticisms as part of a postcolonial ambivalence of the poets and critics of Odisha towards Modernism.

In an article titled “Contemporary Oriya Poetry: The Revolt Against ‘Modernism” published in 1993, S.N. Barik criticizes the “Pound-Eliot school of Poetry of the 20s and 30s” as one that is “orthodox, highly personal and deliberately intellectual”. Barik goes on to suggest that poets like Guruprasad Mohanty who brought Modernism to Odia poetry were responsible for “artificiality”, “overdose of scholarship”, “obscurity caused by deliberate cerebration” and “shrewd use of unusual images and personal symbols”. Barik feels that Eliot’s was a bad influence on Odia poetry – working mostly through Guruprasad Mohanty, but also through major poets like Sachi Routray – which imposed on the Odia readers, sensibilities far from their own reality.
The protagonist of Eliot’s poetry who is “a Modern man without any local identity” is apparently not Odia enough for Barik. He goes on to suggest that a “revolt”, as the title suggests, has been undertaken by the Odia poets of the seventies and the eighties of the last century against the dominance of “Westernism” in Odia poetry. Barik calls these poets, who “do not look at life through the eyes of an Eliot”, “post-modern”. While it is indeed true that Odia poetry, starting in the seventies, did witness a shift from the preoccupation with models of Western Modernism, Barik’s own criticism is highly inaccurate as far as both Eliot and Mohanty are concerned. It is one thing to debate the extent of artificiality or overdose of scholarship in Guruprasad Mohanty’s poems vis-à-vis his predecessors in Odia poetry; and completely another thing to say that none of these existed in Odia poetry before Mohanty came and brought along with him these Eliotian vices. The ambivalence with which Barik reacts to Eliot is interesting. For him, artificiality of form or obsession with scholarship are nothing but Western influences against which an Odia “revolt” is happening. A cursory glance at medieval Odia poetry would have told him that there indeed were Odia poets like Upendra Bhanja, Dinakrushna Das or Baladeb Rath who were masters of form employing much more “mechanical conventions” or “overdose of scholarship” than Eliot or, for that matter, any other Modern poet has done. One may take Upendra Bhanja as an example. Born in 1670 in a royal family in Odisha, Bhanja was the most prominent Odia poet in the kavya tradition. Not only did he write around fifty kavyas, but also wrote several alankara-grantha (works on rhetoric), abhidhana (lexicography) among others. While his excessive use of alliteration and musical notations – folk as as well as classical – in his works may not be something similar to what the Modernists were doing, his use of unusual images and often providing comments on his own works are of interest. Bhanja’s works – as was the case with the works of his contemporary Dinakrushna Das who once challenged Bhanja to write an entire kavyawith the alphabet “ka” used in the opening wordsof all the lines – often carried elaborate commentaries and glossaries by the poet himself. “Upendra Bhanja’s own comments on his works”, observes K. Ayyappa Panikker, “help a critic to evaluate them”. It is all the more unfortunate that there is practically zero critical work exploring the connections between Bhanja and Mohanty, particularly in the light of Eliot’s influence that emphasizes on scholarship, despite the fact that in Kalapurusha, Mohanty alludes to Bhanja:

“Mo deha ra gandha puni pushpabati ganika ra
Chandrabhanu hunkara o ishikaara Lavanyabati ra
Gomansa ra gandha puni mada matsa nari gandha
Mo deha re pruthibi ra jajabara aloka andhara.”
(“My body smells like a newly bloomed prostitute,
The pride of Chandrabhanu and the orgasm of Lavanyabati,
The smell of beef, of wine, of fish, of women,
In my body exist the wandering light and darkness of the earth.”)

The tradition of referring to a girl who has attained menarche as “pushpabati” (literally, a girl who has bloomed) is found in several texts of Upendra Bhanja, most prominent of which is Vaidehisha Vilaasa (lit. Tales of Vaidehi’s Husband), a kavya about Ram that focuses on his relationship with Sita. Similarly, Chandrabhanu and Lavanyabati are the protagonists of Bhanja’s kavya, Lavanyabati that abounds with detailed descriptions of love-making between the two. It is interesting how Mohanty goes back only to Bhanja’s texts as opposed to Eliot who goes back to Shakespeare, Marvell, Spencer among others.

Another major point that is often used as a criticism against Guruprasad Mohanty’s Modernist writings, particularly Kalapurusha, is his preoccupation with “alienation and morbidity of modern man” that many critics have found to be out-of-place for the Odia sensibility. Dilip Kumar Swain observes, immediately after quoting some lines from Guruprasad Mohanty’s poem “Mrutyu: Ascharya Abhisara” (lit. “Death: A Wonderful Adventure”), “The readers are often surprised at the sheer interest of Odia poets towards morbidity. The poets have chosen death as an alternative in poetry because they have failed to tackle with the failures and the pain of life (translation mine) .” Swain goes on to locate this poetic helplessness as a product of Western influence. “These poems had their feet planted in Odia soils but their brains were flooded with Western waves” . While it is true Eliot’s was the most powerful influence on Odia poetry of the sixties, the preoccupation with alienation and morbidity were not necessarily borrowed concepts planted by these poets. The history of Odia poetry abounds with texts that deal with such preoccupations. One such text is Tika Gobinda Chandra (lit. A Glossary to Gobinda Chandra), written by a Nath Yogi from eighteenth century named Yogindra Vipra,  and still sung by Yogis in the villages of Odisha when they go from house to house begging, playing a musical instrument called kendera. The original Gobinda Chandra text, to which this one is a glossary,is attributed to Yasobanta Das, a poet born in fifteenth century, and part of the famed Pancha Sakha group of poets (The Five Friends). Among these five poets (Jagannath Das, Balaram Das, Ananta Das, Achyuta Das, Yasobanta Das), Yasobanta and Achyuta were famous for their mystical thoughts, use of strange images and sustained lyricism.[3] Written as a glossary to the original text by Yasobanta Das, the Gobinda Chandra text by Yogindra Vipra thus begins:

“Bhaju kina Rama nama re Kumara japu kina Rama nama
Bhaji na parile kula chandrama re bandhi neba Kala Jama re Kumara
Bandhi neba Kala Jama”
(“Do you keep remembering the name of Rama, O My Son, do you keep chanting the name of Rama?
If you can’t, the Moon of my House, then Time the Yama will come and get you, My Son, Time the Yama will get you.”)

Anyone conversant in Odia can see in almost all the poems of Guruprasad Mohanty, a striking similarity in terms of the repetition of words to create music as well as the sustained lyricism, even though Mohanty has abandoned the formal structures of the medieval poets for free verse with irregular rhymes.
One of Eliot’s most popular and often misquoted quotes goes like this, “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” It is important to give the quote a bit of context. Eliot offers this statement as a “test” of Massinger’s “inferior[ity]” to Shakespeare by placing side by side quotations from Shakespeare and Massinger. Immediately before the quote comes in the essay, Eliot writes, “One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows”. He goes on to say, “The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest”. While it is evident that judging Guruprasad Mohanty and how (well) he borrows from Eliot on these terms is no final test of Mohanty’s poetic greatness but it can shed new light on Eliot’s influence on Mohanty. 

(This write-up forms a part of an extensive paper written by the author on the subject.)