The Indian Summer by Jayant Mahapatra (Summary)

The Indian Summer

by Jayant Mahapatra

(Summary)

 Poem

Summary

Jayant Mahapatra was the poet of ‘the Modern Age’. This age is also known as ‘The age of interrogation and anxiety’. The general characteristics of this age are:

·      Anxiety and interrogation,

·      Art for life’s sake,

·      Growing interest in the poor and the working classes,

·      Impact of socio-economic conditions on literature,

·      Stream of consciousness,

·      Impact of the two world wars &

·      The two world wars.

The general characteristics of poetry of this age are:

·      Tradition and experiment,

·      Imagism,

·      Symbolism &

·      Pound and Eliot tradition.

The modern poet includes: transitional poets, war poets, Georgian poets, poets of imagism, poet of symbolism, oxford poets and the poets of Neo-Romanticism.

Jayant Mahapatra, a modern poet of Indo-Anglican poetry was born in 1928 at Cuttack. He studied science and was a reader in physique. He was a poet who wrote both in Oriya and English. His poetry is lyrical in nature and portrays both ugliness and beauty of life. According to him he writes what pleases him. His poems carry fragrance of soil and he has raised petty things or subjects to the level of national and universal.

In the short poem ‘Indian Summer’ Jayant Mahapatra describes the activities of an Indian family in a hot summer season.

  The Poetry of Jayanta Mahapatra (Fourth Revised and Enlarged Edition) by Bijay Kumar Das (Author)

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According to the poet, India is a hot country and the summer season here remains very dry. In this poem he gives a tragic view of life. The poet is pessimistic when he talks about the sufferings of the common people of India. In this poem, he has acquired a gloomy attitude towards life. According to the poet, he hears the sighing of the gloomy winds. He says, that the priests chant their hymns in loud voices. ‘The open mouth of India’ suggest the wide spread hunger and starvation in India. The poet means to say that the poor people of India suffer not only from the extreme heat but from hunger too.

While describing the hardships of an Indian in summer season, he also talks about an amphibian, crocodile, which moves into greater depths of water to get rid of the extreme heat. According to him the sun is very hot and heaps of refuse emit smoke during the day.

In the last lines of the poem, the poet portrays the Indian women but with sympathy. According to him in this hot season when it is impossible to get out of the house in afternoon, the women shut themselves in their room and they spent their whole afternoon by relaxing and lying-in bed. They dream away their afternoon in such condition. They do not suffer the burning air of the summer season which makes sound like the sound produced by funeral pyre.

The poet presents a gloomy picture of India in summer. The Indian suffer the extreme heat and somber wind in this season. ‘The mouth of India’ suggests a tragic view and the pessimistic view of the poet’s philosophy. The poem is written in a free verse form having no rhyme scheme. The language of the poem is simple and style is jerky, i.e., the sentences suggested by the lines of the poem are small and incomplete.