Treatment of Indianness and Indian Lexical Items in the Poetry of Jayanta Mahapatra

Abstract

In this study, we try to focus the issue of Indianness and the Indian lexical items used by Jayanta Mahapatra from a socio-cultural and linguistic point of view. The issue of Indianness reflected in the works of Indian English literature is a much discussed and debated topic among the high brow people. It is often seen that the Indian writers, whether poets or novelists or any prose writers, are conscious enough about their Indian identity. According to Meenakshi Mukharjee, this tendency is nothing but an „anxiety of Indianness‟. For Gokak, “It is easy to slip into thinking that Indianness consists in adopting an angle of vision which is recognizably vedantic” (Gokak in Mohan, 1978, p.23). Besides this vedantic view, however, as he argues, there are other world views too presented by Indian literature. These areMarxist, socialist, existentialists etc. According to Gokak, mysticism is an important feature found in the Indian literature which is a very common theme found in other literatures too. He says, “An expression of occult experience is not the monopoly of Indo-Anglican or Indian writers. Blake and the romantics and the poets of the Irish revival like A.E. Houseman and W. B. Yeats are full of it.This too, is a feature which distinguishes the work of all great writers in world literature”(Gokak in Mohan, 1978,pp.23-24).