Eco-critical Elements in the Selected Poems of Jayanta Mahapatra

Abstract

Jayanta Mahapatra is a well-known, distinguished, Indo-Anglican writer whose poems and short stories are acknowledged worldwide. He was awarded the Sahithya Akademi Award for his work Relationship in 1981, which enabled him to gain the name of one of the doyens of Indian English Poetry. His major themes are all linked with his native place Orissa. His poems mentions Puri, Konarka, Chilika lake, Bhubaneswar recurrently and each of them are pictured in detail. An Ecocritical study on his poems is worth probing as it deserves more attention and consideration in the current state of environmental crisis. His sole inspiration is his interaction with the nature and his intimate relationship to it. As ecocriticism rightly perceives it as the study of the relationship between human and nature, deserves a detailed study with his poems. River daya in his poem takes the role of a bearer of history and is the memory of the past valor and glory of Orissa. The study here focuses on the elements of ecocriticism in his selected poems.