FREUDIAN PSYCHOLOGY IN THE POETRY OF Dr. P. K. MOHANTY’S “KRAMASHAH”

The text of Dr. Promad Kumar Mohanty’s “Kramashah” is full of complex codes, languages from different fields of discourse. The cultural context is the 1960s of Orissa, its rural, as well as urban experience. The major preoccupation of the poet is adolescent love, its failure, frustrations and its pang portrayed through intellectual metaphors, culled from myth, history and folk culture. The space is interior and the poems are partially psychological. While combining both the features, we can situate the poems of Kramashah (Gradually) in the register of psychology.

The poems of Mr. Mohanty, being psychological, occupies a unique place in the gamut of Oriya poetry. No other modern poet, be he Sachi Routray or Guru Prasad Mohanty, has written poems based on psychology. But this again poses a problem of duality: whether the poet would intend to make his poems communicable and relevant to the society or he would exteriorize his repressed subconscious and unconscious. However, the milieu of Oriya poetry was not considered to be very rich by 1967, the year of the publication of Kramashah. The poet recollects that no other significant modern texts of poems were published by that time except Mr.Ramakant Rath’s “Kete Dinora” and Mr. Sitakant Mahapatra’s “Astapadi”.

It was a time of radical cultural destabilization. The older norms of poetry were being transgressed boldly. No one was, however, sure about the future. The golden dreams of independence Orissa were splintered by that time. The poet therefore, confesses in the introduction. “I have tried to incorporate into these poems lots of my inner helplessness, intense feelings of tragedy and the defeats of my directionless soul.”

Every poet has a right to externalize his inner feelings before his readers. But to dwell on his own inner to experience at the cost of the society might not fulfill the expectations of the reader who want their poet to be seen as a holistic man. They do not expect the poet to echo the pangs and helplessness of a directionless soul. On the other hand, they want to detect the poet’s strong convictions, his faith in cosmic scheme and the messages of the creator’s ultimate victory over orders of life. However, Mr. Chittaranjan Das comments in his introduction to this anthology, “Why, should the poet demand a plate of rice of honor and offering in the interior of his scarce

home ? Why should not he dream of a prosperous home like the son of the soil? Why should not he initiate dialogue of prosperity and golden dreams through his poems?”

But Dr. Mohanty can also be compared to the young romantic poet John Keats, who sang of melancholy. However, the yardsticks of romanticism would not measure appropriate for Mr. P.K Mohanty, since he is a modern poet and he experiments with Freudian Psychology .He is also one of our unique poets who depicts the deep layer of mind in poetry. His collection of poems in Akatakata (Abysmal Depths) metaphorizes the unconscious.

The notion of unconscious is a discovery of Dr. Sigmund Freud. The major contribution of Sigmund Freud was to provide a scientific analysis of the functioning of the subconscious and the unconscious layers of the psyche. Freud defines these layers as the store house of infinite energy. They are compared to a melting pot of repressed desires and unfulfilled wishes, the “night side of life.” One has to exercise tremendous will power through controlling the ego in order to overcome them.

Carl Gustaf Jung, another psychologist who improved upon Freud gave more relevant definitions on the concept of the unconscious. On the level, Jung says that the subconscious mind exercises control over the unconscious. Its effects are discernible in the day to day life of the individual. This is called personnel unconscious. Yet an individual has a still deeper level that stays independent of the personal unconscious. At this level an individual shares the unconscious level of the society. This is called collective unconscious. While analyzing the poems of Kramashah, the reader is concerned with the creative unconscious of the poet.

The-first-person-narrator of these poems may not necessarily be taken as the poet. The narrator may be accepted as the surrogate author. In that case, the carnal wishes are expressed here through the mask of a persona. If he is not the mask, the poem can be categorized as a “confessional poem”. The poetry of the 1960s, elsewhere in the global scenario, is characterized by “confessional” features that are dominated by exteriorization of the libidinal desires.

The poets of Europe and America in the 1960s seemed to be united with traditional patterns of verse, rhyme, meter and formal structure were to be discarded in favor of a more spontaneous and immediate poetry. Poems were now viewed not as “made” things, but as powerful “process”. This new phase of global poetry is characterized by a terminology named, the “poetics of indeterminacy”, and this school of poetry is divided in to schools like Beats, Confessional, Projectivist, New Yorkist, and Deep Imagist poetry, seen more and more as a vehicle foe the direct expression of feelings, preferably “extreme”, “open” or “naked” and in ideology “underground”.

As far as the use of the dramatic monologues, the poems can also be viewed as impersonal since Champa belonged to a different time and a different literary context. But the poet’s absorption into the repressed psyche of Champa might have included some of his personal experiences that prove to be a kind of exorcism of the poetics or so called “modernism” in Oriya poetry under the ageis of T. S. Eliot. At this point, Mr. Mohanty signals toward post modernist imports. Now, viewed from the vantage point of a distanced historic context, these poems seem to be a big liberation and released from the oppressed sensibility of modernity.

These poems in Mr. Mohanty’s academic oeuvre exercises playing with only rhyme or image or myth or allusion. Secondly, these poems show a significant shift from the poetic of tension, paradox, and irony, in the conventional sense and proceed toward an apparent absence of tension. The poems, despite all their thematic and formal experimentations achieve greater simplicity, directness, and intimacy.

A Book Review of “KRAMASAH” by Dr. Pramod Kumar Mohanty

Reviewer: Pradipta Kumar Parida

E-mail:pradiptakumarparida@gmail.com