A Missing Person is a countryside woman delineated and depicted in the poem, telling
of life and personae of the rural scape in reality. A Missing Person is not an artiste of a
theatre or a so-called bar tender, a nautch girl or a devadasi, but a countryside rural
woman living namelessly. A persona non-gratia, she does the household jobs and lives
she namelessly. Had it been Burquawalli or Purdahwalli, it would have better. The
bibi under the ghumta has the tales of her to tell. The Lakshmanrekha drawn out and
circled need not be crossed as the courtyard of the house is the periphery round which
moves it the life of a woman. Sad to refer in this context there had been the monstrous
Sati system in the past. There was the child marriage system. Widows were not at
allowed to marry again as they used to restrain themselves from. Even the women
were not allowed to utter the names of their godly husbands. Sometimes the tattoo
used to tell the name of the husband imprinted on the hand of the wife. Under these
circumstances given, how to tell the story, depict the picture, flash the light upon, do
the portrait of hers?
To see it otherwise, A Missing Person is the Mona Lisa of Jayanta Mahapatra which
he keeps portraying and silhouetting or maybe it The Last Duchess of Robert
Browning whose photo lies it on the wall of with the smiles snatched and scrapped
from her suspicious lips. But definitely she is not A Missing Person of Adil
Jussawalla, the poetical text of his to make a way for into the realms of Indian English
poesy nor is she the Adil Jussawalla the missing person of poetry who is re-surfacing
after a 35-year break from creativity. She may be The Purdah Nashin of Sarojini
Naidu.
In the dark room a woman cannot find her reflection is the truth no doubt and that too
in the villages of Indian countryside, mostly built from mud and haystacks, bamboos
and straw-thatched though the rock-built temples may be for the gods and goddesses
to house in. Even now those who build great mansions live in the shanty is the truth;
the masons as daily wagers, labourers and workers which the foreigners startle to view
it in utter surprise.
Tired of full-day labour and work, she appears to be taking naps, half-sleepy and waiting for. Apart from that state, there is a lamp burning in her hands whose drunken yellow flames know it where her body hides.
An image-maker Jayanta though may be a feminist, but is not free from the twitches of the body and its intricate relationships. As a poet he is not only Wordswothian, Keatsian and Yeatsian, but Lawrentine too. Personal and private matter is his top priority. Here the missing persona or protagonist is but a rural woman in the ghumta, the Andrew Marvellian To His Coy Mistress or The Dark Lady of William Shakespeare. E.M.Forster too in one of his essays tells of the burqua-clad women of Hyderabad. The Fakir of Jungheera too by Derozio is one such poem reminding us of the Sati system and its brutal impact on society. Jayanta as a poet suffers from sexuality. Jayanta is Wordsworthian when he takes to solitude, space and landscapes luring around, meeting the ground. He is Keatsian when he takes to beauty and truth and is Lawrentine side by side when he is full of sexuality and its twitches, the intricacies of man-woman relationship tangling it all.
But the marvel is in it that in a poem of just a few lines, he has said it all what he had to, picturing the whole of India and its society, life and living which but cannot be negated. How had it been life in the villages?, you can feel from it. How had it been the Indian villages scattered and far flung, unreachable and inaccessible, not connected with ways linking them all? In addition to it, you just feel it, how did superstition and fatal creep in, the purdah system and all other social evils? How did the foreigners loot, plunder and devastate it, pulling all the glories of it? How did it lapse in misrule and maladministration?
Though he does not say it all, the missing persona is no doubt an Indian rural woman, living a nameless life to be redeemed by great man like Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar and the British system of education.
Sita or a Draupadi or who is more modern? Were Putana and Surpanakha described in bad light? Our mistake is we have not heard others’ tales. We have only Aryanized our tales, but the tales of India are Dravidic and Austro-Asiatic too apart from Tibeto-Chinese.
Or, is it that Jayanta Mahapatra is drawing the image of a woman in his art studio, cleaning and copying it to be reflected through the photo-negative? An Indian rural woman, a nameless person figuring in as the heroine and protagonist or mouthpiece and spokesperson of the seminar on feminism may be the truth hidden inside. A Missing Person as a poem foreshadows the use of the dark daughter theme in Relationship.
She will not take the name of husband on the lips as it will be a sin to take his name. Just the tattoo saying her name and if that too is inscribed upon otherwise she will keep mum unless and until someone else tells her name. If this be the thing then how to talk of feminism and women liberties in masculine and patriarchal India full of medieval and fanatical people? But the context of the poem is one of an image, a picture drawn, a portrait of an Indian woman from the countryside.
