About Jagannathprasad Das

 Jagannathprasad Das was born in 1936 is a noted poet and playwright. An M.A in Political Science from the University of Allahabad, he is a senior officer of the Indian Administrative Service. His first collection of poems Prathama Purusha (First Person, 1971) is quite popular and has been translated into Hindi and English. The poems are spoken by an ‘I’ who could be both the poet himself, a modern man, or the primal man. This ambiguity in the title gives a special significance to the book.

For, the sense of loneliness and fear which the poems convey belongs, to both the poet and his primal ancestor. The book depicts a world in which strains, crossroads, labyrinths, circles, and mirrors are the staple images. It is ‘a strange land’, an‘enormous void’. And the people who inhabit it – emperor, soldier, magician, harlot – act out their roles in a,spiritless, mechanical manner. Life is but a mask play. But the ‘I’ is no passive onlooker, nor is he indifferent to the meaningless goings on around him.

He probes these absurdities with singular ardour and honesty in his other two collections Anya SabuMrityu Ebam Anyanya Kavita (Many other Deaths and other Poems, 1975) and Je Jahara Nirjanata (One is one’s own Loneliness, 1979). The former may well be read as a long meditative poem on death. The speaker in Prathama Purusha perceives that time has no identity, no meaning, and so the one problem before him is how to give it a name. Death is proposed in Anya Sabu Mrityu Ebam Anyanya Kavita as a possible means, a defining context. Every experience of love is a kind of death and the ‘I’ sustains all these deaths.

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