Sitakant Mahapatra’s position as a postmodern Indian writer needs no introduction. However, the directions his poetry and prose have taken in response to the complex postmodern condition in India have yet to receive a sustained critical assessment. In the Indian experience, modernism had a shape and color different from those in Europe and color different from those in Europe and the United States, its impact tempered both by the softer and slower landing of technology and the long cultural history that cushioned the stunning blow of disintegration and collapse that the West had felt. In both these aspects of India’s encounter with modernism, an indigenous understanding of time was of the essence; in fact, in the four decades during which Mahapatra has negotiated with history and tradition in the face of change and revision, one sees in his writing a recurrent motif, carving a new mythography of time and resurrecting the old cast-away icons of life and nature from the scrap heap of history and nihilism. Sitakant Mahapatra: Mythographer of Time is a collection of fourteen essays by scholars from India and abroad focusing on Mahapatra’s metaphysical feat integrating the homelessness of the twenty-first century city slums with the mystical experience of a radically ambivalent life, entwining death with deathlessness in a double helix of past and future, weaving history with sternity and raising man towards God. His poetry, these critics argue, not only blurs the boundary between the physical universe off flesh and blood and the transcendental world of the mind and the spirit, but also paves a path toward total transubstantiation of one into the other.
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