International Journal For Multidisciplinary Research

E-ISSN: 2582-2160   •   Impact Factor: 9.24

A Widely Indexed Open Access Peer Reviewed Multidisciplinary Bi-monthly Scholarly International Journal

Call for Paper Volume 8, Issue 5 (September-October 2026) Submit your research before last 3 days of October to publish your research paper in the issue of September-October.
Submit Research Paper Join as a Reviewer

Plagiarism is checked by the leading plagiarism checker TurnItIn

Call for Paper

Volume 8 Issue 5
September-October 2026

Submit your research paper

Indexing Partners
Academia Advanced Sciences Index Bielefeld Academic Search Engine CiteSeer DRJI Google Scholar Independent Search Engine & Directory Network ISI (International Scientific Indexing) Issuu Mendeley Research Networks
RefSeek ResearcherId - Thomson Reuters ResearchGate Scirus Scribd Semantic Scholar UTeM - Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka Wiki for Call for Papers WorldCat Zenodo

Silenced Flesh, Sanctioned Hunger: The Predicament of Women in Prostitution in Jayanta Mahapatra’s Calcutta Poems

Author(s) Ms. Pragnya Paramita Samanta, Dr. Suropriyo Chakraborty
Country India
Abstract Between the lyric hush of the imagist poem and the clamour of a society that trades in hunger, Jayanta Mahapatra’s “Hunger” and “The Whorehouse in a Calcutta Street” stage some of the most disquieting encounters in Indian poetry in English. This paper investigates how the two poems render women ensnared in the sex trade, and whether their austere, image-driven art exposes the economic and patriarchal machinery of exploitation or quietly reproduces the silence it seeks to indict. Drawing on feminist, postcolonial and formalist criticism, it reads “Hunger” as a poem in which carnal appetite and material want converge in a single transaction, yet in which the girl is denied any interior voice and the encounter is filtered wholly through the visitor’s consciousness. It then shows how the Calcutta poem transposes these concerns into an urban, commercialised register, where second-person address, fragmentary imagery and an externalised view of the woman present the brothel as an anonymous, endlessly repeatable institution. Calcutta is considered as a symbolic space of contrast and moral ambiguity, and subaltern readings, which lament the absence of female speech, are weighed against readings that prize the poems’ unsentimental refusal of rescue. The paper argues that the poems sustain both interpretations at once, and that their unresolved ethical discomfort is not a flaw of the criticism but the defining signature of Mahapatra’s poetics of witness: an art that denies readers the consolation of innocence and holds them answerable for the structures of poverty and desire it lays bare.
Keywords: Indian English poetry; prostitution; female agency; subaltern silence; poverty and patriarchy; imagist witness; male gaze
Keywords Indian English poetry; prostitution; female agency; subaltern silence; poverty and patriarchy; imagist witness; male gaze
Field Sociology > Linguistic / Literature
Published In Volume 8, Issue 5, September-October 2026
Published On 2026-10-11
DOI https://doi.org/10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i05.89536
View / Download PDF File

Share this



E-ISSN 2582-2160
CrossRef

CrossRef DOI prefix of IJFMR is 10.36948/ijfmr

Downloads
Research Paper Format Copyright Permission Form and Undertaking Form

All research papers published on this website are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, and all rights belong to their respective authors/researchers.

CC-BY-SA Open Access

About IJFMR
Fees & Payment
Current Issue
Publication Archive 		Submit Research Paper
Track Submission Status
Publication Guidelines
Publication Ethics
Peer Review & Plagiarism 		Join as a Reviewer
Editors & Reviewers
Reviewer Referral Program
Get Reviewer Membership Certi. 		Website/Journal Policies
Usage Policy
Content Policies
Privacy Policy
Contact Us +91-9687-828-838 editor@ijfmr.com
Powered by Sky Research Publication and Journals