“Hunger” is a very touching poignant and highly moving poem which stands unique in Indian English poetry for the authenticity of experience. The poet ironically reveals that the feeling of hunger which has been used in a double sense, first it means the sharp desire to eat caused by starvation and secondly the insatiable hunger for sexual satisfaction. The word is metaphorically used in this poem. It is a poem on the theme of prostitution which is the result of poverty, social and economic injustice. It stands a comparison with “The Whorehouse in a Calcutta Street”, which also centres on the theme of prostitution.
 |
| Mahapatra’s Poem, Hunger, Critical Analysis |
The poem is in the form of dramatic monologue. The speaker in this poem narrates his experiences with a fisherman and his daughter. He is sex hungry and wants immediate sexual gratification. He has learnt from somewhat that the fisherman provides his daughter for sexual gratification. So the speaker meets him and tells him the purpose of meeting. The fisherman father, dragging his nets behind him walks towards his humble cottage along with the speaker. The fisherman, without any feeling of remorseless and shame, asked him whether he would like to have sex with his daughter. The fisherman spoke his words elegantly as there were an air of sanctity and solemnity in his words. However, the white teeth shining in one side of his mouth seemed to be chiding him silently.
The speaker followed the fisherman over the sandy shore towards his cottage because he was intensely feeling the pinch of sexual desire. His sense of guilt had almost dumbed him. The fisherman was laboriously dragging his foam covered nets behind him. It was getting dark.
The speaker was also guilt stricken but the flesh (sexual urge) was heavy on him. He found himself speechless. Inside the fisherman's shack an oil lamp was burning and the “sticky soot crossed the space” of the speaker's mind. The fisherman, compelled by poverty and hunger, told him that his daughter had just turned fifteen. He continued saying that he would go out for a while. Meanwhile he could feel her body as he liked. The customer's would leave at nine. He would return by that time. The speaker was stunned by the fisherman's shamelessness and his “exhausted wile”. He went away leaving his daughter alone with the speaker - customer. She was tall and slim. Although she felt no sexual warmth, she mechanically “opened her wormy legs wide” for the customer to perform the sexual act. Compelled by intense sexual urge, the speaker pounded upon her and sexually gratified himself.
“Hunger” is remarkable for dramatic element which reaches climax in the last stanza:
“I heard him say: my daughter, she's just turned fifteen........
Feel her; here, there. Be back soon, your bus
leaves at nine. The sky fell as me, and a father's
exhausted wile. Long and lean, her years were cold as rubber.
She opened her wormy legs wide. I felt the hunger there,
the other one, the fish slithering, turning inside.”
This poem is a highly moving mordant satire on the object poverty and social injustice in India. The penury of the fisherman father compels him to let his fifteen year old daughter to resort to prostitution for earnings. It is also a masterpiece of poetic art. It is a profoundly human document and its former depends mainly on the authenticity of human experience, which is expressed through apt and properly arranged words. There is fine fusion of the literal and the metaphorical in expressions such as, “trailing his nets and his nerves,” “his white bone thrash his eyes”, and “the fish slithering, turning inside.”