A farewell note to Jayanta Mahapatra

Mahapatra’s death on Sunday has left the community of Indian poets writing in English both sobered by grief at his passing and rejoicing in his long life, astoundingly rich and prolific writing, and his warm, congenial encouragement of younger poets.

He had been in hospital for more than a fortnight, was on ventilator following a bout of pneumonia, and previously suffered a brain stroke. His suffering is now over.

Seeing the incestuous poetry world from the inside out, it is astonishing to see how much Mahapatra meant even to the outside world. He was the first Indian poet writing in English to receive the Sahitya Akademi Award. Over Mahapatra’s long career, his poetry collections are numbered variously as 22, 27 or 28; he also wrote prose. The literary magazine he edited, Chandrabhaga, is among the longest-published ones from India. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 2009, which, he declared in 2015, he wished to return to protest against “the growing moral asymmetry that’s visible in our country”.

Indian poets, offline and online on Sunday, sombrely honoured the legacy of Mahapatra.

Poet, curator and art critic Ranjit Hoskote, over phone from the Auroville Poetry Festival 2023, said, “Jayanta was part of a generation of pioneering post colonial Anglophone Indian poets”.

Hoskote said, “In one sense he symbolises the way in which literary expression could come from Cuttack, a city with a glorious past but also not from the mainstream… amazing work emerging from anywhere from the map without regard for the metropolitan”.

Now the world passes into my eye:the birds flutter toward rest around the tree,the clock jerks each memory towardsthe present to become a past, floating awaylike ash, over the bank.

— From Ash by Jayanta Mahapatra

Indian poets know Mahapatra as a major voice in his own right when many other great poets were based in bigger cities. But Mahapatra was in touch with them, including the Bombay poets, a few of whom ran the publishing collective Clearing House. Among its publications was one of Mahapatra’s books of poems.

Mahapatra was from Cuttack, by no means a metropolis, and while his poetry got him to a fellowship in the famous Iowa Writers Workshop, and to other international acclaim, he remained interwoven with his myriad, complex contexts.

Asked what Mahapatra’s work evoked for him, Hoskote said, “His core concerns remain with the interplay of time and eternity, the presence of the monumental… the monumental in architecture and frail vulnerable human lives”.

For me, to read some of the great poet’s work was to admire the languid, swan-like, arboreal segues of his flow of expressions. His voice and poetic palette found its own way to take stock of his complex family history, his human mortality, his generational traumas, his cultural heritage. His was a singular engagement with what Indianness meant for him. Like any great writer, it would seem, a whole settlement of people spoke rhythmically through his lines. I wonder what it means to let the pasts possess your bones and walk on your tongue, as Mahapatra did.

And his magazine, Chandrabhaga!

Mahapatra, he said, also “acted as a mentor, point of inspiration for so many poets”. And this – his kind words and actions of encouragement for other poets – is a common refrain I heard over and over after his death.

Writer Salil Tripathi, who is based in New York, tweeted to mourn “the passing of an era” and the loss of “another powerful voice”. Mahapatra, Tripathi recalled, had in the late 1970s published poems which Tripathi as a college student submitted to Chandrabhaga. Tripathi, also board member of PEN International, noted Mahapatra’s return of the Padma Shri, calling him “a quiet, unassuming man [who] let his words speak for himself”.

Tributes to Mahapatra painted a picture of him as a nourishing presence for writers. Poet/anthologist Vinita Agrawal posted photos of her with Mahapatra as he cut a birthday cake perhaps last year. For her, it was a personal loss. Writer and reviewer Kabir Deb, also on FB, said Mahapatra had told him, “Keep writing, son! That’s the only thing you should do,” and that Deb would. Writer Rochelle Potkar, on FB, shared a text conversation with Mahapatra appreciating one of her poems which he had liked. As this is being written, she plans to write a post on Chandrabhaga.

Before Kolatkar died nearly 20 years ago, he brought out a few remarkable books of poetry. A poet-journalist suggested I preview one or two in the newspaper which employed me. I remember doing so, and hoping he would read it, though it was only a listing, maybe three inches by two, one column. Maybe he did, before his demise or didn’t.

No doubt, at various places in the country, small groups of poets will seek out cafes and tea houses and Press Clubs to celebrate Mahapatra’s life. I, too, will attend one in my home town, a memorial service organised by friends of Mahapatra. We will read out poems written in his memory, or some of his works.

Bye bye, Jayanta Mahapatra, thanks for everything. Say hi to Nissim Ezekiel and Dom Moraes and Arun Kolatkar, Dilip Chitre and the others in whatever heaven poets go to.

Suhit Bombaywala’s factual and fictive writing appears in India and abroad.