What other answers can one think of
— From 'Relationship' by Jayanta Mahapatra.
on a late autumn night,
when centuries drift quietly in the air,
rising like a mist from steaming rivers
toward this visionary part of one?
How does one describe the corpus of a poet about to turn 95? How does one describe the span of his life by a thousand-year-old city by a river? It is not measurable by the number of books he has written, or events he graced, or even the numerous awards and honours given to him. In an age where anything and everything is publishable, and the written or spoken word no longer needs incubation in the womb of trepidation and hope, all of it clamours to be called poetry or literature.
Jayanta Mahapatra’s work – many refer to him as a living legend of Indian English poetry – unyoked as it is to the artefacts of our fast-paced consumerist times, has remained essential art. Developed at a later stage of the physicist-turned poet’s life, this art speaks of trying times as well as embedded happiness.
Although a problematic word, especially from a feminist post-colonial perspective, I shall be using the term “anthropocene” (which, some suggest, should be replaced by “ capitalocene”) to note that this anthropocene era is teeming with laudatory tales of control, achievements, and assertions that place humans centerstage as the absolute and powerful entity. Some of us may grudge it, but we cannot deny that human civilisation today is focused on the unquestionable power of humans over all other universal aspects and life forms.
In such a scenario, where does a poet find their locus standi? The answer is situated within. I met Mahapatra recently after seven long years, after the Covid pandemic that claimed his health, and found my way into his world. The first meeting was not memorable, being in a “litfest” setting. The more recent ones were delightful.
The oeuvre Mahapatra has perfected is entirely the outcome of living in a world with universal elements and life forms. Up close, I see him as an individual who indeed holds in his gentle palms the key to leading us back to a humane reality, the natural world, and to multitudes that are still tied close to universal truths. Speaking of rivers, nostalgia, and solitude as the connecting thread to Mahapatra’s universe – my observations spring from my recent association with the poet of the essential, as I call him – these constitute a redeeming factor for the anthropocene era we live in, so as to be able to return to them.
Nostalgia as a component in his work has often been referred to as past-adhering or the thirst for a bygone era of his golden triangle of cities – Cuttack, Puri, Konark. Mahapatra, in fact, does more than just search for the times that are gone; he’s not just any plain nativist. His vision is unique here, as he adjusts his lenses to view the expansive culture, tradition, history, topography, and motifs of the Odisha landscape to merge them with all that he has gathered from all over the world. He then crafts these into a longing for the beauteous, the nourishing and the nurturing, and the myth-enabled reality we all aspire to in a time of chaos and breakdown.
My observation of Jayanta Mahapatra as a seeker and poet is that he has strived to get closer to the world by rejecting dislocation or displacement, rampant among so many of us in the post-industrial and post-colonial histories. Mahapatra’s peregrinations have only routed him back to his home town. At 94, he has consciously chosen to locate his temporal existence and experience within the reach of the memory and nostalgia that accords him a sense of belonging he has imbibed since he was born in Cuttack. He deftly uses this “belonging” to swing between the coordinates of Past and Present.
This in turn brought me into closer proximity to his nostalgia, which is far from disengagement with the current or the present. The temporal experience of vitality is what gently cups Mahapatra’s nostalgia and solitude, thus making us aware of the need to re-define our anthropocene environment, which has let go of the ability to heal or create harmoniously.
Why does one room invariably lead into other room?
— From 'The Moon Moments' by Jayanta Mahapatra.
We, opening in time our vague doors,
convinced that our minds lead to something never allowed before,
sit down hurt under the trees, feeding it simply because
it is there, as the wind does, blowing against the tree.
In this post-Covid era, even as laypersons we have felt that the recourse to what elevates, what is original, and what spurs creativity must be the outlook for the healing of our body and mind. According to Valentina Stoycheva, a clinical psychologist and the author of The Unconscious: Theory, Research, and Clinical Implications, in times of trauma and overwhelming stress, it’s a natural instinct to feel nostalgic and rely on those feelings for comfort and a sense of normalcy. A poet such as Mahapatra would know best how to align “the present to become a past” even as tragedy has stalked:
Now the world passes into my eye:
— From 'Ash' by Jayanta Mahapatra.
the birds flutter toward rest around the tree,
the clock jerks each memory towards
the present to become a past, floating away
like ash, over the bank.
According to Stoycheva, nostalgia serves as a kind of emotional pacifier, helping us to become accustomed to a new reality that is jarring, stressful and traumatic. This psychological declaration is something that the poet here has already known. Mahapatra has shown us how to uncouple ourselves from the mundane, the oppressive, and the self-destroying anthropocene, and to commit ourselves to a more meaningful humane existence.
…feel the tensed muscle of rock
— From 'Relationship'.
yield to the virtuous waters of the hidden springs
of the Mahanadi,
the mystery of secret rights that make up destiny;
Mahapatra’s past is not the past tense of our common parlance. Rather, it is the adherence to a certain vital thread that keeps all life together in a world where things fall apart too easily, as has happened in the historical past:
Years later, the evening wind,
— From 'Dhauli' by Jayanta Mahapatra.
trembling the glazed waters of the River Daya,
keens in the rock edicts the vain word,
like the voiceless cicadas of night.
Describing his vision, people have used the word “mythopoeic”, whereby he connects us to both the sublime and the grounded by voicing his concern about the wrongs of the historical past. Through his observations on culture, traditions, and mythology of his land by the mighty Bay of Bengal, he declares:
“To Odisha, to this land in which my roots lie and lies my past and in which lies my beginning and my end, where the wind knees over the grief of the River Daya and the waves of the Bay of Bengal fail to reach out to day to the firelight soul of Konarak, I acknowledge my debt and my relationship.”
— From the declaration while receiving the Sahitya Akademi Award.
This is where we value his idea of nostalgia – a return to the sustaining life force in the anthropocene era fraught with decay and disharmony. The core strength of values in our indigenous and grounded (I would refrain from using the word “rooted” because of the other problems it leads to) communities and societies that uphold the arc of life in waters, memory, and self-realisation, has been massively sidelined in this age of capitalistic and consumerist domination – but not so in the archaeology of Mahapatra’s poetic oeuvre.
For the nonagenarian, even life and death as a paradigmatic see-saw is represented as resurgence and re-emergence, harking back to words that have multiple skins – spurring a kind of nabakalebar, if we may use that wondrous mythical image associated with the trinity of Jagannath, Balabhadra and Subhadra, or Resurrection, if we use the Christian theological image.
Since I write about my personal association, it is imperative for me to assert that nostalgia in Mahapatra’s essential art is an omnipresent force. I have sat beside him while he soaked in the February sun in his ancestral house of Cuttack. I have taken a ride with him and other friends to the junction where the slim river Kathajodi leaves the lap of the blue Mahanadi to chart its own course. I have seen him looking up in child-like wonder at the hundred-year-old banyan tree (“aerial roots of a centuries-old banyan tree”) in a solitary yard which is home to hundreds of crows. All along, I saw him hold nostalgia by its hands, walk each hopeful step on fallen bamboo leaves and on bird droppings gone sapphire from weather effects, and stand gazing at the Mahanadi ghat that waits for him patiently. A long life, a long-winding river, a long relationship – his epic poem as well as his multilayered ethos – is the contour of fulfilment here.
This is where history sets its tone. This is the history we need to reclaim for our own well-being as well as the earth’s.
“Once again one must sit back and bury the
— From 'Relationship'.
face in this earth of the forbidding myth,
the phallus of the enormous stone”
In my brief encounter with the poet, I have seen him consumed by reverie as well as restlessness – both embodying his attention to solitude in the scene of Cuttack. Rivers being a perennial motif in his work, Mahapatra sets his vision on the Mahanadi that carries along his and others’ lives, offering a space of solace and serenity amid his mortal weariness:
Now I stand among these ruins,
— From 'Relationship'.
waiting for the cry of a night-bird
from the river’s far side
to drift through my weariness,
listening to the voices of my friends
who have become the friends of others,
writing poems, abject and anxious.
I had written earlier elsewhere that monsoon is the best time to read Jayanta Mahapatra’s poetry. As with rivers, the rain is a prominent image in a large number of his poems. Rivers, rains, and the rush of emotions flow through his landscape unabated as a creative vector to carry languor and misgivings to their cleansing site.
Sometimes a rain comes
— From 'A Rain of Rites' by Jayanta Mahapatra.
slowly across the sky, that turns
upon its grey cloud, breaking away into light
before it reaches its objective.
The rain I have known and traded all this life
is thrown like kelp on the beach.
Like some shape of conscience I cannot look at,
a malignant purpose in a nun’s eye.
Who was the last man on earth,
to whom the cold cloud brought the blood to his face?
Numbly I climb to the mountain-tops of ours
where my own soul quivers on the edge of answers.
Which still, stale air sits on an angel’s wings?
What holds my rain so it’s hard to overcome?
The twin rivers of Mahanadi and Kathajodi that embrace poet Jayanta Mahapatra’s home town Cuttack constitute a motif that he lives by every day. In the dusty Odisha towns of Cuttack and Puri, and the bye-lanes of memory and activity, the poet proliferates with his crows, bamboo groves of shedding leaves, cries of hawkers, and life moving along the ghats of grace and repose.
A man does not mean anything
— From 'A Rain of Rites'.
But the place
Sitting on the riverbank throwing pebbles
Into the muddy current,
A man becomes the place.
The arc of the rivers that entwine Cuttack, its delta, and the bustling human life of thousand years is in particular the purveyor of cohesion and amalgamation of senses for Mahapatra. The sorrow or losses are re-assembled into his own thirst for a seamless world of justice:
At times, as I watch,
— From 'Freedom' by Jayanta Mahapatra.
it seems as though my country’s body
floats down somewhere on the river.
Left alone, I grow into
a half-disembodied bamboo,
its lower part sunk
into itself on the bank.
Here, old widows and dying men
cherish their freedom,
bowing time after time in obstinate prayers.
While children scream
with this desire for freedom
to transform the world
without even laying hands on it.
“The similitudes of the past and those of the future” may be cited to sum up the river-soul of our sage of Cuttack:
The similitudes of the past and those of the future,
— 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry' by Walt Whitman.
The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, on the walk in the street and
the passage over the river,
The current rushing so swiftly and swimming with me far away,
The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them,
The certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of others.
Mahapatra’s art is more than just Whitmanseque grandeur, though. It connects past to a luminous state of being in the time ahead.
The past, no doubt, is a source of nostalgia, but in the case of Mahapatra’s poetry, the sense of belonging to a time is intimately tied to the future. In this, the sensibility is one of completion, hope, and resurgence.
Even if fleetingly, I could compare some of his work to those of the Bengali poet Jibanananda Das, a poet of hope and undying romance of the soul refusing to be overcome by civilisation’s deadening chants. The untiring walk across life and the nesting eyes of Jibanananda’s Banalata Sen finds resonance in love which is all things Mahapatra cares for and cherishes. Often the aloneness of love guides him assess his environment better:
And no one’s back here, no one
— From ‘Of that Love’ by Jayanta Mahapatra.
I can recognise, and from my side
I see nothing. Years have passed
since I sat with you, watching
the sky grow lonelier with cloudlessness,
waiting for your body to make it lived in.
Historicity, a strong component of Mahapatra’s thematic core, flows as a parallel space alongside his rivers of life. While his observations abound regarding the real rivers, the mythical river Chandrabhaga reiterates in his imagines and real spaces – including the name of his home and the title of the eminent journal – Chandrabhaga – he edits and publishes. One is reminded of the imagined flow another poet has mused about in his epical verses:
“Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
— From ‘Kubla Khan’ by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.”
For the Kubla Khan of the “Silver City” Cuttack, the rivers are the lifelines of Mahapatra’s emotions, his ruminations, and his petitions that seek answers of identity, peace, and reconnecting back to a benevolent world – aspects that one find thinning in the thoughtless, dislocated, and disconnected anthropocene era.
Hence, indeed, “what man has made of man” – bloody wars, genocide, brutal oppression by the state machinery, and natural calamities (often spurred by human-made follies) – makes the poetic heart heavy.
for our lives are only of the seeds of dreams,
— From 'Relationship'.
forgetting the cruelties
of ruthless emperors who carved peaceful edicts
on blood-red rock,
forgetting our groans and cries
the smells of gunsmoke and smoldering flesh.
One therefore deciphers a call to solitude in his poetry. Mahapatra’s solitude is not translated as loneliness or aversion to fellow humans; he does not foster the stigma of desolation. Observing him and speaking to him in a variety of settings such as Baripada, Konarak, and Cuttack from spring to summer, I’ve come away convinced that his oeuvre indicates that solitude is the radical unshackling of the self from the need to be attached and embedded.
Mahapatra’s gentle concern for our time, age, and history, tinged with sorrow and pensiveness, is reflected in the mixing of Christian imagery with his inherited local myth:
Maybe my mother’s soul set the apple free,
— From 'Genesis' by Jayanta Mahapatra.
making it roll down the road.
And I look for the same sense of stillness,
hoping it will heal me.
The myth has its head stuck in the fork of a tree.
And the spirits of knowledge won’t let it pass.
What this vast array of poetic utterances can say is that the crows, the trees with their fruits of prophecy and prayer, and humans in the midst of all of these awaiting both salvation and salvaging can only hope that deprivation and loss will not visit us:
Not yet.
— From 'Summer' by Jayanta Mahapatra.
Under the mango tree
The cold ash of a deserted fire.
Who needs the future?
A ten-year-old girl
combs her mother's hair,
where crows of rivalries
are quietly nesting.
The home will never
be hers.
In a corner of her mind
a living green mango
drops softly to earth.
From this place of solitude, the poet moves on to a more crowded scene, and rekindles his prayer to the deity for a return to a sane world:
This must be the myth of every happiness,
— From 'Relationship'.
the high wind that flings the flowers into disarray
the adamant bones which keep rolling in the dust
of the dark butterflies
The cry of the wounded sun silenced among
the ruins of Konarka.
I thought: those who survive the myth
have slipped past their lives…
At the poet’s home in Tinkonia Bagicha – literally, the garden of three apexes – where dry bamboo leaves rustle at the threshold, what converge are the remembrances of lives past, musings of the wrongs and follies of history and the nation, and sea-faring human souls, in an extraordinary template:
The ground seems only a memory now, a torn breath,
— From ‘Chandipur-on-Sea’ by Jayanta Mahapatra.
and as we wait for the tide to flood the mudflats
the song that reaches our ears is just our own.
The cries of fishermen come drifting through the spray,
music of what the world has lost.
The music that the anthropocene world has lost rings in his lines and reaffirms the sense of belonging. The latter has been analysed by many on an empiric-epistemological level. Belonging to the past opens the cultural connection to the future. The realisation of self is indeed complete with the sense of belonging. Everyday objects thus render solitude an open possibility for the poet. He looks at them as though as old photographs, and connects back his present to harmonise the past:
sunsets are fiery red
— From 'The Vase' by Jayanta Mahapatra.
and the waters of wells are clear already
there we are, under the mango tree,
in the old house, amid the drift of things,
the vase on the bookcase
with shadows of swifts reeling round it,
and we don’t know whether we are alone any more.
“Belongingness”, a dynamic construct, emerges strong in Mahapatra’s verse via his connections to the nostalgia he nurtures, and the solitude he fosters, alongside the rivers of his reality and fantasy “because of and in connection with the systems in which we reside.”
But at times I see a shadow
— From ‘A Grey Haze Over the Ricefields’ by Jayanta Mahapatra.
move slowly over these, a shadow freed
from the past and from the future,
that contains the footsteps of that childhood
so light I can only think of squirrels
slipping in and out of the mango trees.
The poet’s vision is not a binary lens, there is no room for presumption that “belongingness” is disconnected from solitude and nostalgia. Instead, it is a feeling that hinges on multiple parameters, the most prominent being the need to see a better and saner world. The need of our times is summed up in that – a return to the earthly pleasures, the grassroots, lives freed of consumerist compulsions, a freedom that the poet defines:
Trying to find the only freedom I know,
— From 'Freedom'.
the freedom of the body when it’s alone.
And the sheer interconnectedness of humans against all disruptive forces that the anthropocene era has thrown up to us. This space of finding love and sharing, is what Mahapatra’s essential art all about.
Back in my own corner with his books, including the latest titles and his new memoir, I strongly sense that the need for our civilisation is to follow the arc of his rivers, the euphoria of nostalgia, and the dialogue with solitude that he so deftly presents. The arc is complete with him living a life in Cuttack enriched by the images and symbols he has gathered from all over the world, not wishing to be tied down to Western history or topography.
Borrowing from Whitman, Martin Espada has written: “Vivas to those who have failed: for they become the river”. Nothing has failed here, as I reflect on my close encounters with the living legend of Indian English poetry. In meeting Mahapatra at 94, I encounter a victory of a special kind – that of becoming and celebrating rivers, their course, and the elegant solitude of hearts that gifts us ageless and essential poetry. The bamboo groves in his yard have flowered this Holi, lighting up the March air, rekindling Mahapatra’s thirst for life, to see new leaves appear close to summer.
“I’m vulnerable to love,” said the Mahakavi of Mahanadi at the ninth Chandrabhaga Poetry Festival, held in the seaside town of Konarak in January 2023, home to the world-famous Sun Temple. Aren’t we all? The love that his universe has showered on him is what he himself showers on us through his poetry, and makes our return to rivers, nostalgia, and solitude an organic possibility. There is enough room for storing this largesse, and an urgency to multiply the benediction of his essential art.