It was on October 22 in the year 2022 that I first spoke to the late poet Jayanta Mahapatra. It was his 94th birthday. “Happy Birthday, dear poet”, I wrote to him from Kerala and introduced myself. having read a few issues of his journal Chandrabhaga earlier, I had decided to get in touch with the spirit behind it.
Mahapatra had just completed his autobiography Bhor Motira Kanaphula in Odia, and published a special volume of his iconic Chandrabhaga magazine in honour of the late Kunwar Narain, the poet – a friend he admired tremendously. It was no surprise that he could accomplish so much work with such ease even at his age. He replied to me instantaneously with a deep sense joy, with his usual exuberance. Our conversations continued on the phone and WhatsApp until a few weeks before he died, on August 27, 2023.
Mahapatra, one of the most important poets in India writing in English, differed from many of his peers, particularly the Bombay poets, in ethos and style, carving out a distinct niche and style of his own, rooted in his home state of Odisha. Even though he began writing poetry relatively late, his stupendous pursuit and perseverance earned him many awards and honours from India and abroad. Mahapatra won the Sahitya Akademi award for his poetry book Relationship, the first poet o get the award for English writing. He was also awarded the Padma Shri in 2009, which he returned in 2015 to register his protest against rising intolerance in India.
Mahapatra lived in Cuttack, Odisha in a place called Tinkonia Bagicha. The house was old, named after the river Chandrabhaga, surrounded by bamboo trees about which he often spoke passionately. During our months-long chats, we shared poetry, stories, likes, and dislikes. Then in January 2023, we met at the Chandrabhaga Poetry Festival at Konark and this meeting deepened our mutual understanding. Excerpts from the conversations:
Do we know the origin of poetry?
Sreekala Sivasankaran (SK): Dear Jayanta-da, your place Tinkonia Bagicha sounds like a musical tune to me. Was it actually a garden area?
Jayanta Mahapatra (JM): There was a garden in Tinkonia, but with passing years, it’s reduced to a patch of 12 by 12 by 12 feet
SK: And did you plant the bamboo in your home?
JM: Yes, the bamboo is my favourite tree. I loved bamboo since I was a child. The shape of the leaves especially. Bamboo leaves touch you when you enter the house. And early summer mornings, when you sit under the bamboo, or when you pass by, tiny droplets of water fall from the tips of these leaves. I love them. Yes, I planted those bamboos, more than fifty years ago.
SK: What an ideal place to be in for a poet!
JM: Poetry comes from all kinds of places. Do we know its origin, Sreekala? I don’t know. This is my old house, breaking down slowly, haven’t even thought about a house. It was poetry which seduced me.
SK: Poetry, yes. Tell me, how many books of poetry have you written?
JM: About 22 poetry collections in English, nine collections in Odia, nine books of translations from Odia and Bangla. Hope I remember correctly.
SK: Jayanta-da, your memory is important. What is your earliest memory of writing a poem? And which poem of yours do you like most?
JM: “Hunger” is liked most by readers. As for me, I think I like the long poem, “Relationship”. The first poem I wrote, I think was titled, “Girl by the Window” and was published in The Illustrated Weekly of India, which was considered then to be a prestigious publication.
SK: “Relationship” won you the Sahitya Academy Award also.
JM: I never thought I’d write poetry. I was 38 when I came to my first poem. But then, I knew I had to take the long, difficult road.
SK: What is your method of writing? Are you a spontaneous poet or do you really work hard on your poems?
JM: I write in the morning, then take a break, go to the kitchen, try to cook something, make a mess of it, then lie down a little. I try to forget what I wrote but come back to the poem again in the evening. Make corrections and rewrite something. Sreekala…what about you?
SK: I write when I have something to write. Doesn’t matter what time it is. I tend to write a lot when I am in a state of mental turbulence or something like that. Then I have to write, whether it is morning or midnight. I rarely edit my own poems. Words are as they come, spontaneously, with all their charms and imperfections. But if I am translating somebody else’s writing, then of course, I do spend quality time on the choice of words.
JM: Frankly, when I am rewriting, I am not sure whether the rewritten line is more effective or not. I am a Libran; just as I can never decide which shirt to wear when I am going out.
SK: That means you have lots of shirts and lots of words? Aha! A rich vocabulary for sure, full of words. Mine is very basic. Like an old-fashioned sculptor, I work with minimum tools.
JM: I don’t know what I have or don’t have, Sreekala.
The rain connection
SK: You have the city of Puri. “This city, with no seasons but rains will never tire me even if its name changed”. Nissim Ezekiel said this about Bombay. What is Puri to you?
JM: Odisha, where I live, is a place of rain too. But why does Nissim say there are no seasons in Mumbai? I can’t understand.
SK: The Mumbai rains are very pronounced with continuous rainfall, aren’t they?
I met Ezekiel in Mumbai, in the early 1990s when I was doing fieldwork among the Jews as part of my M Phil-PhD at JNU. He wrote a letter of introduction for me to the community. He was very gentle and graceful. After his demise when I read more about him, I was stunned by the life he had. The waves of turbulences and the poetry, like a brisk boat that carried him through…
I couldn’t relate any of that with the sober figure I met once. In his final years, he had Alzheimer’s…
JM: I visited him only once in his office in Marine Lines. He asked me to sit down and that was all. After five minutes I left. Three or four sentences from him. So, Sreekala, a person is not the same with everyone. So that’s life…
SK: Put in another way, how many facets of us are revealed to everyone? As for Nissim Ezekiel, he spoke very little, I remember.
JM: True. And it’s better to live with a bit of lie than to be miserable with truths in the open. Rains, yes, just as in the months of rain in Kerala or Odisha. But the Mumbai rains are hard. Two hours of continuous rain and the streets are knee-deep with water.
“Rain
— Jayanta-da sent these lines in a voice message. Despite several age-related ailments, his voice was firm and clear.
Falling through my grandmother
She is lost in the kneeling jasmines of her childhood
That appear through her glass door
Sometimes in the rain
She glimpses her mother’s love
And knows and knows
There’s no cure”
Memory ashes
SK: Jayanta-da, how did Chandrabhaga happen? Did you start it?
JM: Yes Sreekala, I wanted to. The few poetry magazines that were there around 1975 weren’t publishing the poems I wanted to read. It was depressing indeed. So, Chandrabhaga was started in 1979.
SK: That’s a genuine reason. What are the activities of Chandrabhaga, apart from publishing poetry? You also conduct poetry festivals, I suppose.
JM: Yes, an annual festival at Konarak Temple, near the Chandrabhaga seabeach. Second Saturday and Sunday in January each year. But I have nothing much to do at the festival. I am simply a participant.
SK: Chandrabhaga Beach is poetry.
JM: Isn’t it? I want my ashes to be immersed in the waters there
SK: Ashes have memory, isn’t it?
JM: Yes, true because ashes are not ashes, I think.
“When I lay in my cot facing the wall, I nurtured only a wisp of a dream, a dream to be a pinch of an ash, which would fly in the wind and settle as ash in somebody’s garden of affections”.
— Jayantada wrote about his childhood memories in his autobiography.
I am not a love poet
JM: Sreekala, I have been reading your starkly raw poems many times. Because your thoughts pierced me. I don’t know what we want Sreekala, why we want to know. But your poem, “Electric Chair”, I loved most on the morning after Christmas. Love to you, much love.
SK: They were poems written in a mental health centre last Christmas. Love to you too. I am immensely grateful to unknown powers that allow me to travel with you like this at this point in life.
Today;s poets think perhaps: which is the next journal to write in? Which is the next poetry festival to attend? And so on…
For you, what was it like? Did you write poetry for publishing or reading somewhere or did you write because poetry came to you?
JM: Poetry doesn’t come on its own. For I have never felt that. Yes, an idea, a thought from somewhere comes in first, and you have to build the poem, from that. My poems have come through after a painful struggle. I was never a “born: poet. I began to write at a time in my life when other poets had already done their best work.
At first, there was this urge to get published in significant periodicals; later, there was this push to go on writing, as it is today. I had no ambitions whatsoever. I was lonely and restless all my life.
SK: Nowadays poets have many avenues and opportunities to develop poetry. But poetry that comes through hard struggle is something very different I believe.
JM: I needed love, love has sustained me. I guess you are right. I’ve continuously worked hard for fifty years.
SK: You were also at times very detached from the world. Right? Was it a conscious choice?
JM: Not deliberately, Sreekala. I just couldn’t cope with the world. I had ideals, everyone seemed to be selfishly happy. I couldn’t be with the world, and I couldn’t be happy. Only those moments when I was fortunate to be loved by someone, were what I treasure most.
SK: Yet, if I say that you are not a love poet, would you agree? You saw darkness, in a deeply touching way and the “lie of the dawn” is a stirring title…
JM: Probably, and I may be wrong, but I started writing poetry when I was 38 I Andi felt I had little time ahead of me. So, I was racing against time.
No, I am NOT a love poet. Being in love mattered much more than writing poetry.
Sreekala, there is darkness in love as there is darkness in life. Inside the ecstatic feel of love is farewell after farewell.
SK: I agree.
I think your training in Physics and subjects other than Literature has given your poetry a wider universe.
JM: Could be. I feel Physics taught me a certain discipline which helped me in the writing of poetry. All in all, Sreekala, I am a fool.
SK: Why do you say that Jayanta-da? I have noticed that in your interviews, you always tend to understate yourself, am I correct?
But apart from the commonsensical usage, fool, or clown is a very complex condition of being…
JM: Because, I am so very unsure of myself. I just don’t know what to do with my time, how to go on with my relationships. Poetry doesn’t matter to me, only life.
“I come to you,
— Sky Without Sky by Jayanta Mahapatra.
Because here is death, and nothing to see
You have moved away from your past,
Lonely in your death, to show us
How necessary it is for us too,
To die alone”
I lived in Cuttack all my life
SK: Tell me about your birthplace a little.
JM: I was born in Cuttack, in a poor relative’s hut. Have lived in Cuttack all my life. It was wartime, and food was hard to get, from 1939 to 1946. The early years were smoother. At 17, I left for Patna University, Bihar, where I lived for three years to get my Master’s degree in Physics. Days were really lonely, my evenings spent by the Ganga, on the bank of which I lived in rented lodgings. Then, back to Cuttack. Joined as a lecturer at Ravenshaw College. And have been there all my life – except, later, when invitations for my poetry came in, and I had to travel to various countries. That’s my life in a nutshell. I have lived in Cuttack all my life.
I haven’t ever forgotten how my grandfather and my grandmother were starving to death in a fearful famine in 1866. Grandfather staggered, famished, and got into a missionary camp run by Christians. They became Christians then. And, then my father and then, I.
SK: From your name, one cannot make out your religion. May I ask if you practice religion in your life?
JM: My father must have given me the name “Jayanta”. I was always a thorn in my mother’s eyes. Never went to church. Never prayed. But today, I believe in prayer, and prayer helps me to live. I look up to Christ knowing there was no one like him. Learnt to be humble, to try and love people.
SK: A figure like Christ is a universal figure. The whole religious empire built up in his name has in fact very little to do with what the essence of Christ was, I think. Just like the way Marxism was built in the name of Marx, has often nothing to do with what he imagined.
JM: Religion, the ritualistic idea, has never appealed to me. I have lived outside of myself. It gives me peace. I don’t know what’s right, what’s wrong. Puri; behind the cultural scene is a strong faith practised by generations. Unshakeable, diamond-like. You cannot break it.
“At Puri, the crows
— Taste for Tomorrow by Jayanta Mahapatra.
The one wide street
lolls out like a giant tongue
Five faceless lepers move aside
as a priest passes by
And at the street’s end
the crowds thronging the temple door
a huge holy flower
swaying in the wind of greater reasons”
‘I touched the tree where Yeats’s initials were etched’
SK: There’s a bit of Yeats in you, no?
JM: Well, I admire Yeats very much. Superb poems. I have tried to imitate him but made a mess of it. A poet. A human being. In Coole Park, I touched the tree where his initials were etched.
SK: I would like to hear a bit about your travels in other countries. I saw a picture of you with Ginsberg somewhere.
JM: The first time, I was invited by the Director of the International Writing Program to Iowa, US, where we were given money to spend, and be on our own, with just a couple of poetry readings and talks to do. Imagine, four long months all alone, in a totally different culture. It was exile for me. And it took me quite some time to mix with the other 21 writers from all over the world.
SK: You have such vivid memories…you even remember the number of participants!
JM: I have been abroad quite a few times. Both the US and England three times each. Japan thrice, Germany four times, USSR once, Italy once, Indonesia, Singapore, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Hongkong once – but never as a tourist. Always by invitation. To read my poetry.
SK: Poetry took you places…
JM: And these invitations gave me the confidence I needed. To be writing alone, with a Physics background, and with no one to turn to, in a small town like Cuttack, made me feel small. Was always perturbed, but plodded on with my poems. But I was learning, taking in from all the poets I met, in the places I visited. But Ireland was a very different country for me. The very countryside bursts with poetry and literature. Visiting the places where Yeats lived, loved, died, brought tears to my eyes.
SK: How important is criticism for the growth of poetry, in your opinion?
JM: For me, it was necessary. I never thought I’d write poetry. I was a student of Physics. But literature, fiction in the main, helped me to build my language. But I never realised poetry was just not language. I had to learn about feeling, the revelatory thing the poem strives at.
SK: You have said that poetry belongs to the reader, they may find totally new meanings in them. I can't agree more. But have you ever felt that you were not understood properly by your readers or by the critics at times?
JM: Yes. But maybe un-understandable. Or they were not able to understand. It's not a crime, both ways
Perhaps I am not a poet at all, Sreekala.
‘These poets humble me’
SK: I wish I had your humility.
Now I wish to know your favourite poets. Please name some.
JM: Vicente Aleixandre Salvatore Quasimodo, Pablo Neruda, Kunwar Narayan, Jibananda Das, Robert Bly and more. They humble me.
SK: All men crew!
JM: Sorry. I didn’t think of that!
SK: I don’t know if there is any one who doesn’t like Neruda!
JM: A fashion to like him!
SK: I was so intoxicated by his poetry for si long… Now I can say, I am out of that kind of mood.
JM: Guess I could say the same
SK: So, the women poets?
JM: Sylvia Plath, Evan Boland
SK: Sylvia, too. I liked her in my younger days. Now, I can say I disliked some of her poems too. Hope it’s not blasphemy.
JM: That’s natural
SK: But unlike Virginia Woolf, she had a terrible partner in Ted Hughes which would partly explain her horrendous suicide.
JM: Ted Hughes swallowed her up.
SK: Yes, that's correct.
What do you like to write about often? What inspires you to write?
JM: Most of what I wrote was about my place. There’s so much to go around in Odisha. Kerala has much more.
SK: Finally, it's quite heartening to see your work in your 90s, an inspiration for all of us who do literary work in our capacities from the small havens of our lives, from different parts of the country. It’s remarkable how you finished your autobiography at this age. Hope it’s getting translated into English soon. What prompted you to write your autobiography, Jayanta-da?
JM: Selfishness, pure selfishness. And I don’t know, but I have little time left, and I wanted to open my heart, all my indiscretions, my neuroses.
“The last farewell can become fluid, like water
— Farewell by Jayanta Mahapatra.
It looks through the eyes of darkness at this darkness
Whose falseness is all I can share”
Sreekala Sivasankaran is a poet, author, scholar, essayist and translator based in Kottayam, Kerala. She was formerly an Associate Professor at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, New Delhi. Prior to that, she was a fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Teenmurti, New Delhi. She writes primarily in English and Malayalam. Her books of poetry include Samayathinte Manaltharikal (Malayalam), You Walk with Me (English), Dream of the Butterflies (English), and Stranded (English) and stories, ‘Pink Mothers and the White Monk’, ‘Two Stories’, and ‘Amaltas Spring’. She has also written a pocket book of haikus, Alei Stav-Autumn Leaves in Hebrew-English. Her latest work is a collection of poems in Malayalam, Veedu Thirike Ethunnu. She is also the co-editor of the forthcoming title Women Write Women’s Rights: One Hundred Poems.
