Key-note address by Ashwani Kumar

Jayanta Mahapatra: Wandering Yaksha of Poetry

Who is Jayanta Mahapatra? Is he “a sacred relic growing up with the helplessness and the generous tears”? Or is he “a hidden wound in the darkness,” as he confesses in his poem ‘Wound’? Widely regarded as one of the ‘immortals of Indian literature’ and practitioner of what Bruce King calls ‘elite art’ of fugitive imagery, Jayanta Mahapatra is the most meditative and subversive voice of  ‘a disturbing silence’ in world poetry. Significantly, “his concern for the dispossessed rustic that is rare among the urbanised Indian poets writing in English marks him out as a tragic rebel,” writes K. Satchidanandan about Mahapatra’s poetry. Affectionately described as ‘a native Neruda’ by Ranjit Hoskote, Jayanta Mahapatra’s relationship with Indian poetry in English is marked by dream-layered experiences of mythic forms of memory, and elegiac   engagement with language, landscape and history of ‘the virtuous waters of the hidden springs of the Mahanadi.’  Whether it is his epic poem ‘Relationship’ or chillingly visceral poem ‘Hunger,’ Jayanta Mahapatra’s poetry is conceived on an oceanic scale to give a panoramic vision of the chaos (moral or material) sustained by the transcendent and transient.  Like David Walcott, every poem of Jayanta Mahapatra is about the language, land and landscape of his people. If ‘sea is history’ for Walcott in the Caribbean Island of Saint Lucia, Jayanta Mahapatra’s poetry is born out of ‘hunger’ for “rain of rites” in the “fallow fields of Dhauli” in Odisha. ‘Everything is called sacred in my land. Even poems,’ he avers shyly. No wonder, he is a national poet of Odisha. Once you start reciting his poems, ‘rivers of Odisha swell like pregnant women,’ and we ‘pluck the first line of Odyssey’ in trance as if we are sailing at the edge of rains for the lustful experience of an unknown melody. That’s why Jayanta babu’s poems are “a kind of music/ nothing that one can hear in the silence everywhere / and then more silence,” in his own words. He is deeply political but never screams because “ashes of sobs, the baying of hounds,…the vomit of iron” haunts you with such liquid, languid ferocity that you are stunned  and also bewildered, simultaneously.

Defying conventional labels, and stereotypes, Jayanta Mahapatra is the most distinctive poet writing in English and also Oria whose intricately metaphorical poetry or what he himself describes ‘colloquial narrative poem’ revels in the physical beauty of the earth, the harshness of survival, and the complexities of living and writing in two cultural worlds overlapping and also in conflict with each other. What gives narrative momentum and lyrical beauty in his verses is an uncanny melange of memoir, travelogue and cultural history of his multiple selves rooted in rains, rivers, rivulets, paddy fields, flowers, and stone-gods  of his native place in Odisha. While accepting that human beings inevitably seek to achieve life’s purpose, Jayanta babu takes the skeptical position that the natural world remains silent about any such redemption (liminal or subliminal). Since existence is fragile, easily perishable even in bright sunshine , Jayanta babu speaks of ‘dying silence of the rain,’  like  a fertile  emptiness arising out of vast expanse of memories. In other words, he is a supreme exponent of human fallibility, vulnerability, and solitude – a strange abode of fire and flame held together by streams of illumination ( mythical and mystical). Recall his famous Puri Poems. Jayanta Mahapatra is actually a ‘pilgrim-poet,’ searching the secret places of the heart’ while spreading Promethean fire wherever he travels.  Like Kalidasa, Jayanta places himself in the ancient Indian tradition of poet-seers who see themselves as speaking the Truth like ‘recurring prayers’ shifting from lips to lips, linking the ephemeral and chimerical bodies (heavenly and earthly) for a ‘taste of tomorrow.’ In this primordial struggle with language of bodies, Jayanta has inflicted on himself deep wounds but he has also remained unstained by the bleeding joys of self and soul. Are you still surprised why you surreptitiously experience sublime beauty and suffering in his poems?  ‘This is the Indian in me,’ but he does not know ‘where does it all begin.’ No poet is more apt than Jayanta Mahapatra who creates what I call a  ‘metaphysics of realism’-  a strange form of  verdant ‘nothingness’ which pushes language to the point of disintegration where he listens  to the ‘rain’s murmurs on Orissa’s jungle of tall sal,’ and also laments on ‘hunger in Somalia.’  Thus, he blends elemental imagery of eternal and experience of ephemeral in unpredictably whimsical ways which evokes entangled   journey of the lyrical and linguistic surprises. In short,  Jayant Mahapatra’s  poetry reveals and revels in   existential and ecological dilemmas of life- arising out of ruins of history, and ravages of modernity.  For him, history is “the sagging, worm-eatendoor I try to push shut behind me” in his own words. This obscurity and opaqueness  about history has lent a frayed sense of time and space to his poetry . Self admittedly, this seemingly paradoxical nature of his poetic world arises from a Heideggerian sense of dwelling, for him language, especially his own language is a means of being at a certain place, almost predetermined by anonymous forces of his ancestral destiny. This leads Jayanta Babu to relinquish his subjective absolutism of landscape in order to deploy uniquely agnostic philosophical, and phenomenological outlook towards his poetry and people. Poetic language, for him, has the potential to free us from the instrumental use of language.  Thus, it’s poet’s obligation to retrieve arbitrary truths from the ‘void of forgetfulness’ and reveal the mysteries of memories (mimetic/historical).

Indisputably, Jayanta da is the most luminous and mesmerizing poet of shape-shifting mythic adventures of self and sensuality (sacred or secular). Known as wandering yaksha in Indian poetry, he is epic, even in miniature, concealed in the frighteningly intimate mysteries of life. The universal human imagination through meandering rhythm of rainclouds reveals, regales itself in his verses as the renewal of our humanity with a rage and regret.  It is indeed impossible to think of Indian poetry without him. With transgressive thrills and mischievous provocations, he has quietly and delightfully invented a uniquely personal language specific to his poetry and people. What is striking about his poetic resonance or dhvani is the exceptional intensity of rasa or aesthetic enjoyment of rupture and rapture etched in our memory like ‘the mating songs of peacock and kingfisher.’ And he beguiles us with his “map of a country one has never visited /and to find one’s way in / one needs only know how to read the map.” Nothing is repressed in his poems; rains, rivers, or rainbows all are sensuous living creatures like his people, breathing sweating, and whispering softly  in lisping, lilting  vernacular tongues. This elevation of sensuality in Jayanta’s poems reaches apotheosis of life in the sense of Sakhi- bhavlike Jayadev’s Gita Govinda where lover’s attraction, estrangement, and final reconciliation become enigmatic devotional experiences of life. I won’t be surprised if Jayanta Mahapatra’s poems are sung in temples during festivals, and at kirtanas (communal worship through song).

Unlike ‘unhomely’ and culturally uprooted baroque Anglophone poetry, Jayanta Mahapatra’s fluorescent and flamboyant verses are deeply ‘rooted’ into his native world – his fabled Tinkonia Bagicha home Chandrabhaga. And this native world of poetry has no traces of Xenophobia or what anthropologist Arjun Appadurai call “narcissism of small differences.” Let’s not forget that Jayanta Mahapatra has freed Indian English poetry from a narrow well-entrenched social and literary class uprooted from local, native cultural traditions in popular imagination. In other words, while the fashionable Anglophone poetry celebrates Nietzschean ressentiment, despair, envy and existential nihilism or what literary theorist Sianne Ngai calls Ugly Feelings, Jayanta Mahapatra, like sage Atri in the Rig Veda practises a rare form of Leela – eternal love(erotic and spiritual) because without it the world lacks gloss—emotional and physical. In other words, his verses are rooted into intense attachments to things outside our control- those exterior illusions, and interior mirages trembling with ecstasy in this world, the immediacy of the present. And it fosters a public and individual commitment to bigger, deeper, more universal forms of love for all. Like Gandhi, and Tagore, Jayanta babu has refashioned the register of emotions as humanist allegory of love for community and individual. For him, love is what gives humanity its authenticity and allows us to reap the bounties of paradise—the eternal reign of luminescent truth and tolerance for all forms of love.

In the end, allow me to reflect on Jayantada’s celebrated talent for epistolary magic. We all know that  to hold a letter addressed to you and see your own name in another’s hand is to feel mysteriously unsettling like ‘the fish slithering , turning inside.’ Even before you’ve opened the envelope, your identity has been refracted through someone else’s. This invitation (real or imagined) is both estranging and thrilling, I am told.  “Writing letters,” Franz Kafka once complained (in a letter) to Milena Jesenská, his Czech translator and the object of his tortured love, “is actually an intimate act of love making with ghosts and by no means just with the ghost of the addressee but also with one’s own ghost, which secretly lives in your house.” Thus, I tell you truthfully; every time, I receive a letter from Jayanta da in his hypnotically calligraphic prose, I am frightened. Even before I have opened the envelope, my identity has been metamorphosed; I suddenly become “a diamond in my eye.” Can you resist his magic or miracle? This strangely unsettling yet revelatory ways of celebrating a shared geography of myriad forms of life defines Jayanta da and his poetic art at Noon of his life!

[The note was presented as key-note address at the launch of Jayanta Mahapatra’s latest poetry volume, Noon: New & Selected Poems and  Jayanta Mahapatra: A Journey in Bhubaneswar on 8 April 2023.]