In an interview that appeared in the Contemporary Poetry Review back in 2004, Jayanta Mahapatra describes the powerful influence that Gandhi exerts over him. He says: “Perhaps Gandhiji taught me that the body was just a covering for the mind and that this mind could go on to dream and do those things that seemed impossible to achieve. I haven’t thought much about this before, but now in the long run of my life I can face the world with the conviction of my own poetry because of him.”
Mahapatra was a late starter. His writing career began at the age of 40. He had spent much of his working life teaching Physics at various colleges in Odisha. There is, you might say, an urgency to his writing. In the same interview, he says that he was unaware of the work of poets both in India and elsewhere. “Maybe I stumbled into poetry like a blind man who couldn’t see what was ahead of him. What happened later is a different story — I fell, I got up, I groped my way through,” he says. And emerge into the world, he did — with several collections of poetry and the literary journal Chandrabhaga of which he is editor.
In Hesitant Light , Mahapatra’s latest collection, we continue to hear the voice of a self-taught poet. This, of course, can be a position that cuts both ways. In the case of Mahapatra though, self-taught is well-taught and works mostly to his advantage. The slender yet sure thread that connects all his poems in this collection is a freshness, an innocence of perception that is nonetheless wise.
The collection contains a number of poems about death, beginning with ‘The Crossing’, ‘After the Death of a Friend’ and ‘Behind Closed Windows’, which speaks of a deliberate turning away from the world through an interconnected web of images: closed windows, crushed-out cigarettes, Robinson Crusoe and a condemned lighthouse. The title poem continues to explore this obsession which, in some ways, is a trifle disappointing because it is a common enough obsession:
Where we go is unimportant./ Life’s choices are few./ When someone passes on outward, into thought,/ perhaps growing smaller,/ he’s buried in this earth…
The treatment of this obsession sometimes appears to lack energy but then perhaps this tiredness of spirit is also what the poems are about. That tiredness certainly echoes throughout the poem ‘A Meaningless Evening’:
If the evening stops here,/people might not go away and leave me alone.
Yet another enquiry into death, ‘When the Shadows Would Leave’ becomes an attempt to name it:
I’ve given it a name: winter./ Perhaps time to leave the rain behind/ to its restless peace , he writes. The poem swings between lyrical lines such as these to harsher, more direct lines where the poet seems to forget the usefulness of the oblique and ends up depending on the thing itself: I wish I could put something between myself/and the world that could be a defence/against more than physical danger. Indeed, in his poem ‘The Triumph of Things’, Mahapatra writes: Sometimes a thing is what it looks like./ It is not a front for something else.
My quarrel would be with a poem like ‘Crossing the River’ where Mahapatra describes the rape of a Kondh woman. The poem appears somewhat insufficiently internalised, and might just be the victim of an overtly worthy theme:
Her face buried in their rage,/ the stripped, naked Kondh woman/ writhing on the forest floor/ can only implore/ her deity of the silent trees/ to pull down those leaves upon her.
Mahapatra is at his best when his words are anchored to the particularities of place. Odisha remains the heartbeat of his work. In ‘Happenings’, one of his best poems, this sense of place is underscored by the infinite possibilities it holds. Its lines are seductive and languorous: In a place like this, anything could happen and In a town like mine/ a warm March morning by the river/ could simply look at itself,/ all alone, with nowhere to go . ‘At the Rock Edict of Emperor Asoka, Dhauli Hill, Odisha, 261 B.C’, and ‘End of the Rains in the Hills of Odisha’ get into the skin of Mahapatra’s beloved place.
One wonders whether, in the end, Mahapatra’s poems about death too are about place. Just that death happens to be a different kind of place.
Hesitant Light ; Jayanta Mahapatra, Authorspress, Rs. 250.
K. Srilata is poet, fiction writer and Professor of English at IIT Madras.
