Opinion Express View on Jayanta Mahapatra: The poet’s humanism

In 1981, Jayanta Mahapatra became the first Indian poet writing in English to receive the Sahitya Akademi Award. About three decades later, he would go on to become the first Indian-English poet to be conferred the fellowship of the Akademi. But much before these, in the Sixties, Mahapatra — who died at 95 on Sunday — had already gone where only a handful of Indian poets had ventured at the time: He had embraced the English language, a creative leap in a newly-independent country, and chosen to write about the land and the people that had nurtured him, in it.

The Sixties were a time of churn. Far away from Cuttack, where Mahapatra lived and wrote, in what was then Bombay, a cultural zeitgeist was taking shape. The Bombay Poets, helmed by the likes of Nissim Ezekiel, Dom Moraes, Adil Jussawalla, R Parthasarathy and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, were experimenting with literature in English, the language of an emerging cosmopolitanism. Their writing captured the many Bombays.

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In contrast, Mahapatra captured the chiaroscuro of provincial life — the heat and dust of small-town India, the impoverishment and despair that plagued people, the work of faith and tradition on individual lives, sculpted by loss and longing.

“At times, as I watch,/ it seems as though my country’s body/ floats down somewhere on the river/… 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,” wrote Mahapatra in the poem, Freedom.

It is a gaze that is both critical and affectionate and imbued with a ruminative political consciousness that would manifest itself in 2015 when he decided to return his Padma Shri Award in protest against rising intolerance in the country. It is this deep core of the poet’s humanism, tempered by an awareness of both the dichotomies and frailties of life, that will be deeply missed.