'I want the thunder and the lightning to come in’
A Conversation Between Jayanta Mahapatra and Sailen
Routray
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Jayanta Mahapatra (On the left)
Photo Credit - Wikimedia Commons/Suman Pokhrel |
If you want to reach Jayanta Mahapatra, it is enough to
mark the epistle to ‘Jayanta Mahapatra, Cuttack’ for it to find him, standing
testimony to the reputation and web of friendships, he has built over the
foundation of more than half a century’s prodigious creative output. For this
grand old man of Indian literature, more conventional recognition has also
always come his way, the most recent of which is when in the May of this year,
he was made a Fellow of the Kendra Sahitya Akademi, which has also recently
published the ‘Jayanta Mahapatra Reader.’ Last year, in January, a Mumbai-based
publisher released his 744-pages long, ‘Collected Poems.’ In this conversation, Jayanta Babu talks about his work as a bilingual poet and his ninety years’ long love affair
with Cuttack . Excerpts:
Sailen Routray [SR] – In the 25th of May this year, you were
awarded the Fellowship of Kendra Sahitya Akademi at a special function organised
in Cuttack. This is perhaps the highest literary honour ever bestowed upon an
English poet in India?
Jayanta Mahapatra [JM] -When a poet, a writer, keeps on doing his work
seriously, awards will come his way. I have thought of awards as little flowers
that fade the next morning. But what is strange is that, when I was given the
Sahitya Akademi Puraskar almost forty years back, in 1981, I was the first
Indian English poet to be so awarded; I am now also the first poet writing in
English to become a Fellow of the Sahitya Akademi.
SR – Your poetic voice is an ambiguous one. In a large number of your poems, the authorial
voice and the voice that is narrating the poem, are not always in consonance.
It is not a distraction though; in fact, it produces a startling intimacy. How is
this achieved?
JM – I would not be able to talk about what you pointed
to me right now. You see, I have always tended to go back to those images,
which have built my life. And these have always come from the place I have
lived in. When I was a boy, a child of
five or six, my father had taken me to Puri and I still remember being at the Narendra Tank –
the fact that turtles were there, very very old turtles – with people shouting,
‘ekade ekade’ (‘this side, this side’). These images have made my life; it is
the land that has made me, which has in turn shaped my poetry. So, yes, I am
intimate with the land; I could not have lived elsewhere, nor could I have
written poetry anywhere else.
SR – Your
poetry is suffused with the rains, both as a climatic event of which you
provide descriptions, but also as metaphor. Increasingly you live in a climate
where rains are decreasing in intensity. How do you relate to this shift?
JM – The rains are tied to my inner longings; the inner longing that is
always there and which my years of writing poetry has not been able to subdue
or take care of. Rains are a metaphor, a correlation, for the life that I lead
inside.
SR – In your
English poems the sentences are intricately crafted. But the Odia poems are
simple. Also, sometimes you have ‘paired’ poems in both these languages, that
are not translations of each other, but seem related to the same experience.
JM – I do not
know Odia that well. Writing in both English and Odia has been a complementary
exercise for me. I have explored my innermost thoughts in English, which I have
not been able to do in Odia, at least not deliberately. I want to be understood
more generally by everyone when I write in Odia. Many years after I began
writing in English, I started composing poems in my own tongue, because I
wanted to be closer to my brothers, to my own people, to my neighbours.
For example,
the Odia poem ‘Aamba Gachha’ (‘The Mango Tree’) from the collection ‘Baayaa
Rajaa’ has come directly from flesh and blood; it is more intimate. It has come
straight from Jayanta Mahapatra who lives, who was there with his father - the
father and the son who planted the tree - and that intimacy is not there in the
English poem ‘Collaboration’ from ‘Lie of Dawns’, which is an altogether different
poem, although somehow springing from the same experience. Influences of poems
that I have read in English have contributed significantly to ‘Collaboration,’
whereas the Odia poem ‘Amba Gachha’ has come out of my own mind and
experiences.
SR – In your Odia autobiography ‘Paahini Raati’ (The
Night is Yet to End’), we get lyrical descriptions of the dark in small town
Odisha. At the same time you also mention the fear of the dark. How do you
relate to darkness these days?
JM – Darkness is a part of our world, a part of life.
When I was a child, the house we lived in was located at the edge of the
neighbourhood. It was surrounded by huge deodar trees. We had no electricity
then. And the clamour of fruit bats and the wind howling through the leaves of the
deodars, these brought some unknown fears to me. I still remember the shadows
from the kerosene lamps that I used in my little room to study in. All this
instilled in me a certain fear which took a long time to overcome.
When I started writing poems, the Bombay poets had a big, big hold on
Indian poetry in English; they had created their own lingo. The twist of the
language that comes to play, the inherent mystery that emerges in a poem to
provide different meanings to readers - it was totally absent in that
tradition. But mystery has always fascinated me.
SR – Descriptions of small town Odisha – say of Cuttack or Sambalpur – in your
poems, as well as in your autobiography, are populated by trees, creepers,
birds and other aspects of the natural world. What has been your relationship
with ‘urban nature?’
JM – Look at this house. In its yard I have planted
bamboos. Many of the older mango and pear trees are now gone, felled by
successive cyclones, but many still stand and their leaves often enter this
house and make a mess. When it rains, I open my doors and windows. I want the
thunder and the lightning to come in. I also want the dust to come in. I do not
mind the dust of Cuttack. I do not mind the way of life of Cuttack. Now I feel
really bad when I see everything changing so fast. All the trees in the city
are gone. It has a couple of rivers on its two sides; sixty, seventy years
back, you had water just besides the banks. Now the rivers have very little
water. And that itself brings a pang to my heart. I can’t live like this. It is
as if I am now living in a totally different environment.
SR – If one imagines you at the head-spring of a
particular tradition of Indian poetry in English, that is not
over-intellectualised (and tries to directly deal and cope with the affects),
who according to you, amongst the younger Indian English poets, have this
approach towards writing poems?
JM – Many poets from the North East write in this
fashion. My friends Kynpham
[Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih]
and Robin [Robin
S Ngangom], Nabanita [Nabanita Kanungo] - all of them write really
well. And they are talking about their place; poetry can only
emerge from the place you live in. I have had several chances to go and lead a
life abroad. I do not know why, but I could not do so. I do not know what it is
about the place, but I really love it here in Cuttack. And I continue to live
here. That’s all.
SR – Apart from the Kendra Sahitya Akademi publication ‘Indian Literature’
there is now no credible, regularly published, print magazine for creative
writing in English in the country. But simultaneously there has been an
explosion of English language media. What do you think of this phenomenon?
JM – I have
not been able to find out why there have not been good, standard, magazines or
journals in English which would publish creative work. We write more and more
in English and at the same time, are not able to sustain a print magazine in
the language for creative literature. English language newspapers should devote
a page a month, at least, for creative writing.
SR – You have
been a prolific translator from Odia to English. Of your translations, which
ones do you like the most?
JM – I liked translating parts of ‘Rudra Sudhanidhi’ [a fifteenth century
Odia text in prose, composed by Narayana Abadhuta Swami]. I really love that
text; the very fact that a mendicant, a sadhu, would do this kind of writing is
amazing. It is a very difficult text and I thought it was beyond my powers. I
did not find anybody who could explain things to me; so I could not complete
the translation.
Note: A much shorter version of this conversation was first published as an interview in the Hindu Sunday Magazine on 28th July 2019.
