IWE Online mourns the passing of the poet Jayanta Mahapatra (b. 1928) on 27th August 2023. Winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award for poetry, Mahapatra trained as a physicist and taught Physics for several decades.
Mahapatra was the author of 27 volumes of poetry (his Collected Poems released in 2018 from Paperwall), short stories and essay collections. He also edited the literary periodical Chandrabhaga for several years.
Mahapatra wrote in ‘Ash’, published in Poetry, April 1977:
The ways of freeing myself:
the glittering flowers, the immensity of rain for example,
which were limited to promises once
have had the lie to themselves. And the wind,
that had made simple revelation in the leaves,
plays upon the ascetic-faced vision of waters;
and without thinking
something makes me keep close to the walls
as though I was afraid of that justice in the shadows.
Now the world passes into my eye:
the birds flutter toward rest around the tree,
the clock jerks each memory towards the present
to become a past, floating away
like ash, over the bank.
