Close Reading Jayanta Mahapatra: Influence and Introspection

Nothing Much, To Begin With: A Poem After Mahapatra’s ‘A Tale, To Begin With’

What happens when you do close readings of a particular poet?

Probably you like their words, or you don’t.
You understand their works, or you don’t.
You feel like you know them, or you don’t.

But one thing is certain: their style lingers. A little bit of them occupies your mind, and slowly, it begins to speak through you.

In this post, I write about how one Indian poet, Jayanta Mahapatra, got to me, the imprint he has left behind and I end with a self-critiquing poem inspired by his work.

In the first of the Poet of the Month series — an offline event conducted by alt.poetry — our featured poet was Jayanta Mahapatra. He was the first Indian poet to receive the Sahitya Akademi Award for English poetry, for his book Relationships. His poems Indian Summer and Hunger (both must-reads) are regarded as classics in modern Indian English literature.

He was awarded the Padma Shri in 2009, which then he returned in 2015 as a protest against rising intolerance in India.

Along with A.K. Ramanujan and R. Parthasarathy, Jayanta Mahapatra helped lay the foundation of Indian English poetry as we know it today.

With that small introduction, let me get into what reading Jayanta Mahapatra felt like to me.

Before that, a disclaimer: I haven’t read all of his works. His oeuvre is an ocean, and it would likely take me a lifetime to swim through it. What follows are simply my impressions formed from reading a handful of his poems over the past month.

To begin with, he comes from a place where I spent my early childhood — Cuttack, Odisha. So the recurring images of its narrow streets, the wide road of Puri, the rich culture and heritage of the land, the reverence for the deity Puri Jagannath, of the Konark sun temple, of crows and beggars by the roadside, and of the riots did not feel distant to me. They felt remembered. Nostalgic.

Reading him was not just reading a poet. It was revisiting a landscape.

And yet, what struck me more than the geography was the emotional climate of his poems. He doesn’t seem entirely at ease with either the past or the present. There is a quiet dissatisfaction, a restlessness, a constant pursuit of the self that runs like an undercurrent through his work.

This line — “I was really waiting for: the life that my life seeks”  from “A Poem at Fifty-One” seems to distill that quiet longing, that subtle regret for a life that remained just out of reach. It carries the ache of someone who has lived, yet feels something essential was deferred or perhaps never fully arrived. Despair and pessimism surface early in his poetry and persist even in his later writings. Only through close reading does one begin to notice this pattern and wonder: why this lingering ache? What was he searching for? What was he unable to reconcile?

His poetry reveals a self that is secluded, withdrawn, and almost watchful. He writes as someone who stands slightly apart from the crowd, observing, absorbing, and rarely fully belonging.

During our poetry discussions, one thing we all agreed on was this: Mahapatra does not write to impress; he writes to uncover. His poems are not decorative. They are excavations. Of memory. Of despair. Of identity. Of history.

About his writing style, I was fascinated by how straightforward and contemporary it feels, especially considering he was writing in the 1900s. His poems feel less like performances and more like witness statements. They do not shy away, nor do they soften themselves for comfort. There is an unflinching quality to them, always observing what is happening in the world outside and equally attentive to the unrest within.

As part of the poetry discussion, we were given Jayanta Mahapatra’s poem “A Tale, To Begin With,” a self-critiquing piece in which the poet places himself under scrutiny. The poem opens strikingly with the line:

“Jayanta Mahapatra never did anything worthwhile.”

It is disarming in its bluntness. As much as he questions his own worth, he subjects his poems to the same objective gaze.

Taking inspiration from that work and from the courage it stirred in me to examine myself just as honestly, here is my attempt at a self-critiquing poem.

Let me know what you think!

Nothing Much, To Begin With

Seethalakshmi never did anything
worthwhile;
just like this page, this poem
where each word grows in randomness,
like wild shrubs along the pathway
catching no one’s attention, yet growing right royally,
taking up space.
like this page, 
this poem,
with no sentiment to carry,
no intention to worry,
no rhythm to stick to,
no purpose to prove,
Seethalakshmi, never did anything
worthwhile.

The “works” of Seethalakshmi
if one might call it so —
a collection of ramblings,
masked in the name of intuitive writing,
loaded with the burden
to sound philosophical, sometimes spiritual,
as a stream of consciousness
written from the comfort of home,
seated by the window,
trying to make a point
on “point of view” mattering,
and bringing
or trying to bring creative imageries,
by translating visuals into words
like this, a beaver bird building its nest:
a fluffy ball of dried twigs and grass,
carefully collected threads from rucksacks,
a home hanging upside-down
from the neighbour’s cable wire,
strong enough to survive winds
and mild showers from overflowing tanks,
as if this point of view would matter
to the one reading
her so-called works…

Her words are random stars —
one never gets to know them for real —
brought together as constellations
for convenience. 

Seethalakshmi’s househelp assumes
she’s working on matters that would change the world,
like her words did heavy lifting
the way Sri Krishna
lifted Govardhan to save His devotees.
She believes, when her ‘akka’ puts on her specs
and adds an intellectual tilt to her frame,
that she intently taps away words
with pauses in between,
looking away from the window,
she thinks her ‘akka’ is selling wisdom across the screen,
for a barter of fame and money,
that would help akka be generous to pay off
her son’s annual education fee,
without realizing she earns more income doing household chores
and is a household name
than her 'akka' ever could be.

Seethalakshmi sacredly clings
to the mask of saviour
her househelp has imagined for her.

Poets are intellectuals —
a lie.
Poets are saviours —
an irony.
Poets recognising themselves as poets —
an illusion.

How could one, longing for words,
offer another the same?
Be it for meaning,
for survival,
or just romanticism.

No, there’s no sense
in looking into her works
for comfort, for hope,
maybe a companionship
that brings solace masked in moments of
shared experiences,
whispers of “yeah, me too”
while reading through those words
that fought their way out of her system.

And yes, to get them out of her system
was her only reason to rhyme
or not to, rather.

Many insist
she writes from a space of authenticity.
Well, does Seethalakshmi herself
know what that was?
Or was she tactical,
reflecting the reader’s expression,
and expectation
a sense of foresight
into another mind, maybe—
but authenticity?
one will never know…

The building blocks of Seethalakshmi
are composed of her "fawn response"
where compliance was necessary for safety,
not flight, not fight,
but fawn,
where saying ‘no’ felt lethal,
being, felt like a curse,
forgetting felt impossible,
forgiving felt self-erasing
and whistleblowing, fearful.

Her hushed voice learnt new tongues,
the language of mystery
and its ways of protest
in the unfilled spaces
between verses.
That’s why Seethalakshmi
can never quite learn to believe
the language of love
the kind that gives,
altruistically.

You would rather find her loving,
but not believing.
You’ll find her in self-portraits
taken in the comfort of her space
a little further back,
behind those smiles
that try hard to hide
moistened eyes,
and a little harder still,
when she chooses to lay bare
only that much truth you could handle
but not beyond the walls
she has built
from betrayals.

Has she done anything
that people would know her for?
Well, does she even bother
to be known?
Perhaps she was a lost nightingale,
alternating between singing
to be found by the universe
and hushing herself
to be not found by anyone else.
A sacred symphony
or so she believes it to be.

And her poems —
they are nomads
in the land of her longings,
trying to build a world
where they could feel seen,
a belonging.
Perhaps a couplet from them
will find a place in eternity,
if someone as lost as her
finds her voice a saviour
and raises a memorial in her name,
with a placard that reads:
“She is an open book of anonymity
And mystic poems of fame.”
which again, is an illusion
stitched in hope,
hanging by gossamer-thin threads.

For Seethalakshmi never did anything worthwhile
except, perhaps,
write herself into existence.

Some poets leave behind admiration. Others leave behind mirrors. Mahapatra left me with the latter. On that note, I sign off for now and I’d love to hear your reflections on Mahapatra, on the poem, or on anything this stirred in you.

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