Now that Jayanta Mahapatra, the poet, passed away on the 27th of August 2023 and the body has been cremated as per the will made, how to pay homage is a question? What he did and what remains behind as his legacy?

After the death of his wife, a caretaker used to look after him and he tried to live and re-live writing and publishing in Oriya too. His son too pre-deceased him and his family stayed overseas. 

He was not only a great poet of Orissa but of India and his books sold far and wide. A recipient of so many awards and prizes, laurels and accolades, Indian and foreign, he is Wordsworthian, Keatsian and Whitmanian. Had Ezra Pound been alive, he would have loved to read his imagery-laden poetry. 

His verses are a study in mannerism, stylistics and they can orient us  differently. What does he not like to draw it from, historiography, sociology, geography? Rural studies, Gandhian studies, peace studies, women studies, he goes it by to take his poetical notes. The history of Orissa is his history, the myth of Orissa his myth, the myth and mystery of the land the thing of his reckoning and deliberation, the mass and matter which but it has been lying deposited as and called Orissa. But he felt disheartened when communal disharmony took it over, flared it up, he felt from his within to return the highest civilian award received from even bearing the brunt of criticism but we could not understand it then.

An Oriya Christian, he was a professor of physics before he turned to the writing of poetry as it was his passion, flair for poesy which came to him through his love of photography and by the visits of picnic spots, tourist destinations, sea beaches and rock-built temples and he reflected in that way. He wanted to write novels but wrote verses and these came tumbling to in the form of lines, symbols and signs where the meaning was not. 

Late in his life, he started to write and verses came to him just as linguistic, imagistic lines. He did not mean to communicate, just wanted to dabble in verse. Loneliness also teaches a man. Solitude, we mean quietude too adds to and we need them for to repose in. A world draped in silence full of woodnotes, pristine scenery and mysterious landscape we need them to know the beauty and mystery of Nature and the world.

In his earlier stage, shadows, reflections and images crawled into the poetic texture, dominated over and he dabbled into verses to tend off the lines rather than infusing in meaning. He reflected on the verses, and these came to him just as imagery and wordplay. He was an image-maker, a photographer. 

The shadow of a nameless woman he saw through the reflection of an oil-lamp burning and the black soot going up and she is holding it into her hands trying to see. 

Drought and hunger he expresses is about the shortage of stuff, lack of things, scarcity of food. The fate of a poor girl, he thinks, is about in his poetry. What is in her destiny, the crisscrosses of her fate-lines, who can say it? Flesh trade, human trafficking, he portrays them without blaming anyone. He just tries to present the situations of life occasioning them all. When will hunger be eradicated? When will poverty be eliminated? When will the food problem be solved? Have you thought about those who are below the poverty lines? 

The passing of summer days in the orchards reeking with the scent of raw mangoes, under the cool, shady and leafy foliage of big trees he paints the scenery. He thinks when the woman is in the house and when she is not. A house without a woman, how will it look? When the sun blazes hot, how do the hamlets sun-burn during the hot and perspiring summer days when there is no respite from heat and its intensity? The sun seems to be a blazing fireball. The hamlets at the bare and denuded foothills mock the stories of our progress and development with their hutment segmenting our claims. Poverty and hunger still malign them, the rural folks. Superstition, illiteracy, underdevelopment and backwardness wreak havoc. 

What is extraordinary about him is this he is very, very personal and reflective in his allusion and poetic narration. Sometimes we fail to comprehend them, take him into totality as he is existential and skeptical too, his poetry often taking refuge in existentialism, bordering on the fringe of nothingness. The dawn breaks, cock crows, night falls, eve falls, mean to him with varying moods and reflections. 

His poetical journey is from photography, picture and imagery to myth and mysticism and historicism and from there to realism, gender bias and post-coloniality. Even if he takes to Gandhi, he will but privately and personally say the things of his psyche, space and reflection within him, holding a vis-à-vis, a tete-a-tete with him. 

The song of the river, who has but known it? How are the pebbles in a trance? He unfolds the doors of dreams to revel in, dwell it far. People go about searching for faith, but it goes a missing. Faith is not there where we keep logic and reason blindfolded. Human day will remain the same as nothing can change the routine. Only the shapes of the things will as mass and matter is often the same. His Relationship is a mini-Leaves of Grass for which he received the Sahitya Akademi Award for the first time ever given to any writer of Indian English poetry. 

A  nameless woman, how to photograph her, an Indian rural woman, imageless, photo less, how to make  a photo of her, how to photograph her, sketch and draw the portrait of her?

Directly or indirectly he tells of the Jagannath temple, the Puri sea beach, the pyres burning, the widows past their desire and life of activity and frail faith dazzling as the morning light. He tells about the dark daughters and his relationships with the land of his birth. Who are those dark daughters? 

Sanskrit! How is the syllable of it, the linguistic impact, the mantric effect? How do the words with sounds purge and purify us? Even at midday when with the good wife by his side taking a siesta unmindfully, the crocodiles seem to be moving deep into during the hot summer, he can hear the Vedic, Upanishadic chants doing the rounds in the far-off temples and the winds carrying the muffled sound. 

Sometimes the duty to serve and the nurturing of holistic approach raked him as the duality of the inner mind and psyche. Faith and doubt raked and rattled belief as blind faith when he saw the lepers and the widows. The torture and tyranny subjected to womankind he could not see it. Social evils clawed him for an expression. Follies and foibles, he never liked to look at them turning back. He felt the splendor of the Konark through his private and personal reflection and reckoning. Just by the way he noticed the Asokan rock edicts and he referred to them as allusions and anecdotes in his poetry. Under the shadow of the rocks and the vultures, he relates to the relationship story and the linga lights it up. The myth and mystery of Odisha he talks of and narrates it in Relationship, the cartography and topography of the land with rivers, woods, hills, sea beaches and shores, rains and waters. 

How does Puri take the canvas of the Oriyas away? What love does the Oriya populace hold in for Lord Jagannath, Balabhadra and Subhadra? The Ratha melas have not left him behind in their all mirth and gaiety. The solitary countryside dotting the secluded space, topography of land has always made him reflect over. He has felt the loneliness of man in a pensive mood of his own and has brooded over shifting shadows. Days and nights ever coming with noon, evenings, nights, twilights, dawns have given varying moods and reflections of own.

Jayanta Mahapatra saw hunger, poverty, scarcity, underdevelopment, moral depravity to tell his tales. He saw poetry through the prism of light and darkness. From physics he got the materials of his poetry. The rock-built temples, the Vedic and Upanishadic chants together with bare realities twitched him for a duality to rake him apart with classicism and romanticism. 

Jayanta Mahapatra was first of all an imagist who loved to frolic with imagery and word-play drawing and deriving from serenade, light flashing, breaking upon, retreating back. One from Odisha, he was a poet of its woods, rivers, hills, fields and fallows, temples, cities, towns and hamlets. 

The rathayatra had been his love which he cherished since his childhood. The Jagannath Puri temple, the Khandagiri, the Konark, the Dhaulagiri, the Kalinga War, the sea beaches, all found an expression into the poetic texture of his corpus. 

Jayanta Mahapatra is gone, but his legacy and heritage will continue to haunt us, and it is difficult to judge him as he is so regional, national and international at the same. Odisha is his hub of thinking and nowhere can he be leaving it. But discerning it all, he is uniquely linguistic and imagistic. To read him is to see the kaleidoscope. Private and personal mythmaking and the flight of imagination add a new dimension to his poetry. The temples of Odisha, the seascapes and the common folks, he takes up, mud houses, sun-burnt hamlets, beaches and life pulsating in.

We wonder how he came to grapple with the regional, the national and the international? Regional history and geography of coastal Orissa he cannot admonish that as for his identity. Imagery and wordplay are his first love with which he colors his poetical lines. A mythmaker, he goes on reveling in, deriving and drawing from myths. The saffron sadhu is lost in his sadhna, the peaks of Annapurna, Dhavalgiri, take him unto them, but something holds him to ask if he is a Hindu, what his identity. This is how India has lured him with Vedic incantation and Upanishads, their undertones and overtones, folk beat of drums, secluded rural space and pastoralism and has ruffled him too with its heat, humidity and dust, poverty and hunger. The dark forests, tribal homes and strange rites and rituals, the echoes of theirs, sometimes twitch us otherwise. Anthropological things, what more to say it? Rock-built temples and classical things, let them be sacred and sacrosanct. But worldliness dilutes it all and we need to be pure from within.