How Not to Read Jayanta Mahapatra: A Tribute via A Whiteness of Bone

Abstract

Jayanta Mahapatra straddled a whole generation of Indian English poetry as a colossus and continues to do so even after his death. He lived a full life and has left behind a legacy that is an antidote to our fevered and anguished cerebrations. Only now we are beginning to discover ways to unravel the magic of his lines, for we don't go to a Mahapatra for topicality and contemporaneity of themes, but for the residual wisdom that defies ratiocination. We go for the strange quiescence that his poetry bequeaths. This paper is a tribute to a poet who—strange as it may sound, given the forbidding opaqueness of his poems—instilled in me the taste for poetry. My poet lives with me… Here I watch my little craft spread its wings and hear my memory echo across its muteness. All night words of mine drift, nearing meaning but never finding it. (A Whiteness of Bone 40)