By Ashwani Kumar
Scent of Rain is about remembering Jayanta Mahapatra, and his ‘relationship’ with the world of poetry; it’s a mesmeric parable of remembrance, a lushly physical, sensual and spiritual journey between memory and remains of memory. Scent of Rain lurches between the absence and presence, a brooding, melodic mix of yearning for a rain of rites and a summer poem.
From the chiaroscuro of provincial life to the charms of the cosmopolitan world, Scent of Rain is about the hermeneutics of blurring the boundaries of mortality and immortality; it precedes and exceeds our existence and linguistic practices. The beauty of Scent of Rain lies in its anonymity, fragility and vulnerability to Amor Mundi (love of the world), a defining motif in Jayanta Mahapatra’s life and poetry. And it speaks in the sacred language(s) of the earth. No wonder, it smells like the human body, and god’s flesh too.
‘Call it memory or call it geography’, Scent of Rain is a ‘mask of longing’ and belonging from across generations, genres and landscapes. It is a unique anthology of 192 poems by as many poets on a wide range of themes, representing a variety of languages and voices. Poets from Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, English, Gujarati, Hindi, Khasi, Kokborok, Odia, Malayalam, Marathi, Sikkimese, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu have joined this collective tribute of creating a ‘sky without sky’, or a lingering sunset—each page a recurring intervention “in the silence everywhere and then more silence” in the words of Jayanta Mahapatra.
Scent of Rain is also like an ancient ‘stone temple’ in which you experience, along with Jayanta, a mysteriously intimate political experience of bodily and psychic sufferings, even awaiting the risk of actual death, a sacred and immanent realisation of the authentic self. In the semiotic and symbolic sense, the poems in the anthology are actually memory archives—luminescent mirrors of the unknown, the unforeseeable, “a dense forest throbbing with poetry wherein dwells a blossom of spontaneity and inspiration”, and “leaping into blindness or light”.
Unsettling linguistic and cultural conventions of so-called Anglophone poetry, Jayanta Mahapatra’s ascent coincided with the forces of decolonisation and democracy in life and literature in India. Jayanta Mahapatra’s fluorescent and flamboyant verses are deeply ‘rooted’ into his native world—his fabled Tinkonia Bagicha home Chandrabhaga in Cuttack. Whether it is his epic poem Relationship or the chillingly visceral Hunger, Jayanta Mahapatra’s poetry is conceived on an oceanic scale to give a panoramic vision of the chaos (moral or material) sustained by the transcendent and transient.
Like David Walcott, every poem of Mahapatra is about land, language, and landscape of his people. If ‘sea is history’ for Walcott in the Caribbean Island of Saint Lucia, Mahapatra’s poetry is born out of ‘hunger’ for ‘rain of rites’ in the ‘fallow fields of Dhauli’ in Odisha. “Everything is called sacred in my land. Even poems,” he avers shyly. In fact, Mahapatra’s originality lay in blending haunting beauty of sensuality, alienation, and loss and recovery of self-identity with rain(s) washing the sin, sand, and blood in “the earth of the forbidding myth”.
In other words, Scent of Rain is also about a strangely intimate journey from ‘dispossession to rootedness’, and a pilgrimage for realising what philosopher Søren Kierkegaard calls ‘impossible faith’ for humanising our fragmented selves colluding with each other. In this journey of many ‘memories of another world’, Mahapatra speaks to the fragility and precariousness of our existence and meditates on the illusion of existence (liminal or hymnal). In fact, poems in Scent of Rain invoke Jayanta Mahapatra’s deeply elegiac way of viewing the erasure of the past through the struggle for self-creation, which informs the radical and emancipatory language of existential angst and revelation.
A rebellious semiotician, writing in English—a language of deferral and slippage for the ‘wretched of earth’—Jayanta forces us to confront the human condition and the anxiety-provoking givens of death, freedom, and meaninglessness arising out of the ravages of modernity. Jayanta, as a poet-philosopher in the literary and aesthetic sense, meditates on the language of poetry as the bridge between “the minor truth of the seen to the major truth of the unseen”.
Unlike many of his contemporaries, Mahapatra’s poetry speaks of a certain ‘capacity’ of the language—native and primordial—to awaken and redeem our pre-linguistic desires and emotions. That’s why you “stand among ruins, waiting for the cry of a night bird”. Let’s not forget that Mahapatra’s poetry is also about a light, liquid raging feminist language speaking in a maternal tongue of prayer and protest against the cruelties of the past and present.
Jayantada is no more. I remember him saying “love is as strong as death; it’s jealousy as unyielding as the grave. My tears have always been mine. Yes, mine. But let a drop fall on your window sill.” Somewhere, it’s always raining and always summer simultaneously. And I feel the hunger for a language of my own and his. I don’t know how it works. So I lick my tongue and prepare to walk back on the dusty road of homecoming, a journey through frequent loss of memory. I see in his eyes hurricanes furrowing our future. I come home “buy him the morning’s lotus”, promising nothing, only loneliness of the earth. At once I become like him—the scent of rain…
(Ashwani Kumar is a poet, political scientist and professor in Mumbai. Widely published, anthologised and translated into several Indian and foreign languages, he is the editor of Scent of Rain: Remembering Jayanta Mahapatra.)
