Some deaths arrive as news. This one arrived as silence, in the exact place where a voice used to live. I had planned to meet him in June. Life happens when one is busy planning. For years, a certain kind of phone call could change the shape of my whole day. The number would flash, I would steady myself, and then that unhurried, precise, faintly amused voice would begin; never with small talk, always with the thing itself. A line of mine he had read. A word he thought I had got right, or one he thought I had reached for too quickly.
To get a call from Jagannath Prasad Das, JPD, was to be told, by the man himself, that your sentences had been weighed by someone who knew exactly what a sentence was worth. Last night that voice went silent, and Odisha lost not merely a writer but one of the last great windows it had left to itself. He was close to my family, close in the old, unannounced way that does not require occasion or appointment. But our real conversation, the one that belonged to no one but us, happened on a different plane altogether. We talked about language and what it carries and what it loses. We talked about literature, about history, about the strange, stubborn intellectual life of Odisha: its budding thinkers, its missing translators, its hunger, as he once put it to me, for “creative oxygen.”
I would arrive, almost always with an enthusiast in tow, because I had learned early that the more people heard him, the more enlightened they came away. He was, in the truest sense, a culture rebbe, and not of literature alone, but of thought itself. When I dedicated my book Pramod to JPD, I was, in a way, returning a friendship to its source. He and my father, Pramod Panigrahi, had been bound together by literature and by the long arguments only true friends dare to have.
He stood tall, unbending in demeanour and in stature, across a journey that began in the fifties, when his early poetry appeared in Kumkum, years before he ever sat for the civil services. That detail matters more than any award, because it tells you everything about the order of his loves. Many in Odisha turn to writing only after the officer’s bungalow is secured. He wrote first, and wrote because it was his natural calling: the boy from Banapur who topped every class he ever sat in, who dreamed through classroom windows in Cuttack, who went on to the “Oxford of the East,” Allahabad University, and topped his MA there too before briefly teaching at that very university.
And then he did the unthinkable. In a society where an administrative posting is regarded as nothing short of lightning from the skies, the greatest benediction a life can hold, the could-have-been Cabinet Secretary of India simply walked away. He resigned from the Indian Administrative Service in 1984 to give himself wholly to writing, research, and the cultural life he loved. I never once heard him brag of this. Greatness, I came to understand from watching him, arrives in simple steps, steps that look daunting and impossible only to the rest of us. This is the thing I want said plainly, because it is so rare it deserves to be carved somewhere.
Jagannath Prasad Das was one of the few Odia writers who never flaunted the IAS letters after his name, never piggy-rode on a title, held or relinquished, to claim recognition that talent had not already earned. He did not need the crutch. He was confident enough, secure enough in his own astonishing gift, to ride on that alone. In a literary culture where the race to be visible has so often turned mean and political, he simply refused to run it. He spent his decades not racing but researching, digging, getting the facts and the feeling exactly right. Invincible in this way, he was almost impossible to influence: not by ideology, not by trend, not by the insecurity of needing to be garlanded.
He stood his ground, honourably and unobtrusively, to the end. What ground it was. He was a renaissance man who flirted with every format the language offered: eleven volumes of poetry, eight collections of short stories, a novel, essays, plays, children’s verse, and nonsense rhyme. His seminal Prathama Purusha, its cover, fittingly, designed by Satyajit Ray, changed the very quality of readership in Odia. His Desha Kala Patra, a six-hundred-page historical novel of late nineteenth-century Odisha, is a literary classic; I had finished romancing its vintage shades of life a full year before Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy arrived to similar acclaim.
The National Book Trust chose it for translation into every Indian language under its Aadaan Pradaan scheme; it travelled into Hindi, Bengali, and into English as A Time Elsewhere, brought to Penguin’s readers as the story of a colonised society shaping its own destiny rather than merely being written about. His plays, Suryasta Purbaru, Saba Sesha Loka, and Sunderdas, were staged at the national level, entered the repertoire at the National School of Drama, and were carried into other languages. Then there was the scholar. A Ph.D. in art history, he did for Odishan painting what almost no one else had thought to do: he made the world look.
His Puri Paintings, his work on the palm-leaf manuscripts in Palm-Leaf Miniatures, and his Chitra-pothi brought the patta tradition out of the temple lanes and onto national and international platforms, and they remain ground-breaking references. He served on the National Film Award jury and on the board of the Children’s Film Society of India, and his love for cinema, for the long argument about a film well past midnight, never dimmed.
He co-founded the Poetry Society (India) to help young poets find their voice and their pages, and guided it as President for fourteen years. And he gave Odisha what it has always starved for: translation, the only ventilation a culture has. He translated Odia women poets into English with Arlene Zide; carried Gulzar’s verse from Urdu and Catherine Clément’s from French into English; brought the Swedish poet Werner Aspenström into Odia; and rendered the medieval Lakshmipurana into English, alongside the work of the Dalit poet Basudev Sunani.
When I once teased him, a self-confessed atheist, about translating the Lakshmi Purana, he shot back, dry as ever, that it was “about the evil of untouchability and gender atrocity.” He never wore his atheism on his sleeve, never made it a brand; he was, as in all things, simply matter of fact. For all this, the Saraswati Samman in 2006 for Parikrama, being only the third Odia writer ever to receive it; the Sarala Award; the Nandikar honours; a Sahitya Akademi film made on his life, what I will carry is smaller and infinitely larger. He was chosen for the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1990 for his poetry collection Ahnika, though true to his principles, he chose not to accept it.
It is that this man, who had sat in conversation with Mulk Raj Anand, Nissim Ezekiel, Gulzar, the culturati of Lutyens’ Delhi, and the long evenings of the India International Centre, and been awed by none of them, this man read me. He read what I wrote, and the moment he finished, he called. Not later. Then. The feedback came warm and exact, a senior’s hand on a younger writer’s shoulder. I keep returning to one of his one-liners, the kind he fired off without ceremony and which I have saved the way one saves a photograph: “Thanks for sharing. One of the best pieces on Akshaya that I have read; J.P. Das” Read it again and you will see the whole man in it: no flourish, no condescension, no performance of grandeur.
Just the truth, generously and instantly given. To a writer, a line like that from a legend is not praise. It is oxygen. He once told me that Odisha was full of budding intellectuals, that the old inevitability of print was giving way to a hundred new formats, and that this was good. He rarely dwelt in the past, itself a rarity, the gift of a mind kept incessantly at work. Even lately, with Delhi’s air having played havoc with his health, he was bent over a new novella, reluctant to stop. His parents named him appropriately: Jagannath Prasad, the gift of the Lord.
He would have dismissed the simile, self-effacing as always. But it is true, and now the gift has been returned to the one who gave it. Leafing through his legacy was always like walking into a bright room with many windows, each opening onto a different world: letters, drama, cinema, history, painting, the long unfinished argument about who we are. Last night, one by one, those windows went dark. The room is quiet now. And the phone, I know, will not ring again — A grieving fan, reader, a grateful junior.
(Charudutta Panigrahi is a writer)