Koliyak, by the Gulf of Khambhat

Koliyak is a coastal village in Bhavnagar district on the Saurashtra shore, known to pilgrims for the sea temple of Nishkalank Mahadev, which can be reached on foot only when the tide draws back. Jaya Vallabhdas Mehta was born there on 16 August 1932, the daughter of Vallabhdas and Lalitaben. She would spend most of her working life in Mumbai lecture halls and editorial rooms, but the small coastal beginning matters. It helps explain the unshowy, grounded quality of a writer who became one of the most intellectually rigorous voices in twentieth-century Gujarati poetry.

A Teacher Before a Scholar

Her route through education was not the smooth one available to city-born children of privilege. She first completed a primary teaching certificate and went to work in a school, earning a living while continuing to study. Only afterwards did she take a bachelor's degree in 1954 and a master's degree in 1963, both connected with SNDT Women's University in Mumbai, the pioneering institution for women's higher education in India. She later completed a doctorate on humour in Gujarati poetry and drama, a subject that sounds light and is in fact demanding, since it obliges a scholar to explain why something is funny without killing the joke in the process.

She joined SNDT as a teacher of Gujarati and rose to a professorship, remaining there until her retirement. Generations of women students in Mumbai first met Gujarati literature through her classes. She had a reputation as a demanding reader who wanted argument rather than admiration, and who was unimpressed by reputation for its own sake.

The Poetry of a Clear Eye

Mehta wrote mainly in free verse, and she wrote as a rationalist. Where much Gujarati lyric poetry of the period leaned on devotional feeling or romantic longing, she preferred observation, irony and an almost clinical honesty. Her first collection, Venetian Blind, appeared in 1978, its title an image of light admitted in strips, of seeing partially and knowing that one sees only partially. Akashman Tarao Chup Chhe followed in 1985, and the sequence gathered as Hospital Poems in 1987 drew on the ward, the corridor and the body in pain.

Those hospital poems are the work she is most often quoted for. They refuse both sentimentality and horror. Illness in them is neither a punishment nor a lesson; it is simply a condition in which human beings are stripped down to their essentials, and the poet watches with compassion but without flinching. Death recurs throughout her writing, yet the poems are rarely heavy, because she declines to become metaphysical about it. Social awareness and reason, not private ecstasy, are the engine of her verse.

That stance had consequences beyond her own pages. A woman writing sceptical, unornamented poetry in Gujarati in the 1970s and 1980s was widening the permissible range for everyone who came after her, and later women poets in the language have acknowledged the room she made.

Critic, Editor, Translator

Poetry was only one strand. Mehta also produced fiction, including Renu and Ek Aa Khare Pandadu in 1989, and criticism such as Manogat in 1980. She co-edited the weekly Sudha and the journal Vivechan, the latter published by her university department, and she wrote regular columns for Gujarati newspapers, among them Mumbai Samachar, addressing literature and society for readers who were not specialists.

Translation may be her quietest and most far-reaching contribution. She brought Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea into Gujarati, and rendered S. L. Bhyrappa's Kannada novel Daatu for Gujarati readers, work recognised with a Sahitya Akademi translation prize. Carrying a book across two Indian languages, rather than simply importing one from English, is difficult and poorly paid labour, and she took it on because she believed the literatures of India ought to be able to read one another directly instead of always through a European intermediary.

A Long Life, Quietly Spent

Mehta never courted celebrity. She built no public persona around her poetry, gave few grand interviews, and allowed the work to stand on its own. Within Gujarati letters, however, her standing was secure. She is regularly named among the most significant women writers the language produced in the twentieth century, and her insistence that a poem could be doubting, plain and still deeply moving changed what younger writers thought they were allowed to do.

She died on 26 August 2025, ten days after her ninety-third birthday. The date is recorded in standard reference sources, though detailed obituary coverage in English remains thin, as it often is for writers who worked mainly in an Indian language and outside the metropolitan spotlight.

For Koliyak the connection is straightforward and worth stating plainly. A girl born in a small village on the Bhavnagar coast, who began her working life as a schoolteacher holding a modest certificate, ended as a professor, a translator of world literature, and a poet whose lines are still set for study across Gujarat. Villages produce such lives far more often than the national conversation admits. They are simply less often written down.