Recently the literary fraternity is going to celebrate the Centenary Celebration of Satchidananda Routray, popularly known as Sachi Routray who breathed his last on 24 August, 2004 was best known for his poetry, acclaimed to be the harbinger of modern Odia poetry, though he was a man of many genres. His versatile genius has found easy success in almost all the branches of literature and the present epoch in Odia poetry is known after his name as the Routray era. Once he observed, “Although poetry has been my forte, I have also written other form of literature, i.e., short stories, novels, poetic drama, criticism and research. I think, every poet is unconsciously a critic for he has to choose, reject and harmonize words, associations, metaphors, etc. while writing poetry. Hence there is no wonder at the British example that almost every major poet of England was a major critic of his times, such as Dryden, Carlyle, Mathew Arnold, Eliot, etc.”
An exponent of progressive literature in Odisha, he was the first poet to introduce prose verse in Odia poetry. While still a student of Khurda High School, he came under the influence of the then fashionable school of thought in the literary field of Odisha Sabuja Sangha (Society of Evergreens), whose aim and ideals were to a great extent, the distant echo of Sabuja Patrika of Shantiniketan. Sachi, the young lad, with heart full of exuberant high hopes started his literary career as a romantic poet with a terrific passion for shaping his designs according to his own pattern. Patheya (For the Road, 1932), his first collection of mystic-verses, was published when he was sixteen. Although influenced by Tagorian mysticism, the book full of promise, enthusiasm and lyrical spontaneity, drew the attention of the reading public towards the tender boy. Dedicated to a ‘young traveler’ it contains fifty-two sequences conveying ‘mellifluous experiences’ concerning love, nature and general dissatisfaction against the prevailing social injustice and inequalities, followed by Purnima in 1933. A poetic drama by its form, establishes the full significance of the ultimate aim of human life, it depicts the mythological love episode of Siva and Parvati.
These two books reveal the highly imaginative mind of a young promising poet and the style closely follows the tradition of the Sabuja Poets. Sachi, however, attained celebrity with the publication of Baji Rout (1942), a long poem to celebrate the heroism of a young boatman boy, Baji Rout, born in the village of Nilakanthapur in Dhenkanal, who refused to oblige the king’s soldiers to cross the river, on 10 October 1938, while guarding a vantage point. First published in 1938 in Sahakar, then a leading Odia journal, and also in a small, slender booklet, later on an enlarge edition published from Kolkata in 1942, the poem was written in a meditative rhetorical language and in a symbolical structure. Later it received universal acclaim through an English rendering entitled The Boatman Boy and Other Poems by Harindranath Chattopadhyay. The book is a perennial symbol of revolt became extremely popular with the younger generation. Considered as an epic which become almost the Bible of the State Prajamandal (People’s Movement) of Odisha and in general, of the revolutionary youth of his days, Baji Rout recounts the sacrifice of a rustic village boy and fell to their bullet but averted disaster.
It is no ‘assassination in the sacrificial grove of poetry’. Here is a breath of greatness. The poem is conceived in five spans, and comprehends the full circuit of ardour, agony, martyrdom, despair, and eventual resurrection. With the powerful invitation to the tyrant, Sachi Routray wrote:
“This is no funeral flame, comrade!
No funeral flame, but freedom’s leaping flame
To cleave the country’s dark of death and shame,
A sacrifice mystery of death turned life…”
The poet raised high above the personal level and makes it truly a saga of freedom and of heroic sacrifices for the cause of the country. The incident fired the imagination of the people and became a rallying point for them to unite against the imperialist ruler. The Founder- Secretary of All India Progressive Writers Association, Sazzad Zaheer once observed, “Sachi’s poems were the best examples of progressive literature”. The poet was deeply imbued with the feelings of nationalism and sacrifice of Odishan people fighting for Indian independence. Baji Rout shows the unwavering commitment to the national cause. He wrote:
“Shoot, shoot as steadily as you can,
Our breasts are bared to your bullets!
Keep aside your wooden lathis,
For we damn it all,
Our breasts are made of rocks”!
Palli‑Sri (The Village Graces, 1941), his magnum opus, the testament of faith in spirit of freedom and carefree living in a world of rare charm and natural beauty, is considered as the best palli‑kavita (rural poetry) written in Odia after Pallikavi Nandakishore Bal. Containing ten poems, the book begins with the poem titled Chhota Mora Ga’nti (My Littleknown Village) which indicates that the writer starts to write on the little village in which he was born. The poem is full of reminiscences breathing a sweet note of pastoral simplicity and permeating the mind with the fragrance and purity of a distant dream. The change in his poetry came naturally as a part of his evolution as a poet, a symptomatic of the continuous process of growth of his sensibility and craftsmanship. Based on the different aspects of village life and the rural folk and set against the backdrop of natural beauty, the idyllic countryside, the poem is a living force. He wrote:
“My little village! How beautiful is
Your shimmering moonlight!
Yet, how more beautiful is your darkness too.”
J.B. Mohanty says, “Palli‑Sri represents the founding of a virile and full blooded literature for the people, expressing faithfully their joys and sorrows, hopes and despairs and ushering in a people’s literature that could reflect the ideational pattern of the life of the people in an unmistakable way”. The publication of Pandulipi (Manuscript, 1947), however, ushered the advent of the modem era in Odia poetry. Introduced with new verse forms like prose verses, verses with interim rhymes, elimination of metrical similarity of vowels, Pandulipi was the harbinger of new poetry. Accepted for their innovative quality, freshness, new idiomatic expressions and a fascinating range of imagery, the poems have exerted a salutary influence on the younger generations of poets. Pandulipi was a defiant declaration of human rights against a decadent social order. Sachi, a conscious writer, wanted to unmask the forces of reaction and exploration that had taken shelter under the pretext of religion, revivalism and reformism.
His other early poetic works during 1930s and 1940s include Raktashikha (Red Flame, 1939), Abhijan (The Expedition, 1938), Bhanumatira Desha (The Land of Bhanumati, 1949), Smramika Kavi (The Labourer Poet), Sarbahara (The Proletariat, 1937), Biplabar Janmadine (On Birthday Revolution, 1939), and Nal November (Red November). Excellent command over language and throbbed with innumerable new images, turns of phrase and metrical and rhythmical innovations, his early poems had strongly elements of left oriented progressivism as well as soft romantic strain. During the period some of his poems were banned in 1939 and 1942. The fiery lines of Raktatshikha, a book of patriotic songs, though proscribed by the Government in 1939 and the Press was fined Rs.1, 000/‑ for having printed it, are still alive, gathering force and momentum as they pass from lip to lip whenever there is a popular movement afoot in Odisha. Verse of high compelling quality, it spears to the people in the language of the people.
Abhijan, another characteristic book of Sachi, held in high esteem by the modern generation, is a landmark of new progressive ideas in the domain of Oriya literature. Embodies all visions and aspirations of the people of the age of freedom and democratic consciousness Abhijan bears the signature in fire of the titanic struggle of a budding consciousness in a new-awake nation. Regarded as the gospel of revolutionary outlook and containing verses of a highly compelling quality, such as: “Bhat”, “Spain”, “Gallows,” “Andaman”, etc. Abhijan, directly appeals to the starving millions. His poetic credo is unambiguously stated in a poem “Bhat”:
“Hunger burns like a bloody heart,
Give me a share of rice to eat”.
Apart from progressive and modern poems he had also written some humorous poems contained in Hasanta. The typical examples of his satire may be given from his book containing his humorous poems like “Horse Race in Heaven”, “Gopabandhu’s Death Anniversary”, the vegetarian village “Sarpanch” ‑ a strict Gandhian who only ate meat when a goat or hen committed suicide. Subsequently after Independence he wrote poetry, which linked him with the new poetry that emerged from mid fifties. These are: Svagat (1958), Kavita (1962) and the Kavita series appearing at regular intervals in 1969, 1971, 1974, 1983,1985,1987, 1988, 1990, respectively, Asiar Svapna (1969), Mayakovosky Kavita Sangraha (1965) which won him the Soviet Land Nehru Award. His Kavita 1962, adjudged to be the best collection of poems between 1960 and 1962 by the Sahitya Akademi, containing fifty-five best poems of Sachi, experiments with the new style and technique of expressing the contemporary reality, particularly related to his own new romantic themes about nature and social concern.
Kavita 1962, an extraordinary book of impassive poems, introduces many striking imageries. “It includes an expressive introduction to the movement of new poetry in Odia and other languages,” says the Akademi. The alchemy of words, magical charm of accents and dhvani has achieved greater success in Kavita’62 than in any other book of Sachi. Prafulla Jagdev says, “In Kavita’62 modern themes have been consolidated with a matching structure of images and rhythms”. The predicament of the modern man ‑ his sense of deep rooted frustration and disillusionment, and his sense of rootlessness and his acute sufferings in the present social gestalt’ have found authentic expression in Kavita’62.
Containing sisty-seven poems and dedicated to an unknown rickshaw puller, Kavita’67 is undoubtedly a major poetic work of Sachi bearing the indelible stamp of his all-inclusive poetic personality. Surendra Mohanty, the noted Odia writer who reviewed the book in his journal Kalinga says, “Kavita’67, more important than Kavita’62, carries the message of affirmation of life and different levels end of his apocalyptic vision of a brave new social order which a conditioned m