Sochi Raut Roy

A child of the new renaissance in Orissa and yet “less one of the children of our climes than of an age yet unborn” there arises Sochi Raut Roy, the poet and the “revolutionary”, who has become even at the tender age of 28 “the voice of Orissa’s voiceless millions.” He is largely responsible for the great alchemical changes that are now taking place in the language of Orissa, which is being moulded by him to give expression to the authentic voice of a people now awakening to new life.

He is markedly a poet of the huge multitudes of ill-fed and ill-clad human beings, their great passions and aspirations which remain unrecognised by the established writers of the day. He is not a poet of the “Ivory Tower” or of the isolationist school which worships beauty in her secluded chambers. ‘Art for Art’s sake’ is as much a myth to him as the entire negation or total crucifixion of all art for the sake of rigid utilities: His feet are firmly implanted in solid ground.

As Harindranath Chattopadhyaya, the translator into English of his Boatman Boy and other poems, has remarked, Sochi Roy is a brilliant instance of the de-classing that has been taking place among the modern writers who have come face to face with reality. For he has exclaimed:

Ye, lotus-eater Poets of our clime!!
The world is taking on another shape
From what it wore in the bygone times
When song for you was just a fine escape,
For you, self-isolated in a swoon
Nourished on decadent dreams, that day is done!!

The revolutionary in him is quite evident from

Now let your poet’s pen
Interpret the tragedy of men,
Interpret the black magnitude of sorrow
Which makes Today a tomb to close around Tomorrow.

Fighting all along single-handed against the false mannerism and escapist emotionalism of the neo-romantic school, on the one hand, and the die-hard tendencies of a barren revivalist on the other, Raut Roy is now able to evolve, with some initial success, a new line of progressive dynamic thinking in the post-war literature of his province. He is the much acclaimed leader of the young progressives of Orissa in the world of literature.

Accepted literary forms and evasive or suppressive media of poetic expression are extremely distasteful to his revolutionary genius, which wants to get rid of placid ornamentation and to establish the vital significance, fertility and daring of human thought in its “heroic nudity.” The genesis-motive of the young poet is to create the necessary conditions for a virile, vivacious and massive literature of the people.

The wide range of his sympathy, his keen sensitiveness to the tragic in life, his deep inborn love of the simple fraternities, endear his creations to the commonest man in the street.

Aviyan, his book of poems in Oriya, is regarded as the gospel of revolutionary outlook and contains verses of a highly compelling quality, such as “Bhat”, “Bread”, “Spain”, “The Gallows”, “The Andamans”, etc., which directly appeal to the starving millions. The fiery lines of his “Rakta Sikha”, though proscribed by the Government, are still alive, gathering force and momentum as they pass from lip to lip whenever there is a popular movement afoot in Orissa.

Sochi Raut Roy is at once a realist and a visionary. While his poems sound like the rousing bugle-calls of freedom exhorting people to fight against the existing forces of sham, exploitation and tyranny, they are also charged with a supreme message of idealism for the future–a message that indicates that a purer humanity would rise out of the death of a broken and effete social order. Like the proud music of the storm his lines record a loud protest against the forces of a lame ‘status quo’. The uncompromising idealist and propagandist in him battles against the pride of the dictatorship of private economy when he says in “Bhat” (‘The dying who never die’):

Hunger burns like a bloody heat
Give me a share of rice to eat

Do you forget, do you forget
That rice comes out of our toil and sweat?

The rich man walks with his head held high
And passes us by, just passes by
Us, the dying who never die!

But soon again we find the toil-worn visionary in him looking like a prophet with a softening in his eyes towards the eastern sky when new dawn trembles between the forces of darkness and light struggling hard for birth. He sings almost whisperingly, musing within himself:

I stand and dream of the day to come
When man shall rise out of martyrdom.
Rise in the dawn of freedom when
A new red sun and my poet’s pen
Shall sign the charter of man for Men!!

His are the living, direct and spiritual experiences of life en masse as contrasted with the distant and merely intellectual appreciation of its values from the top of our secluded towers of isolationalism. He is at once ‘the very bone of their bones and the flesh of their flesh,’ standing on the same level with the people and knowing more than intimately their wounds and smiles as they themselves know them. To be a poet of the people is his devout aspiration. How pathetically he sings of their hungry plight in:

Our children on the foot-paths lie, lifeless as any log:
They are not even destined to eat the leavings of your dog!

On a cushion of yielding rubber your dog lies safe and warm,
His fur soft-white as the suds of soap, lends lustre to his form.
Unlike its own body ours is coarse with dust and dirt and toil,
Coarse and hard and chopped and scarred–it would make your body recoil.

Weary and worn and tattered and torn like the sail of a boat in a storm!
The milk is dry in the women’s breasts which sag and droop so sad

And their children wildly at clay–starvation has made them mad!

Of his poems  ‘Baji Raut’ has attained the full stature of a pathetic epic. His short stories playlets and novels bear ample testimony to his intimate study of various aspects of human life. His “Smasaner Ful” “Matir Taj”, and “Andhar” are remarkable among his short stories. His poems are rich with a haunting melody and spontaneity. They are polished and charged with a music born of freshness and colourful buoyancy. There is a virlile strain of manliness in them that reflects his dynamic personality. His Chitra-griha isa wonderful novel challenging the forces of a clay-footed romanticism.

Sochi Roy’s poems in Bengali are being published in the leading Bengali journals. They reveal a fine command over the language.

There has not been a single up-surge or movement of the Orissan masses since 1930 which has not been to a greater or less extent inspired by his poetry. Even illiterate cowboys and girls cherish his lines on their lips and can be caught singing his tunes while at work or play.

Many of his lines are highly rousing, as for instance:

There is no funeral flame, Comrade!
No funeral flame, but freedom’s leaping flame
To clean the country’s darks of death and shame
A sacrificial mystery
Of death turned life….Flame beyond price! !
Lo, you have offered unto history
The century’s supremest bud of breath,
Extremest symbol of high sacrifice,–
Our Boatman-boy, proud conqueror of death!!

Such is Sochi Raut Roy, the poet of the martyrs and the hungry, a dreamer of a “brave new world” that is yet to come and will certainly come, for

.........Death is loud with life,
With future liberated life,
With life, a flaming carnival of freedom...