A Profile of Sachi Raut Roy, the Poet

Padmabhushan Kalaprapurna
DR VISWANATHA SATYANARAYANA, M. A., D. Litt.

[This article written by Kavisamraat Viswanatha Satyanarayana a few years ago on ‘Padmasri’ Sachi Raut Roy, an eminent Oriya poet, remained unpublished. Sri Roy is recently conferred the Hon. D. Litt. by the Andhra University.
–Editor]

Not so easy it is to resist the desire to write about a brother poet from a sister province, especially in these days in the wake of the new dawn of Independence when the cultural unity of India is found all the more indivisible, and to review the vistas of luxuriant flora, particularly when the patch of ground before one splashes the brilliant rays of the morning sun. Sri Sachi Raut Roy’s poems are always an isle of vignettes where soul gets an “apocalyptic” vision revealing “Ecce Homo” and melts into a “requiem”. The dual nature of his dirge is made plain by the symbol “Ecce Homo” which stands at once for mysticism and suffering. Sorrow and suffering though not devoid of each other, are two different things in their spiritual content. From the beginning of time sorrow has been the main theme of the muse of poetry, but now in a world riddled by many an antagonism, suffering seems to have taken its place. Poets singing of the suffering of the people are generally hailed as ‘people’s poets.’

Sri Raut Roy has sung passionately of the sorrows and suffering of the people and he is predominantly known throughout India as the ‘People’s Poet of Orissa.’ Sri Roy has come to be regarded as the ‘voice of the voiceless millions’ and his reputation in contemporary India as a national poet and as a singer of the hopes and fears, and joys and suffering of the mighty but mute millions bears comparison in many respects with that of the poet Kazi Nazrul Islam of Bengal and the poet Bharati of Tamilnad. Sri Raut Roy had faced the ruthless attacks of British Raj several times and incarceration, fines and proscription of books had been meted out to him bounteously, but nothing had retarded the steps of this bard from being the bugler of his country’s struggles.

His ‘Boatman Boy’ was born directly of the people’s baptism of fire when they launched a revolt against the feudal rule of the Native States of Orissa in 1938. It narrates the story of a brave ferry boy who bared his breast to the bullets of the feudal troops without the least tinge of fear. When the agents of bureaucracy threatened him with death he did not betray the cause of revolution. This is the main theme of the poem. It is aptly divided into five spans, the name of the first chapter being ‘Red Flower.’

‘Nay Boatman you shall not renounce the oar
Until the boat has touched the shore...’

These lines are full of suggestion and carry away the reader to a realm of ecstasy. It is an immortal song. “Sun shudders to read it, the storm turns pale reading it and the black might bloom to laughter.” The imageries contained herein reveal the temperament of the poet that responds readily to the delicate overtones of melancholy. The poet has a brilliant expression:

‘Poet of future freedom
Your dying was a poem.’

This is something grand, because the dying of the martyr inspires the world as much as a real poem does.

The poem was translated into English in 1942 by Sri Harindranath Chattopadhyay and published in the same year. It created quite a stir in literary India and consolidated the position of Sri Raut Roy in India as a true national poet.

Sri Raut Roy, had he only been a poet of revolution with the fervour and ideology of seeing the existing order topsy-turvy, would not have received the encomiums from different kinds of admirers as he does. But he is essentially a poet of the soul. He is a poet-philosopher and therein lies the allurement of his songs. His poems resonate the ‘Eternal music of the spheres.’

“O dead! why are you silent?
Ah nay, your very death is loud with life
With future liberated life,
With life a flaming carnival of freedom.”
–THE BOATMAN BOY

In these lines, though the last line smacks of revolution, the preceding lines cannot be said to mean only revolution. They eternal life, the journey onward, which is the main strain of the soul of India.

“Through his dying earth has changed
from so much ugliness to so much beauty.”

Oh! what a great truth it is that man is consecrated in his death by the nobleness of his acts! Sri Roy’s soul is full of poetry. Sometimes melodious expression is mistaken for poetry. The diction is only the garment of the great thought-process which gives individuality to a poet. Roy’s poetry is full of such flashes which reveal his close observation of Man and Nature. Very often he is one with the dawn and the ‘soaring bird’, singing slender-throated.

“O he is like a slender-throated bird
Which soars and sings,
While around its flight
All heaven is struck and stirred
To a wide sense of wings
Fire-tinged, unfettered, high,
O he is a bird of freedom now
Who rests no more upon the crooked bough
Of wasteful agony, but sweeps the sky.”

The lines remind us of Shelley’s “Skylark.” The soul of Roy has something akin to Shelley’s and that precisely ensures his place among the lyricists. The poem embodies some epic qualities and above all, that sweep of passion that makes it vibrant with life.

But now the whole poem would have been the dry dirge of a revolutionary, but Sri Roy is far above that. And the part of this poem entitled “To the Mother” is not intended to appeal to the revolutionary fervour, but to the human sentiment because the two strains are two different streams. One appeal is in Veera Rasa, while the other is in Karuna Rasa.

“Your shrunken woman’s body
Your trembling aged body
Your brave though broken body
Grown neighbour unto heat and dust and toil:
While in your deepest heart the young voice whispers
‘Oh Mother! Oh Mother’!”

It touches the deep-most human sympathies. It is as if the poet has crept into the mother’s bosom and heard the whispers of her child therein. This is poetry at its highest. And as for the poetical similes and metaphors, the following lines would be the best example:

“How when the blue-black clouds of July covered
The naked spaces
Their inky shadow wooed and won the river
And how his little boat would also then
Woo and win the bosom of the river.”

A part of the poem is addressed to the wayfarer. This part is something like an elegy though maintaining at the same time its distinct dynamism.

“Is it not marvellous how this little dead
Has cast a giant shadow everywhere
Now he has left us all
And will not answer though we call and call.”
–THE BOATMAN BOY

This is real sorrow. There is nothing of the ‘revolutionary’ strain in it, because the revolutionary’s aim is to rouse people in the name of injustice done to them and not to reflect the sorrow of the human heart. In these lines we note a sublime disinterestedness that behoves of a truly great poet.

Considering Sri Roy’s other poems, especially those included in the new collected edition of his poems published by the “Modern Review” Office, under the title of “The Boatman Boy And Forty poems.” The Boatman Boy is perhaps negligible and decidedly enough for Sri Roy’s claim to being a poet does not rest on this poem only. The poem may be responsible for his popularity, but his claim to greatness as a poet lies elsewhere. Poems contained in this collection, particularly the poems grouped under the section ‘Vignettes’ are his best at least as far as this collection is concerned. He is not simply a poet. He emerges as an ardent philosopher–a devout seeker of Truth–one who has pondered over the birth, sustaining and the truth of human life. It will be hyperbole if it is said that these ideas have not been expressed better elsewhere. They sound like a page from the Upanishads:

“Pneumas yoked in twos
Plough through slumbering hours
As couples lie locked in sleep
Resigning to a mooning minute.”
–VIGNETTES

The thought, the expression and the execution have all so finely been blended here that the whole piece is seen in a lustrous form.

“Out of the womb of earth
A tree is born
A murmuring lone forest soul...”

The ‘Vignettes’ are to be studied and enjoyed by the reader. They are not to be explained or eulogised. Herein lies the poet of India though read in English.

The English language used as cloak of Indian poetry sometimes lends its colour, sometimes disfigures things and sometimes creates new values. A completely native expression does not lend itself to translation and the translator seeks a new expression that appears to be natural to the language he translates a work into. This difficulty is, however, not felt much in the matter of translation between different European languages as they have a common parentage of religion, ideology and philosophy and, very often, derivation. But when it comes to translating a literary piece in an Indian language into English, a very great poet with a native genius may at times suffer, whereas the works of a comparatively lesser poet may assume flavour. Some portions often appear as landmarks in a translated poem though on the very face of them they are found to be not faithful to the original on account of the imageries employed therein being foreign to the native tongue, and the expression an imposition. If the translator happens to be an adept at the language into which he translates a work, his idiom, his vocabulary and his rich expressions go a long way to embellish the original. Sometimes even the vice versa may take place. Herein this collection that such anomaly does not exist is evidenced by the exquisitely beautiful, original native thought which could never have been incorporated by a translator. Besides, the poet says in the ‘Acknowledgements’ of the book that most of the poems in this section (Apocalypse) were originally written by him in English though final verse-form was given by the translator.

The “Cloud-Symphony” is full of the colour and imagery of Kalidasa’s Meghadoota and at the same time it is a very original composition having a wealth of new word-pictures, subtle symbolism and imageries. It stands as an eloquent testimony to the beauty of Sri Roy’s original native expression. Only a man drunk deep at the fountain of native literature can write such a poem.

This single piece can alone prove abundantly the integrity and thoroughness of Roy as a truly Indian poet:

“Atop the roof of the skies
the cloud maidens dry their hair.”

Dr. Kalidas Nag and Sri Harindranath Chattopadhyay in their introductory essays have assessed the real poetic value of Sri Roy’s works in the two languages–Bengali and Oriya (vide the book “Sachi Raut Roy–A Poet of the People”, Modern Review Press, Calcutta). He is undoubtedly one of the great poets in his own mother-tongue and the translation of his poems is really welcome to the English reader as well as to Indian readers of other states.

In the veins of Sri Roy runs the celestial music of the sphere–a symphony of sounds heard in the mundane and heavenly planes. His soul is one with the Cosmos and the philosophy of his poetry rises to the height of singing

“The end of music is music.”

This does not mean Art for Art’s sake. This means something else. Read it in its context, it will reveal that the word ‘music’ here stands for the beauty of the soul–the soul that pervades the Universe. The poet singing in his orb gets merged in the Cosmos:

“The whole history of everything
Is the essence of a soul
Getting lost into another’s.”

Here instead of the word ‘another’s’ if the word ‘eternal’ had been used, his philosophy would have been of a Vedantist. But now his philosophy is that of a poet. It is a humanitarian philosophy taking cognizance of the eternity of soul. He hears ‘voices in the dark’, ‘the worm of voices’ taking ‘foggy shapes’, the craggy walls speaking, and the ‘fading footsteps of tomb-stoned days.’ He hears music in the flight of a swan and in a gurgling brook. He hears muted notes in a soul freed from its enclosures and closely follows up the trail. The moonlight and midnight shade and the whispering notes of the leaves are to him a ballet. What a colourful soul this poet has which transmigrates into beautiful sounds and beautiful sceneries and landscapes! He becomes one with everything that is beautiful and it is a wonder that this poet should speak of revolution. A poet with such approach has had nothing to complain–far less revolt–against the disorders that are seen in the mundane world. Things come and go. All these things are nothing but the vicissitudes of life and cruel deeds of ambitious men. But the poet whose soul is in tune with the music of the spheres is not naturally concerned with the petty transient occurrences of the objective world. These are to him merely passing shadows.

But Roy’s realism born of his innate dynamics is socially conscious and is imbued with values of social contents. So we cannot expect complete escapism from a poet of Roy’s character. A Yogi is a Yogi. But he has got a body to feed and clothe. A poet of cosmic vision should also come down to the terra firma as he cannot lose consciousness of his environs altogether. Sri Roy is both a pure poet and a poet of the people, both of which though incompatible with each other, have found a happy blending in the poems of Roy. He combines highest imagination with a sense of realism and reality. The beauty of his soul can be summed up in the following words: He identifies himself with revolutionary poets when he sings of mundane things. He even goes to the extent of calling his other half ‘escapism.’ It is nothing but an index of the poet’s transparent sincerity–marked with an authentic stamp of genuineness. Sincerity may not be taken to mean a phase of thought prevailing throughout one’s lifetime. But he did and does feel them all alike at different times and under different circumstances, and what he feels he sings with utmost sincerity. This interpretation explains the apparent dualism that characterises Sri Roy’s works as a poet.

The poems called “Apocalypse,” “Ecce Homo” and “Requiem”, though their titles smack of Christianity, have nothing in common with the Christian theology. They are words simply borrowed to suit the strain.

“I wait for the diapasonal word
The Signature–
I am He and Everything
The origination and the end
The seed, the fruition eternal
Alpha and Omega.”
–APOCALYPSE

These lines embody the experience and realisation of India through ages. Sri Roy is a fond child of ancient ages and the grand traditions of our ancient culture. This is the point where he endears himself to all real poets of our land.

In this collection there are many other poems–songs written on different subjects, and at different times. The two titles The Dying Who Never Die and When Hunger Burns are songs written on the toiling population. They are simple, courageous and dynamic. His “Shajahan” is a poem with a difference interpreting the love of the Emperor for Mumtaj more as an Imperial show than anything conventionally taken for granted.

The frustrations of the age, the “Cinderella of faith abandoned” fill his heart with anguish and finds his ego “tattered and riven in seven winds….like confetti from a town of dreams,” and he seeks fulfilment in a “meridian moment that negates him,” “his cinder shadow burnt out by the verves of fury” of the sun. The poem “Nocturne” emerges as a harbinger of a later state of fructification of his soul which bloomed into Vignettes and Dhvani Lok.

Sometimes his ‘realism’ is the realism of the imagists. In ‘Protima Nayak’ the ‘Khaki inane smiles’ of his heroine reveal a lining of melancholy to the pattern of his poetic thought. The symbols represent disintegration and lost hopes. A symbol in poetry must be an acknowledged one on all hands, conveying a universal meaning. Now-a-days modern poets create new symbols. If the poet can successfully imprint on the minds of the readers, the import of the symbol it is well and good. It can be safely said that Roy is infinitely successful in this matter as well. Sometimes his pictures are in the strain of a second-rate novelist, e.g.,

“A soldier sits in the empty eating house
And sips a lukewarm tea
Bleared eyes
Peeping over the rim of a yellow cup
Gazing at his own visage
In the straw-coloured brew.”
–To CHANDRAVATI

This is no doubt picturesque, but it can never be said good poetry except for its Freudian impact, importing a reflex or if we may say so, the Narcissism complex. At moments Roy’s realism assumes real grandeur and a classic dignity, e.g.,

“Bullying oracles of Delphic dailies monitor our thoughts
with brazen words that sleep with the winds
Our winged days are meaningless
Mummied butterflies on plastic flowers
In the show-windows of civilization.”
–ATLAS

Sri Roy’s poems bear the unmistakable mark of his, ‘internationalism.’ We come across in his poems symbols and word pictures that represent strange landscapes, unknown horizons and ‘unmapped savannas’ belonging to far-off lands ranging from the Penguin islands to the gum woods of Australian shores loud with ‘corroborees.’ All these assume significance when we remember that the poet had travelled widely all over the world and he visited in 1952 Australia, New Zealand, and many South-east Asian countries like Siam, Ceylon, Indonesia on a Government of India deputation. He was accorded rousing receptions by the leading artists and litterateurs as well as the cultural organisations of the countries he visited. Some years Sri Raut Roy was invited by the Harvard University to deliver talks in the Harvard University International Seminar of Arts and Science and on their invitation visited U. S. A. Later on he toured extensively in Europe visiting U. K., Switzerland, France, Germany, Italy, Bangladesh, etc. He addressed the BangIa Academy Seminar in Dacca recently.

The different cultural streams of India seem to have been commingled in the life and works of Sri Roy. Like the triple-streamed Triveni the cultures of sculpturesque Orissa as well as of reverine Bengal and Andhra Desh find equal echo in his life and works. There are numerous images and allusions in his poems that reverberate the local colour and natural sceneries of Orissa, Bengal, Andhra and even of U. P. His life is a confluence of the many-splendoured cultures of South and East India.

His poems On Flows The Krishna and Geometric have Andhra grounds. This may apparently seem strange on the part of a poet who is born in Orissa and bred over 22 years in Bengal. But a few know the fact that Roy’s genius is interwoven with the culture of Andhra Desa since he has married into a renowned Zamindar family of Telugu land and as such the river Krishna naturally wakes in him thoughts of pleasure and happiness which are common link between him and the writer of this article, a Telugu man born on the banks of the Krishna.

Raut Roy’s short-stories, available in three principal collections such as ‘Masanir Fula’ (The Flower of the cremation ground ), ‘Matir Taj’ (The Clay Taj) and ‘Chhai’ (Shadows) some of which have since been published in English garb, emerge as fine portrayals of contemporary sensibilities. They reveal his mellow character study and deep insight into the human mind unfolding the many-coloured facets of average human life on urban and rural grounds. Some of his stories are replete with great charms inset with beautiful vistas of day-to-day life.

Raut Roy has also written many a treatise on Labour Welfare, Industrial Relations and Social Security and the allied subjects in which line he had worked for twenty years in a large industrial concern in Calcutta. He had the privilege of representing India in the last International Seminars of Social Services and Labour Welfare which were held in Australia and New Zealand, being deputed by the Government of India. He is the President of All-India Utkal Mahasabha, the Central Organization of the Oriyas living outside Orissa and a member of the Advisory Board of the Central Board of Film Censors of the Government of India and of National Sahitya Akademi. In a nutshell his life and muse have been dedicated and rededicated to the people of his land whom he adores above all things.

The epithet of “people’s poet” which is often used against his name seems to be more than justified in the present literary scene of India.