Description

Saptama Rutu or Saptama Ritu is the fourth collection of poems by the eminent Odia poet, Ramakanta Ratha, which received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1978. Saptama ritu (seventh season) contains 39 poems and a postscript in prose which attempts to define the nature and function of great literature. According to the poet- critic, great literature must embody the self-realisation of a life beyond man’s material existence, a life redeemed by an anguished search for truth. For an example he takes the eighteenth-century Oriya classic, Mathuramangala by Bhaktacharana Das and analyses it in some detail. The love of Yashoda and the gopis for Krishna, as portrayed in Mathuramangala, is seen as the human soul’s craving for communion with a higher reality. In contrast the desires of Kansa and Uddhava are earth-bound and self-centred. For Ratha the anguish involved in the search is far more valuable than its outcome.

This sustains great literature and ultimately human civilisation. As in his earlier three collections, here too the theme is time and its transcendence. Each of’the 39 poems offers a symbolic account of the poet’s encounter with ‘our sad fate’ or Death who appears now as a sanyasi clad in torn clothes, now as a lunatic carying a sword dripping with blood, or playing cards all alone in a desolate mountain cave. Every experience is an experience of death, even that of smoking a cigarette or taking a stroll in the evening. The season is the seventh season, the season of death, in which everything moves fast towards dissolution. The world is on the verge of disappearing altogether, and its haste, its frenzy, is very well captured in the swift moving rhythm of the lines. The idea of a future, deathless and illumined by heavenly light (‘Duradrushti’), is rejected by the poet in a very casual manner. Saptama ritu is an authentic record of man’s existential anguish, the anguish ‘that compels a re-examination of our ideas about our destiny’ (‘Postscript’), but not many readers can stand, not to say appreciate, its nightmarish, almost morbid, version of reality.

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