Odia Books

Ramakanta Ratha was born in 1934. He is an eminent poet, studied English literature, taught for sometime as lecturer in English at Balasore and subsequently joined the Indian administrative service. His first collection of poems, Kete dinara (1962), contains some of the outstanding poems of our time.

The poet contemplates the world of familiar objects – a prostitute, a tiger, a lantern – with a kind of philosophical detachment. In some poems he turns inward and evolves a very personal kind of symbolism which was to characterize much of his later poetry. The voice that speaks through these short, compact poems is the voice of a sensitive, though alienated man. The reader is led into a world of strange shapes and forms; a shoe-shine boy eating butterflies,a man playing violin in a desolate house on the sea-beach, a man withdrawing from a ball because of a sprained ankle.

His second and third collections, Aneka kothari (Several rooms, 1967) and Sandigdha mirgaya (Dubious
hunt, 1971) raise profound metaphysical issues but do not offer any solution. In such poems as ‘Bagha shikara’, ‘Ananta shayana,’ and ‘Bimana durghatanare mrutyu,’ the theme is Time, its intransigence and destructiveness. The poet seeks a state beyond death in which he can at least try to understand the life he has lived. But such an understanding is, perhaps, beyond one’s grasp and the poet’s search for meaning reaches a dead end. Rath’s is not a poetry of achieved certainties but of ambiguous possibilities.

In his subsequent collection, Saptama rutu (Seventh season, 1977), which won him the Sahitya Akademi
Award in 1978, the poetic voice takes a new turn and its symbolism offers a new world of rich and varied experience. His use of common speech rhythms and of Oriya folklore is very effective. On the whole, his poetry is the saga of an inward voyage undertaken with admirable courage. His latest volume of poetry entitled Sri Radha (1985) maps this ‘inward voyage’, linked with life, death and time in the form of Radha’s many appeals to Krishna, with a power and sensitiveness almost rare in modern Oriya poetry.

Ramakanta has been a recipient of. many honours besides the Sahitya Akademi Award.He wrote types of bibliography B. Das, ‘The Metaphysical Mode in Modem Oriya and Sister Languages’ in Indian Literature (1979); Dasarathi Das, Adhunika kavya jijnasa: chitrakalpa (Cuttack, 1974) and Mrutyaulokare rutu saptama (1079); Nityananda Satapathi, ‘Sri Ramakanta Rathanka kavyamanasa eka anudhyana’ inIstahara (1978); Soubhagya kumar Misra, ‘Ramakanta Rathanka kavita: drusti o darshna’ in Nabarabi
(1975).

Aneka Kothari
Sandigdha Mirgaya
Bagha Shikara
Ananta Shayana
Bimana Durghatanare Mrutyu
Adhunika Kavya Jijnasa