ABSTRACT
Shyam Sundar Rajguru’s “Sudramuni Sarala Das: Author of the Odia Mahabharata” has the distinction of being the first ever critical essay on the monumental Odia epic, the Mahabharata composed by Sarala Das. It is worth mentioning here that the attempt to assign Odia poets and their works to a specific period in history began to be made only after the advent of colonial modernity. Shyam Sundar Rajguru’s essay on Sarala Das (and other writers) may be seen as a major contribution to this ongoing initiative to construct a historical account of Odia literature. To Shyam Sundar goes the credit of recognizing Sarala Das as the first major poet in Odia literature and this soon led to Sarala Das being universally celebrated as the adikavi [the first poet] of Odisha. Subjecting available evidence to diligent scrutiny, Shyam Sundar concludes that Sarala Das was a contemporary of the king Kapilendra Deva and that his epic was composed in the fifteenth century CE. Although for centuries Sarala’s version of the epic had enjoyed inexhaustible mass appeal it was looked down upon by the Sanskrit educated literati as rustic and lacking in aesthetic refinement. Shyam Sundar carefully examines the language Sarala employs, identifies its defining characteristics and goes on to show how it draws its vitality from folk sayings and popular proverbs. He convincingly defends the absence of any discernible metrical pattern in Sarala Das’s composition and celebrates the unfettered freedom of his lines. He insightfully adds that Sarala Das’s deviations from the Sanskrit original are not to be viewed as deficiencies but as sources of imaginative felicity.
