MEDITATION ON THE WORLD
– Om Biyani
Picture a rustic-looking student appearing for the M.A.
Part I examination and attempting a question on
Sudhakar Gaidhani’s first collection of poems. The
students is well, Gaidhani himself. Picture a boy washing
dishes in a dingy village eatery who grows up to say :
Suppose you pushed the earth on …
Where would you park it in space?
That is our poet.
“Devdoot – c’est moi,” says Gaidhani in his language.
Incidentally, it seems poetically fit that the creator of
Devdoot – which word literally means God’s courier
(hence an angel) – should belong to the postal department.
That the experience of hutment life should colour
Gaidhani’s poem is understandable; what is remarkable is
the way he transcends the usual limitations of the
literature we associate with people of such a background.
Devdoot is Gaidhani’s second and favourite work, a
long-gestated long poem whose epic status is tentatively

conceded by some noted Marathi critics. Its larger-than-
life hero, its breadth, and the nature of the action in it are

advanced to support the epithet. On the other hand, its
reflective nature – reflective more than episodic – has
earned it the description “meditations on the world”. But
it is not a chapter by chapter disquisition, it is a picaresque
meditation, the link between one thought and next being
associative and underground.
Underlying the poem is the awareness that external
nature and human nature are sprung from a common
seed. Nature images abound in the poem and its complex

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“message” is at places reduced to a simple appeal to seek
one’s identity in nature – to be like a flower, like a tree.
Devdoot is Buddha and Christ rolled into one, who has
compassion in his bag but who dismisses “defunct
prayers”. If the ancient lawgiver has stopped, Man
shouldn’t “pitch his tent”.
The poem has, fittingly, the quality of eloquence. The
original is a cascadingly fluent, eminently recitable free
verse poem, punctuated by explosions, interspersed with
echoes from folk songs and traditional hymns, parodic,
sardonic, witty, aphoristic, blunt. Its one-stretch, 90
minute readings (about Canto-I) have enthralled varied
categories of listeners. It is not a cloister poem at all.
Within a short time of its publication, lines from it were
read in a legislative assembly, scrawled on village walls,
printed on invitation cards, quoted in college lecture halls,
and commended by India’s ex-deputy Prime Minister
Y. B. Chavan as containing the “wisdom of ages”.
There could be several reasons for the poem’s success,
but a major one must be its mythopoeia nature – the pithy
little stories about romance, hunger, exploitation, death.
It may be noted in passing that when UNESCO
considered Devdoot under their programme for
translations of representative works they found it a
“lovely story”. Another curiosity is that the Smithsonian

Institute, Washington’s discovery of a thirty-million-year-
old fossil of a giant bird reminded a critic of Devdoot.

Devdoot’s characteristics remarkably resemble those of
the real-life giant bird: gigantic size, flying over oceans,
living aeons ago. Raymond T. Rye II of the Smithsonian
Institute, on reading Devdoot, found the coincidence “a
rare occasion when science and poetry can meet with such
magnificent blend of serendipity”.
The serious reader will of course be sensitive to the
poem’s suggestions and nuances and resolve its

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paradoxes. Coded and cryptic as some lines do sound,
readers avow that they have mined fresh meanings with
each reading. After discussion with Gaidhani I feel the
poem awaits the patient digger.
Compassion is Devdoot’s keynote, played allegro:
Hurry up, wash these wounds
On the earth’s heart

Lest it split into two-
Because this planet is all

That we mortals have got
Devdoot somehow assures us that messiahs can never
be an extinct species.