Fire-Worship (Ahitagni)

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Saraswat Sanskriti Sanstha is devoted to acquaint the readers with great life of Swami Paramananda Saraswati (1915-1980), the great Saint, Sage and Seer and valuable literary wealth left by him. For the readers who cannot read and understand Bengali, Saraswat Sanskriti Sanstha is also engaged is getting his literary works translated into English and other languages, since all the writings of Swami Paramananda Saraswati consisting of 21 books of Poems and 3 books in Prose, are in Bengali. In 1996 a book entitled Selected Poems of Paramananda Saraswati with a valuable preface and translator's note was published. The translator is an eminent scholar of English literature. This book has been well received by the readers in the country and abroad. Earlier, in 1995, Swamiji's Uttar Mimansa, a bunch of articles on social and spiritual matters were got translated into Hindi by a scholar of Hindi literature with a foreword by another well known scholar of Hindi literature.

The present book is a translation into English of Ahitagni (Fire Worship), one of those books of poems written in Bengali by Swami Paramananda Saraswati. Swamiji had been deeply immersed in Sadhana realising gems of truth of life and the ultimate reality. He had recorded his experience, his dialogues with the divine in rhythmic idiom colloquial and esoteric, not-too-easy to decipher. The difficult task of rendering into English of the poems of Ahitagni had been undertaken by Dr. Oneil Biswas (born 1916) who is himself an eminent scholar of English and Bengali literature. Dr. Biswas has translated into Bengali verse Shakespeare's Sonnets, T.S. Eliot's Waste Land and into Bengali Prose Aristotle's Poetics. He has rendered Bengali poetry into English in "A Book of Bengali Verse" -An anthology of Bengali Poetry from its inception to modern times a Writer's Workshop Publication (1990), devoted to Indian Creative Writing in English. He is a poet and a critic. Recently he has written Poet-I-Metricka (1998) in which the functions of both are analysed against Eastern and Western Poetics.

India is a land of saints and seers. There is a tradition that they are born whenever the situation is imminently ripe for it. Thus the Geeta (IV.7) records the statement of Krishna, one of such seers, made to Arjuna on the eve of the battle of Kurukshetra: "When goodness becomes weak,/ when evil increases,/ I make myself a body". This does not happen only once, but throughout the ages. And Krishna says: "In every age I come back / To deliver the holy/ To destroy the sin of the sinner/ To establish righteousness". Such a one is Swami Paramananda Saraswati as claimed by his devotees; his mission has been "to establish righteousness". Religion aims at the ascent of man from the animal to the human, from the human to the spiritual. And righteousness is the matrix of this transformation. The operation of this process is stated thus (Fire-worship, poem no. 163).