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Saints and Poets
Every devotional poet asks to be delivered. This one asks to be left in hell, on one condition.
Two lines in Odia, from somewhere in the second half of the nineteenth century:
Praninka arata dukha apramita dekhu dekhu keba sahu Mo jeevana pachhe narke padithau jagata uddhara heu
Witnessing the boundless suffering of living beings, who can bear to watch it?
Let my life fall into hell, if the world is redeemed.
They are among the most quoted lines in Odia devotional literature, and the man who wrote them was a Kondh tribesman who owned nothing.
Take the structure seriously, because it is unusual.
Almost all devotional poetry asks for something, deliverance, the sight of God, an end to rebirth, forgiveness. The asking is the genre.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.