Cuttack, July 11: Oriya music lovers are in for a treat.

Pandit Godavarish Mishra’s poems have been turned into a bouquet of songs in the album E Bijana Baate (Along the Forlorn Path).

Driven by a desire to revive and popularise the works of the Oriya poet through music, a group has sorted out eight poems from his nine collections, and rendered them into songs and recitation of another eight poems, in a two-in-one audio CD pack.

“Pandit Godavarish Mishra was the most versatile among the Satyabadi School of writers, who flourished in the first half of the 20th century. But his works have been out of print for years and are hardly available in bookstores. So, we decided to bring out an audio CD,” said Saroj Kumar Singh, a retired physics professor, who explained the project concept to The Telegraph.

Viraj Shukla (research work), veteran music composers Purna Khuntia and Om Prakash Mohanty and singer Trupti Panda, who sang the first-ever Oriya version of Rabindranath Tagore’s songs, are among the other members of the group.

“What we could lay our hands on was essentially poetry and not the lyrics,” said music composer Purna Khuntia.

Composing the music while keeping in mind the needs of the music lovers of today was a challenging task. “Composing the music with a contemporary touch while retaining the colloquial mood of the poems was certainly a challenging task,” said composer Khuntia.

What came to the aid were Hindustani ragas. “To do justice to the poems the music composition had to be based on Hindustani ragas, but with a modern touch,” Khuntia added.

The album is a tribute to shades of solitude. The selected songs are perhaps Pandit Godavarish Mishra’s most intense poems on loneliness, longing, separation and desire for union.

Music director Om Prakash Mohanty believes that the various moods and emotions had been captured thoroughly by mellifluous singing of the artistes.

“I wanted to compile an album on the legendary Oriya poets, but E Bijana Baate was a unique experience thanks to the metaphysical nature of the compositions,” said Trupti Panda, the singer of the album. “At first it appeared a daunting task to do justice to the compositions. But it seemed easy when I got accustomed to the mood of the songs after I read the words. The songs spoke about union with the almighty but had an underlined sense of union of two lovers”, said Trupti.

The present generation has no inkling of the greatness of the Oriya poet, a fact that the group intends to change. “I feel the present generation should know that such inspiring poetry in Oriya was written in the past,” added the classical singer, who trained under Pandit Gopal Panda and Subash Das.

The CD pack also has recitations by Jyoti Shankar Mishra of eight poems. Jyoti Shankar Mishra is a retired Akashvani announcer and radio jockey.

Pandit Godavarish Mishra (1886-1956) was a poet, playwright and prose-writer of distinction. He penned nine collections of poetry and enriched Oriya lyrical poetry withe effective use of idiomatic phrases. He earned the Sahi tya Akademi Award posthumously in 1962 for his autobiography Ardha Satabdir Odissa.