MUMBAI, Jan. 11 -- After decades spent amid files, forms and the patient grind of the Indian state, Ramnath Sonawane has chosen a quieter, riskier instrument: the line break. The retired Maharashtra bureaucrat -- who once steered vast urban bodies such as the Kalyan-Dombivli and Nagpur municipal corporations, and served with institutions such as MMRDA and the Maharashtra Water Resources Regulatory Authority-has produced something almost wilfully unfashionable in our hurried age: a 240-page epic poem on Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, written in English blank verse. Sonawane says, poetry unlike prose, is a durable vessel for truth. "A novel has a relatively short life," he says with the calm certainty of someone who has measured time in decades of public service. "An epic poem can last for centuries." Sonawane's recently released enterprise in verse, titled 'The Saga of the Hindu King Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj' travels the moral and emotional arc of Shivaji Maharaj's life - as a military genius and shrewd statesman, a son shaped by his mother's resolve, and ruler burdened by constant siege, betrayal and responsibility. Battles thunder through verse, but so do quieter moments of doubt and reflection. The king is not embalmed in reverence; he breathes, thinks and hesitates. The origins of this undertaking stemmed way before his retirement. Sonawane began writing poetry and plays as a college student, long before governance claimed his attention. His bond with the Maratha king was however forged during his schooling at Rayat Shikshan Sanstha, in his village Chincholi Gurao, Ahmednagar district. Retirement, for Sonawane, was not an ending but a clearing. The noise of administration receded, leaving space for a long-deferred ambition. "Returning to poetry felt like returning to myself," he says. Yet writing about Shivaji Maharaj is never a neutral or purely literary exercise. In India, he is not merely a historical figure but a living presence-invoked in politics, culture and fuelling popular imagination with equal fervour. On writing the book in English rather than his mother tongue, he says, "If his life is to endure in the global imagination, it must travel in a language with reach." The form, too, is carefully chosen. Sonawane rejected the novel and the stage in favour of blank verse, the unrhymed, measured cadence most closely associated with William Shakespeare and John Milton. "Blank verse carries gravity without ornament," he explains. "It can hold historical fact without distortion." Through 240 pages, the poem's scale mirrors the vastness of its subject. The ruler's life, Sonawane admits, often resisted metre. Compressing such magnitude demanded discipline as much as imagination. That discipline to carry out the task bears the imprint of Sonawane's bureaucratic life. "As an administrator, you are trained to respect records," he says. "As a poet, you listen to what the records cannot say." His years in governance gave him an unusually tactile relationship with history. Serving as municipal commissioner in Kalyan-a city threaded deeply into the Maratha past-he found himself working amid the physical residues of Shivaji Maharaj's world. Overseeing the installation of a statue of the king at the roundabout below Durgadi Fort remains one of his proudest moments: a convergence of civic duty and personal devotion. His dual identity-administrator and poet-runs through the epic. The administrator insisted on precision, wary of myth hardening into falsehood. The poet sought the emotional truth beneath the chronicle: the loneliness of command, the moral calculus of power and the weight of perpetual vigilance. Blank verse, he says, allowed both voices to coexist, offering structure without strangling feeling. Perhaps the poem's most striking quality is its refusal to deify. Sonawane is clear that reverence by itself is reductive. "Poetry allows you to enter the inner life of a hero," he says. His Shivaji Maharaj is formidable, certainly, but also human-shaped by loss, doubt and the relentless demands of leadership. By restoring vulnerability, Sonawane believes, the king's achievements become more, not less, extraordinary. "I see his administration as a living blueprint, not a museum piece," he says. Sonawane's literary career owes itself to his leaning towards iconic lives. He has written a full-length play on Princess Diana, reimagined through the architecture of Shakespearean tragedy, and a collection of poems on the textures of everyday existence. What links Diana and Shivaji Maharaj, he suggests, is not fame but scale: lives lived under relentless scrutiny, shaped by destiny and public expectation. What does Sonawane hope readers will take away? "I want them to hear the rhythm of a great life," he says. In choosing the epic form, Sonawane makes a quietly defiant claim: that poetry can still hold history without flattening it, and that some lives are best remembered not through slogans or statues, but through verses patient enough to endure time itself....