India, 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 decad...