The Saint of Modern Bengali Poetry by Baby Shaw
Although the tradition of poetry is age-long, modernity in poetry came as recent as the 19th Century. Modern Bengali Poetry has its seeds in English Poetry. Victorian poet G.M. Hopkins was the first to convey a certain modernity in his poems. His style was so radically different from those of his contemporaries that it brought a new age in the history of poetry writing (1). The revolutionary styles of his poems influenced Bengali Literature as well and left its effects on the works of several modern poets (2).
There were many such poets who touched the shores of many hearts with the waves of their poetry. So much so that they changed the course of Bengali literature through the modernity that they conveyed in their art. As for the concept of modernism, we find, Modernism is a period in literary history that started around the early 1900s and continued until the early 1940s. Modernist writers in general rebelled against clear-cut storytelling and formulaic verse from the 19th century. Instead, many of them told fragmented stories that reflected the fragmented state of society during and after World War I (3).
Many modernists wrote in free verse, and they included many countries and cultures in their poems. Some writers used numerous points of view or even used a "stream-of-consciousness" style. These writing styles further demonstrate the way the scattered state of society affected the work of writers at that time (4).
Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman are thought to be the mother and father of the movement because they had the most direct influence on early modernists. Sometime after their deaths, the Imagist poets began to gain importance. The University of Toledo’s Canaday Center has a rich collection of poetry and critical work from that era.
Imagist poets generally wrote shorter poems, and they chose their words carefully so that their work would be rich and direct. The movement started in London, where a group of poets met and discussed changes that were happening in poetry. Ezra Pound soon met these individuals, and he eventually introduced them to H.D. and Richard Aldington in 1911. In 1912, Pound submitted their work to Poetry magazine. After H.D.’s name, he signed the word "Imagiste," and that was when Imagism was publicly launched. Two months later, Poetry published an essay which discussed three points that the London group had agreed upon. They felt that the following rules should apply when writing poetry:
Direct treatment of the "thing," whether subjective or objective.
To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome.
In the following month’s issue, Pound’s two-line poem "In a Station at the Metro" was published. In addition to the previously published works of Aldington and H.D., it exemplifies the tenets of Imagism in that it is direct, written with precise words, and has a musical tone that does not depend on a specific rhythm (5):
In a station at the metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Over the next four years, four anthologies of imagist poetry were published. They included work by people in that London group (Pound, F.S. Flint, H.D., and Aldington), but they also contained the works of Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, and Marianne Moore (6).
In the case of Bengali poetry, Rabindranath Tagore himself has represented a mingling of the concepts of romanticism and modernism with the influence of Indian philosophy. Though he was also influenced by the thoughts and philosophies of European culture, he was far from the madding crowd of modern concepts of alienation and existentialism. Hence, as modern poets, we find the poets of the 1940s who were very close to the concepts of modern ideas. Buddhadeb Basu, Amiya Chakraborty, Sudhindranath Dutta, Bishnu De and Jibananda Das bore the torch of modernism in Bengali poetry. The main concept of their poetry was the exploration of individual existence in the macrocosm of eternity. But this search of self within the eternal quest is shaped within the atmosphere of alienation, from which the roots of existentialism take shape. When we find out in Jibananda Das’s poetry the rhetoric of nature, we also find a dry wasteland in the city life depicted in his ‘Satti Tarar Timir’. This book of poems, published in the 1930s, has become a landmark of Bengali modern poetry. In his poem Banalata Sen, Or ‘Bodh,' he has rightfully shown us the loneliness of existence, which gives us the assurance of uncertainty. The philosophy of modern urban uncertainty has been depicted by Jibanananda Das in a perfectly well-crafted manner (citation). Whereas in Europe, we find Eliot searching for the concept of modernism in the wasteland or showing us the blindness and shapeless existence of human beings in the ‘Hollow Men' in the late 20s, Bengali poetry, with the incomparable poems of Jibanananda Das, Buddhadeb Basu and Amiya Chakraborty, has touched the international crisis of philosophy in a more subtle way (7).
The inner thoughts of creation are-enmity.
The inner thoughts of creation: the dragging of a shadow of
our doubts over our sincerity and thus bringing us pain.
We see a fountain of water gush forth from nature's
Mountains and stones and then we gaze into our hearts
And see that because the first water is red with the blood of the slain,
The tiger is still today chasing after the deer;
I have killed man-my body is filled with his
Blood; I am the brother of this fallen brother
Banalata Sen had been his disembodied muse; the eighteen-line poetry reaffirms the clandestine aura of the enigma Banalata with two strokes of his poetic brush: first, her hair carrying the eternity of perpetual darkness of night; and second, her face bearing the sculptures of Sravesti: "Her hair the ancient darkness of Vidisha; her face a sculpture from Sravasthi." Thus, her beauty surpassing plebeian reality stands before man not only as the epitome of beauty but, to a certain extent, the call of distant wilderness, of sense, and a presence abstractly provided; the poet clarifies, 'A sailor in distant oceans, rudderless, lost/When hooves into view/Island of grass through fronds of cinnamon, /A green relief (8).'
Banalata Sen therefore seems to be art transfigured into a quintessential beloved rather than a woman of any exclusive identity. This assumption is strengthened by the use of the word 'wisdom' in the translated text. Like the Grecian Urn, where Keats shared an interpersonal communicative relation with the later and the Urn symbolising the moments trapped in frozen time, Banalata Sen serves the similar quest, the similar purpose of trying to capture the unattainable ideal, where 'Beauty is Truth, truth is beauty, that is all ye know and all ye need to know.' Jibanananda Das earned the acclamation of being one of the best poets of post-Tagore era by the last year of his life (9).
After Jibananda, with the advent of post existentialist thoughts, the poets of the 1950s proved their poetry to be more precise and modern with the inner course of thoughts that helped them create a modern outlook in their poetry. Shankha Ghosh was a poet of suggestions and subtleties, seldom strident or flamboyant like the "Hungry Poets," who were his contemporaries. His poems are essentially lyrical, poems of moods and feelings, though always filtered and moderated by his sharp intellect, which distinguished him from the romantic crowd.
He was not a narrative poet either, though at times his poems tend to have narrative contexts, questions, conversations, and colloquial expressions. It is difficult to compare him with any of his contemporaries, or those who lived and wrote before or after him. He modernised Tagore’s legacy by distilling his style; he could be imagistic like Jibanananda Das but was rarely nostalgic like him; he could surprise like Shakti Chattopadhyay but was more moderate. It is likely that he learned from the French symbolists, but the impact is oblique. He never stood out from the crowd like poets with an imagined aura around their heads, and he wore even his formidable scholarship rather lightly. One can disagree with Subhash’s take on the development trajectory of Bengali poetry, but he nevertheless makes an important point: that both Jibanananda and Shakti stand apart from most poets of their respective generations, both in what they were seeking to achieve and how they were going about it. In some sense, Shakti was even more of a heretic than Jibanananda, whose early lyricism was often redolent of the limpid grace and easy mellifluousness of much of Rabindranath Tagore’s middle period. Consider the opening poem of Jibanananda’s first major anthology, ‘Dhusar Pandulipi’ (‘The Greying Manuscript’, 1936):
Maybe you don’t know it; not that you need to know--
And yet every song I sing has only you at its heart.
Contrast this with some of Shakti’s earliest offerings, for example the poem Jarasandha published in 1956, when he was a callow 22 year old, later anthologised in He Prem, He Naishabdya ( ‘Hello Love! Hello Silence!’):
When a mild breeze rises, I tend to think the sea is near. With your wasted
hands you hold me tight. That tells me, if I would go bathing with the dark-
ness of all I have, the ocean would recede, the chill would recede, and so
would death.
Maybe then you gave birth to death, thinking it was life. I live in darkness,
will stay on in the dark – or become darkness.
Why did you get me here? Take me back.
Nothing quite like this had been attempted by a Bengali poet before. Buddhadeb Basu, whose poetry magazine Kabita had carried Jarasandha, was excited by the discovery of an explosive new talent. And yet Jarasandha somehow linked up with tradition in some sense, for it emphasised a character from the Mahabharat. Soon, however, Shakti was venturing into completely uncharted territory, trying his hand, in another poem published in Kabita, at what may legitimately be described as automatic writing that defied both sequential thinking and ‘rational’ structures:
I won’t live very long I don’t want to
At harvest time I’ll take in enchanting vistas
Have settled liegemen down in my home unlighted
Will pick some for a while but not live too long.
Here was a rebel who would brook no constraints on his poetic imagination, no limits on his artistic apparatus, by way either of diction or of metrical structures and rhyme patterns. And he insisted that the hermetic world of his kind of poetry was the only one that mattered—or even existed. Literary or linguistic conventions meant nearly nothing to him, and he cheerfully and audaciously melded respectable Sanskrit-originated (‘tatsamo’) words and turns of phrase with unalloyed colloquialisms, even colourful street lingo. Miraculously, he seemed to be able to pull it off most times, too, often to the consternation of readers brought up on more staid diets. Early on, Shakti also began to stress that he wrote podyo (verse), not kabita (poetry). The mystique of high art, Shakti was telling his readers, was not what he was striving for. His verse was not an instrument of exploration but rather a tool of affirmation. Its reward, he believed, lay not in the excitement of discovery but in the pleasure of encountering the familiar, often in an atypical garb. (Which is why his collected poems have always been called Podyo-Somogro, not Kabita-Somogro.) He was also trying to trace his path back to the original meaning of the word 'poetry,' which is ‘heightened speech.' And it was the process of heightening that concerned him more than what it was seeking to do (10).
This is not to suggest, however, that Shakti Chattopadhyay was content with testing and expanding the formalistic capabilities of his art alone. Far from it, indeed. His irreverence, his predilection for iconoclasm, his infinite capacity for self-deprecation, and the intensity of his feeling for nature helped significantly widen the content horizons of Bengali poetry in the 1960s through the 1980s.
Bhaskar Chakraborty is a poet who hears and writes silence. There is a ghostly ambience in his poems that reverberates with a strange depth, where the obscure is familiar and the familiar is obscure. Like almost all other poets from Calcutta, Bhaskar is a poet of the city, but unlike them, he does not grapple with the sweat and toil, the hustle and bustle, of city life. He breathes and walks in a different time, where the city is transported into memory. Calcutta is Bhaskar’s nightmare and source of nostalgia. The absence of sentimentality in the poems adds to the emotional maturity of the poet’s engagement with the city. Bhaskar is an imagist, and his poems constantly offer surprising and even shocking juxtapositions of imagery. It creates the strange ambience of his poems, where intimacy is often marked by unfamiliarity. His poems are also a constant conversation with death. It is crucial to read Bhaskar through the state of his illness and the hallucinatory element it adds to his poetry.
Your hair is flying in the air – in your left hand you hold
Your telephone
In the light of winter, I have again come to your room
I see your cat; it isn’t as lithe as before –
Your ball of Pashmina; I see it go rolling – rolling
Beneath the tilted bed –
I sit quietly – your cat yawns quietly
The fountain of winter repeatedly calls us and recedes (Winter)
Bhaskar’s poetry depicts the urban insecurity and sense of alienation in a silent anarchy. Like
Did I desire the increasing presence of friends
By my bedside,
Ash falls from the cigarette at dawn
I need to do something
This lying and sitting down, this aimless wandering
Would it be good for me to move away
From a draught of wind
Did I want life to be ornate
From a dry window, the light of dawn is falling
On an empty pair of shoes
Did I want all that, brother
Did I want this (Illness)
Tusar Roy, an outstandingly gifted poet of the seventies of Bengal, died only at the age of 43 and would have been 68 today had he lived, or should we say had he chosen to live? If he lived, he was sure to leave his indelible footprints in the annals of modern Bengali poetry and secure a sure place in the gallery of great talents of all times, by the side of his contemporary giants of the present time like Sunil Gangopadhyay, Shakti Chattopadhyay, Sankha Ghosh, SamarendraSengupta, and their likes. The first named poet, an onetime close associate of Tusar Roy and a great name in the domain of Bengali poetry and novels, once described him as 'the crownless king among the poets' to indicate his temperament as a poet, his popularity among his readers, the uniqueness of the style of his writing, and over and above his way of looking at life, which was exclusively his own and had definitely influenced his poetry.
Tusar may be classed together with Nawab Wajid Ali Shah of Ayodh, for he was equally aristocrat in his attitude and identically sad and nostalgic in his feelings. The last of the Mughals, Bahadur Shah Jafar, might have found a peer in him as a man and a poet, influenced by personal tragedies. Monmarte of Paris of the nineteenth century might be the best suitable spot for his frequenting, alongside Van Gogh, Paul Ganguin, De Gas, Cezanne and most particularly, Henry Toulouse Lautrec of the 'Moulin Rouge' fame. In many sense he may be called a Lautrec reborn in the this part of the globe, with the marginal difference that while Henry indulged in painting, Tusar distinguished himself in poetry, though painting was not an alien field of interest for him as he had studied painting for some years in the Government Art College of Calcutta and nurtured a keen interest in that area of art through out his life. He designed the cover of his most celebrated collection of poems 'Band Master' and he also had drawn a self-portrait which was printed and published by his friends in his other collection named 'Aprakasito Tusar'. Apart from his poetry, these also testify for the versatility and talents he was born with. His poems have reference to modern painters like Salvador Dali and Tusar till his last days dreamt of directing a film and made some progress about writing the screenplay of his film. Like many of his unrealiseddreams, this also never came true. He fancied himself to be a great interior decorator and would love to boast to his friends of having provided important tips for the interior decorations of the leading hotels of Calcutta. Claims'..not verified (11).
From these perspectives, we can conclude, Bengali poetry in sixties, have found the same psychological and sociological crisis like a young poet in Poland Orin England. From sixties, the bar between West and East have been demolished.
After a million years of living together
It will be decided whether you’re mine.
Let all that be for now.
Wild plums have ripened in the Mikir hills,
Let’s go eat them.
Against the sunset
Unkempt rust-coloured hair
Is flying like gleaming orchid roots.
– Let me, let me look at your coppery face
The sun will set any moment. Gaunt as beasts,
We’re wading through a knee-deep stream –
The current keeps growing stronger…icier… (Let All That Be For Now: Manindra Gupta)
From this perspective, Manindra Gupta has played a pivotal role in the depiction of Bengal’s modern poetry in a much more original way where his poetry reflects Bengal’s nature, local colours, traditional culture and a close association with nature. Therefore, ManindraGupta is a completely different poet in compared to other poets of his contemporary time.
Tiny bird sits on the horn of a one-horned rhinoceros
And leads him into the deep forest, whistling sweet
The wood’s alight with creeping thistle blooms.
Bird and Rhinoceros think together— (Rhinoceros,Manindra Gupta)
Manindra Gupta has helped Bengali poetry to explore the world of its own.
Biblio
There were many such poets who touched the shores of many hearts with the waves of their poetry. So much so that they changed the course of Bengali literature through the modernity that they conveyed in their art. As for the concept of modernism, we find, Modernism is a period in literary history that started around the early 1900s and continued until the early 1940s. Modernist writers in general rebelled against clear-cut storytelling and formulaic verse from the 19th century. Instead, many of them told fragmented stories that reflected the fragmented state of society during and after World War I (3).
Many modernists wrote in free verse, and they included many countries and cultures in their poems. Some writers used numerous points of view or even used a "stream-of-consciousness" style. These writing styles further demonstrate the way the scattered state of society affected the work of writers at that time (4).
Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman are thought to be the mother and father of the movement because they had the most direct influence on early modernists. Sometime after their deaths, the Imagist poets began to gain importance. The University of Toledo’s Canaday Center has a rich collection of poetry and critical work from that era.
Imagist poets generally wrote shorter poems, and they chose their words carefully so that their work would be rich and direct. The movement started in London, where a group of poets met and discussed changes that were happening in poetry. Ezra Pound soon met these individuals, and he eventually introduced them to H.D. and Richard Aldington in 1911. In 1912, Pound submitted their work to Poetry magazine. After H.D.’s name, he signed the word "Imagiste," and that was when Imagism was publicly launched. Two months later, Poetry published an essay which discussed three points that the London group had agreed upon. They felt that the following rules should apply when writing poetry:
Direct treatment of the "thing," whether subjective or objective.
To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome.
In the following month’s issue, Pound’s two-line poem "In a Station at the Metro" was published. In addition to the previously published works of Aldington and H.D., it exemplifies the tenets of Imagism in that it is direct, written with precise words, and has a musical tone that does not depend on a specific rhythm (5):
In a station at the metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Over the next four years, four anthologies of imagist poetry were published. They included work by people in that London group (Pound, F.S. Flint, H.D., and Aldington), but they also contained the works of Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, and Marianne Moore (6).
In the case of Bengali poetry, Rabindranath Tagore himself has represented a mingling of the concepts of romanticism and modernism with the influence of Indian philosophy. Though he was also influenced by the thoughts and philosophies of European culture, he was far from the madding crowd of modern concepts of alienation and existentialism. Hence, as modern poets, we find the poets of the 1940s who were very close to the concepts of modern ideas. Buddhadeb Basu, Amiya Chakraborty, Sudhindranath Dutta, Bishnu De and Jibananda Das bore the torch of modernism in Bengali poetry. The main concept of their poetry was the exploration of individual existence in the macrocosm of eternity. But this search of self within the eternal quest is shaped within the atmosphere of alienation, from which the roots of existentialism take shape. When we find out in Jibananda Das’s poetry the rhetoric of nature, we also find a dry wasteland in the city life depicted in his ‘Satti Tarar Timir’. This book of poems, published in the 1930s, has become a landmark of Bengali modern poetry. In his poem Banalata Sen, Or ‘Bodh,' he has rightfully shown us the loneliness of existence, which gives us the assurance of uncertainty. The philosophy of modern urban uncertainty has been depicted by Jibanananda Das in a perfectly well-crafted manner (citation). Whereas in Europe, we find Eliot searching for the concept of modernism in the wasteland or showing us the blindness and shapeless existence of human beings in the ‘Hollow Men' in the late 20s, Bengali poetry, with the incomparable poems of Jibanananda Das, Buddhadeb Basu and Amiya Chakraborty, has touched the international crisis of philosophy in a more subtle way (7).
The inner thoughts of creation are-enmity.
The inner thoughts of creation: the dragging of a shadow of
our doubts over our sincerity and thus bringing us pain.
We see a fountain of water gush forth from nature's
Mountains and stones and then we gaze into our hearts
And see that because the first water is red with the blood of the slain,
The tiger is still today chasing after the deer;
I have killed man-my body is filled with his
Blood; I am the brother of this fallen brother
Banalata Sen had been his disembodied muse; the eighteen-line poetry reaffirms the clandestine aura of the enigma Banalata with two strokes of his poetic brush: first, her hair carrying the eternity of perpetual darkness of night; and second, her face bearing the sculptures of Sravesti: "Her hair the ancient darkness of Vidisha; her face a sculpture from Sravasthi." Thus, her beauty surpassing plebeian reality stands before man not only as the epitome of beauty but, to a certain extent, the call of distant wilderness, of sense, and a presence abstractly provided; the poet clarifies, 'A sailor in distant oceans, rudderless, lost/When hooves into view/Island of grass through fronds of cinnamon, /A green relief (8).'
Banalata Sen therefore seems to be art transfigured into a quintessential beloved rather than a woman of any exclusive identity. This assumption is strengthened by the use of the word 'wisdom' in the translated text. Like the Grecian Urn, where Keats shared an interpersonal communicative relation with the later and the Urn symbolising the moments trapped in frozen time, Banalata Sen serves the similar quest, the similar purpose of trying to capture the unattainable ideal, where 'Beauty is Truth, truth is beauty, that is all ye know and all ye need to know.' Jibanananda Das earned the acclamation of being one of the best poets of post-Tagore era by the last year of his life (9).
After Jibananda, with the advent of post existentialist thoughts, the poets of the 1950s proved their poetry to be more precise and modern with the inner course of thoughts that helped them create a modern outlook in their poetry. Shankha Ghosh was a poet of suggestions and subtleties, seldom strident or flamboyant like the "Hungry Poets," who were his contemporaries. His poems are essentially lyrical, poems of moods and feelings, though always filtered and moderated by his sharp intellect, which distinguished him from the romantic crowd.
He was not a narrative poet either, though at times his poems tend to have narrative contexts, questions, conversations, and colloquial expressions. It is difficult to compare him with any of his contemporaries, or those who lived and wrote before or after him. He modernised Tagore’s legacy by distilling his style; he could be imagistic like Jibanananda Das but was rarely nostalgic like him; he could surprise like Shakti Chattopadhyay but was more moderate. It is likely that he learned from the French symbolists, but the impact is oblique. He never stood out from the crowd like poets with an imagined aura around their heads, and he wore even his formidable scholarship rather lightly. One can disagree with Subhash’s take on the development trajectory of Bengali poetry, but he nevertheless makes an important point: that both Jibanananda and Shakti stand apart from most poets of their respective generations, both in what they were seeking to achieve and how they were going about it. In some sense, Shakti was even more of a heretic than Jibanananda, whose early lyricism was often redolent of the limpid grace and easy mellifluousness of much of Rabindranath Tagore’s middle period. Consider the opening poem of Jibanananda’s first major anthology, ‘Dhusar Pandulipi’ (‘The Greying Manuscript’, 1936):
Maybe you don’t know it; not that you need to know--
And yet every song I sing has only you at its heart.
Contrast this with some of Shakti’s earliest offerings, for example the poem Jarasandha published in 1956, when he was a callow 22 year old, later anthologised in He Prem, He Naishabdya ( ‘Hello Love! Hello Silence!’):
When a mild breeze rises, I tend to think the sea is near. With your wasted
hands you hold me tight. That tells me, if I would go bathing with the dark-
ness of all I have, the ocean would recede, the chill would recede, and so
would death.
Maybe then you gave birth to death, thinking it was life. I live in darkness,
will stay on in the dark – or become darkness.
Why did you get me here? Take me back.
Nothing quite like this had been attempted by a Bengali poet before. Buddhadeb Basu, whose poetry magazine Kabita had carried Jarasandha, was excited by the discovery of an explosive new talent. And yet Jarasandha somehow linked up with tradition in some sense, for it emphasised a character from the Mahabharat. Soon, however, Shakti was venturing into completely uncharted territory, trying his hand, in another poem published in Kabita, at what may legitimately be described as automatic writing that defied both sequential thinking and ‘rational’ structures:
I won’t live very long I don’t want to
At harvest time I’ll take in enchanting vistas
Have settled liegemen down in my home unlighted
Will pick some for a while but not live too long.
Here was a rebel who would brook no constraints on his poetic imagination, no limits on his artistic apparatus, by way either of diction or of metrical structures and rhyme patterns. And he insisted that the hermetic world of his kind of poetry was the only one that mattered—or even existed. Literary or linguistic conventions meant nearly nothing to him, and he cheerfully and audaciously melded respectable Sanskrit-originated (‘tatsamo’) words and turns of phrase with unalloyed colloquialisms, even colourful street lingo. Miraculously, he seemed to be able to pull it off most times, too, often to the consternation of readers brought up on more staid diets. Early on, Shakti also began to stress that he wrote podyo (verse), not kabita (poetry). The mystique of high art, Shakti was telling his readers, was not what he was striving for. His verse was not an instrument of exploration but rather a tool of affirmation. Its reward, he believed, lay not in the excitement of discovery but in the pleasure of encountering the familiar, often in an atypical garb. (Which is why his collected poems have always been called Podyo-Somogro, not Kabita-Somogro.) He was also trying to trace his path back to the original meaning of the word 'poetry,' which is ‘heightened speech.' And it was the process of heightening that concerned him more than what it was seeking to do (10).
This is not to suggest, however, that Shakti Chattopadhyay was content with testing and expanding the formalistic capabilities of his art alone. Far from it, indeed. His irreverence, his predilection for iconoclasm, his infinite capacity for self-deprecation, and the intensity of his feeling for nature helped significantly widen the content horizons of Bengali poetry in the 1960s through the 1980s.
Bhaskar Chakraborty is a poet who hears and writes silence. There is a ghostly ambience in his poems that reverberates with a strange depth, where the obscure is familiar and the familiar is obscure. Like almost all other poets from Calcutta, Bhaskar is a poet of the city, but unlike them, he does not grapple with the sweat and toil, the hustle and bustle, of city life. He breathes and walks in a different time, where the city is transported into memory. Calcutta is Bhaskar’s nightmare and source of nostalgia. The absence of sentimentality in the poems adds to the emotional maturity of the poet’s engagement with the city. Bhaskar is an imagist, and his poems constantly offer surprising and even shocking juxtapositions of imagery. It creates the strange ambience of his poems, where intimacy is often marked by unfamiliarity. His poems are also a constant conversation with death. It is crucial to read Bhaskar through the state of his illness and the hallucinatory element it adds to his poetry.
Your hair is flying in the air – in your left hand you hold
Your telephone
In the light of winter, I have again come to your room
I see your cat; it isn’t as lithe as before –
Your ball of Pashmina; I see it go rolling – rolling
Beneath the tilted bed –
I sit quietly – your cat yawns quietly
The fountain of winter repeatedly calls us and recedes (Winter)
Bhaskar’s poetry depicts the urban insecurity and sense of alienation in a silent anarchy. Like
Did I desire the increasing presence of friends
By my bedside,
Ash falls from the cigarette at dawn
I need to do something
This lying and sitting down, this aimless wandering
Would it be good for me to move away
From a draught of wind
Did I want life to be ornate
From a dry window, the light of dawn is falling
On an empty pair of shoes
Did I want all that, brother
Did I want this (Illness)
Tusar Roy, an outstandingly gifted poet of the seventies of Bengal, died only at the age of 43 and would have been 68 today had he lived, or should we say had he chosen to live? If he lived, he was sure to leave his indelible footprints in the annals of modern Bengali poetry and secure a sure place in the gallery of great talents of all times, by the side of his contemporary giants of the present time like Sunil Gangopadhyay, Shakti Chattopadhyay, Sankha Ghosh, SamarendraSengupta, and their likes. The first named poet, an onetime close associate of Tusar Roy and a great name in the domain of Bengali poetry and novels, once described him as 'the crownless king among the poets' to indicate his temperament as a poet, his popularity among his readers, the uniqueness of the style of his writing, and over and above his way of looking at life, which was exclusively his own and had definitely influenced his poetry.
Tusar may be classed together with Nawab Wajid Ali Shah of Ayodh, for he was equally aristocrat in his attitude and identically sad and nostalgic in his feelings. The last of the Mughals, Bahadur Shah Jafar, might have found a peer in him as a man and a poet, influenced by personal tragedies. Monmarte of Paris of the nineteenth century might be the best suitable spot for his frequenting, alongside Van Gogh, Paul Ganguin, De Gas, Cezanne and most particularly, Henry Toulouse Lautrec of the 'Moulin Rouge' fame. In many sense he may be called a Lautrec reborn in the this part of the globe, with the marginal difference that while Henry indulged in painting, Tusar distinguished himself in poetry, though painting was not an alien field of interest for him as he had studied painting for some years in the Government Art College of Calcutta and nurtured a keen interest in that area of art through out his life. He designed the cover of his most celebrated collection of poems 'Band Master' and he also had drawn a self-portrait which was printed and published by his friends in his other collection named 'Aprakasito Tusar'. Apart from his poetry, these also testify for the versatility and talents he was born with. His poems have reference to modern painters like Salvador Dali and Tusar till his last days dreamt of directing a film and made some progress about writing the screenplay of his film. Like many of his unrealiseddreams, this also never came true. He fancied himself to be a great interior decorator and would love to boast to his friends of having provided important tips for the interior decorations of the leading hotels of Calcutta. Claims'..not verified (11).
From these perspectives, we can conclude, Bengali poetry in sixties, have found the same psychological and sociological crisis like a young poet in Poland Orin England. From sixties, the bar between West and East have been demolished.
After a million years of living together
It will be decided whether you’re mine.
Let all that be for now.
Wild plums have ripened in the Mikir hills,
Let’s go eat them.
Against the sunset
Unkempt rust-coloured hair
Is flying like gleaming orchid roots.
– Let me, let me look at your coppery face
The sun will set any moment. Gaunt as beasts,
We’re wading through a knee-deep stream –
The current keeps growing stronger…icier… (Let All That Be For Now: Manindra Gupta)
From this perspective, Manindra Gupta has played a pivotal role in the depiction of Bengal’s modern poetry in a much more original way where his poetry reflects Bengal’s nature, local colours, traditional culture and a close association with nature. Therefore, ManindraGupta is a completely different poet in compared to other poets of his contemporary time.
Tiny bird sits on the horn of a one-horned rhinoceros
And leads him into the deep forest, whistling sweet
The wood’s alight with creeping thistle blooms.
Bird and Rhinoceros think together— (Rhinoceros,Manindra Gupta)
Manindra Gupta has helped Bengali poetry to explore the world of its own.
Biblio
- Williuamson, John, Modern Poetry, Penguine, Ed-1980, Page 28, London
- Dasgupta, S.C, The poetry of New age literature, Ed-5th, 1978, Page 4
- Abrahams, Modernism, Ed 91st, 2001, Page 78
- Das Sisirkumar, Modern Literature and Joyce, Ed 2, 1989, Page 24
- Pound Ezra, Collected poems, Oxford University Press, 2012, Page 65
- Harold J,M, Existentialism and Modernism, Penguine, 2018, Page 37
- 1946-47, Jibananda Das, Selected poetry, Trans- Clinton B Silly, 1992, Ed-2
- Do
- JIbanananda Samagra, Ed- Debesh Roy, Pratikkhan, First issue, 1980, page 24
- Guha Chinmay, Baudelaire and Modern Bengali Poetry, Ed 1, Penguine, Page 33, 2000
- Anthology Letters, Tushar Roy, Trans- Arjun Sengupta, Ed-2, 2001, Bhashabandhan
- Eliot T S, Sacred Wood and Other Essays, Penguine, 2010, Page 20
- Ray Anabelle, Modernism, 2005, Page 34
- Manindra, Collection of poetry, Adam Pub, 2018
- Chakraborty Bhaskar, Collection of poetry, Bhashabandhan, 2006
- Roy Tushar, Bandmaster, Sundor, 1996,
- . Das Jibanananda, Selected poetry, Trans_ Clinton B, Silly, 1992, Ed-2
- Yorked Notes on Literature- Volume 1-18, 2006
- Joyce James, Ulyssess, Penguine, 2006
- Foucault Michel, The codes of modern poetry, La Monde, Page 78 , 2008
Baby Shaw having MA degrees in Bengali & English literature from Kolhan University, Jharkhand, is now doing her PhD on Modern Poetry. A poet, an essayist and a translator, she has 11 poetry books from various established publishers like Ananda Publishers, Bhashalipi, Pratibhash, Sristisukh etc. Besides, she has two books of essays and one book of free prose. She has also translated poems of various poets like Bek Seok and Thik-nhat-Hanh. She is also a member of the editorial team of Abahaman. She has received Bangla Academy award for 'Kandnageet: Sangraha O Itibritto': a complete history plaintive song of women in South East of West Bengal in 2020.
