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Jibanananda Das- An
Introduction--
Sisir Kumar Das
Among the Bengali poets other than Rabindranath Tagore known
outside the Bengali-speaking area, the most notable are Kazi
Nazrul Islam and Jibanananda Das. Except that they were born
within a year of each other, there is, however, hardly anything
in common between them. In fact they represent two altogether
different faces of Bengali poetry.
Nazrul Islam, an embodiment of Hindu-Muslim cultural synthesis,
lived a life full of exciting events. He had a brief stint in
the army, experience of which enriched his poetic vision. He
responded vigorously to the Indian national movement; he was a
political activist who welcomed the October Revolution, and he
went to jail for his inflammatory poems and journalistic
writings. A romantic youth full of revolutionary zeal,
extravagant in life and literature, warm and passionate, loud
and prolific, Nazrul Islam, who was given the sobriquet Bidrohi
(Rebel) by us admirers, had a brief literary career, though he
lived much longer than Jibanananda. He achieved great popularity
with the publication of his very first work Agni-bina (The Lyre
of Fire) in 1922. His fame continued to increase with each
subsequent publication, and by the end of the 1930s he had
become the idol of the Bengali youths much for his poetry as for
his musical talent. He is probably the author of the largest
number of songs in Bengali. His career, however, was tragically
cut short in 1942 by an irremediable disease affecting his
brain. He lost his voice and remained paralysed for thirty-four
years till his death in 1976 in Bangladesh, which honoured him
as its national poet. Like a meteor indeed, he lived and died,
and has now been transformed into a legend.
Jibanananda, on the other hand, was a quiet, withdrawn and
intensely introverted person. He maintained a distance from the
crowd, from literary gatherings and learned societies, as well
as from the political movements and ideological debates that
kept his contemporaries occupied. Shy and soft-spoken,
Jibanananda experienced hardly any exciting event in his life
worthy of drawing public attention, except for his agonizing
death at the age of fifty-five in a tram-car accident. This
makes for a glaring contrast with the vivacious Nazrul Islam.
Yet the justification for introducing Jibanananda with a
reference to Nazrul Islam lies not only in that they represent
two different streams of twentieth-century Bengali poetry—the
private and the public—but more because one is the last
celebrated figure of a romantic phase of poetry with its spirit
of revolt and passion, while the other inducted the tortured
sensibilities of modernity into Bengali poetry.
The modernity that created the real rift in the history of
Bengali literary consciousness—whatever be its immediate causes
political, social or aesthetic—appeared in the work of a small
group of avant-garde writers, thoroughly westernized in their
training and thought. They differed from one another in their
response to the earlier traditions of Bengali poetry,
particularly the Tagorean, and in their regard for Western
modernism. They also differed in the strategies for
appropriating Western modern poetry. Yet they were successful to
a considerable degree in presenting an orchestrated voice of
challenge to the established norms of literary culture.
Jibanananda was the most conspicuous among these writers; and
today, more than four decades after his death, he appears to be
the most outstanding.
 II
Jibanananda* was born on 18 February 1899 in Barisal, now in
Bangladesh. The landscape of this riverine district, known for
its serene natural beauty untampered by urbanization—the
district does not have any railways even today—had a deep and
pervasive influence on his life and literature. Not only did it
shape his sensibility towards nature, but it remained with his
poetic subconscious throughout his life as the most significant
space out of which emerged his metaphors and images. Later in
life, he wrote lovingly of the open fields in the town of
Barisal ‘its evenings lit by glow-worms, its mysterious nights
broken by the shrieks of owls, its roadsides—all this could keep
human souls absorbed for a long time.’*
Jibanananda was born in a Brahmo family.
The Brahmos were known for their progressive views in social
matters, particularly for their laudable role in the
emancipation of women. His father Satyananda, a dedicated
school-teacher and an active member of several social and
religious organizations, was also a writer on religious and
moral themes. His mother Kusum Kumari was a poet ef merit she
published a considerable number of poems in different journals
and also a volume of verse. The simplicity and spontaneity of
her writings did not go unnoticed by her contemporaries.
Jibanananda must have had a thorough •religious and moral .
training, but he never showed any particular inclination towards
religion. He had a happy and normal childhood, and’ like most of
his contemporary poets, he grew into a young. man without any
interest in religious dogma.
The Das family was dominated by a strong literary culture a
typical feature of the contemporary English-educated Bengali
homes, where English literature was read with passion without
neglecting either Bengali or Sanskrit, particularly the two
Sanskrit epics in their Bengali transcriptions. Jibanananda is
not known for any special interest in Sanskrit, though his early
education consisted of. reading and listening to the Ramayana
and the Mahabharata, works that he valued all his life. It was
English literature—to which he was introduced by his father and
then the teachers at school quite early in life—which remained a
permanent source of delight and inspiration for him. He studied
English literature at Presidency College, Calcutta, and then
took his Master’s degree in the subject from Calcutta University
in 1921. That very year he got a teaching assignment in the
Department of English at City College, an institution founded by
the Brahmos in Calcutta. The impact of English literature was
quite deep and pervasive in his life. Almost all the ‘modern’
Bengali poets were formal students, and some were teachers, of
English.
Jibanananda did not continue at City College for long. The
College has been unjustly maligned by some admirers of
Jibanananda for dismissing him on the charge of obscenity in one
of his poems. Teaching, however, remained his, life-long
profession. He taught at a college in Khulna for a few months,
then at a college in Delhi. It was from Delhi that he came to
Dacca in 1930 to get married the bride Labanya was then a
student in one of the colleges in that enlightened town. He did
not return to Delhi. Little is known about the period between
his leaving Delhi and his appointment at Brajamohan College,
Barisal in 1935. In the interim, he applied for jobs at various
places without much success, finding only intermittent
employment. FOr some time after marriage, life was not easy for
him.
Brajamohan College ,had acquired great prestige in Bengal at
that time for its high moral and intellectual standards. This
college and the natural setting of Barisal gave Jibanananda
stability, security and probably happiness., He continued at
this college for a little over a decade. In 1946 he came to
Calcutta to spend his holidays, a month before the infamous
Calcutta riots. Jibanananda had to postpone his journey hOme.
Then came Independence: the country was partitioned, and
Jibanananda did not go back to Barisal again; .
After months of unemployment, he found a job in a daily
newspaper but was unable to continue with it. The next few years
of his life were marked by dire financial distress and acute
unhappiness. Occasional payment for poems published in journals
were his only earnings for a long time. His wife’s income as a
school teacher was very meagre. We are told by his biographers
that during this period Jibanananda received one hundred rupees
as royalty, the first ever in his literary career, for one of
his books. Finally he found a teaching job in a college in
Howrah. But his last days were haunted by financial anxiety and
the trauma and humiliation caused by the partition of the
country.
• His death on the night of 22 October 1954, eight days after he
was hit by ~ tram-car, brought down the curtain on the life of a
man already crushed under the weight of poverty and anguish.
His reputation as a poet was still confined to a very small group of enlightened readers, who admired him as the most
remarkable literary figure of contemporary Bengal. He left
behind a large number of unpublished manuscripts; some of them
were, expectedly, of verse, but more of novels. The discovery of
these novels, distinguished by their narratorial skill and
thematic complexity, opened up a new area of exploration within
the legend that iibanananda had slowly become. The Sahitya
Akademi’s bestowal on Jibanananda of the first of its annual
awards in Bengali was announced soon after his death.
III
The conclusive emergence of iibanananda as the greatest Bei poet
after Tagore and the most powerful influence on the generation
of poets and poetic movements, took place afte death. Although
now a canonized figure in the Bengali lit~ pantheon, he did not
attain smoothly to this. eminence. Recogn came very slowly
indeed. Most critics and fellow-poets, the notable exception of
his generous-minded friend Buddha Bose—himself a versatile
writer —maintained a studied sil about him. The tradition-minded
reader, engrossed in Tago splendour, found him different, exotic
and imitative of We~ poets. His unconventional metaphors and
uneven diction rawness of his language and his sensuous imagery,
became the target of untiring lampoons by several critics
including a notorious weekly magazine, Sanibarer chithi, which
consistently misspelt his. name with gleeful malice. The Marxist
critics did not lag behind, censuring him for his lack of social
awareness and his dark pessimism. Buddhac~1eva Bose described
him as ‘the loneliest’ poet.
The wheel of fortune has now turned full circle. There is hardly
any voice today complaining of obscurity or obscenity, two
frequent charges leveled against him by his contemporaries. The
.new poetics today has privileged the opaqueness of his
language, and has found in his rhythm and diction the fitting
medium for the agony arid anxiety of the fractured sensibility
of the modern world. Marxists too have tempered their criticism;
some are apologetic for their past folly.
Jibanananda started publishing poems from 1920. His early poems,
some of which. are now available, hardly show any special flash
of genius they disappeared unnoticed into the milling crowd of
Bengali verse. His fir&t collection of poems, Jhara palak
(Fallen Feathers) appeared in 1927. Most of these verses show
unmistakable traces of the influence of contemporary poets
notably of Näzrul Islam and Satyendranath Datta, a poet known as
the wizard of metre, as well as a few whom the avant-garde
treated with indifference if not . contempt. This book hardly
created any impact on the Bengali reading public; yet~ it
contained a few poems which certainly heralded a change in his
poetic language and the emergence of a new poetic voice, which
acquired intensity and power in his next collection Dhusar
pandulipi (The Grey Manuscript) published nine years later. It
is a significant work in the history of Bengali poetry, ushering
in a silent revolution. Not only did Jibanananda emerge here as
a mature poet with a .distinct idiom of his own, .but also as
someone utterly exotic to the main tradition of Bengali poetry.
His admiring readers hailed his world as an isolated island,
strange and unknown, compelling and magical. The first phase of
his poetic career, as evidenced in Jhara palak, is marked by a
sustained and strenuous search for a new diction and rhythm. On
the one hand he had to work clear of the formidable Tagore, with
whom most of the avant-garde poets had an ambivalent
relationship; on the other, he had to carve out a world of his
own, different from those of his contemporaries, some of whom
were highly gifted.
His success was reflected in the
manipulation of diction and prosody. particularly the controlled
use of assonance and alliteration and the employment of a slow
and gentle rhythm. Unfortunately, this aspect of his poetry
cannot be fully appreciated in translation. When viewed against
other contemporary experiments with metre and rhythm, one
realizes the contrast in Jibanananda’s practice. His vocabulary
is uneven, jarring, conspicuously defiant of the established
rules of rhetoric, at times repellent to the canons of taste.
Their provocative tower comes partly from their role in the
evolution and construction of Bengali poetic language, and
partly from the tensions they create within levels of style
determined by the aesthetics of different social classes. His
syntax too is often sloppy and tortuous, slow-moving and at
times rather unkempt and fragile. His rhythm advances in
delicate languid ripples, hardly ever surging into vigorous
waves. These are all parts of a conscious design, but also
appear congenial and inevitable. This syntax and rhythm, that
contribute to the distinctiveness of Jibanananda’s poetic
structure, are in perfect harmony with his poetic world, which
first appears distinctively in Dhusar pandulipi.
The poetic world of Jibanananda is
colourful and sensuous, dark and melancholy, and totally
different from the geography celebrated in Bengali poetry both
by his predecessors and his contemporaries. Spring and the
rains, the two favourite seasons of Bengali poets (especially
Tagore), are conspicuously absent in Jibanananda. He chooses
hemanta, the short-lived interval between sarat,
known for its bright blue sky, green fields, young paddy and
swollen rivers, and sit (winter), a season of tender sunshine
and ripe crops. Hemanta is a season of mist and fog, of
melancholy light and fields with ripe crops almost ready to be
garnered. Jibananaflda represents it so. He abandons the gaiety
and vivacity of the rains and the colourful abundance of
sarat and vasanta (spring), so familiar to Bengali
readers. He creates an altogether different world with exotic
geographical features. Like his syntax’ and rhythm, his imagery
attempts a state of defamiliarization. He uses his ingenuity to
construct an unfamiliar geography out of a familiar world. It is
dominated by mists and mellow fruitfulness; its rivers are
languid, its trees mysterious, its leaves grey and yellow. He
also privileges the kite, the owl and the vulture, not the koel.
His favourite trees are the hijal, akanda and dhundhul,
which had never found an honourable place in poetry. The animals
inhabiting his world are rats, jackals and frogs, all evoking a
sense of the dark and the sinister. And yet this world is not
totally fearsome or eerie: it has its charm, tenderness
and sensuous beauty. I quote a few stanzas from the poem Mrityur
age (Before Dying), published in 1935:
We who have seen the wild duck, escaping the hunter’s shot
Take wing into the horizon’s mild blue moonlit glow,
We Who have rested our hands in love on the paddy-sheaf~
And come home like evening crows, expectantly; have found
Children’s breath-scent, grass, sun, kingfishers stars, sky—
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Traces of these, again and again, the
whole year round;
We have seen the green leaf yellowing in the autumn dark;
Light and bulbuls play in windows of hijal-branches,
The mouse on winter nights coat its silk fur with bits of
grains;
Morning and evening, to the eyes of lonely fish, the ripples
Fall fair in smoky rice-smell; at pond’s edge the duck at dusk
Smells sleep and is borne away by a soft female hand.
Clouds like minarets call golden kites to their windows;
Under the cane creepers, the sparrows eggs are hard;
The river coats the bank with the soft water’s smell;
In dense night the roof-thatch shadow falls on the moonlit yard,
Smell of crickets in the air—green air of summer fields, In deep
desire thick juice descends to the blue annona’s core.*
The magic of this world of .Jibanananda has been heightened by
his unusual fascination with the sense of smell and the
transition of the senses one into another. The ‘old owl-smell’,
‘children’s breath-scent’, ‘smoky rice-smell’, or the sleep
scented by ducks abound in his poems. But more remarkable is the
continuous traffic between the senses : smell into touch, touch
into taste, sight into sound. One of the poems most finely
characterized by this exercise in the dismantling of categories
is Ghas (Grass). Written in simple prose-like language with
sparing use of words, this poem makes complete the coalescence
of the animate and inanimate worlds, and celebrates a primitive
darkness where all pluralities are dissolved. It begins with the
description of the morning light, that looks soft and green like
tender lemon-leaves, and of the deer tearing the grass, fragrant
and green like unripe grapefruit. The fixed world of categories
with their structured functions then slowly crumbles down, and a
wish ‘to drink in the scent of this grass’, ‘to strain its]
body’ and ‘rub its eye’ against the eyes of the beholder
pervades the poem. The green grass changes into a bird, as does
the beholder:
‘My feathers on grassy wing’. The poet’s response to the beauty
of the morning, and of the green and fragrant grass, culminates
in a desire to be horp as grass, to descend to the ‘delicious
darkness! Of the body of some intimate Grass-Mother’, and thus
finally to return to an elemental oneness with Nature.
Iv
Jibanananda reached the height of his power and virtuosity in
Bunalata Sen, published in 1942. The title poem, built up
through
a series of opulent images of sea and island, lashing storm and
quiet resting-place, fragrant forests and shipwrecked sailors,
captures the old fairy-land magic, that merges the geography of
mythical and historical times only to culminate in the
frustration and hope of the modern age. Asok and Vimbisara,
Sravasti and Vidisa, the Malay Sea and the Sinhala sea cease to
be the luxuriant backdrop of a romantic escape. Apart from
heightening the contrast between the past and the present, and
intensifying the pain and agony of modern man, the poem connects
the narratorial voice with the ever-moving forces of history.
The poetic ‘I’ no longer remains an indefinite universal, an
outsider to man’s anguished journey; it declares its location in
time and space. The private voice of the narrator becomes part
of a historical experience of the continuous journey of man and
the predicaments of the here and now. Natore, a modern
place-name, jars on the ear after Sravasti and Vidisa, embalmed
in the serene beauty of the Buddhist world, as does Banalata Sen,
a commoner without any mythical or historical halo, welcoming
the ‘hero’ with a commonplace greeting. The contrast is further
intensified by juxtaposing the embellished metaphors of
classical association (‘Her hair the dark night long ago in
Vidisa/Her face a Sravasti carving’) and the completely baffling
image of eyes like bird’s nests, rich and suggestive yet
violating the norms of comparison. The tension caused by such
contrasts continues in following up a flowing crescendo-like
sentence with a short staccato question; and, one may add, with
the unprecedented use of a common verb chhilen (‘were’) to rhyme
with the surname Sen as well as the highly poetic Sanskrit word
saphen (foaming). The last few lines, now completely denuded of
the glorious chiaroscuro of the past, capture the modern anxiety
in simple and direct language, playing with conventional
grammaticality till it borders on a strangeness filled with
frustration and hope:
At the end of all the days, dusk comes like the sound of dew;
The kite wipes off the scent of sunlight from its wings.
The earth’s colours all quenched, the manuscript prepares
To tell its stories, lit by firefly gleams.
All the birds came home, all the rivers—all life’s trade ends.
Only the dark abides; and, to sit face to face, Banalata Sen.
‘Banalata Sen’ may or may not be the best poem Jibanananda has
written, but it is undoubtedly the most popular one. The
haunting rhythm, the rich imagery, the magic of proper names and
the ethereal beauty of the concluding sestet have contributed to
its immense popularity. The book Banalata Sen. too, has been
identified a~ containing Jibanananda’s most representative
writings. The majority of the poems are about love, love that is
fractured and wounded, and also about nature, sensuous and
earthy. Despite the fever and the fret of modern existence and
the hostilities of civilization, love survives all brute forces
and exudes hope and contentment, just as nature remains glorious
and compelling. Jibanananda is able to create a fairyland
atmosphere with his frequent references to the evening, to the
moon and glowworms, the fragrance of water and the sound of
crickets. A sense of history, a vision of the rise and fall of
civilizations pervades the whole work: the bones of peasant and
king mingle in the dust, and still there is hope for the future
of men : ‘the world will evolve in freedom’. But there are
strong strains of escape, surrender and death-wish. The poem
Andhakar (Darkness), charged with a powerful rhetoric and
loudness of tone rather rare in Jibanananda, brings out more
than any other poem in the collection a cynical morbidity and
Schopenhaurean wish of extinction
I have been afraid
I have felt an endless irrepressible pain;
I have seen the sun wake in a blood-red sky
And command me to dress as a soldier of humanity,
confront the world;
All my heart has filled with hate, pain, anger;
Assailed by the sunlight, the world seems to start a festival
With the shrieks of millions of pigs...
Alas for festivities!
Drowning the sun in the unpierced darkness of the heart,
I have wished to sleep again,
I have wished to lie merged like eternal death
in the bosom and the womb* of darkness.
This rejection of the world, ‘its rhythm, conflict, motion,
effort, thought and action’, and the desire to sleep beside the
Dhansiri river, evoked strong protest from one section of
readers, particularly the Marxists, who condemned Jibananand’~
as an escapist. His poetry with its narcotic effect, they
declared, lulls the reader into inaction. I repeat, however,
that this pessimism generated through metaphors of sleep,
darkness and death is not a dominant mood in Banalata Sen. The
book abounds with evidence of the poet’s intense love for human
existence and an unshaken faith in the ultimate triumph of the
human spirit. ‘The deeper gain of coming’ finally compensates
for all suffering and the pain of birth and living
Now is the earth gravely, most gravely sick;
Yet to this earth man is indebted still. (‘Suchetana’)
V
The two books of verse that followed Banalata Sen, Mahaprithibi
(The Great Earth, 1944) and Satti tarar timir (The Darkness of
Seven Stars, 1948), presentanew landscape, almost radically
different from the world of Bunalata Sen. The new poetic setting
emerged out of the agonizing experience of war and famine and
riots and the partition of the country. The exotic and the
mysterious, which had dominated the earlier phase of
Jibanananda’s career, yielded place to the rough and crude, the
cruel and sick, the tortured and tormented. The urban world with
all its loud harshness, its cold and callous inhumanity, now
became the most conspicuous component of his poetry. No longer
does the journey stretch from Ceylon waters to the
Malay Sea, or from the grey world of Asok to the dark.nights of
Vidisa. It is now a movement from ‘pavement to pavement;
pavement to pavement, through Calcutta’
It’s drizzling now—the wind seems rather cold
In the face of the chilly wind, in the dead of night
In this city of Calcutta
You will never see a blue-veined nest shiver:
No dove, waking from sleep among the olive leaves
(‘On the Pavement’)
The lament for the lost world slowly changes into an agonizing
outcry condemning modern civilization
A black man, grinning, bus against a pillar;
Cleaning out the briar pipe in his hand With the faith of an
old gorilla.
For him the vast• night of the city -is like the Libyan forest.
Even so, the beasts, all senate—wage slaves, Out of shame, in
fact, are dressed.
(‘Night’)
The private sorrows and agonies have become part of a larger
suffering. The rough and violent cacophony of the urban world
now finds its rightful place in Jibanananda’s poetry, and irony
and sarcasm surface as two powerful modes. of articulation to
negotiate with ‘a strange darkness (that) has come to the earth
today’ (‘A Strange Darkness’). But it is not only the
articulation of anger and frustration that makes this poetry
different from Jibanananda’s earlier work. It is also the
consummation. of his power to address different existential
questions. The poem. At bachhar ager ekdin (One Day Eight Years
Ago), written in this period and included in Mahaprithibi, shows
his intense engagement with questions of suffering and death and
of what he calls bipanna bismay (‘terrified awe’, a wonder
fraught with a sense of danger), a perception that ‘plays
in our blood I And tires us out’. It is a poem of severe beauty,
constructed through a series of complex and even uncanny images,
as well as a tense narrative, of contrasts between the instinct
of self-preservation and the choice of self-extinctions
Jibanananda employed the practices of the Symbolists as well as
the Surrealists within his own poetic world. He appropriated as
much from the Symbolists as from his Indian predecessors it is
not difficult to detect traces of several European poets in his
poetry, or to link him with various tropes of the modernisms of
his time. He wrote in the preface to his. Sreshtha kabita (Best
Poems, 1954) that ‘my poetry, or rather its author, has been
described as lonely or loneliest. Some say it is nature poetry
or poetry of historical and social consciousness; according to
others it is the poetry .of indifference. Some think it belongs
to the symbolic tradition of total unconsciousness. All are
correct, but only partly, correct for a particular poem or a
particular phase but not of my total work.’
Jibanananda rejected the mode of public poetry and political
poet ama and anxiety of the political situation cont,,~,.. ~.
growth of his poetic personality. He wrote with a strong sense
of individuality but did not fail to locate the individual in
the larger space of history. His engagements with existential
problems are not confined to any narrow subjectivity but involve
a cosmic view of life, which is partially shared by his
contemporary novelist Bibhuti Bhusan Bándyopadhyay, author of
Pather Panchali.
‘After the death of men, man still abides.’
(‘After the Death of Men’)
VI
The posthumous publications of Jibanananda ~re quite numerous,
in fact much greater in volume and variety than those published
in his lifçtime. They contain, as I have already mentioned, not
only several volumes of poems but also half a dozen novels and
short stories, most of which are quite remarkable in their
themes and structural sophistication. Among them are Malyaban,
published in 1973, nearly two decades after his death an
introspective narrative about a painful marital relationship,
told with subtle and grim irony.. Among the poetical works are
Rupasi Ban gla (Beautiful Bengal, 1957) and Bela abela kalbela
(Time, Wrong Time, Inauspicious Time, 1961). The poet himself
prepared the press copy of the second work, which contains
several poems written in the last phase of his life. When
published, it was received with expected warmth and interest by
the reading public. A competent collection with the unmistakable
stamp of Jibanananda’s style and vision, this slender volume
presented some memorable poems; but it did not cause any
excitement or surprise.
Rupasi Bangla, on the other hand, assailed the reader with
surprise and excitement, virtually revealing a new Jibanananda.
It wbn spectacular popularity and commercial success. Among the
61 poems collected in this volume, 58 are sonnets, most of them
conforming to the Petrarchan structure. Two others (except no.
60) also aspire to the condition of the sonnet. These poems were
written in the mid-l930s, when Dhusarpandulipi was still under
preparation. (They have therefore been placed first in this
volume.) The manuscript remained uncorrected, without any hint
of the poet’s intention to make the poems public, at least in
that state. Even the title of the book was not devised by the
poet it is the gift of the editor, who happened to. be his
brother. The response to these poems, all celebrating rural
Bengal, was overwhelming. Some years later, during the struggle
for the liberation of East Pakistan, some of the poems acquired
an unexpected political meaning. In particular, the line 1 have
seen the face of Bengal’ became charged with a feverish
patriotism.
It is intriguing that Jibanananda did not feel any urgency to
publish these poems when they were composed. He wrote them with
care and love, opting for the rigidity of the sonnet form
to regulate the soft and delicate emotion of a subdued
patriotism. It indicates that Jibanananda responded to the
contemporary political movements in his own personal mode,
glorifying the country .yet avoiding the rhetoric of patriotism.
He wrote with utter innocence: ‘You can all go where you wish; I
by Bengal’s expanse/Will stay’. But his Bengal was not
apostrophized as
with
a mother, nor was it identified any mother goddess. His Bengal,
in harmony with the entire geography of his poetic world, is
earthy, concrete, pulsating and sensuous, redolent
with myths, history and poetry, and lively and vivid with its
trees and plants •and birds and beasts. Deeply rooted in the
regional ethos, these poems, all intensely Bengali in temper and
tone, are linked with the mainstream of Jibanananda’s poetry in
their rhythmic structure and patterns of imagery. Regional yet
sophisticated, sentimental but not lacking in depth, flowing
with passionate love for his native soil yet free from the
arrogance of patriotism, these poems have a unique place in the
history of modem poetry. I conclude with one of them, which
links Jibanananda with the broader traditions of Indian poetry,
celebrating the desire to live and to be remembered through
several births
I shall return to this Bengal, to the Dhansiri’s bank
Perhaps not as a man, but myna or fishing-kite;
Or dawn crow, floating on the mist’s bosom to alight
In the shade .of the jadkfruit tree, in this autumn harvest
land.
Or maybe a duck—a young girl’s—bells on my red feet,
Drifting on kalmi-scented waters all the day
For love of Bengal’s rivers, fields, crops, I’ll come this, way
To this sad green shore of Bengal, drenched by the Jalangi’s
waves.
Perhaps you’ll see a glass-fly ride the evening breeze, On her a
barn owl call from the silk-cotton tree;
A little child toss rice-grains on the courtyard grass,
Or a boy on the Rupsa’s turgid stream steer a dinghy
With torn white soil—white egrets swimming through red clouds
To their home in the dark. You will find me among their crowd.
* Jibanananda is not a common name in
Bengal. It was deliberaei~ confounded with the more popular
‘Jibananda’ by his detractor*. and often by other well-meaning
but tongue-tied Bengalis.
Introduction iii
* See Jibanananda Daserkabyasangraha, ed.
Debiprasad Bandyopadhyay
(Bharabi Calcutta, 1993), p.(l9).
* All extracts quoted in this introduction are from the
translations in this volume.
* The corresponding Bengali word, yoni, actually means ‘vagina’.
(An Anatomy of Orpheus - Rilke among the critics - By Michael
Hamburger)
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