(From left) Subhro Bandopadhyay, Samaragnee Bandyopadhyay, and Abhimanyu Mahato.

Invocation

The birth centenary of Salil Chowdhury (1925-1995) is presently being observed across the country. Salil is arguably one of the most versatile and influential trio in the history of Bengali music, the others being Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) and Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976). Like his two illustrious predecessors, Salil’s works finely balance poetry, or lyrics, and musical forms; and, in the case of Salil, an activist musician, these two sides of a musical composition are often interconnected by mediations of Socialist ideology. In a song, “Sei Meye” (That girl), composed against the backdrop of the Bengal Famine of 1943, Salil both reworks and, thereby, responds to a very well canonized Rabindra-sangeet, “Krishnakali ami tarei boli” (I call her Krishnakali). Tagore’s source poem of 1900 laments the poetic persona’s inability to enter into the life of a Bengali dark-skinned rural girl with a dazzling gaze. Salil decontextualizes Tagore’s poem by an intervening uncertainty regarding the current situation of “Krishnakali,” “Hoytoba sei Maynapadar mather kalo meye …” (maybe that dark girl of Maynapada …); before giving his protagonist a direct call to join people’s movement and find “jeebaner basa” (the home of life). The concluding lines of Salil’s poem not only promise a radical change in Bengali social structure but also emphasize the urgency of a novel poetic rhythm: “Bujhi kabi kobita tomari natun chande habe gantha” (poet, it seems that your poetry needs to be rewritten in a new rhythm).

I

The above intertextuality between Rabindranath’s romantic idealism and Salil’s revolutionary romanticism registers the remaking of Bengali poetry during the heady days of the nineteen-forties, as both a continuation of its early-twentieth-century tradition and a remolding of the cultural grid. The late-modernist Bengali poets, foregrounding either a counter-state or an extremely individualistic ideology at least since the nineteen-fifties and sixties, can be seen to be influencing Bengali poetry well into the late-twentieth century. However, a gradually engulfing ideological crisis of the nineteen-nineties and after seems to be reflected by a tendency in Bengali poetry to frustrate the reader’s habitual expectations of meaning and closure. Such challenges against conventional poetic associations are found to be leading to a new group of self-reflective poetry which draws the reader’s attention to its self-construction as well as the process of construction of the outer reality.

In a representative poem of Angshuman Kar, a major poet and critic of the turn of the twenty-first century, this self-reflective strategy becomes implicative by showing the incompletion in both aesthetic and social constructions. Though written most intimately, the poem, entitled “Abandoned” in its English translation, reflects on a larger reality of a “runaway world”—a phrase of the economist Anthony Giddens for corporate capitalism. Such a capitalist world order likes to give an impression of both being destiny and not yet fully experienced. The poem counters the over-determination of such a socio-economic order by reinventing a commonplace and peripheral space as a profound means of sustaining perpetual human expectations through contingent but more essential experiences of unfulfillment:

Some houses stop growing at the lintel. … At the end of a village, in the corner of a field, such a house, dusty, stands alone. ... The house which is complete, has windows and doors, cannot have any feast. No one crushes any Mallika in it, no one writes slang on its walls. For all this you need a house … that wants feasts, wants slang to be written on its walls like inscriptions of the Stone Age, wants Mallika to come gingerly and wait for Suman.

An unqualified optimism, deriving its force from the possibility of polyphonic utterance of a community of people in “Abandoned,” centrally contributes to the emergence of a poetic style at the turn of the twenty-first century. Similarly, the opening lines of the poem “Youban” (Youth) by Chaitali Chattopadhyay (b. 1960) insist: “Ekhono kobita ache! / Tumi, ekhoni jeo na” (Still there is poetry! / you do not go away so early) (119).

Such desperate affirmation of the sustainability of poetry is often realized at a personal level as the only repose against the global sweep of late-capitalism or what is commonly known as ‘globalization’ in the post-Soviet era, involving shrinking of physical and mental geographies of the earth to a single global market that utilizes virtual modes of transactions. With all respect to the immense versatility and variety of a long range of poets who grew up in the late eighties and nineties, exhibiting conflicting ideological views and innovative experiments with poetic forms, it may be argued that their poetry commonly refuses to adopt the cultural drive of late-capitalism mainly by either an anxious trust in human kindness and fellow-feeling or social criticism that employs irony and wit. For an instance, Amitabha Mukhopadhyay’s “Biswas Omnibus” (The collection of convictions), included in Shunyosthane Takao (Look at the empty space), 2019, succinctly states, “Biswas korte ichche kore, chokher jol thekei megher srishti / Ar manusher dharon khomota ekhono pray matir moto…” (Wish to belief that clouds form from teardrops / and the holding power of men and women are still like that of the earth) (10).

II

Angshuman Kar in his introduction to twenty-first-century Indian poetry in English in a special volume of Indian Literature (March/April 2017) considers Yashodhara Ray Chaudhuri’s “The Shop Poem” as a representative Bengali poetry of the nineteen nineties. The poem has “a slanting look at a fast-changing society which was almost surrendering itself to the global market” (Kar, “One” 28): “In this hapless, blind shop-trap / Everything that you see, you feel like buying, asap” (qtd. in Kar, “One” 28). A different vein of social protest can be located in Mallika Sengupta’s overtly feminist poems which also expose a consumerist world, as exemplified by “Mayabi-ayna,” translated as “Magic Mirror”:

On her thirty-seventh birthday
The mirror spoke:
  Not you, not you any more:
  The beauty of the young translucent girl
  Like the soft glow of light
  Has dethroned you: (130).

It is legitimately impossible to cluster disparate literary voices from overlapping generations together, as wittily noticed long ago by T.S. Eliot in his short introduction to David Jones’ war epic, “In Parenthesis,” 1937: “David Jones is a representative of the same literary generation as Joyce and Pound and myself if four men born between 1882 and 1895 can be regarded as of the same literary generation” (x). However, in the course of literary history, a visible gap between one sort of literary practice and another becomes unavoidable, despite their constant interactions. For example, to a poet groomed up in the twenty-first century the pre-Partition Bengal, once a powerful trope of literary realism, may appear as some distant world of illusive stories, as in Aritra Sanyal’s “Andhokal” (The dark era), 2020: “Desh bibhager age prithibir akashe eto tara chilo na / Samanyo smriti ghantlei amar dadu shukrer jonmo dekhte peten ujjyal” (There were not so many stars in the sky before the Partition / My grandfather could brightly see the birth of Venus by reminiscing just a little) (23). In the aforementioned introduction, Angshuman Kar observes, “[w]hen we come to the poets who started writing in the twenty-first century, the poets who are usually known as either shunya dashaker kabi or eker dashaker kabi, the broad division” between them and their senior poets becomes “operative” (“One” 32). These young poets have had “direct exposure to a new kind of readers, the reader of the web,” as the “term ‘netizenpoets’ came into use,” and “in the 2000s and later, thanks to the Internet, the poet does not need to be a citizen of Kolkata,” and “all these things [have] brought more diversity in Bengali poetry,” as Subhro Bandopadhyay – an accomplished poet and translator – further explains (38). Therefore, the extensive use of the virtual platform has democratized the arena of Bengali poetry, a fact first realized by the so-called poets of the nineties. On the other hand, these ‘netizen-poets’ are likely to miss the pathos and pains of losing a more intimate world, where every communication and relationship was not subject to the rule of the global capital: the pathos and pains suffered by the poets born in the nineteen-fifties, sixties, seventies, or even early-eighties.

The very young poets have learnt to live in multiple realities simultaneously through their readings of Harry Potter and Percy Jackson and the crime fiction of Dan Brown, and listening to Radio Mirchi and YouTube. They have also been victims to a conscious erasure and manipulation of history by communal fundamentalism, and also gradual withdrawal of the state from public service. The poets of younger ages writing in the first and following decades of the twenty-first century can be, therefore, distinguished in respect to their different kinds of negotiations with reality, which tend to become nonjudgmental and non-incisive and prefer to work through what poststructuralism calls ‘rhizome,’ or through “proliferation,” the “multiplicitous production of AND … AND … AND” (Buchanan and Marks). In a collection of poems published in 2013, entitled Sannidhyer Mouno Prostuti (The quiet preparation of intimacy) by Saikat Singha, poems seek such rhizomatic magic from daily proliferation of experiences; thus in “Bioscope”: “Tumi age jeo / Ami age jai / Nitya a kathopakathan rupkatha hoye othe” (You go ahead / I go ahead / this daily conversation becomes fairytale) (15). This sort of poetry seems to be cautious of its internal word-to-word arrangement and considers reality itself as a matter of some kind of narrative sequence. Saikat Singha’s “Boi” (The book) in the above-mentioned collection sets such narrative codes: “Sabdora, sajao / Chobir moto – / Mayer anchol, / Athoba jake ma bole thaki / Athoba jake ma bole daki: / Sthir hoe jai sthobir molate” (Words, arrange / like pictures – / the corner of mother’s sari / or whom I habitually call mother / or whom I call mother: / turns still in unmovable covers) (51). In an untitled short poem of 2010, Nilabja Chakrabarti finds the urban life as a flow of multifarious words in restricted routes: “Sabdogulo one-way dhore nichche / Kanchronga sahare” (Words are following one-ways / in the glass-coloured town) (No pag.). Animikh Patra in “Aragya” (Cure), included in his collection of poems written between 2004 and 2008, Yatodur Baidha Bali (That far I term legal), 2009, reflects on disharmonious experiences of the contemporary world without being judgmental, as the closing lines of the poem suggest. The poem begins in the following way: “Anirdistakal ei rat / Boseche dharmaghate, anasane, mode / Tumi heshe otho. Tumi bondhuder songe gol hao” (This night is of indefinite time / they have sat in a strike, fasting, on the crossing / you begin to laugh at, make a circle with your friends). The poem ends thus: “Bolte pari, Bhalo thako / Bolte pari, alo hoe thako” (I may say, stay well / I may say, stay as a ray of light) (29). This is significant to note that Halaljhanda o Onyanyo (Lawful-flag and others) by Nabarun Bhattacharya was published also in 2009. The revolutionary fervour returns in Animikh’s poem, “E Muhurtya Sore Gele” (If this moment moves away), included in the aforementioned collection, as a fleeting moment of fellowship, dependence and trust: “Biplaber prankona / Santotir swapno … Mayer moto lagche take. Jisur moto lagche” (The particles of the life of revolution / the dream of children … It looks like mother. It looks like Christ) (13). This seems to be a search for completeness that would acknowledge varying connections between living particles without imposing any authoritarian scheme of sameness. The conversational style of shunya dashaker kabita seems to be a training of the senior poets. The title poem of Aritra Sanyal’s 2010 collection, Aj karo jonmodin noi (Today is not anybody’s birthday) begins with a sort of jerk that seems to redefine freedom as something that needs to be released from the human domain: “Aj karo jonmodin noi / Swadhin belun / Tader probhabe / Pakhira borte jak emon suyoge” (Today is not anybody’s birthday / the balloons are free / under their influence / let birds feel lucky for having such a scope) (17).

The collection of poems, Antyakshari, 2005, by Mandakranta Sen—the youngest recipient of the Ananda Puraskar in 1999, and also the recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Golden Jubilee Award for Poetry in 2004—is a significant work of Bengali literature of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Mithu Sen’s (b. 1971) Ma Jai Boluk (Whatever Mother Says, 2000), and Bashmati Sharir Bagan Ba Gaan (Basmati Body Garden or Song, 1995–2005) present highly confessional poems. In the second decade of this century, two Bengali poets of two age groups got recognition in the form of a series of awards. Subhransu Bandopadhyay (b. 1978), aka Subhro Bandopadhyay, who had received the Antonio Machado International Poetry Fellowship from the Government of Spain in 2008, was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar in 2013, and Mallika Sengupta Puraskar in 2016; another important poet cum translator of the same age-group, Hindol Bhattacharya (b. 1978) has come to the forefront in the present century. Raka Dasgupta received the Krittibas Puraskar in 2023, the Bangla Akademi Award in 2016, and the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar in 2016. These recognitions along with many other events speak of the extraordinary proliferation of Bengali poetry since the opening years of the twenty-first century. The literary output of the twenty-tens and twenty-twenties is to a great extent affected by the literary turn in the shunya dashak, accomplished by the participation of junior poets with their new outlook. Writing mainly prose poems, Raka Dasgupta, for example, throws light on the over-loaded but clueless intellect, working on the virtual platform in a series of poems called “Ave Maria”: “At this moment, this moment which will be over in no time, this fraction of a minuscule second, I am Mark-Matthew-John-Luke-Homer-Valmiki-Vyasdev! I insert hundreds of false clues so that you cannot recognize yourself. In one moment I am writing of this stone well in Bethlehem, and then writing of the garden of grapes on the banks of the Rhine in yet another…” (104-05). Thus, in a world made of fragments of identifiable bits that are resistant to the idea of a whole, no connection is sustained for long. Mitul Dutta’s “Atmahanan,” translated as “Suicide,” records an indifferent link-less urban life:

Like a quiet demon who falls at night, you came back –
You jumped and fell below, in the middle of the highway
into a country of empty graves,

The city stomped and walked over you ever so smoothly. (83)

Rajarshi Chattopadhyay’s line in “Chha’kahon,” 2010 (translated as “Poem for Panchami”), “You look very nice when you are all empty” catches the mood of a whole generation of poets (101). Another representative voice of Bengali poetry of the ‘zero decade’ is Sanghamitra Halder, whose 2010 series, Namano Rook-shack (Rook-shack that is put down) includes poems built by experimental images, as exemplified by “Easel”: “Momer golano raat / Ei bhebe kara jeno khusbu chorieche gota raat …” (Night of molten wax / Somebody has spread scent over the whole night with this perception) (No pag.). As in Bengali fiction, “identity politics has [also] started making its presence felt very recently” in Bengali poetry, too, by the intervention of self-conscious Dalit writings (Kar, “Bangla” 69).

It is still too early to arrive at any comprehensive view about such a composite movement with so many crossovers in Bengali poetry of 2000 onwards, which leaves too many threads open in a rapidly altering world. Even in many respects the year 2000 itself appears a distant past to many of the contemporary poets and their readers, given the socio-economic and political changes on the local and global scale over the last couple of decades. Therefore, the corresponding streams of Bengali poetry have to be understood in terms of both a continuing journey and unnegotiable ruptures.

 

Works Cited

Bandopadhyay, Subhro, “Compiler’s Note.” Indian Literature 61.2 (2017): 37-38.
Buchanan, Ian and John Marks, Deleuze and Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000.
Chakrabarti, Nilabja, Poems: 2010. https://kaurab.tripod.com/
Chattopadhyay, Chaitali. “Youban.” Hirak Sangraha Kabita (Diamond collection of poems). Ed. Nirendranath Chakraborty. Kolkata: Ananda, 2017.
Chattopadhyay, Rajarshi, “Poem for Panchami.” Trans. Souradeep Roy. Indian Literature 61.2 (2017): 100-01.
Dutta, Mitul, “Suicide.” Trans. Souradeep Roy. Indian Literature 61.2 (2017): 82-83.
Dasgupta, Raka, “Ave Maria.” Trans. Souradeep Roy. Indian Literature 61.2 (2017): 104-05.
Eliot, T.S., “A Note of Introduction.” In Parenthesis. By David Jones. London: Faber & Faber, 2018.
Halder, Sanghamitra, “Namano Rook-shack.” https://kaurab.tripod.com/
Kar, Angshuman, “One Language, Many Voices: Twenty-first Century Bengali Poetry.” Indian Literature 61.2 (2017): 27-36.

______. “Bangla Modernist Fiction: Looking through the Canon.” Modernist Transitions:
Cultural Encounters between British and Bangla Modernist Fiction from 1910s to 1950s. Eds. Subhadeep Ray and Goutam Karmakar. New Delhi, London, Oxford, New York, Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2024.
Mukhopadhyay, Amitabha. Shunyosthane Takao. Kolkata: Parchment, 2019.
Patra, Animikh, Yatodur Baidha Bali. Kolkata: Saptarshi Prakashan, 2009.
Sanyal, Aritra, “Andhokal.” Bhanga Manusher Bhumikai. Kolkata: Saptarshi Prakashan, 2020.

______. Aj Karo Jonmodin Noi. Howrah: Sritisukh, 2013.
Sengupta, Mallika, “Magic Mirror.” Trans. Purna Chowdhury. Voices from Bengal: Modern Bengali Poetry in English Translation. Eds. Manabendra Bandyopadhyay, Sukanta Chaudhuri and Swapan Majumdar. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2007. Second Edition.
Singha, Saikat. Sannidhyer Mouno Proshituti. Hooghly: Chhonya, 2013.

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