Modern Bengali Poets; 1; Rabindranath Tagore: Images of Modern Indian Culture

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some of these challenges to his ideas, to his political forms? Well to both Rabindranath Tagore was a poet of affirmation Not there. There was no sadness in him There was great conflict in him too, but on the whole he struck a note of optimism of hoop and of joy And of joy. Yes, I think that's perhaps why he was so popular in parts of the West at the end of the First World War Whether it was a good deal of despair Everywhere and here was a poet who Not only felt joy and nearly every aspect of life including the sadness and despair, but the expressed it in a way which even in translation could be enjoyed throughout Europe and America And then in Bengal his influence was

supervasive that for two or three decades after him scarcely any authentic poetry in the Bengali language was written except his own Now the generation that came to age in the late 1920s, which is my generation They for the first time I began to seek a voice of their own They all started by imitating Tagore almost blindly in their very youthful days but as they grew up they became more and more aware that they should break from Tagore in what ways in form as well as in content and then Tell us about an outstanding figure who broke away in form and content Well, I could begin with Jibonananda Daesh who died in 1954 in Calcutta as a result of a street

accident and We regard him as one of our greatest modern poets The most curious thing about him is that he does not seem to exhibit the slightest influence of Tagore Which we his friends and colleagues regard as very very strange now he began as a poet of nature not in the sense of Tagore or Wordsworth There was a senseless quality in his poems Which would remind you possibly more of Whitman than of any Indian poet But then later he developed an anguish Connected with the transitoring as of all human affection and human love and beauty and The paying was felt very very deeply by him. I think we could illustrate his

similarity perhaps to Whitman in his fondness for grass. Yes, that's a famous line Where he says that he wishes he could descend into the savory darkness of some warm grass mothers flesh and be born as grass within the grass One of his a better known poems is called a star arrives One star arrives there after walking alone It seems as she might come along the rows of fern on this starfield autumn night in the dark When did my door open under such confident hands? The last tram has faded the last city noise Now the whole city is the ultimate night of life of Nature of the universe houses roads run symmetries gather

round as if along an imperishable road Turned back from the shores of many oceans after much waste and weariness to return and re -enter the ancient heart The newly intimate to body of women This celebration of the city Calcutta here. I would suppose. Yes, it is cut It is very unlike Very unlike of course The celebration of the metropolis everything returns as it were into the mother's Body and the intimate body of the woman who might or might not be the mother Yes, and that also is very much unlike anything that you go would readily write So he was rather a verse to certain themes and this into duck this city life as Distinguished from the country is a distinctive feature of modern poetry in Bengali as in the Western

languages and I suppose this Difficultie we have in identifying just who this girl is or this woman whether she is a human or a superhuman a woman or a goddess Would be a natural The two Bengalis living in Calcutta at least to some extent the city of Calcutta is named after the ancient goddess Calais and the mother of City governments as it were metropolis means the city government ruled by the mother and Such was engine Calcutta Well, the distinction between a woman and the goddess is never very very clear to your Hindu that's right, and It's a very interesting Experiencing India to

find that people and goddess and goddesses are being continually mixed up though It's much more common in Calcutta for the superhuman to be identified with the female human Jivananda Jivanananda has another poem called Wind Water Fire Varyu Varuna Agni In which the goddess seems as it were to have been degraded Defiled But who made her the elements wind water fire in their snakey whim these primeval gods did give you shape What a fearfully lonely shape they gave you and Bugged like lecherian men whom you must know and he suggested it in a crooked move. Yes, in this poem. He's contrasting the the ideal of womanhood as as it is revealed

in a poet's imagination with the reality of a woman who is used in a flesh by men by human beings and he is unable to Seems to be deeply hurt Yes, and he thinks of her as being handled fondled handled fondled Does it turn your flesh into the flesh of a swine? I? To start laughing with these crooked gods and laughter all around puffs the darkness up like the waves of the sea bloated with the Caucus of a huge and putrid whale An image that take off would never have you to never have used all your loveliness and now we're confused once more because he's now saying This girl is mother earth all your loveliness my earth stinks like a whale's caucus and Wherever tossed on those meteor waves. I go it is strange

But I see him at home so much at home this sense of The irony yes of having to live and being able to live and feeling very much at home in a world Defiled is nothing to gory and about it Yes, it feels himself to be a part of the defilement He he is anguished at the defilement, but he he realizes that he cannot escape its senses alive now other things happened especially in the field of politics the happenings in the fascist and communist countries in Europe and the second war and and the events that followed the second war these two Made a considerable impact on modern Bengali poetry of which a chief exponent would be Shuddin Rana dr. who died last year in 1960

and And he has a poem in which he describes the political situation in 1945 and His despair is a political despair rather than a personal he feels that The destiny of the individual is involved with the destiny of the millions not only in his own country, but all over the world Yes, this poem Well 1945 I have again unlike anything to go a rope because it refers to specific events of a political nature happening all over the world consists of seven of a sequence of seven sonnets and I will read a part of one of them Most prophets then Equivocate because the moral law reflects and tenemies inherent in the universe a Philosophical note to be sure It's perfectly clear that these are false prophets whom he's

been talking about and he's told us about them in Germany and in Italy and in China and in the United States And if indeed the good we're all together free from flaw how could the bad avoid becoming infinitely worse? It is from death perhaps that life derives significance and Vice is virtue's mirror image Wrong inverted right no myth is born until the braves are come to craven plans and Liberty requires the dungeon for its finest flight secreted by the past Invisibly the future grows and justice must be rendered only when injustice asks and man's salvation lies in Sweating at appointed tasks this notion that the world And human experience consists of a series of and tenemies problems

dichotomies and that it's very hard as it were to grasp the whole and Understand it and especially is not something it can be easily left to politicians who immediately think of wiping each other out in order to get a World where no sinners any longer exist is very un Indian and is probably one of the sides of Indian thought which has led to India's reluctance to make commitments We think of this as a simple problem to and that it should be to the Indians they think there might be qualities virtues and vices on both sides and it takes a long time to weigh them I think they've been weighing them for quite a while now and perhaps are coming to conclusion And then of course there is the Indian instinct for assimilation for

Reconciling the opposites But that is yes But that that does not come out in this poem No, no, no, no, no Despair at the situation Into which man has led himself in the 20th century and he feels very strongly about it He was a very political poet, you know. Differing very much from Tagore in this respect. Yes, differing very much from Tagore in this respect. And then there were the poets who might be called to some degree, images to poets taking a cue from French literature. Symbolism. Yes, French symbolism has exerted considerable influence on modern Bengali poetry. And through them partly and for a number of other reasons, the style too of Bengali poetry has changed after Tagore. Tagore wrote in that effusive,

spontaneous, excited and exciting manner of the European romantics. But now the turn is more restrained, more concentrated, more in the language of pictures. And more given to pictures, more than in the language of pictures. So just... Yes, then perhaps it's for the sojourner. The subject is laid in the United States, where he has visited and where he is professor at Boston University. And in one of the poems, the sojourner, we read of a train, continuous time of mourning along the blue steel of the tracks, black fires gleam, the 225 is in sight, stops at the trembling edge, and a nearby stretch of water, a stalk, meditates on one leg, thinking,

fish, wandering words travel along telegraph -wise overhead, on which sits a bird swaying a fancy tail, across the field a red tractor waits. I am a present in Mississippi, somewhere in America, the watch on my wrist ticks the memory scraps. Yet I see in timeless seek, in timeless flashes, to capture in Bengali forever. This stalk, this train, this morning's face. Yes, this is an interesting poem, and especially because it is one of the very few poems which has been written in the Bengali language about a foreign country. The girl had traveled all around the world, but he had never written on any topic which was not connected immediately with Bengal. Now, I would like to mention a few

magazines which took a leading part in shaping this new poetry. In the 1920s, there was a magazine named Carl Loll, which started as a magazine of short stories, and which the younger writers changed into a mouthpiece of the modernist movement in Bengali poetry and literature, which at that time rose to such controversy that Rabindranath Tagore himself once condescended to intervene. And then, after that magazine, another named Parichai, the word means introduction. This was edited by Shrutindranath Dutta, whose poem you have just read. Now, he is or was the chief theoretician of modern Bengali literature. His essays are very great significance. Now, in that magazine,

there was an attempt to make an intellectual assessment of what was happening to Bengali and world literature at that time. What about the magazine which you edited? And do edit so? Well, shortly after Parichai was started, I founded Khabeta, this poetry magazine, which you have in your hand. And this at that time was the home of all new Bengali poets, poets who were coming up, who had been published for the first time, and Tagore himself contributed to it very frequently. Now, after a five or six years, let us say of this controversial period, it was felt for once and all that conservatism had lost its day, and modern Bengali poetry was finally established. And then came the

second war, during which that sense of cohesion between the Bengali poets broke down. I think that Professor Bocher of course is very low to talk about himself. I believe he is the Bengal's leading poet, living poet. In my eyes, he certainly is. And I think this is a widespread judgment of those with the best judgment. I would like to read some parts from a three -part poem of his called Two Memory. I think this poem reveals once again that it is very different for Indians and perhaps for a Bengali to distinguish a woman from a goddess. Who but

you the goddess? All that is is yours, hidden in your slumber, unfelt and full of hindrance, is what we call beginning, cause, or source. It should you flick an eyelid, flowers will race like children's feet and blushing vineyard spread like miles of kissing that earth grow ripe in sweetness. Discordant is the mute, the canvas blank, the marble dull and mute, until your breath impels the breathless crossing. Beyond the wave's roar, to the calm and timeless ocean, perhaps to former lives primordial gloom, where shine like constellations and a mother's womb, the fate of man, and your jewels without a flaw, oh, the dark that is you is

illumination, and what your hands let fall, not with a straw. There's not despair among Bengali's, perhaps armoured Indians because of their women. Life goes on. Women never give up. Men sometimes perhaps do, but it's very hard to break the spirit of a good woman, and the women of India all seem to be good women from CETA downward. Here is the last part of this poem, if I may just read a word from it. It seems to be perhaps very much in the somewhat in the French manner. I can't, I would, here echoes of Rambo and Berlin, and especially Baudelaire, many,

many of whose poems, Professor Boge has translated into English, into Bengali. What can our changes bring to the flesh, but the worms old feast? The brilliant rise of the beast exhausts all swollen spring and thrusts of parasite, hurried old men conspire in honeyd youth CETA, progress takes for bride progressive diminution, all that we can reap is what you bring to fruition within those caves of your deep sleep, where the flickering worlds were drawn into the first forevering dawn. Thank you for reading my poem so beautifully. But well, but now, you know, there's a new generation of people who are rebbling against the old -time rebels, and they are trying to

write in a different way from us. They are doing to us as we did to Tagore, which I consider natural and entirely right. These poets again are divided into two or three schools. One we could call the back -to -home school. Does that mean anything to you? Oh, yes, I think so. It makes me think of some of the poets at Jadafua under Professor Bosch at Jadafua. I have been teaching, first of all, Sir Dundranath Tata, whose few of whose words we have read. And here is another... Much younger. This is a new generation. Hello, Karanjan Das Gupta. That's right. And also Nauresh Guhar. Hello, Karanjan is typical of the movement which you regard in America as the grassroots, seeking the grassroots

of American culture. He is trying to be, to become very, very Bengali. As one can see in this poem to the world. Will you not stand once more beside the world? Will you not promise not to go to town, to watch the fireworks whizzing or catch the fancy of a foreign poet? Not that I know who urges me, even now to go on talking, wrapped in the nights of magma, scorched by the joychish sad days. I assume the beautiful air of a kakatur. Everything is ordained and to shift a straw is not in my power. Not even a single sparrow can I subjugate. But will you not stand once more beside the world? But then the younger poets have a lighter and gay or mood too. Possibly you could paint a few lines from Nauresh Guhar to bring that out. A curving sand. Many of the curving rivers that have changed to sand

since the vague heart of childhood through the black hair of story crossed a courtyard patterned by moonlit hours. She stands with lowered eyes at the window of the upper floor, remembering a little girl's fancy. If I be a flower petal or a little beetle, duck or a cloud of very busy, fussy and ever busy, bees then, like an errant truant, I'll fly away, be ruined, and leave the sums and tables of the primary science class and drop up, dive into a flower lake I dive, robe, who can keep my track as daily I go and gather from flower, and the head of honey, my hair is towsled, I'm blossomed and purpled all over, it is I who am really dancing on that punk -dran of grass. Then there's another poet who is now about youngest poet, Jotilmai Dr. who is different from either of the two. You have

Jostred. He has a note of anguish again, but he's not like our generation at all. That's his poem on the bigger woman, for instance. That's true, who seems to whom he compares to the perennial enduring tree, but this time the perennial endurance is more clouded. Not a woman, really, but the ghost of a tree uprooted by a storm in some foreign century for Dutton. Her bark is now ragged. In a beggar's disguise, she sits there all day, and so still she is. It's clear her secret roots go down beneath the pavement stones. Well, on the whole, wouldn't you agree that the modern Bengali poetry is rich and viride? I think it's very rich and buried, and should be a possible translated again and again, both by good Bengali poets who write excellent English, as you do,

and many others, and also by poets in the West, a rich mind of fine poetry. Yes, certainly it would be worth anybody's trial to study it in the original and interpret it to the world and if possible to translate into other languages. This task had better be done by people who speak the language of translation naturally than by us Indians. National Educational Television has presented a discussion of modern Bengali poetry, with Professor Budadeva Bose, head of the Department of Comparative Literature, Jada Poor University Calcutta, and Dr. Rodrick Marshall, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Brooklyn College, New York.

This program was produced for the National Educational Television and Radio Center by New York University, and directed by Lee Polk. This is NET, National Educational Television. Thank you.