The wind from post-Tagore Bengali poetry

Anisur RahmanAnisur Rahman
Published : 13 August 2016, 09:37 AM
Updated : 13 August 2016, 09:37 AM

In 2006, on my way back home from Mexico via Paris, I had a week's stopover in Stockholm. After long hours' of air travel, I was exhausted. I was one of the non-Europeans who were stopped by customs officers at Arlanda Airport. They opened my luggage, and searched for a long time, finding nothing but some books and magazines, mostly collections of poems. There was also an ongoing dialogue. Some of the questions were like:

– Are there many poets in Bangladesh?
– Are you a poet also?
– Is it difficult to lead a life as a poet in Bangladesh?

I gave my answers and couldn't resist returning a question as I was about to leave: – Do you know Rabindranath Tagore?

The Swedish customs officer stopped: – Tagore who?

I replied, 'He received the Nobel Prize for poetry from your country, Sweden, in 1913. He came from my country'.

"In Bangladesh, you will find more poets than crows," the saying goes. It is literally a land of poetry. Nobel laureate Bengali poet Tagore (1861–1941) is the gateway to Bengali literature. Bengali poetry has a thousand year old tradition. It is almost as old as Swedish poetry.

The first Swedish literature traces back to Rök Ruene Stone. The first Bengali poetry is Charyapada, which was missing until 1907. Bengali literary scholar Haraprasad Shastri discovered the manuscript at the Royal Palace in Nepal. Let me tell you about the background of Charyapada written in the 9th century, and how it got "lost".

Nālandā was an ancient "center of higher learning" (university) in Bihar in India, an area neighbouring to Bengal. It is to be noted that the political map of South Asia was different at that time. The regions like Bengal (today's Bangladesh and West Bengal), Bihar, Urissya, Tripura and Assam were closely connected since Delhi was very far away. The site was a religious center of learning from the fifth century AD to 1190. It is believed that when the Buddhist rulers of the Pal Empire had fallen to the Hindu rulers of the Sen Empire, the Buddhist poets of Charyapada escaped from Bengali speaking areas.

Nalanda was looted and destroyed by an army under Bakhtiyar Khilji in 1193. The great library of Nālandā University was so vast that it is reported to have burned for three months after the invaders set fire to it. The army pillaged and destroyed the monasteries and drove the monks away.

Despite devastating political and military turmoil over Bengali culture and education, Bengali poetry continued to be enriched by hundreds of poets over the centuries, sometimes under different local regimes, other times under invaders.

Now let me focus on modern Bengali poetry from Tagore onwards. Bengali poetry witnessed many great poets, in both the pre and post-Tagore generations. Let me mention one name from the pre-Tagore generation: Michael Madhusudan Dutta. He converted to Christianity from Hinduism and was in exile in France for a while. His ambition was to write in English and he started out doing so. Later he realized that he had to write in his mother tongue, and he returned to his homeland.

Rabindranath Tagore founded a solid base for Bengali poetry. Many new poets in the 20th century emerged following the footsteps of Tagore. But writers often found that their freedom of expression was limited and threatened. Tagore had become a national as well as an international figure, and both India and Bangladesh had chosen their national anthems from Tagore's poetry. Other poets had not put energy in developing an international presence. Dutta and Tagore were exceptions to this.

In modern Bengali poetry, the readers will find not only diverse styles and techniques but also diverse content. In response to a student, the Norwegian poet and dramatist Henrik Ibsen is said to have claimed that he who really wants to know his literary works would have to know Norway. The same holds for modern Bengali poetry. If you want to understand Bengali poetry, you will have to acquire a minimum knowledge of modern Bangladesh, its culture and politics.

Post-Tagore Bengali poetry witnessed the division of Bengal in 1947: East Bengal (today's Bangladesh in a union with West Pakistan, today's Pakistan) and West Bengal, a province of India. Between the two parts of Pakistan, there was a distance of 1 200 English miles. After the division of Bengal, Bengali became a language for the underprivileged. The language had to struggle for survival in both these geographical areas.

From the beginning, Pakistan's leadership, with its first leader, Jinnah, treated Bangladesh as a colony of Pakistan. West Pakistani authorities tried to make Urdu the official language for Pakistan. However, Urdu was not even the language of the majority of people in Pakistan. Bengali was the language of the majority. Speakers of Bengali demanded the recognition of Bengali alongside Urdu as an official language. The authorities even tried to force people to write Bengali in the Urdu alphabet.

Tagore was soon banned in Pakistan. This cultural aggression was imposed on the Bengali speaking world. Bengali speakers were annoyed and protested against this cultural aggression. The Pakistani authority ordered the police to shoot at the protesters on February 21, 1952 and killed students and other protesters on Dhaka University campus. This day is now recognised by UNESCO as the "International Mother Language Day".

For more than two decades the people of Bangladesh had to struggle against Pakistani occupation and cultural aggression, almost in the same way as they did against the British colonial regime from the 18th century until the first half of the 20th century. In the end, Bangladesh won its Independence through a bloody Liberation War in 1971. After independence, the country witnessed a military coup in 1975. The military junta assassinated the country's entire group of leaders including first President and Prime Minister Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Tajuddin Ahmad.

Military rule continued till 1991. Successive military regimes patronised the population, and extremist nationalist and Islamist groups, for instance Jamaat-e-Islam, who had committed atrocious crimes like rape, assassinations and arson in collaboration with the Pakistani army. The country still witnesses a sharp polarization in politics: 'centre left secular politics' versus a 'centre right nationalist Islamist extremist alliance' overshadow people's aspirations to create a secular Bangladesh. All these realities are reflected in Bengali poetry. But alongside this, you will find strong images from nature, life in general, birds, waters, trees, flowers and landscape. Without a basic knowledge of Bangladesh's social, natural and political life, it will not be easy to grasp Bengali poetry.

In addition to Bangladesh and West Bengal, there are Bengali speaking people in other North-Eastern provinces of India, on the North-Eastern border of Bangladesh like Tripura and Assam. Bengali speakers face continued pressure from Hindi, English and other Indian languages, but there are many great poets writing in Bengali in those Bengali speaking provinces as well. However, Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, has become the main city of the Bengali language as well as Bengali poetry.

Bengali poetry plays on a combination of diverse themes, for instance politics, protests, the liberation war of Bangladesh, love, nature, as well as the pains and pleasures of modern life.

PEN International was founded in London, the capital of British Empire, in 1921. In the following year, one particular poet was imprisoned by the imperial authorities in Bengal. He was Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899–1976). In the eyes of imperial leadership his fault was, in particular, that he wrote a poem critical to imperialism. The last stanza of the poem Bidrohi (The Rebel) reads:

I am the burning volcano in the bosom of the earth, I am the wild fire of the woods,
I am Hell's mad terrific sea of wrath!
I ride on the wings of lightning with joy and profundity, I scatter misery and fear all around,
I bring earth-quakes on this world! "(8th stanza)" I am the rebel eternal,
I raise my head beyond this world,
High, ever erect and alone! "(Last stanza)"

(English translation by Kabir Choudhary)

Kazi Nazrul Islam was officially recognised as the national poet of Independent Bangladesh in the 1970s.

Bengali poetry has the privilege of receiving thematic, stylistic and structural characteristics from all continents, and also draws on poetry from many other languages. This enrichment has been possible as an outcome of translation of poetry into Bengali. At the same time poets in different generations try to be familiar with poetry from Latin America to China, from Africa to Scandinavia.

Today, informal literary get-togethers with poets have become living writing workshops all over the Bengali speaking world. Poets sit together, read poems, and discuss poetry for hours. Sometimes they pass the night with poetry. It is almost a ritual in Bangladesh that most major poets publish new collections of poems every year during the month long International Mother Language Day Book Fair in February.

In addition to books and literary newspaper supplements, hundreds of small poetry magazines are published by young poets. This has become a platform which offers space to young poets for experimental poetry. I have to mention two names from the post-Tagore Bengali poetry tradition. They are Jíbananda Das (1899–1954) and Shamsur Rahman (1929–2006), but only two among many of major Bengali poets who could qualify for the Nobel Prize.