Hemchandra's Bharat Sangeet (1870) and the politics of poetry

Abstract

This article intends to examine the legacy of an unabashedly militant Hindu image that the poet Hemchandra Bandyopadhyay inaugurated at the very inception of nationalist and literary discourse in India in a famous poem called Bharat Sangeet (1870). Where was this prescient image, which would become fundamental to a certain type of anti-colonial politics, located in the relationship between nineteenth-century literature, militancy and the political imagination in Bengal? A closer look at the conflicting pressures on the colonised cautions against a teleology which would see this poem as a precursor to a more pernicious strain of later Hindu nationalism while recognising, at the same time, that the dissemination of certain revolutionary ideals through a few influential literary texts inaugurated a philosophy of extremist politics in Bengal that travelled, in no time at all, from the literary arena into life.