Bengali Poetry Research Articles

Green Romanticism?: Exhibiting the Ecocritical Approach in Binoy Majumdar’s Poems

Green romanticism is a term that focuses on the symmetry and interconnectedness of both human and non-human entities. It is interested in re-reading and re-evaluating the writings of romantic writers using an ecocritical approach with an enlightened perception of the features of the ecosphere. The concept and ideas of green romanticism can be found in both western and eastern romantic poets. Binoy Majumdar (1934-2006) is considered the fallen star who has changed the “chaka” (wheel) of contemporary Bengali poetry with the use of scientific and ecological avant-garde symbols and metaphors. He considers nature as equal to a human being and incorporates both real “Nature” and physical “nature” into his works to create a “Body-ecology-text” nexus. This research paper examines the intrinsic green romanticism theme in Binoy Majumdar's poems and how it manifests itself.

Modern Bengali Poetry: Desire for Fire

Modern Bengali Poetry: Desire for Fire

Woman-Speak: Ventriloquizing Femininity in the Poetry of Radharani Devi

Challenging critic Pramatha Chaudhuri’s claim that Bengali women authors lacked a genuinely feminine voice, the writer Radharani Devi embarked on a literary experiment – adopting a nom de plume, “Aparajita Devi,” she started writing poetry in a markedly “feminine” style about women’s experience of everyday domestic life. Aparajita’s language, buoyancy, and humor introduced a new esthetic into Bengali poetry. And her poems were wildly popular. This paper makes a two-fold examination: First, it demonstrates Aparajita Devi’s originality by addressing how her narrators’ vocalization of everyday worlds, delivered in ordinary language voicing common people and circumstances, blew a gust of fresh air over the serene, decorous landscape of Bengali women’s literature. And second, it asks what makes her poems so compellingly feminine. While Aparajita was applauded for restoring the feminine to women’s writing, did it come instinctively to women writers or was it a persona that any writer could adopt? Radharani Devi’s artistic concerns frame the question of the authentic feminine voice against the wider issue of the sources of the poetic impulse in the modern writer.

Reading Creative Translations of Jibanananda Das’s Bengali Poetry into English: A Journey across the Frontiers of Experiences

Indian English literature generally refers to that body of writing, which is produced in the English language by the litterateurs of an Indian origin. It is however, understandable that creative translations should also be located into the corpus of Indian English literature. Historically speaking, what gave the first solid footing to Indian English poetry was Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali, and this came in the form of creative translation. After Rabindranath we find another accomplished poet of twentieth century Bengal to practice creative translation of his Bengali poetry into English. This poet is Jibanananda Das, whose English- language poetry in the form of creative translation is yet to receive a broader audience. The present paper seeks to study three of these creative translations titled Meditations (Manosarani in Bengali), Darkness (Andhakar in Bengali) and Sailor (Nabik in Bengali), which seem to form a complex sequel in respect of Jibanananda’s deep concern for the socio-cultural unrest that characterized the general fabrics of life in Bengal after the Partition of 1947. Moreover, these poems appear equally contemporary in the twenty first century, when the disruptive forces of corruption, falsehood, debauchery, political coercion and cultural denigration are more severely at work to corrode and annihilate the cultural roots of Bengal. So, the purpose of the present study is two-fold: first, to show how the creative translations of Jibanananda continue to strike the note of a universal humanity in the present times, and second, to voice for their inclusion in forthcoming anthologies of Indian English poetry. For, these poems composed by one of the greatest poets of modern Bengal would make room for readers from all over India to savour the taste of a fine artistry that transcends the limits of every ideological bias.

Translating Robert Burns into Bengali: A case study of Rabindranath, Dwijendralal and Satyendranath

AbstractThis article closely studies the translations of Robert Burns's songs/poems made by Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), Dwijendralal Ray (1863–1913) and Satyendranath Dutta (1882–1922), three leading lyric poets of the Bengali language. Apart from Rabindranath's famous adaptation of the text and tune of two of Burns's songs (“Auld Lang Syne” and “Ye Banks and Braes O'Bonnie Doon”), he also translated four of Burns's songs for the monthly Bharati between 1878 and '79. He indigenizes Burns's songs and deploys the idiom of contemporary Bengali poetry (using throughout a Sanskritized poetic register) without emphasizing the foreign source. As opposed to this, the five translations of Burns's songs by Dwijendaralal Roy (included in Aryagatha, Part 2, 1893) are more innovative, if not always with a happy result. Dwijendralal's translations attempt to be closer to the source text in terms of the overarching temperament. Besides, they experiment with idioms and dialects. As opposed to these two, Satyendranath Dutta in his translation of “To a Mouse” and “A Man's a Man for A' that” (included in Tirthasalil, 1908) follows the meaning of the source text with rigorous loyalty. More importantly, he tries to approximate to the rhythm and stanza pattern of the original with startling results. As part of his vast repertoire of lyrics in translation, Satyendranath's rendition of Burns gestures towards a tacit paradigm of “world literature” and internationalism. This article attempts a comparative study of these translations of Burns with a view to assessing their underlying aesthetics and cross‐cultural negotiations.

Book Reviews

87 Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Vol. 42, No.4, Summer 2019 Book Reviews Edited by Nadia Barsoum The Middle East, South Asia, and North Africa INDIA IN THE 21st CENTURY: WHAT EVERYONE NEEDS TO KNOW by Mira Kamdar. United Kingdom, London, Oxford University Press 2018. 244 pages. India is fast overtaking China to become the most populous country on Earth. By mid-century, its 1.7 billion people will live in what is projected to become the world’s second-largest economy after China. While a democracy and an open society compared to China, assertive Hindu nationalism is posing new challenges to India’s democratic freedoms and institutions at a time when illiberal democracies and autocratic leaders are on the rise worldwide. How India’s destiny plays out in the coming decades will matter deeply to a world where the West’s influence in shaping the 21st century will decline as that of these two Asian giants and other emerging economies in Africa and Latin America rise. In India in the 21st Century, Mira Kamdar, a former member of the New York Times Editorial Board and an award-winning author, offers readers an introduction to India today in all its complexity. In a concise question-and-answer format, Kamdar addresses India’s history, including its ancient civilization and kingdoms; its religious plurality; its colonial legacy and independence movement; the political and social structures in place today; its rapidly growing economy and financial system; India’s place in the geopolitical landscape of the 21st century; the challenge to India posed by climate change and dwindling global resources; wealth concentration and stark social inequalities; the rise of big data and robotics ; the role of social media and more. She explores India’s contradictions and complications, while celebrating the merging of India’s multicultural landscape and deep artistic and intellectual heritage with the Information Age and the expansion of mass media. With clarity and balance, Kamdar brings her in-depth knowledge of India and eloquent writing style to bear in this focused and incisive addition to Oxford’s highly successful What Everyone Needs to Know series. 88 AUSTRALIANAMA: THE SOUTH ASIAN ODYSSEY IN AUSTRALIA by Samia Khatun United Kingdom, London, Oxford University Press 2018. 286 pages. Australian deserts remain dotted with the ruins of old mosques. Beginning with a Bengali poetry collection discovered in a nineteenth-century mosque in the town of Broken Hill, Samia Khatun weaves together the stories of various peoples colonized by the British Empire to chart a history of South Asian diaspora. Australia has long been an outpost of Anglo empires in the Indian Ocean world, today the site of military infrastructure central to the surveillance of ‘Muslim-majority’ countries across the region. Imperial knowledges from Australian territories contribute significantly to the Islamic-Western binary of the post- Cold War era. In narrating a history of Indian Ocean connections from the perspectives of those colonized by the British, Khatun highlights alternative contexts against which to consider accounts of nonwhite people. Australianama challenges a central idea that powerfully shapes history books across the Anglophone world: the colonial myth that European knowledge traditions are superior to the epistemologies of the colonized. Arguing that Aboriginal and South Asian language sources are keys to the vast, complex libraries that belie colonized geographies, Khatun shows that stories in colonized tongues can transform the very ground from which we view past, present and future. A POPULATION HISTORY OF INDIA: FROM THE FIRST MODERN PEOPLE TO THE PRESENT DAY by Tim Dyson. United Kingdom, London, Oxford University Press 2018. 310 pages. A Population History of India provides an account of the size and characteristics of India’s population stretching from when hunter-gatherer homo sapiens first arrived in the country—very roughly seventy thousand years ago—until the modern day. It is a period during which the population grew from just a handful of people to reach almost 1.4 billion, and a time when the fact of death had a huge influence on the nature of life. This book considers the millennia that were characterized by hunting and gathering, the Indus valley civilization, the opening-up of the Ganges river basin...

Flowers in a Begging Bowl: Tagore, Eliot, and Bengali Modernism

In the mid-1920s Bengalis found themselves in an atmosphere of political upheavals, of communal and labour riots, and of dire poverty. Amidst this destructive environment a fervent group of young poets felt that the pressures of the modern age required a new poetics. Although anxieties stemming from economic instability and political turmoil contributed to this new poetics, this group of poets, who identified themselves as modernists, found in the poetry of Eliot a reality which seemed to them to be a true reflection of their world. This article looks at that pivotal moment in Bengali poetry when a new generation broke ranks with the establishment and forged a poetics that reflected a world different to the one that Tagore had earlier introduced to the rest of the world. The poets challenged Tagore's image of Bengal and created an altogether different image, one that had strong Elitoesque characteristics.

The Late Mr. Nirad C. Chaudhuri, C.B.E. (Hony.), and the Twilight of Empire

The aim of this paper is to examine the philosophy of history expounded by Nirad C. Chaudhuri, and relate it to the apocalyptic temper of modernism. It argues that the sense of impending apocalypse in modern Bengali culture had more to do with the decline of the British Empire than with events like the First World War, which was the most significant historical landmark in the evolution of Western modernist apocalypticism. The paper ends with a cursory look at the apocalyptic note in modern Bengali poetry and suggests that further exploration of the subject will enhance our understanding of what Partha Chatterjee has dubbed the ‘colonial modern’.

Poetry from Bengal: The Delta Rising: An Anthology of Modern Bengali Poetry

Certainly in states the cover summary of Poetry from Bengal, where the poet is never far from the life of the people . . . the mind searches for truth, as this selection shows, with all the agility of the ascetic and the brilliance of the fierce Indian sun. Thus Forest Books launches the UNESCO Library of World Poetry. The minds of poets anywhere must search for truth, but that imperative has had particular effect on Bengali poets. In one of the most pivotal cultural collisions during the British raj, Bengalis, always intensely proud of their poetic traditions, turned to them for both reassurance and orientation. From the 1880s until his death in 1941 the preeminent figure was Tagore, who left subsequent generations of Bengali poets with a dilemma: he refined or experimented with so many forms, styles, and vocabularies, how were they to get out from under his shadow? Buddhadeva Bose, a leader in the first post-Tagore generation of poets, wrote in his 1948 survey of Bengali literature, An Acre of Green Grass: Rabindranath Tagore is a phenomenon. . . . What I am thinking of as Rabindranath' s unique merit is his quantity, his immense range, his fabulous variety.

Blood in the lotus‐pool

Sibnarayan Ray and Marian Maddern (eds), I Have Seen Bengal's Face: a Selection of Modern Bengali Poetry in English Translation (Calcutta, Editions Indian, 1974), xxxiii. 170 pp. $US 6.50, Rs. 30.00.

Tagore: Avantgardism & Modernism in Bengali Poetry

(1976). Tagore: Avantgardism & Modernism in Bengali Poetry. South Asian Review: Vol. 1, No. sup1, pp. 1-16.

Journal of South Asian Literature: Bengali Poetry Issue

Journal of South Asian Literature: Bengali Poetry Issue