Essays

A preoccupation with history and the changing political space has ensured a constant evolution in the literary form, argues Syed Manzoorul Islam

Kolkata was the centre of Bangla literature till 1947, when the Partition of India separated East and West Bengal. Beginning in the late 1920s, poets of the Kollol group, so called because of their affiliation to the avant-garde literary magazine of that name, inaugurated a distinctly modernistic trend in Bangla poetry. The group consciously moved away from the romantic tradition set by Rabindranath Tagore. After 1947 however, Dhaka, the capital of East Bengal, which became a part of Pakistan, saw the emergence of a separate stream of literature that reflected the new social realities and cultural aspirations, which were different from those of West Bengal. The loss of connectivity with Kolkata, enforced by the Partition, also meant that Dhaka had to develop its own publishing industry and literary establishments.

Creating a new cultural identity

The language movement of 1952 was the first manifestation of the struggle to establish our own cultural identity. This in turn inspired our poets to explore the possibilities offered by the language, opening areas of experimentations with forms and techniques. The poets of the 1950s, many of whom were university graduates, were avid readers of contemporary European literature. They were familiar with the thematic complexities and stylistic innovations in the poetry of Eliot, Pound and Auden. But while they expanded the range of their experimentation and innovation, they were acutely aware of the need to be responsive to their own social and political realities. Those poets, thus, made a happy combination of the local and the global: they drew on their Bengali ethos, but incorporating the insights they derived from European poetry.

Indeed, until 1971 which saw the emergence of the sovereign state of Bangladesh through a nine-month war of liberation, Bangla poetry kept its focus firmly on the political aspirations of the people – even as it strived to create a modernistic sensibility which was objective, ironic, reflexive and unmistakably urban. Because of its preoccupation with politics, the language of poetry avoided abstraction and detachment in favour of directness and involvement. The new cultural epoch that arrived after the independence, with its short-lived euphoria and the subsequent disillusionment with social and political realities, saw a continuation of the thematic engagements and formal properties of the 1960s. However, with the rise of divisive politics, the dominance of the military in running the state, the spread of education on the one hand, and the arrival of the visual media on the other, poets began to shift to newer themes and formal experimentations

Linguistic reprogramming in the 1980s

What characterised the poetry of the eighties, however, was a perceptible linguistic shift. Partly as a reflection of the ambiguities in our national discourses – which often contradicted each other – partly in response to the uncertainty that marked the time, and partly in recognition of the influence of the visual media, the language of poetry abandoned its earlier directness, and reverted to being dense and abstract. The new poets who crafted this largely self-referential and self-reflexive language were Farid Kabir, Masud Khan, Sajjad Sharif, Shantanu Choudhury, Subrata Augustine Gomes, Rifat Choudhury, Samshet Tabrezi, Jewel Mazhar, Bratya Raisu and a host of others.

With this re-visioned language and poetics, these poets began to explore the rich interiority of poetry, and, in the process, collapsed the line separating the inner and the outer. Personal realities blended into social ones; standard Bangla began to accommodate words and expressions from the colloquial register. The new poetry also began to incorporate multiple and disparate themes. For many poets, language itself became a theme. Its power of abstraction allowed diverse experiences to collapse, overlap and create a separate presence.

In the eighties and the nineties, poets began experimentation with rhyme – which had been side-lined by the predominantly free verse compositions of their predecessors. They also revived the lyric; but in both cases, the revival and reinstatement had to be negotiated in the light of changed realities and shifts in cultural and political landscapes.

More and more poets of quality arrived in the scene such as Tokon Thakur, Kamruzzaman Kamu, Shahnaj Munni, Mujib Iram, Sohel Hasan Galib and Hijal Jubaer. They introduced newer perspectives and themes, displayed newer preoccupations with identity, gender, society and the environment. In some poets, irony ruled; in others sarcasm, even cynicism predominated. Some fought with alienation or paranoia, while some others reinvented lost myths. The language of most of these poets veered towards experimentation, at times self-consciously so. As little magazines throughout the country began to create an impact – in the shape of a wide readership – newer and more diverse voices began to emerge, such as Shahin Mumtaz, Badre Munir, Ahmed Munir, Imran Majhi and Muyeen Pervez.

Going forward

In the last one decade or so, quite a few poets have thus begun to pursue a mode that is critical of modern poetry’s exclusive nature and susceptibility to self-indulgence. These poets believe that poetry should not be averse to the rural, the eternal and, what they consider, the vital principles of our culture. They promote even the pre-modern in their search for a new aestheticthat will be inclusive and multi-vocal.

Bangla poetry in the 1960s displayed an anxiety about time, history and the uncertainty of living in a changing world. Poets of our time are worried more about a loss of space – territorial as well as political and cultural. The predominance of visuality and a self-gratifying consumer culture, the rise of violence of all kinds and a shift of reader preference to fiction mean that poetry now faces a difficult time. But young, restless and talented poets persist and keep striving to find newer expressive modes and newer meanings.