Essays

A middle class romantic ethos meets poetry of protest, experimentation meets populism, and spiritualism meets politics in contemporary poetry from Bengal.

The modernist ethos has had a firm grip on Bengali poetry till date, which has been selectively internationalist, but often homemade and insulated within a provincial set-up. This is evident in two ways.  Expression and formal experimentation, in spite of occasional audacity, have remained largely unchanged for over a period of at least seventy years. However, more significantly, bourgeois modernism in poetry circles has relegated what could have been keenly political or cosmic, into something called ‘protibaadi kobita’ (poetry of protest)—a baggy, all consuming term.

There used to be a clear progressive political aspect among poets like Bishnu Dey and, later, Subhash Mukhopadhyay and Birendra Chattopadhyay.  How were they made irrelevant? Literary journals like Krittibas and Shatabhisha and poets who were manning such magazines ensured that politics turned into protest, at best. The two pillars of contemporary poetry (and more importantly poetry criticism), Sankha Ghosh and Joy Goswami, have been influential in making poetry sensible, sensitive and protest-worthy. Goswami contributed to another remarkable amalgamation in the 1990s—as the poetry editor of Desh, he brought diverse poets into the fold of the largest corporate structure in Bengal, the Ananda Bazar Patrika group. As a result, certain poets who, till the 1980s, were dedicated to alternative circles, began desiring and writing for, a middle class readership.

The biggest casualties were powerful poets like Utpal Kumar Basu, Partha Pratim Kanjilal and Ranajit Das. A dynamic man, not only was Goswami successful in denting the idealism behind the little magazine movement but also in ushering in a remarkable middle class romantic ethos in poetic language, diction and subjects.  Katha bolar chhondo (rhythm that is close to the speech) was to be practised in order to make poetry accessible. The idea was, ostensibly, to be reader-friendly and democratic but the outcome was a dumbing down. This is what, in another context, Geoffrey Hill has said about Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry that it humanises “…the linguistic semantic detritus of our particular phase of oligarchical consumerism.” With Goswami and his followers, ‘oligarchical’ may be replaced by another term: market. The ‘Goswami Amalgamation’ and the politics of mutual recognition have led to the present day poet-lyricist-television phenomena like Srijato and Mandakranta Sen.

Does this mean that there is no detachment, experimentation or anti-establishment poetry emerging from contemporary Bengal? Yes and no. Yes, because it will be very hard to distinguish the basis upon which someone is called anti-establishment. Much of Shakti Chattopadhyaya’s poetry is genuinely bohemian but his location and networks were not. The relations of production within which Shakti worked were deeply compromised and banal. From such an ethos you can only have protibadi kobita. Another complicated example is that of the classical and spare writings of Anirban Dharitriputra. Though he is part of a terrific alternative magazine called Anubarton, he has a tremendous urge to be popular and therefore, his poetry appears in the media and mainstream middling corporate magazines. Deeply critical minds and remarkable poets from Kamal Chakraborty to Sumanta Mukhopadhyaya have also been writing for mainstream publications and are reaching out to a larger audience. They bring a certain criticality to their poetry that goes beyond our little idealisms, which are sometimes jealousy and provincialisms practised in the names of authenticity and the small-scale. One must also think of a host of women poets, who, arriving after Gita Chattopadhaya and Debarati Mitra, have brought sensibilities hitherto unknown in Bangla poetry. These include sexuality and the intimate sphere, surely, but also a sense of politics that is lived and experienced outside of official communitarian or class based radicalism. The poetry of Anjana Chakrabarty and Kabita Sinha ushers in such concerns.

Let me finally come to a set of poets who, in different ways, have been able to keep themselves away from the fuzzy amalgamation. This has happened because their poetic universe is an ongoing process, a quest of sorts, not dwarfed by petty provincialism or dogma. One route is a detached romantic and almost therapeutic spiritualism: Monindra Gupta leads this school. He has been able to keep himself away from all forms of corporatization and from the banality of the accessible. His forte is the cosmic idea of a natural and collective memory.

Binoy Majumdar is an older member of the same school but his works are more consciously crafted. Communitarian localism finds powerful expression in poets like Prasun Bandyopadhyay (valorising timelessness in and through the everyday north Calcutta ethos), Biswadeb Mukhopadhyay (connecting a suburban palimpsest to a cosmic science-fictional sense of harmony), Avik Bandyopadhyay and Sovan Bhattacharya. More than their class, it is their caste position that is important in order to see how their detachment is also a quest for a cosmic harmony, consistent with a quest for spiritual modernism that has been a staple, right from nineteenth century Bengal.

The other strand is that of Bhaskar Chakraborty. Bhaskar could elude the Goswami Amalgamation because he never claimed to be an alternative poet. He kept himself away from all frills and glamour, and his melancholia and robustness are now sharply coming into focus. This rare ability to be simultaneously lyrical, still and affronted, may be seen in poets like Pranabendu Dasgupta (calm in earlier writings, until the 1990s when he suddenly turns irate against consumerism and globalisation) and Rana Roychowdhury (possesses an arsenal of seething suburban anger and stark imagery). We also see a non-spiritual detachment in the poems of Ekram Ali, Sarthak Roychowdhury and Anindita Mukhopadhyaya.

Three more poets must be named in order to show that there is indeed something outside the grey area of the protibaadi kobita. Two of these poets are no more. Swadesh Sen, a remarkable poet writing from Jamshedpur, outside of Bengal, could catch a sense of our modernity and its natural ramifications by staying outside of the establishment. The other is Falguni Roy, whose poetry and life are a testimony to the power of dissipation by staying combatively within life and with life’s travails. The third poet is Mridul Dasgupta, who, in spite of his occasional fraternising with populism, has been able to mark a clear political line of poetry, which is distinguishable from the flattening scourge of protest and democracy. 

Rana Roychoudhury’s collection of poems Wild Donkey’s Bray ¹is a landmark in contemporary Bengali poetry. It disturbs the settled modes of sensitivity and certain spiritual turns that have been the norm.

Words

Snake
Touring around the house

Dread
Touring around the house

Thus touring dread
Gets into the hole

But if words
Surface again?

Then where shall I keep the poison?
Where shall I keep the pain?

Anindita Mukhopadhyaya’s anthology Aeolian School Balcony ² is a nominalist exploration of the creaturely and the defenseless in an untimely cosmos.

Deposition
No, no, for mercy do not train that light on me
My eyes begin to sting and I always do sweat like this
No, I have no discomfort—actually feel entitled if spurred
I require some more chastising
Sitting at the footstool of the cane-teacher I feel I could cry all my life,
Only a single record I own—worn—sometimes that one I play
“Your fingers are shapely, don’t you cry.”
My friends, all lovely people, during times of relaxation
Wish you would summon me, if you remember me again–!
In this melee all my poems go hiding in the bathroom
I do not recall anything else Hujur, Milord–
Banking on one or two faces really
Upon God, I did not smile looking at anyone that day.

References

1. Natmandir, Kolkata, 2010
2. Saptarshi Prakashan, Kolkata, 2009