Rajrishi Das
ENGL 4732 Final Project
Scroll down over here to begin.
Or, use your mouse to explore the map.
The Renaissance poet Michael Madhusan Dutt, for example, is considered the father of the Bengali sonnet; in the dedicatory letter accompanying his first attempt at the sonnet form, he wrote to his friend Rajnaryan Basu, "What say you to this, my good friend? In my humble opinion, if cultivated by men of genius, our sonnet would in time rival even the Italian."
The Western influence in his work is also clear from the fact that in the early years of his career, Dutt wrote exclusively in English. After a stint as a court interpreter in Calcutta from 1858-62, he began to write poetry in his native Bangla -- but attempted, even then, to implement English-style blank verse in the language. Although he was born in rural East Bengal, he is buried in Kolkata:
Despite his considerable debt to Western tradition, Dutt celebrated Bengal profusely in his work, as did other Bengali Renaissance poets.
His self-written epitaph invokes the figure of Mother Bengal: a proto-deific personification of Bengal that emerged during the Renaissance, and later became an organizing symbol for various Bengali nationalist movements in the 20th century.
Mother Bengal is rarely depicted visually; she is a discursive figure, invoked imaginatively through of poetry and song, similar to a Muse, or a nation.
Dutt's most famous sonnet, "Kapatakkha River," apostrophizes a river near his birthplace in Eastern Bengal. It employs one of Bengali poetry's characteristic motifs: invoking one of Bengal's rivers as a metonym for Bengal writ large. We can discern, in this poem, the strength of the association between river-metonymy and the "Mother Bengal" motif: "Many a river I have seen on earth; / But which can quench my thirst the way you do? / You're the flow of milk in my homeland's breasts."
As we'll soon see, the Ganga (or Ganges) is the river most frequently invoked for this purpose. But Bengal is home to several major river systems, as well as the world's largest river delta; smaller rivers, such as the Kapatakkha, are frequent poetic symbols as well (especially as homages to Bengal's rural areas).
In response to the burgeoning anti-imperial fervor, British administrators, led by Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, moved in 1905 to divide Bengal between its largely-Hindu western and largely-Muslim eastern areas.
The provincial borders of Bengal went from this...
(scroll down)
...to this:
(Note: the boundaries on this slide are somewhat inaccurate due to the scarcity of relevant geoJSON data available online, and my present unfamiliarity with advanced GIS software. However, they are usefully inaccurate, as we shall soon see. For now, note that the region of Assam was included in the eastern province.)
Although the precise terms of the 1905 Partition lasted for only 6 years, its underlying strategy of divide-and-conquer was neither understated nor acceptable to Bengalis - especially not Bengali nationalists.
The First Partition of Bengal led to a widespread popular outcry, and while religious and political divisions deepened considerably (Muslim separatist movements, e.g, began to emerge with newfound energy during this 6-year period), the idea of a culturally-united Bengal began to animate much of the artistic production of the period.
In 1905, the legendary Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore composed the text of "Amar Sonar Bangla," an ode to Mother Bengal that, in celebrating several of the region's disparate landscapes, from rice paddy fields to banyan tree forests, pointedly refuses to recognizes the communal East/West division imposed by the British.
"Amar Sonar Bangladesh" has been the national anthem of Bangladesh since its establishment as an independent nation in 1971.
Tagore is the only person to have written the national anthems of two separate nations: "Amar Sonar Bangla," the national anthem of Bangladesh, and "Jana Gana Mana," the national anthem of India. The latter was originally written as a hymn in Sanskritized Bengali called "Bharoto Bhagyo Bidhata"; the first stanza, translated into Hindi, consitutes the Indian national anthem today.
Notice the themes of religious pluralism and regional unity between East and West in the second stanza. In light of British attempts to stoke communal divisions in the subcontinent, pluralism emerged as a prominent theme in the work of Tagore, and in the messaging of many -- but not all -- prominent decolonial and nationalist political organizations.
Alongside Tagore, Kazi Nazrul Islam is considered one of the fathers of modern Bengali poetry. The two figures share some thematic overlap, most clearly seen in their poetics of pluralism -- but where Tagore's pluralism was always checked by a small-c conservatism (he denounced nationalism, for instance, nearly as severely as British imperialism), Nazrul's was more wide-ranging and famously radical.
His 1921 poem "Bidrohi" earned him the nickname "Bidrohi Kobi" ("Rebel Poet"), and was highly influential not only during the Indian independence movements of his own period, but the Bangladeshi nationalist movements later in the century, that culminated in the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. Comparable to Whitman's "Song of Myself" in its structure (notice the anaphoric, pluralistic "I"), its ambition, and its length, only an excerpt of "Bidrohi" is reproduced here.
A major part of Nazrul's project -- and, for thinkers like Amartya Sen and Rabindranath Tagore, a major part of the ethos of Bengal -- is the expression of religious syncretism.
This manifests in Nazrul's work both explicitly -- see his poems "Daridro (Poverty)" -- and implicitly: Nazrul (re)introduced terms from Arabic, Farsi, and Urdu into the Bengali language, crafting a highly influential idiom whose cosmopolitanism resisted upper caste and Hindu nationalist attempts to inorganically sanskritize Bangla poetic diction.
In 1947, the British Raj committed one final act of imperialism: the Partition of India along the Radcliffe Line, which divided the regions of Punjab in the northwest and Bengal in the east into two distinct nations: the majority-Muslim republic of Pakistan, and the majority-Hindu republic of India. The Partition divided regional and ethnic communities that, despite long-standing communal tensions, had nonetheless behind culturally united for thousands of years. The division sparked a mutually reinforcing combination of mass migration and communal violence, leading to unprecedented displacement and casualty.
Scroll down to see how the subcontinent's national borders were changed.
The archive of Partition is notoriously sparse, but scholars estimate that between 10 and 20 million people were displaced -- including my grandparents, who were forced to from their ancestral homeland of Barisal to Kolkata -- and between 200k and 2 million people killed.
The psychic wounds of Partition have stil not healed, and perhaps never will.
The legendary 20th century Bengali poet, Jibananda Das, published this poem just after he, like my ancestors, fled during Partition from his ancestral Barisal to Kolkata. In it, he both mourns and asserts the unity of Bengal in the aftermath of incomprehensible fracture.
I have located the poem, on the map, at the geographical midpoint between Kolkata and Barisal.
Due to technical difficulties, I can't reproduce the whole poem on the map. I have included a link to a translation of it.
After Partition, the former province of East Bengal, with the exception of Assam, became East Pakistan: a subregion of Pakistan separated by 1000 miles of Indian territory from West Pakistan, the seat of the nation's government.
Although the establshment of independent Pakistan had fullfilled the goals of Muslim separatist -- creating an Islamic republic such that Muslims could avoid sectarian violence and marginalization in secular but majority-Hindu India -- the division between the Urdu- and Punjabi-speaking West Pakistan and the Bengali-speaking East Pakistan led to new tensions.
East Pakistanis -- especially students -- strongly opposed Pakistani government proposals to eliminate Bengali from official use as a state language and language of instruction in schools and universities, as well as proposals to convert Bengali into Arabic or roman script (such that it could be more easily read by non-Bengalis).
In February 1952, students gathered at Dhaka University in massive numbers to campaign for the recognition of Bangla as a national language of Pakistan, and to protest orders passed by the Pakistani government that banned Bangla from use in official capacity, unless written in Arabic script.
Ekushey February -- or February 21st -- is now celebrated as a holiday in both Bangladesh and West Bengal. Since 1999, the day has been recognized by UNESCO as International Mother Language Day.
Concurrent with the rise of the Bengali nationalism in East Pakistan in the late 50s and 60s was the Hungryalist poetic movement in West Bengal -- which region, in the aftermath of Partition, was socially and economically reeling.
The movement draws its name from a line of Geoffrey Chaucer's, "in the sowre hungry time," that for its founders reflected the unraveling social and economic fabric of post-Partition Bengal, as well as their adherence to German historian Oliver Spengler's notion that of non-linear historical progression, which stipulates that "an ailing culture feeds on cultural elements brought from outside" (source).
It is important, in light of the movement's Spenglerian philosophy, that the Hungryalist poets wrote almost exclusively in Bangla, not English.
Hungrayalist poetics involved the rejection of received forms, strong critiques of government, illustrations of Bengalis' physical and pyschic suffering, and celebrations of the bodily (including the sexual and the "obscene"). If these themes sound familiar to American readers, it is no coincidence: the Hungryalists directly influenced the Beat movement in the US, with Allen Ginsberg having developed a close friendship with poets like Malay Roy Choudhury while visiting Kolkata in 1959-60.
In 1966, Chaudhury was jailed on obscenity charges for his poem "Stark Electric Jesus," which is excerpted on the map. Notice how Chaudury's speaker collapses distinctions between high/low, spiritual/bodily, sacred/profane.
One can see how Chaudury's poem and Ginsberg's "Howl" (link) are involved in similar projects.
In March 1971, after years of Bengali nationalist organization, the Pakistani government initiated Operation Searchlight -- the first offensive in what came to be known as the Bangladesh genocide, as well as the Bangladesh Liberation War. Operation Searchlight involved the military seizure of East Pakistan's major cities, as well as the killings of known and suspected Bengali nationalists.
In response to the genocide, a Bengali nationalist guerrilla group called Mukti Bahini launched a counteroffensive against the Pakistani military. The war between Bengali nationalists and East Pakistani military forces lasted from March to December 1971, with India joining two weeks before its conclusion as an ally of the former. The nationalists won the war (which claimed hundreds of thousands or even millions of lives), and established the independent nation of Bangladesh on December 16, 1971.
Already an established poet by 1971, Shamsur Rahman became the poetic voice of the liberation movement during and after the war. He wrote and published "Shadhinota tumi (Liberation)" in 1971, and it became an anthem for freedom fighters.
Notice the poem's definition of freedom as "Rabi Thakur’s timeless poetry and everlasting lyrics ... Kazi Nazrul, his willowy mane swaying, / rapturous with the joy of creation, a great man ... / the radiant gathering at Shahid Minar on the / immortalized February 21."
In 1974, three years after Bangladesh achieved independence, the Brahmaputra River flooded, causing one of the worst famines of the 20th century. During the famine, Rafiq Azad published the beautiful and highly controversial poem "Give Me Food, Bastard," which concludes on a stunning evocation of the power of a nation's oppressed: "Give me food, bastard / Or I'll eat up the very map."
The adminstration of Sheikh Rahman, the founding leader of Bangladesh, strongly censured the poem as an attack on the nation's government.
While there is much I have not yet touched on -- e.g. the Naxalbari uprising of 1967 -- I don't have the time or energy to continue on this project any longer. However, there are more poems on the map than I have covered in writing -- click around to explore!
In future version of this application, I plan to introduce visual filtering by theme, period, gender, etc.