The 118th birth anniversary of Jibanananda Das – widely recognised as "the poet of poets"–was observed a few days ago on February 17. Jibanananda Das gave Bangla modern poetry a new dimension and brought into the realm of Bangla poetry the tribulation in the life of the urban modern man in his poems. Sadly Jibanananda did not get the recognition which was his due in his lifetime and he himself perhaps could not imagine what a tremendous impact his poetry would have on the future of Bangla poetry. He helped Bangla poetry break free from the overwhelming (and some say overbearing) influence of Rabindranath Tagore. Every modern Bangla poet after the 1930's has to some extent been inspired by him. Among the readers, those of us familiar with modern European poets, find an affinity with him which is definitely stronger than any other Bengali poet.
In this article we shall try to concentrate on love' in the poetry of Jibanananda. Love, as we know, has various manifestations-but what is generally meant by love is, of course, the love that exists between a man and woman. This love is both physical and emotional. When love is truly intense, it transcends the body and become spiritual and often seems to have covered the universe. In Jibanananda's poems, love often becomes the other name of humanity and sometimes life itself.
Among the seven books of poem published in his lifetime, Banalata Sen is the one which consists mostly of love poems. Banalata Sen - one of the most read Bangla poems ever - is a remarkable one by any standards. Ever since it was published Bengali youth have recited the poem to impress their beloveds.
One interesting thing to note is that among other poets who wrote of love - which middle-class Bengali didn't at some stages of his life?--we know of women they had affairs with. The names of Tagore and Nazrul have been linked with several women. However, in the case of Jibanananda, we do not know of a single woman other than his wife Labanya Das in his life which is somewhat surprising considering the intensity and profound feelings in so many of his love poems.
He married when he was 31 and from his biographers we know that he did not have a happy married life. It is evident that Jibanananda, who was intense,
individualistic and brooding in nature, did not find the perfect soul-mate in Labanya Das who was an ordinary domestically inclined women. She did not recognise the genius of her husband and was prone to complain to friends and relatives about the apparent unworldliness of the poet. Once Biram Mukherji, a well-known critic, termed the conjugal life of the poet "somewhat unnatural" and went on to claim that the untimely death of Jibanananda by accident' had a lot to do with his "somewhat unnatural" conjugal life.
No Bangla poem other than Banalata Sen has portrayed the symbols and metaphors of love and death in the same vein. This trait of the poet is found in some of his other poems also-Hai Chil, Shudarshana, Tumi, etc. Death here often does not signal the end of love but is present as the central theme or as the background.
Names like Banalata Sen, Shuranjana, Sabita, Shyamoli, Shudarshana, Shankhamala occur repeatedly in his poems as heroines. They are sometimes immersed in dreams and sometimes have a searching intellectuality about them. Shyamoli is not just an individual woman, she is the emblem of a green vibrant world. Shuranjana is the essence of womanhood itself. So is the case with his other heroines.
At a time when Jibanananda Das was writing, many readers and admirers of his poetry had called him the lonely or the loneliest poet. The reason for using such a label was perhaps because of the pervasive sense of melancholy and of death in his poems. That label has remained with him forever. He was aware of it and had referred to it in the Introduction to the collection of his poems published in 1954 called Jibanananda Daser Shreshto Kobita (The Best Poems of Jibanananda Das). In the Introduction he says that many labels have been tagged to his name from time to time. Some have called him a nature-poet, some a poet of historical and social consciousness, while there are still others who would prefer to call him a poet of the subconscious or more specifically a surrealist poet. Many of these, as the poet observes, stand true for specific poems, but none describes his whole oeuvre. This problem of defining Jibanananda, as I see it, lies in the unusualness of his poetry. Jibanananda lived during difficult times. It was a time of severe political disturbances, the rise of the Left movement, unemployment, financial crisis, and so on. Premendra Mitra and Subhash Mukhopadhyay, Jibanananda’s contemporaries, had once even declared that they were poets of the ‘coolie and the lowly’ (Bose, 59) and ‘workers and peasants’ (Bose, 59) respectively. In terms of poetry writing European modernist poetry was a big influence on the poets of this generation, so much so that many of Jibanananda’s contemporaries were called Eliotesque poets. Jibanananda too had been at the receiving end of all this turmoil, but his uniqueness lies in dealing with the same situation in a different way. The world may have been chaotic, but the fecundity and correlative quality of Jibanananda’s mind, helped him create a unique world for himself even in the midst of all this turmoil. Hence most of his poems are neither rebellious nor angry nor dark, characteristics common to the poetry of many of his contemporaries. They are rather characterized by silence, tranquillity and a dreamlike ambience. This perhaps was the reason behind calling Jibanananda a surrealist by many. The Surrealists believed that the vagaries of the outside world could be overcome by invoking the powers of the mind to emancipate and escape into the world of amazing possibilities.
Arunima Ray commenting about his poetry said “Angst which is the hallmark of modernist poetry was present in most of the poets of the time, including Jibanananda Das. Its presence can be felt in the pervasive presence of the sense of fragmentation, meaninglessness and even death in their poetry. But Jibanananda’s poetry is not to be marked by any of these, neither in terms of celebration nor lamentation. Rather his antidote for all this is to celebrate life, to be bound in love with this pulsating life as such in nature that makes it possible to be one with one’s own subconsciousness. The mysteriously beautiful and distant places as well as the sensuous opulence of nature that his poetry draws on make this imaginative journey to be one with nature and hence with oneself possible and deeply enjoyable. In Banalata Sen we encounter such a ‘tired’ soul of a journeying poet looking for peace and oneness. He claims he gets it from ‘Banalata Sen’, and we have the unmistakable feel that Banalata Sen, the loved one, is emblematic of Bengal, Bengal’s nature, its deep solace and shelter, so to speak
“Buddhadeva Bose in talking of Jibanananda’s poetry rightly says, ‘He brings us no breath of heaven, nor blasts of hell, draws up no molten metal from the unfathomed mind; what he does is to intensify the everyday experience of our senses to a point where it seems transformed, transcendent, miraculous. He is important because he has brought a new note to our poetry, a new tone of feeling…’ Bose is right and perhapsthe most important aspect about Jibanananda’s perception of life is that in making the ordinary extraordinary and in making the animals of the lower kinds like owl, mouse, crow, duck, shalik, and so on, desirable and capable of bringing out the poetic inspiration in him, he unites his self with the ‘other’, or rather cognizes the ‘other’ almost in the postmodernist way. The philosophy that exudes from his poems is that of a wholesome living wherein human beings are placed at a necessary oneness with this other side of life considered as ‘irrational’, ‘subhuman’. That perhaps is also the reason why he appears to be a surrealist, one who has moved away from the dominance of the mind and the rational that more often than not divides and reached out to the subconscious where all is one in terms of the irresistibility of the force of life and living itself. His poetic self finds itself fulfilled in discovering this irresistible pulsating life and beauty in nature, in the nature of Bengal, and in being part of it.
Jibanananda's poem's were at the same time intellectual and heartfelt. And in the later stages he was more inclined towards the emotional aspects. His poems were personal yet went beyond the personal.
The writer is Assistant Editor of The Independent and can be contacted at: [email protected]
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Editor : M. Shamsur Rahman
Published by the Editor on behalf of Independent Publications Limited at Media Printers, 446/H, Tejgaon I/A, Dhaka-1215.
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Editor : M. Shamsur Rahman
Published by the Editor on behalf of Independent Publications Limited at Media Printers, 446/H, Tejgaon I/A, Dhaka-1215.
Editorial, News & Commercial Offices : Beximco Media Complex, 149-150 Tejgaon I/A, Dhaka-1208, Bangladesh. GPO Box No. 934, Dhaka-1000.