Post-Tagore Literary Trends in Bengal

There is a saving that Rabindranath Tagore was a product of the permanent settlement. This is certainly not true in the sense that had there been no permanent settlement there would have been no Tagore. It only means that the stable social conditions signified and supported by the settlement offered his genius a suitable base for operation. The country had settled down after the tumult of the fall of the Mughal rule. The last effort of pre-British India to assert its independence had collapsed with the suppression of the Indian Mutiny. British rule had by virtue of administrative efficiency restored law and order in the land and the people were disposed to accept it somewhat as a divine dispensation. In Bengal the permanent settlement not only consolidated land relations but put community life on an even keel. The feudal set-up of life which that settlement gave shape in accord with the requirements of foreign imperialism, presupposes dependence of human relations on a super power represented on one hand by the king, the feudal landlord and on the other, by the Church. It also commits excesses by its power and there are revolts against excesses. Apart from those however, it connotes a placid life-stream best symbolized by the unending murmur of bamboo-groves in the villages. It is but natural that under such a setting abiding values of life should come to the fore. In Bengal at this period there was revolt against tyranny and exploitation by indigo-planters, and literary expression of the revolt in Deenabandbu Mitra’s. Nil Darpan translated into English by the Rev. Long. There were also isolated revolts against British power notably under the influence of the Wahabi Rebellion, a religious crusade by Muslims. But all the while newly-found contact with the West had had a cultural impact which attained the dimension of a social and cultural renaissance. Henry Vivian Derozio, a teacher at Hindu College, was the young poet and evangelist of the renaissance, and Rammohan Roy was the harbinger of the social revolution that followed in its wake. Both wrought convulsions within Hindu society which reacted and even made them suffer but there was no turning the process of modernization of social life and thought. Stalwarts appeared in the process among others, Kesab Chandra Sen who instilled the spirit of nationalism into the current of renaissance, and Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar who made the wind of humanism blow into the orthodox Hindu society. Vivekananda, at this period, equated service of God with service of man and his social philosophy had far-reaching social and political results. Michael Madhusudan Dutt had in the meantime recalled to popular understanding, in inimitable blank verse, our national heritage as treasured in the epics, and political self-perception found first literary expression in Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and Poet Nabin Chandra Sen. Public life then was externally stable yet not static. It was involved inthe dialectics of thought-currents and cross-currents which found their voice in Rabindranath Tagore. The god of life was his mentor, not necessarily identifiable with God yet acceding to the increasing purpose of life. Human loves and fears, joys and ordeals revolve on the ground of the cycle of seasons. All found in Rabindranath massive expression, not even the subtlest mood or situation escaping divination and resolution by him in poetry and song. Not, however, only the perpetual thrills of life. Social situations were reflected in his novels and stories. Human and national problems received treatment at once comprehensive and minute in his essays and articles. His plays depicted intricate situations in society and personal and collective lives of man. And he responded to the very first stirs of national awakening byhis writings and kept pace with the nation’s march to freedom as long as he lived. His universal mind scented danger of isolation from the West in the non-cooperation movement but did not fail to assess the epic significance of Mahatma Gandhi’s emergence as the leader of India’s millions. His fears were in due course belied. He maintained organic contact with the national liberation movement and died six years before attainment of independence. Shortly before his death he issued his political testament in a famous essay: The Crisis of Civilization.

Powerful poets appeared in Bengal in his wake: Mohitlal Majumdar and Satyendranath Dutt among them, but there were others too. Satyendranath Dutt, though junior to Tagore, died prematurely long before the Master who addressed a moving elegy to him. They were also evangelists of patriotism. Kazl Nazrul Islam, however, struck a path of his own. He was a rebel poet compromising in his nationalism and not bound by non-violence in his search for freedom. He was an amalgam of the many streams of Bengali thought and culture and created a synthetic current of them all in endless poetry and song. He was struck down by mental illness while barely forty, and still lives, the great potentialities of his genius tragically unfulfilled. Jasimuddin was another distinctive poet who introduced village themes into Bengali poetry with appropriate idiom and diction, and was widely appreciated. He is now in Eastern Pakistan. Two somewhat senior poets were late Jatindranath Bagchi who harked to national history and later a Jatindranath Sen Gupta who voiced in his poetry the personal life-current involved in national life. About a decade junior to Tagore, Saratchandra Chatterjee pioneered a batch of novelists and story-writers who probed the working of human emotions in reaction to social stresses and tensions Bibhuti Bhushan Banerjee, the far-famed author of Pather Panchali (Ballad of the Road) and other scintillating novels, was an outstanding member of this group.

The first signs of departure from Tagore were given, even while he was still living, by a group of writers centering round a monthly magazine called Kallol; Kali Kalam and Pragati, the latter published from Dacca, were ancillary to Kallal. This group of poets and story-writers pretended to ultra-modernity in its attempt identification with the fallen and mean in society and disregard of accepted norms of what should be shunned as obscene. In its youthful enthusiasm it talked of steering clear and going beyond Tagore. There was a furore for the time being; Rabindranath himself joined the controversy and almost settled it by writing in modern style and setting a standard of decency. The writers of this group have since mellowed down, some of them have achieved renown and received the Sahitya Akademi prize for literature. A recipient of many awards is the comparatively older but still vigorous Tarasankar Banerjee who has, in a large number of novels and stories, depicted the transition of his people from declining feudalism to advent of democracy and industrialization. His personal identification with the freedom movement and deep insight into the joys, stresses and tensions generated by social forces released by national liberation, have placed him in the pinnacle of ability to portray his age for the benefit of the ages. Manik Bandopadhyay has died early but has left brilliant portrayals of the common man’s life. Other contemporary writers have concerned themselves with the stresses and tensions of middle class life but some of them ventured into the alleys of lives of the mine-workers and even reached unto creatures that once were men. Charuchandra Chakravarti who writes under the pen-name “Jarasandha” has made a special mark by translating his experiences as a jail official into a number of vivacious novels and stories depicting the impact of society on lives of individuals. In poetry Sudhindranath Dutt and Jibanananda Das are the most prominent of the period closely following Tagore. Both are history-conscious but while Das projects himself as the eternal pilgrim of history, Dutt is tormented by the agonies of his age. The personal quest of both is oriented unto love and nature.

This was, roughly speaking, the position at which Bengali literature rested at the time of winning of national independence. Trends since then have varied from the political to the anti-political–from efforts at what is called proletarian literature to literature mirroring the vacuum created by the end of the idealism which accompanied the freedom movement. These two trends have little in common and their votaries are at loggerheads with each other. The so-called proletarian writers are sprung from the middle class and their proletarianism is very rarely first-hand. Yet they swear and by political struggle and call the uncommitted writers escapist and their literature a literature of decadence. The latter write mainly of frustration in society and in the individual. Their novels and short stories paint stresses and tensions of society and the impact of such stresses and tensions on individual lives often causes entanglements of love and sex, renewing the old problem of obscenity and literature. Abstract poetry and painting are an offshoot of this situation. Proletarian poetry is political and struggle-oriented. These varieties of modern literature have, however, rarely fulfilled the supreme criterion by which they could be recognized as art. \

But the classical form is not obsolete yet. Kalipada Bhattacharya has ventured to write the stories of Gandhi’s life. Azad Hind Fouz, the Chittagong Armoury Raid and allied subjects in the form of epics much in the style of Ramayana and Mahabharata. Epics have a way of taking liberties with rhyme and metre; and Bhattacharya’s are no exception. But dimensions are massive, treatlment of subjects exhaustive, and the effort as a whole is prodigious, Though, necessarily, modernists would not look at them, discerning critics have accepted these epics as a faithful record of soul-stirring events of one of the most significant periods of history and well calculated to stand the test of time.