The Inferno of Bengali Poetry
Not
all are poets. A few are. It is now the year 2001. According to the census, the
population of the earth has crossed six billion. The proportion of men and
women on this planet stands nearly equal: three billion men, three billion
women. By an old adage, every one of those three billion men has, at least once
in his life, written a poem. Which is to say — all men are poets.
Perhaps the reader’s mind will at once raise a question: but all men in the world are not literate; how then could they possibly write poetry? And yet I have deliberately used the word written, though it is not in the strict sense of pen and paper. Even a man who cannot hold a pen may still create a poem. For truth is this: every human being is born with a heart, and where there is a heart there must also be poetry. No one can escape this. From the early rehearsals of life to its ripened fullness, this poetic pulse glimmers within every man at some hour or another.
Be that as it may, it is wiser not to dissect a proverb with the scalpel of literal logic, but to take from it its essence. In that sense, yes — all men are poets. But what of women? What role do they play in this matter of poetry? The ancient maxim itself offers the answer: every woman is the inspiration behind a man’s poem. Which finally means — all men are poets, all women are muses. Thus the saying tacitly acknowledges that poetry is never the work of one gender alone; man and woman are equally indispensable to its birth. A man cannot be a poet without a woman’s inspiration. And so, the hidden meaning unfolds: behind every poem there must be heart and love. Every human being alive today, directly or indirectly, is entangled in this mysterious act of poem-making.
But alas, sir, the proverb does not hold anymore! Such poets, such lives steeped in poetry — where do we find them today? “To call every man on earth a poet is false,” said one elderly poet with a sigh. “Perhaps once the world was indeed so — when everyone partook of poetry. But now? Everywhere I turn I see only faces seared with envy, eyes bloodshot with hatred, hearts crusted over with violence. And these are the people who shall write poems? Corporate culture has produced the very opposite of poetry. Without a heart, tell me, how can poetry be born? A poet must first be a good human being. And where are such good men today?”
Ah, I felt the pain in the old poet’s lament. Jibanananda himself had written:
"One night a hundred thousand villages of Bengal
Shone like painted motifs of alpana,
Like human eyes, wide and clear on the village path —
That day is gone, extinguished forever."
The cherished days of Bengali poetry are no more. Some feel it briefly during the state-sponsored annual poetry festivals; others sense it throughout the year. Among those six billion souls are two hundred and sixty million Bengalis. As a language of poetry, Bengali is by no means insignificant in the world’s literary forum. From Chandidas to Jibanananda Das, with Rabindranath, Michael, Satyendranath, Amiya Bhushan in between — Bengali poetry has held a rank within the world’s first ten. Yet, according to that old maxim, in the year 2000, could we even find twenty-six poets of such stature among twenty-six crores of Bengalis? Many say, barely one or two.
The gulf between a poet and a clerk has all but vanished. Today’s Bengali poets have become slaves of institutions. They squander their lives in factionalism and petty politics. These days, they say, one is not praised or chosen for the worth of one’s poetry, but for one’s party allegiance. At the poetry festival, the banner proclaims: “This event is dedicated to countless flood victims.” But in practice, the honorarium for poets has risen tenfold compared to last year! Last year, a poet received two hundred rupees for reading two poems. This year, though Bengal has faced catastrophic floods, poets are paid two thousand rupees for the same. They thundered long speeches on stage about the flood-ravaged poor — yet lacked the humanity to recite their poems without pay.
The question arises: why should the government spend such sums from the people’s coffers on poets whose works are read by not even one percent of the state’s population? Why should the state carry the burden of poets without conscience or compassion? A greater question still — are these people poets at all? In the evening they dress up, please the ministers, recite two third-rate verses, pocket two thousand rupees and a bouquet, and return home. In what sense do they differ from those who are not poets at all?
Alas, unfortunate land! Michael Madhusudan could not afford his own treatment here. Jibanananda Das’s poems were shunned by sycophantic editors of prestigious journals; his penury was even more brutal. And these poetry-festival poets? One becomes a poet by running errands for an editor, another by tutoring his children, another by supplying him liquor, another by sharing the bed of a senior poet, another by stamping letters at the party office, another by being some leader’s nephew, another by treating a minister’s kidney for free, another by holding the party flag. They arrive at festivals in luxury cars, flaunting their hobby-poems. Their only skill — servility and scribbling rubbish.
A French critic once wrote of Baudelaire: “Dante descended into Hell; Baudelaire emerged from it.” To descend into the inferno of the human soul, or to emerge triumphant from it — that wins both admiration and terror. But those who dwell permanently in that hell and play at poetry — to them belongs only contempt. And yet Bengali poets of today feel no shame; they are even proud of their infernal masquerade. For a place on the stage “dedicated” to flood victims, they conspire shamelessly in cliques. Senior poets and politicians lead this cabal. Thus, a man who has written only five insipid rhymes can still mount the podium and deliver lectures. Though the quantity of poems is no true measure of merit, the audience found themselves wondering why such impostors were permitted to stand there at all. If the president of a local committee may appear as a poet upon a state-sponsored stage, is it not natural for such questions to arise?
In truth, we cannot blame these impostors alone — just as in the old joke, the fault lies not only with the fool in costume, but with those who dressed him. Who gave them the stage? The businessman’s wife-poet, the old poet’s young mistress-poet, the minister’s lackey-poet, the government’s tame poet — a hundred such infest the festival. Some women, too, whose only claim to poetry is their intimacy with famous men. Worse still, poetry is being diluted into “poetry-songs” and declamation-performances. If Jibanananda lived today, he would surely kill himself once more.
To this are added the famous singers who crowd the poetry stage. Why should they be left behind? The elocutionists, too, are thriving. Public money pours down the drain, but those with connections seize the moment. One evening I was utterly bewildered: was this a poetry festival or a rap concert? And the greatest irony — the whole affair is funded by the government, by the people’s purse. Among the vast crowd, perhaps only seven were ordinary folk, people for whom poetry is not profession. Nandan is such a place that hundreds come daily to loiter. Add the winter tourists returning from the zoo and Victoria Memorial, and the crowd thickens. Those who would normally stand a while and move on now sit in chairs under the warm pandal and watch this carnival.
A self-styled poet, blessed more by fortune than by talent, recites his unbearable and hollow verses upon a government-sponsored stage. His words, draped in the guise of “modern poetry,” float meaninglessly into the winter evening air. A mother, passing by with her little child, pauses for a moment before the spectacle. The child, tugging gently at her sari, whispers, “Ma, what function is this?” The mother, with a faint smile of bewilderment, replies, “I cannot say, my son—perhaps a play, perhaps a music festival.” That innocent question and answer strip bare the truth of the state-run poetry festival.
In the past twenty years, many young poets — some of real promise — have quietly withdrawn from this hellish carnival. They could not stomach the bickering, the factionalism, the womanizing, the cliquishness that has become the Sunil Ganguly-style norm. Bengali poetry has been impoverished by their retreat. And yet, the inferno continues. When shall the true poets come again, to drag Bengali poetry out of hell like Baudelaire once did? Remember, it was on this very soil that a poet, burdened with unbearable torment, ended his own life. His name was Jibanananda. We dance upon his memory, yet forget his lines:
"Burying the sun within the endless dark of the heart,
Once more I longed for sleep."
Perhaps the reader’s mind will at once raise a question: but all men in the world are not literate; how then could they possibly write poetry? And yet I have deliberately used the word written, though it is not in the strict sense of pen and paper. Even a man who cannot hold a pen may still create a poem. For truth is this: every human being is born with a heart, and where there is a heart there must also be poetry. No one can escape this. From the early rehearsals of life to its ripened fullness, this poetic pulse glimmers within every man at some hour or another.
Be that as it may, it is wiser not to dissect a proverb with the scalpel of literal logic, but to take from it its essence. In that sense, yes — all men are poets. But what of women? What role do they play in this matter of poetry? The ancient maxim itself offers the answer: every woman is the inspiration behind a man’s poem. Which finally means — all men are poets, all women are muses. Thus the saying tacitly acknowledges that poetry is never the work of one gender alone; man and woman are equally indispensable to its birth. A man cannot be a poet without a woman’s inspiration. And so, the hidden meaning unfolds: behind every poem there must be heart and love. Every human being alive today, directly or indirectly, is entangled in this mysterious act of poem-making.
But alas, sir, the proverb does not hold anymore! Such poets, such lives steeped in poetry — where do we find them today? “To call every man on earth a poet is false,” said one elderly poet with a sigh. “Perhaps once the world was indeed so — when everyone partook of poetry. But now? Everywhere I turn I see only faces seared with envy, eyes bloodshot with hatred, hearts crusted over with violence. And these are the people who shall write poems? Corporate culture has produced the very opposite of poetry. Without a heart, tell me, how can poetry be born? A poet must first be a good human being. And where are such good men today?”
Ah, I felt the pain in the old poet’s lament. Jibanananda himself had written:
"One night a hundred thousand villages of Bengal
Shone like painted motifs of alpana,
Like human eyes, wide and clear on the village path —
That day is gone, extinguished forever."
The cherished days of Bengali poetry are no more. Some feel it briefly during the state-sponsored annual poetry festivals; others sense it throughout the year. Among those six billion souls are two hundred and sixty million Bengalis. As a language of poetry, Bengali is by no means insignificant in the world’s literary forum. From Chandidas to Jibanananda Das, with Rabindranath, Michael, Satyendranath, Amiya Bhushan in between — Bengali poetry has held a rank within the world’s first ten. Yet, according to that old maxim, in the year 2000, could we even find twenty-six poets of such stature among twenty-six crores of Bengalis? Many say, barely one or two.
The gulf between a poet and a clerk has all but vanished. Today’s Bengali poets have become slaves of institutions. They squander their lives in factionalism and petty politics. These days, they say, one is not praised or chosen for the worth of one’s poetry, but for one’s party allegiance. At the poetry festival, the banner proclaims: “This event is dedicated to countless flood victims.” But in practice, the honorarium for poets has risen tenfold compared to last year! Last year, a poet received two hundred rupees for reading two poems. This year, though Bengal has faced catastrophic floods, poets are paid two thousand rupees for the same. They thundered long speeches on stage about the flood-ravaged poor — yet lacked the humanity to recite their poems without pay.
The question arises: why should the government spend such sums from the people’s coffers on poets whose works are read by not even one percent of the state’s population? Why should the state carry the burden of poets without conscience or compassion? A greater question still — are these people poets at all? In the evening they dress up, please the ministers, recite two third-rate verses, pocket two thousand rupees and a bouquet, and return home. In what sense do they differ from those who are not poets at all?
Alas, unfortunate land! Michael Madhusudan could not afford his own treatment here. Jibanananda Das’s poems were shunned by sycophantic editors of prestigious journals; his penury was even more brutal. And these poetry-festival poets? One becomes a poet by running errands for an editor, another by tutoring his children, another by supplying him liquor, another by sharing the bed of a senior poet, another by stamping letters at the party office, another by being some leader’s nephew, another by treating a minister’s kidney for free, another by holding the party flag. They arrive at festivals in luxury cars, flaunting their hobby-poems. Their only skill — servility and scribbling rubbish.
A French critic once wrote of Baudelaire: “Dante descended into Hell; Baudelaire emerged from it.” To descend into the inferno of the human soul, or to emerge triumphant from it — that wins both admiration and terror. But those who dwell permanently in that hell and play at poetry — to them belongs only contempt. And yet Bengali poets of today feel no shame; they are even proud of their infernal masquerade. For a place on the stage “dedicated” to flood victims, they conspire shamelessly in cliques. Senior poets and politicians lead this cabal. Thus, a man who has written only five insipid rhymes can still mount the podium and deliver lectures. Though the quantity of poems is no true measure of merit, the audience found themselves wondering why such impostors were permitted to stand there at all. If the president of a local committee may appear as a poet upon a state-sponsored stage, is it not natural for such questions to arise?
In truth, we cannot blame these impostors alone — just as in the old joke, the fault lies not only with the fool in costume, but with those who dressed him. Who gave them the stage? The businessman’s wife-poet, the old poet’s young mistress-poet, the minister’s lackey-poet, the government’s tame poet — a hundred such infest the festival. Some women, too, whose only claim to poetry is their intimacy with famous men. Worse still, poetry is being diluted into “poetry-songs” and declamation-performances. If Jibanananda lived today, he would surely kill himself once more.
To this are added the famous singers who crowd the poetry stage. Why should they be left behind? The elocutionists, too, are thriving. Public money pours down the drain, but those with connections seize the moment. One evening I was utterly bewildered: was this a poetry festival or a rap concert? And the greatest irony — the whole affair is funded by the government, by the people’s purse. Among the vast crowd, perhaps only seven were ordinary folk, people for whom poetry is not profession. Nandan is such a place that hundreds come daily to loiter. Add the winter tourists returning from the zoo and Victoria Memorial, and the crowd thickens. Those who would normally stand a while and move on now sit in chairs under the warm pandal and watch this carnival.
A self-styled poet, blessed more by fortune than by talent, recites his unbearable and hollow verses upon a government-sponsored stage. His words, draped in the guise of “modern poetry,” float meaninglessly into the winter evening air. A mother, passing by with her little child, pauses for a moment before the spectacle. The child, tugging gently at her sari, whispers, “Ma, what function is this?” The mother, with a faint smile of bewilderment, replies, “I cannot say, my son—perhaps a play, perhaps a music festival.” That innocent question and answer strip bare the truth of the state-run poetry festival.
In the past twenty years, many young poets — some of real promise — have quietly withdrawn from this hellish carnival. They could not stomach the bickering, the factionalism, the womanizing, the cliquishness that has become the Sunil Ganguly-style norm. Bengali poetry has been impoverished by their retreat. And yet, the inferno continues. When shall the true poets come again, to drag Bengali poetry out of hell like Baudelaire once did? Remember, it was on this very soil that a poet, burdened with unbearable torment, ended his own life. His name was Jibanananda. We dance upon his memory, yet forget his lines:
"Burying the sun within the endless dark of the heart,
Once more I longed for sleep."
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