9

The Art of Despair

The Sense of the City in Modern Bengali Poetry

It is commonly acknowledged in historical literature that modernity, along with many other new things—in politics, economic life, social behaviour—brings a distinct aesthetic sensibility. Usually, modernity introduces a far-ranging and fundamental artistic transvaluation of objects. Things, images, attitudes, feelings which were valued earlier are forgotten or treated with indifference, new objects and orientations emerge to occupy the centre of artistic attention. This change of aesthetic sensibility is shown most graphically in thinking aesthetically about the city. I shall attempt a brief historical analysis of how the embarrassment about the city, the place which was the theatre of the most immediate and intense experience of modernity, but which seemed to defy aestheticization, captures this more general process in a microcosm.

Although I hope this illustrates a more general trend in aesthetic reflection, this is a study of a particular case. First, it is only about Bengali literature, not other varieties: secondly, it is about only one problem which troubled Bengali literatures among many other kinds of problems. But a discussion of this theme, and comparison with other regional literatures may show us whether we can make some general points about the aesthetic challenges of modernity. My discussion will focus only on poetry, which introduces a further peculiarity, as the specificities of the modern poetic form allow the aesthetic problems to be framed in peculiar ways. Literary forms other than poetry, like the short story, but particularly the novel, also engaged in sustained and intricate aesthetic explorations of city life. Some formal peculiarities of the novel made it a particularly good instrument for this purpose—its detailed descriptive accounts of space and dense networks of social relations into which characters were inserted. Poetry did not have that formal advantage of the descriptive, and its sense of the city had to be communicated through more abstract, indirect and condensed imagery. Yet, in terms of its different formal language, modern poetry engaged with the city as an aesthetic problem. After a short account of the description of the city in traditional literature, I shall focus on some well-known works of two utterly different poetic voices: Tagore and Jibanananda Das, because the point I wish to make comes out most sharply through this contrast. What remained a problem with Tagore was given a kind of solution by Jibanananda. That is why the fame of the latter has steadily increased in poetry after his rather neglected life, and his death.

To link this particular subject with the general theme of saundarya, I would like to make a few general points. To frame the general question around the relation of saundarya and modernity is to presuppose a modern aesthetic point of view. The general aesthetic transformation in modern times centres on two fundamental shifts of principle. The most fundamental and comprehensive change in aesthetic thinking was the general shift from an aesthetics centred on the organizing concept of rasa to one of saundarya. This change also altered some of the most fundamental orientations that audiences and consumers of art had towards artistic creation. The rasa theory offered an aesthetics of mediation/distanciation, based on the essential distinction in that theory between bhava and rasa, the emotions felt by actual subjects in the actual world, and the emotional life of those subjects, drawn from the fictional-artistic world, in which even the artistic depiction of something fearful produces in the audience, not an emotion of fear, but of a complex enjoyment. The influence of modern aesthetic thinking replaced this basic attitude with one in which identification—the replication and communication of states of mind from the artist to the receiver becomes central. One of the further implications of this change was the relative emphasis placed in these two aesthetics on the aspect of creation: the state of the author’s mind, his artistic intentionality, the nature of the text and its inherent craft, and the aspect of reception; the historically shifting meanings of words through which readers could try to grasp the textual meaning, their emotional cultivation, their relation to the text. Broadly, the shift from the rasa aesthetics to saundarya aesthetics altered how aestheticians and artists regarded these two essential components of the relations of meaning in art—the authorial production, the textuality of the text itself, and the receivers’ meaning.

In the context of Bengali literary aesthetics, this historical change also meant a sharp narrowing down of the boundaries of what was considered ‘literary’, and the shift resulted in a constriction of the far more expansive literary definitions of rasa literature. Historically, this meant, at least for a time, that only those things which could be regarded as beautiful by a fairly strict definition could be considered a fit subject for literary writing; and this meant that a whole range of themes which were traditionally considered essential elements of the literary imagination were disqualified from entry into literature’s new and more sacral territory. I believe that this equation of literary art with beauty in the narrow sense produced a crisis of sorts in writing about the city. To put it schematically, if literature could speak only about beauty, and the city, especially the teeming, disorderly, ungainly modern city of Calcutta, was not by any definition a beautiful theme, it became nearly impossible to include that in the ambit of modern literature. As the new writers and, increasingly, the new readers experienced the city as their most immediate and powerful life world, this meant that literature, at least poetry—the part of literature most exclusively deicated to the celebration of the beautiful—could not speak about a most essential modern experience, at least without great embarrassment. I wish to show through the examples of Tagore and Jibanananda Das how this ‘problem’ was first created, and then resolved.

It must be mentioned however that the rasa aesthetics that was discarded by modern writers in favour of saundarya had become degraded. The magnificent edifice of traditional rasa theory had become, by the eighteenth century, only an arcanely scholastic subject. The actual literary productions of medieval Bengali, from the rise of the mangalkavyas to the eclectic literary tastes of the eighteenth century, did not demonstrate either great complexity or aesthetic sophistication: their basis was a vulgar and degraded aesthetics which a modern Western-derived literary taste could undermine with comparative case. Second, the Bengali reception of European aesthetics was peculiar in one respect. The great tradition of European aesthetics, drawn from its Aristotelian source, was not a limited and restrictive theory focused entirely on beauty in the narrow sense. European aesthetic thought had from its very early stages supplemented the idea of beauty with ‘the sublime’.¹ In modern aesthetic thinking, in Burke, Kant, and Stendhal, the reflection on the place of the sublime in art and its representations of suffering avoided a narrow and impoverishing aestheticization. Curiously, in the Bengali reception of European aesthetics, it was only beauty that was emphasized, which made the problems of the artistic depiction of suffering, or the abundance of evil in the modern world, an especially acute problem.

To follow the historical movement of beauty as an aesthetic concept, let me start with a brief discussion of an eighteenth-century text. Bharatchandra’s Vidyasundar, because the scene of the narrative action is the medieval city of Barddhaman, and this will give us a clear example of how an historically existing city is portrayed in a work of poetic fiction. In fact, the temporal distance of this text from the modern Bengali poetry of Tagore is of little more than a century. Yet within these hundred years a whole new social world of colonial modernity had emerged, reflected in a wholly new aesthetic language of literary art Vidyasundar is unmistakably a text of the pre-modern literary world,² linked in its literary memory, its compositional skills, its conception of what makes for literary enchantment, to the great traditions of Sanskrit poetry and the medieval Bengali mangalkavyas. This can be seen clearly through an analysis of three themes in the text which we can then replay in the cases of Tagore and Jibanananda: the treatment of the city, the treatment of love, and the treatment of literature as well as its central question—what does it offer to people who read it?

The Pre-modern City: Despair and Transcendence in Vidyasundar

How does the Vidyasundar answer these three questions? The text, generally acknowledged as Bharatchandra’s masterpiece, uses a narrative widely known in various regional literatures of India, north and south, straddling the divide between the Sanskrit and the vernacular. Even a Persian version apparently existed. Hundreds of other accounts of Vidyasundar were composed, embellishing the story in various ways. But Bharatchandra’s retelling contains some strikingly significant features which could not appear without deliberate authorial artifice. The story is about the vow taken by Vidya, the beautiful princess of Barddhaman, that she will only consent to marry a man who gets the better of her in a literary contest. Princes were generally not known for intellectual subtlety, and, not surprisingly, a long line of hopeful suitors failed. This led to dark forebodings that the most beautiful woman of the kingdom, cursed by her intelligence, might because of her rash resolve remain unwed and sexually unfulfilled. Interestingly, there is a polyvalence in the depiction of Vidya’s character. It can be read as the view that only the acquisition of intellect makes a woman perfect; but it is equally plausible to see this craving for knowledge in a woman—a rare occurrence in that society—as a curse which can be overcome only by divine intervention.

Happily, in the muscular military world of princely life, a rare exception is Sundar, the prince of Kanchi, who travels to Barddhaman to woo Vidya. Briefly, he searches out Vidya through an intermediary, overcomes her in a private contest of literary excellence, is accepted as her lover, makes a tunnel into the royal palace, and starts seeing her. Vidya becomes pregnant, and after a search by a frantic kotwal, Sundar is caught in Vidya’s apartments and sentenced to death. On his way to the cremation ground for execution, Sundar recites verses composed in Sanskrit, apparently recalling Vidya’s beauty and their raptures in love. Bharatchandra exhibits great ingenuity at this point. The verses that Sundar recites are not original; he simply appropriates conventionally well-known verses of a famous Sanskrit text of shringar poetry, the Caurapancasat or Caurapancasika. What saves this audacious move from the charge of plagiarism was an astonishing demonstration of technical virtuosity as a semanticist. Bharatchandra enjoyed a great, and on this evidence a deserved, reputation for his skill in the alamkara of vyajastuti (false or double-entendre praise). By clever use of semantic resolution (anvyaya) of the sentences he demonstrates that each verse can be interpreted in two ways. One meaning of the verse, the conventional reading, refers to Vidya and only contains erotic remembrance; the other refers to the goddess Kali and is a devotee’s call of distress. Bharatchandra does not compose new verses, but utterly new meanings, supporting his reputation for the semantic-poetic virtuosity so highly valued by one strand of the Sanskrit kavya tradition. Moved by the intensity of his devotion (and his semantic erudition), the goddess acts entirely according to the conventions of mangalkavya, delivers the hero, and the lovers are reunited, now not in a furtive or transgressive enjoyment of their love but in a restful and sanctioned state.

This is an instance of narrative of reversal very common in both Sanskrit and Bengali poetry. For the purposes of our discussion, I am interested in three aspects of the text that provide us with a contrast to the treatment of similar themes in the modern period. These are: the images of the city as a social space; the thinking about love and intimacy; and the underlying sense of the literary—what makes for literary enjoyment or rasa-nishpattih.

Schematically, in medieval literature too, the city is differentiated from the countryside, but not by any distinctive social principle. Historians have pointed out that there were mainly two types of pre-modern cities—cities centred around the seats of deities, or of administration. Both were crowded, full of people, particularly of a transiting flow of populations. The crowding of the space offered opportunities to lovers for furtive signs of recognition, fleeting contacts, opportunities exploited by Sundar in his initial acquaintance with Vidya. Similar opportunities for charm and recognition are encountered in Urdu or Persian poetry as well, where the city, despite its many prohibitions and denials, precisely because of its size, offers opportunities of recognition. But these are mere breaks in the routine of a repressive, hierarchical, strictly controlled life. The traditional city is not marked by either of its two major characteristics in modern times: its democracy and its anonymity. It is not a space of equality because it is not a space of anonymity. In fact, as modern novels and narratives show, there is something insubstantial and fragile even about the equality of the early modern Indian city. People do treat each other with a kind of formal equality, the elementary principle of democracy. Usually, this equality is narratively short-lived: it crumbles very quickly as people get to know each other more fully as social subjects, and recognize that they are divided by caste, class, community, gender, the accidental animosities between families, etc. Still, in early modern narratives the city is an equalizing space: it regularly transforms individual characters in both high artistic Bengali novels and popular films. It can be a threatening space to those who fear its equalizing power, and liberating for those who welcome and enjoy its freedom, and at least a formal equality.

Bharatchandra’s city is nothing like this. In terms of love and intimacy, again, Bharatchandra’s literary aesthetics are firmly anchored in traditional designs. Here is an obvious process of literary individuation without which no narrative can function—the two main subjects of the narrative are differentiated from others in the background by their eminence in beauty and intellect, and their extraordinary attraction towards each other. But they are not individuated as ordinary but peculiar individuals, typical of the modern novel and poetry. Finally, their intimacy is, despite their initial games of intellect, essentially a sexual rapture.

The space of the city in Vidyasundar remains pre-modern because it is not disenchanted. It is a space where all kinds of extraordinary and supernatural events take place. The affection that develops between Vidya and Sundar is extraordinary, just as are the devices used in the narrative. It is as if these are quite common and credible occurrences—Sundar getting access to the royal household, his digging the tunnel, and finally and climactically his deliverance in the cremation ground by a miracle worked by the goddess. Bharatchandra’s text does not give us an impression that townspeople are different kinds of individuals, with a distinct form of life and sociality, or that their lives produce different sorts of crises and require special solutions in literary art.

Within a century of the composition of Vidyasundar, Bengali society began an extraordinarily rapid transformation through the entry of colonial power. By the end of the eighteenth century the colonial city of Calcutta had emerged as a central theme in the spatial imaginaire of Bengali literature. From early on, two strands of literary and metaphorical thinking about space are clearly discernible. One strand sees the city as being increasingly central to the new social experience of modernity. But the early literary probings of this new social space are understandably cautious. The literary sense of this new city is deeply ambivalent, for obvious reasons. The Calcutta of the early nineteenth century is a place of new ambitions and dreams; but even these dreams are disorienting, because they are not historically familiar dreams, or conventionally cherished through the social grammar of desires. Opportunities of an utterly new type open up, with attendant risks, to people who combine the characteristics of economic opportunists and moral adventurers. It is hardly surprising that literature first approaches this new social space and its unfamiliar sociability through a form peculiarly suited to express this ambivalence. This strange combination of curiosity and reproach, an emerging sense that there might be possibilities of unforeseen liberation, is mixed with the apprehension that in its search deeply cherished social values might be sacrificed. The moral ambivalence towards Calcutta is appropriately expressed in the formal ambivalence of humour.

Kaliprasanna Sinha, who organized a full translation of the Mahabharata, was, alongside this high serious engagement with Sanskritic tradition, probing Calcutta’s ambiguous morality through a series of sketches. Hutom Pencar Naksa, a series of fiercely critical sketches of the successful, enterprising, avaricious, profligate, and degenerate Calcutta elite became one of the first triumphs of modern Bengali literature. I believe this was primarily because it captured with perfection this duality of attitude of the modern Bengali towards Calcutta and its excesses. The sketches make fun of the new elite’s taste for exaggeration, entirely useless consumption, formation of pointless cliques around landowning magnates, and their sexual profligacy from an interestingly complex point of view. In one sense, it is the view of those who were excluded from this unexpected, unaccountable prosperity of a group of people who appeared to be entirely accidental beneficiaries of colonial rule. No particular achievement, except a fortuitous proximity to powerful British officials, entitled them to this entirely undeserving eminence. This line of thought was carried on relentlessly and powerfully in Bankim’s famous satire about the irresistible rise of mediocrity in the colonial society of Calcutta, Muchiram Guder Jivancharit. However, the writers of humorous sketches, in the case of both Kaliprasanna and Bankim, show nothing of the literary awkwardness of the lower orders: they make fluent use of the high Sanskritic techniques of vyanga and vyajastuti; they are among the foremost authors who are experimenting with a new, powerful, racy, Bengali idiom.

A second strand of writing about Calcutta is less positive about its promise. It looks at Calcutta as a space of degeneration, as a city which spoils the lives of both those with wealth and those without. The excessively rich, who benefited from their connection with the rising colonial power, but who cannot as yet claim any particular distinction, are usually spoiled precisely by their gift of fortune. Unearned wealth made them prone to conspicuous consumption, and an undirected aimlessness in their lives, leading often to a life of complete idleness and degeneracy. On the other side of the divide, Calcutta showed the despairing existence of the poor and an unusually large class of dependants who lived a life of unspecified employment as unctuous, servile assistants of this newly opulent elite. A second strand of early modern Bengali literature thus views Calcutta through eyes of unrelieved moral darkness, as a space in which society seems to be sliding into a relentless logic of modernist degeneration.

After the rise of colonialism, an additional element came into this literary reflection on Calcutta. As the colonial capital of India, Calcutta always connects the Indian/Bengali elite’s power with its subservience to British rule. Calcutta’s glory as a city thus remains not the glory of the Bengalis, but of someone else, a strangely heteronomous eminence. Thus, celebrations of Calcutta have a strangely dual character, sometimes not deliberately portrayed with satirical intent. It was a celebration of both the glory of the Bengalis and, as Bankim’s Kamalakanta would immediately add, of their unrelieved servility to their colonial masters.³ The sense of power, of unworried sovereignty over a spatial and material world that comes with the assurance of unchallenged political and commercial power, is never found in early modern writings about Calcutta as a city. It is always a space in which the Bengali upper class lacks sovereignty; even when it parades its unrestricted supremacy over the surrounding world, this is marred or threatened by reminders of its subservience. There never was a literature showing a straightforward celebration of Calcutta and the human existence of it.

Calcutta as a Space of Freedom

However, sociological and cultural changes were undeniably taking place which, despite the reluctance of the more artistic writers, found their way into literary descriptions of the common world. However much writers might deplore the degeneration of morals in the colonial city, their narratives illustrate some sociological truisms. Characters in the narratives seek and find both adventure and freedom in Calcutta, away from the monotonous and repressive routines of everyday life in the countryside. Bankim’s novels already reveal this trend, in which the lawyers and modern professionals live in Calcutta, in ways that are socially different from the conventions of the countryside. Some of these sociological changes are reflected more graphically in relatively pedestrian narrativisation. Authors of elevated artistic texts like Bankim naturally work with highly deliberate narrative intent, and their fictional art, instead of passively reflecting ordinary social life, is deeply driven by those artistic interests. ‘Little texts’ of literature—the relatively commonplace narratives by less celebrated and talented writers—constitute a much better mirror of social change, precisely because of the lack of an overriding high artistic design. In such narratives, over time, Calcutta comes to achieve a different kind of status as a space of freedom and anonymity. Certainly, it contained the surprising disorientation of anonymity in a big city of people used to the dense intimacy of rural life. Characters, of course, routinely complain about the city’s heartlessness, especially when they are newcomers. They feel lost and baffled. But they usually recover from these difficulties fairly quickly by making new contacts in the city, which, in novelistic stories, they often turn into new relations of pretended kinship.⁴ Recurrently, their attitude towards the city changes when they meet someone they can love, usually someone they could not have in principle met in the restrictive social order of village life. Through these endless romances in early Bengali novels and stories, a slow rise to self-awareness is the most repetitive theme; these characters fall in love, enter into unexpected social conflict, and are forced to consider the relations around themselves with a new kind of critical intelligence. This leads to the process of their ‘finding themselves’, realizing who they are, or, more significantly, they see the importance of finding an ideal which they then wish to realise in their lives: finding themselves not in the sense of discovering an immanent self, but fashioning their selves through the transformative conflict of experience.⁵

This way of looking at Calcutta gradually became routine in novels, precisely because novels always contain a more expanded sociology of societies than other forms of literature. Eventually, this rhetoric of Calcutta spread from novels into films, as films depended initially very heavily for their narrative material and dialogue on novels and stories. It became conventional in Bengali story-telling in the novelistic or filmic form for main characters, usually male, to leave an idyllic village and find their way to Calcutta’s mixture of bafflement and allure. Heroes regularly make their homes in the crowded city, unaccountably disregarding greater social position and the comforts of the life of a rural gentry, losing their hearts to pert city girls. They accept life in disorderly, cramped rooms, in a world of strangers, which their more innocent rural relatives find impossible to understand. The general line in this kind of narrative is that Calcutta, and the modern city in general, corrupts people by its freedom. The lure of a life free from restraints keeps people tied to the city. Grudgingly, the novelistic genres nevertheless acknowledge the status of Calcutta as a space of freedom.

My main argument, however, deals with a different branch of literary writing—modern poetry. While novels and stories, which have to offer sketchy but credible sociologies, celebrated Calcutta as a space of freedom, this was not reflected in the parallel development of the poetic reflection on the city. The growth of modern poetry can be sub-periodized into several stages; and although the poetry written by Michael Madhusudan Dutt or Hemchandra Bandyopadhyay or Navinchandra Sen represents modern poetry in comparison to Bharatchandra, they still constitute an early modern phase. There is clearly a further break with that tradition of modern poetic mentality in the work of later writers like Biharilal Chakrabarty, culminating in Tagore. The new modern poetry dispenses with the earlier generations’ fascination with narrative or dramatic poetry, which rely for their interest on an underlying mythical or historical story.⁶ The exploration and expression of emotions and their ever-changing shades, the principal task of modern lyrical poetry, is in its infancy. Early Bengali poetry is still troubled by an embarrassment about emotions. In the hands of more talented poets, as with Madhusudan, the exploration of emotions occurs through the exposition of character of the major protagonists. Still, the entirely free-standing elaboration of emotional states is relatively rare. By the time we reach Tagore’s early poetry, this characteristically modern theme is firmly established in Bengali writing, and the task of modern poetry is seen to be the exploration and adequate expression of emotional life. Since city life was universally acknowledged to be new and different from conventional rural existence, and gave rise to a new structure of emotions, literary audiences naturally looked to poetry for an interpretation of urban emotions.

I do not wish here to enter the tricky problem of the strange and enigmatic character of the modernity of Tagore’s writing. It is a vast and complex question. Only a few points are relevant for our discussion of poetic representation of city life.

Tagore lived an urban life. His literary triumphs required an educated, literarily sophisticated audience which was mainly resident in Calcutta. The religious context of his life was furnished by an upper-class Brahmo community which was also primarily based in the city. At the same time, he spent a great deal of time and enterprise in building up his idyllic rural enclave at Santiniketan—an ideal, almost utopian combination of the moral values of modernity and closeness to nature in the unspoilt countryside of Birbhum. It is also amply recorded that he felt suffocated in Calcutta, both by its material environment and its institutional entanglements, and at the first opportunity went to live in his boat in Shilaidaha, in the green riverine world of eastern Bengal.

Not surprisingly, this ambivalence is deeply reflected in his art. All his life, he struggled with Calcutta as an aesthetic problem. He wrote repeatedly on Calcutta, in a great variety of literary forms; and in this variety of I find an indecision of forms, as if he is constantly experimenting with forms and moods to make new poetic approaches to the subject of Calcutta, trying to capture the poetic essence of the city but never quite finding it. Since his novels generally explore modern lives and its emotional complexities, they are almost invariably set in Calcutta, and dominated by the inner lives of urban characters. But his poetry, universally admitted to be the centre of his art, shows a very different relation to Calcutta. A comprehensive analysis of his poetic sense of the city would have to treat not merely poems which are formally directed at the city, but also the teeming, ubiquitous references to an urban world in poetry which looks inattentively at the city. That cannot be attempted here: I shall refer only to those poems which are directly about Calcutta as a subject.

Some of his poems make slightly humorous essays into the subject, like the famous dream of a child in which Calcutta, like an impossibly lugubrious train, is moving forward in a great comic confusion of collisions and displacements.⁷ I wish to draw attention mainly to two poems, of more serious intent, written at widely different points of his life. The first is called ‘Nagarsangit’, literally a song of the city. The tone of the song is primarily one of lament—for the loss of that green sward of nature with the deep blue borders of a horizon, an earth which is called sundar and shubha, an earth marked by beauty and an auspicious wholeness.

 

Kotha gela sei mahan santa nava nirmal syamalkanta

Ujjavalanil vasanpranta sundar subha dharani! (241)

 

This quiet blue earth has been replaced by a world of inauspicious, unnatural greed and acquisition marked by its physical semiosis.⁸

 

kata na artha kata anartha avil karichhe svarga martya

tapta-tapan dhuli avarta uthhichhe sunya akuli.

 

The heated eddies of dust soiling the sky and the earth.⁹

 

Tagore’s lines play wonderfully on the meanings of artha (money) and anartha (generally bad things; meaningless, evil deeds), etymological antonyms, subtly suggesting a connection between the abundance/excess of wealth and the corresponding abundance of evil in the modern city. All the figures of choking, depression, dying out, and enervation occur with a deadening repetitiveness. An astonishing analysis of human effort at the heart of the modern city follows: everything is momentary, fragmented, disconnected, leaving no trace behind, coming together a moment, at the next going asunder. Such a life of enterprise and instability produces a world of strong and contradictory emotions: pitiful weeping, hard unfeeling laughter, unlimited arrogance, obsequious servility, desperate effort, a cruel commentary on what it has achieved—all running in vast crowds. At the centre of this constantly shifting, unstable, dynamic world, Tagore has no doubt, lies the enticement of vast wealth.¹⁰ This vast enterprise of commerce is seen by him—in a characteristic transposition of an ancient trope into a modern context—as a vast sacrificial fire-bowl (vipul yagnakunda); but this is the magic bowl of fire which attracts creatures from the world around to run towards it and seek cremation. Men and women break up the urns of their own life, decanting their life-blood into it. All it’s devotees circle around it, addicted to this golden-coloured death, bringing their bones and their blood to its great sacrifice. The sacrifice itself, the rapacious enterprise of commerce, ‘is growing into leaping uncontainable tongues of flame, blackening every corner of the sky with a terrible noise, obscures the sun and the moon with a burning enveloping the earth. The vast legions of the wind circle those flames and roam uncontented breathing its fiery breath’ (242).

To Tagore its destructive consequences are clear, but its strange attraction for its victims is morbidly fascinating: ‘As if desperate insects watch this vast conflagration, they wish to sever their own limbs and cut their own veins [for sacrifice]’ (242). The creation of the vast commercial world, with the modern city at its centre, is obviously influenced by both romantic and socialist visions, and is similar to descriptions of the European city in the young Marx and Engels, and indeed Tocqueville. What is remarkable is the persistence with which the poem, despite the constrictions of verse form, elaborates the central strangeness of the spectacle: it is not its likeness to a vast conflagration of destroyed lives that is remarkable in his eyes, but the attraction it exerts on human beings. They come to the conflagration of their own, compelled by an irresistible desire for wealth and a debased utopia.

At the mid-point of the poem, there is suddenly a turn of the poetic voice: ‘O city, today I shall drink the overflowing draught of your foaming wine, and I shall forget myself’ (242). In what follows, Tagore presents an astonishingly precise portrayal of the joys of modern life symbolized by the city. A careful and detailed reading of his images reveals a characteristic way of thinking about the city and its attractions. The city is called the stony-hearted nurse of humanity who offers the joys of sleepless intoxicated nights.

 

Ghurnacakra janatasamgha bandhanhin maha-asanga

Tari majhe ami kariba bhanga apan gopan svapane

Ksudra santi kariba tuccha padiba nimne cadiba ucca

Dhariba dhumraketur puccha bahu badaiba tapane …

Hate tuli laba vijaybadya ami asanta, ami abadhya

Jaha kichhe acche ati asadhya tahare dhariba sabale

Ami nirmam, ami nrsamsa sabete basaba nijer amsa

Paramukh hate kariya bhramsa tuliba apan kabale

Manate janiba sakal prthvi amari caran-asan-bhitti

Rajar rajya dasyuvrtti kono bhed nai ubhaye …

Naba naba ksudha natun trsna, nitya nutan karmanistha

Jibangranthe nutan prstha ultiya jaba tvarite …

Tabe dhali dao kebalmatra ducari divas, ducari ratra,

Purna kariya jivanparta janasamghatmadira.

 

I shall break into pieces my secret dream of wholeness and peace in this whirlwind of humanity, this great gathering of men without ties. I shall disdain the small life of peace, ride high and fall down, I shall grasp the comet’s tail, stretch my arm toward the sun itself. I’ll pick up the drums of victory, I shall be unquiet, insubordinate, I will grasp with all my strength whatever is unattainable. I’ll learn to be pitiless, cruel, I’ll take a share in everything, I will snatch things from others’ mouths and bring them in my grasp. I’ll know in my heart of hearts that the entire world is merely the pedestal of my self; there is no difference between the rule of kings and the profession of robbers. I’ll feel constantly new thirsts, constantly new aspirations; I’ll turn the pages of my life as fast as I can … Then pour, for just a few days and nights, filling the cup of my life with this wine of human conflict.

 

There has been comparatively little research on the detailed traces of intellectual influence which can be gleaned from Tagore’s writing; but the sources of this critique are, in broad terms, quite apparent. The Romantic rejection of a thrusting and incessant industrial enterprise which vandalizes nature and its sustenance is combined with a nearly socialist distaste for extractive greed—what he was to characterize in his drama, Raktakarabi, as the deplorable shift from an agricultural to an extractive civilization (karsnajivilakarsanjivi sabhyata), but these are interlaced with ideas drawn from a pastoralist interpretation of Upanishadic advice on a life of restraint and non-acquisitiveness. But some of the characterizations are startlingly close to the concerns of early modern social theory: bandhanhin maha-asanga is a strange phrase that comes very close to ‘unsocial sociability’—a great conglomeration of people who have no feeling of attachment and relate to each other only instrumentally. It shatters and leaves behind his secret dreams of happiness and contentment; but the images solve the mystery of modernity’s powerful enchantment. It is in his powerful image, a firestorm of unrestrained desire for power and acquisition, an extension of the self by relentlessly attaching everything within its grasp. The conquest of things is its only insatiable happiness.

This worship of success through conflict comes close to another celebrated description of human nature from early modern European theory: ‘to constantly outgo the next before is felicity, to be outgone by others is misery, to forsake the course is to die.’ But Tagore realizes with wonder that there is something deeply attractive in this world of frenetic effort, that the swarms of human insects fly, driven by a strange fatal desire towards this great fire, though in his view it leads to an addiction, a ‘death the colour of gold’. The poem also captures the contradiction at the heart of modern life—it is based on a pitiless search for what we desire, with all the means within our grasp, but it is also a life that is transformed by the enchantment of the new—it forces human beings not merely to satisfy their desires but to invent a new hunger, a new thirst (‘nava nava ksudha, nutan trsna’). The final resolution of the poem is the decision to take part in this life only partially (just for a few days and nights—‘kevalmatra duchari divas ratra’), to drink its frothy brew for only a few days because it is, ultimately, an unfulfilling form of life.

It is the first section of the poem, which expresses surprise at arriving at the scene of modern existence from a rural idyll, that states a deep conviction of Tagore’s artistic vision. The poem is significant because it presents an essential connection, in Tagore’s aesthetic thinking, of the link between sundar and shubha (or mangal)—between the beautiful and the good.¹¹ This of course is not a peculiar or idiosyncratic view. It constitutes a fundamental question of many types of aesthetic thinking, and figures prominently in Kant’s analysis of aesthetic disinterestedness in the Third Critique. Beauty, for Kant, must be free from all interest—not merely the more mundane interests of gain, but also from a purely moral interest in the good. Interestingly, after arguing powerfully for this distinction throughout the text, at the end Kant endorses a position that is partially similar to Tagore’s. He acknowledges that there is a fundamental, and to him entirely understandable, proclivity in human minds to connect what is beautiful with what is morally good, at least as a legitimate metaphor (157-60, 223). Although he was not a systematic aesthetician, Tagore gave reasoned presentations of his aesthetic beliefs, not leaving them entirely to unreliable inferences from his poetic work. Several of his essays on aesthetics make serious theoretical approaches to the problem of saundarya, two in particular, ‘Saundaryabodh’ (A Sense of Beauty) and ‘Saundarya O Sahitya’ (Beauty and Literature). In a fairly elaborate reflection on the place of literature in human life, Tagore suggests there are three ways in which human beings relate to the world—through knowledge (jnana), through action (karma), and through enjoyment (ananda). These are separate and distinctly valuable ‘means of understanding’ the world. He continues:

 

Let alone the Himalayas, if an ordinary pond overgrown with algae is presented before our mind’s eye we experience delight. We have seen this pond many times through our eyes. But to see it through language makes it a new seeing. What the mind can see using the sense of the eyes, if it can see through language, the mind can experience a new kind of rasa. Thus literature becomes something like a new sense [indriya] and presents the world to us anew. Not just making it new. Language has a special quality. It is something that is our own, in part created by our mind. Therefore, when it brings anything from the outside to us, it is made human in a special way (87).

 

A second feature of literary seeing, according to Tagore, is that ‘when we see through beauty, we see not only that particular object, but through that, everything else’ (79). In another essay explaining his theory of aesthetics, he presented an idea of cultivation which sought to bring together the capacity for knowledge and a sense of beauty: his particular concern was to guard against an argument which, using the idea that beauty is disinterested, not driven by prayojan (need), treated it as less significant for human life. Fulfilment in a human life consists in relating to as much of the world as possible:

 

My extension, my expanse depends on whatever of this world I acquire through knowledge and receive through my heart … [w]hat does our sense of beauty contribute to our self-development? Does it illuminate to our heart only that part of the truth which we call beautiful, and thus turn the rest into the dull and the derided? If that had been the case, then our sense of beauty would have been an obstacle in our development, a hurdle in the path of stretching our heart into the expanse of the truth as a whole … I tried to say that this was not true … Just as knowledge (science) seeks slowly to bring everything into the grasp of our intelligence, our sense of beauty must gradually bring the whole world into the grasp of our delight: this is the only way it can be meaningful. Everything that exists is true, and therefore objects of our knowledge; everything that exists is beautiful, and therefore objects of our sense of beauty.

The City and the Problem of Transcendence

The trouble with this theoretical argument is that it does not fit very easily with Tagore’s artistic distillation of modernity, his actual artistic practice. The argument that all that is part of life is a legitimate part of art, and therefore evil, and the despair it causes must find a representation in artistic creation, remains merely formal. In a narrower sense, this aesthetic only made his artistic practice appear contradictory. He found the city persistently difficult to turn into an aesthetic object. Individual things, a flower, a ray of sunlight, a figure of shadows could be seen and celebrated as beautiful, not the city as a whole, and these could evoke a tragic beauty precisely because they were small things of beauty imperilled by a vast threatening city, small intimations of beauty fated to succumb to the march of an enveloping ugliness. So the city as a whole was impossible to celebrate in literary art.

This becomes even more poignant because Tagore’s art is full of a delighted imaginary inhabitance of past cities, particularly sketches of city-life reworked from Kalidasa’s poetry—with Ujjayini recurring as a trope of nostalgic fulfilment. In a humorous sketch on Kalidasa he gives us a nostalgic account of what his life would have been like had he been born in Kalidasa’s time (which is incidentally the title of the poem). It is a pleasurable life of urban delights, unattainable in the history of the present. But even their pretended memory causes pleasure. In the second part of the poem he says there are substantial consolations in present times, in the unaltered continuity of the undiminished beauty of nature and women. But the humour I think conceals the underlying problem of his fundamental evaluation of modem city life as unfulfilling. Then there is a last poem of Tagore, which shows his ambivalence about the city with the greatest clarity.

It is well known that, in the last part of Tagore’s long life, his work came to dominate the literary scene to such an extent that this became a crisis of sorts. Other poets found it impossible to move out of the shadow of the poetic idiom he had created, yet many felt deeply that a simple continuation of his art by less talented imitators was stultifying. Younger poets tried, from the 1940s, to experiment with other styles, and in the bitter discussions around this theme the most recurrent criticism against Tagore was his restrictive aesthetics: one which did not have a language for expressing some of the most important experiences of city life—the degradation and frustration that were the common fate of the lower middle class. By the early twentieth century the expansion of education was starting to show poisonous effects: it produced a much larger educated class vis-à-vis the opportunities available in the modern professions. Educated middle-class people, who formed the major part of the audience of modern Bengali literature, faced a life of new frustrations. Sociological and economic facts enhanced the more metaphysical sense of despair that war and other failures of modernity increasingly brought to people’s consciousness. Not only did the younger poets of this class face urban educated misery, but they turned that increasingly into a central critical criterion for literary meaningfulness. Tagore’s art, defined by its high moral tone, its literary sense of restraint, its artistic ideal of beauty, was assailed by this criticism as escapist and remote, already fatally antiquated during the later life of its creator.

In a late poem called ‘Bansi’ (642–5), Tagore tried to respond to the criticism of younger modernist poets that the city and the life of unfulfilment that the ordinary lower-middle-class office-goer eked out in Calcutta was a part of truth and therefore must have, on his own theory, a place of honour in poetry. In his later life Tagore faced this strange dilemma of modern temporality—its unmerciful, quickened obsolescence—with great seriousness. Instead of dismissing this criticism he sought to respond to its central charge by showing that he could, if he chose, produce an art of this redefined modernity of degradation. Among other things, this poem is a major effort in such a direction. It is a poem of considerable artistic skill, and it has the sort of fluent grace that Tagore could command so easily. It also tries, which is rare in his work, to look unrelentingly at the spectacle of an unfulfilled, wasted life—the life of a kerani (the office clerk). Remarkably, the protagonist is introduced without a formal, caste surname, but only as Haripada Kerani. Besides his personal first name, the only encompassing attribute of his life is being a kerani, a word that conveys a sense of pointless slaving in an office which the English word ‘clerk’ does not capture.

Structurally, the poem is divided into three segments. The first depicts the rooms which provide the context to the life of its protagonist, Haripada Kerani, his degrading castle of privacy, with plaster peeling off the walls, and subtle, infinitely sad intimations of even his longing for love. The plaster has fallen off in places, at others there are large patches of rising damp. But the depiction is not without some dark humour: the only adornment is a print of Ganesha, the giver of success, on a cheap sheet of cloth; his only companion is a lizard which lives without paying extra rent—and its distinct advantage over the clerk is that it faces no shortage of food. But the clerk’s life is not without some preparation for love. He was meant to marry a girl from his aunt’s village, and indeed went to the ceremony. The girl wore a Dhaka sari, with a vermilion mark on her forehead. The time (lagna) must have been truly auspicious, for Haripada’s nerve failed at the last moment, and he fled, leaving the girl unwed, narrowly escaping a life of unrelieved drudgery. In a beautiful wistful line, he confesses: she could not come into his home, but she constantly came into his dreams/mind: ‘Gharete elona se to, mane tar nitya asa jaoya.’

In the second segment the despair becomes more intense, reflected in the material surroundings of the grimy street:

 

Things pile up, things putrefy

The skin and stone of mangoes, leavings from jackfruits,

Fish—, a dead kitten,

And assorted garbage …

The dark shadows of the rain clouds

Enter the damp room

And lies unconscious, limp

Like an animal caught in a trap.

I feel day and night bound tight to the back of some half-dead world.

 

It appears that the despair in this damp, rain-sodden, loveless world is entirely unrelievable. But in the third part, finally, Tagore finds a transcendence which seems more like an excuse. A resident at the corner of the filthy street plays the clarinet on some evenings. This leads to an instant transformation of the world:

 

In that moment reveals the utter unreality/falsity of this narrow street

Like the unbearable delirious ravings of a drunk

Suddenly the news reaches me

That there is no difference between Emperor Akbar and the clerk Haripada

The torn umbrella and the royal canopy

Are carried along the tunes of the flute

To an identical paradise.

 

Tagore’s poetic powers are instantly kindled in this part, and the poem of the city can come to a suitably beauteous end. This effort, like his famous novel Seser Kabita, written very late in his life, sought to address the problem of modernity seriously—at least as he understood it—partly as a matter of using modernist forms like unrhymed lines, and partly as an engagement with the subject of ‘evil’ (as one of his best critical interpreters put it, a sense of the inauspicious: amangalabodh).¹²

In his later life Tagore worked out a different solution to this problem: by acknowledging that all aspects of life’s truth were not reflected in his writing but would find a place in literature in general. A late poem, ‘Aikatan’ (Orchestra), directly acknowledged that he had on a few occasions reached the edge of the courtyard of the next neighborhood of poverty, but entirely lacked ‘the strength’ to step inside. He reprimanded those who practised a literature of fashionable plebeianism, because that was, in his view, ‘stealing the fame of literature without paying its true price’ in experience (821–4). This acknowledgement of the limitations of his own poetic imagination produced a satisfying solution at the personal level, and Tagore was much admired for his admission of something faintly suggestive of guilt. But it did not solve the larger aesthetic question: is it possible to write about Calcutta in its realist ugliness as an aesthetic object? And what could be a proper aesthetic language for this task?

In part, this problem was historical. The modern city in India is a bad copy of cities in modern Europe. In the European context the modern city expressed by its vast, organized, material configuration of space, several forces that were intrinsic to the magnificence of modern civilization: the spectacular power of the state, the luxurious opulence of the bourgeoisie, and the imaginative power of intellectuals. The power of the bourgeoisie and its state were expressed through the spatial imagination of the engineers and architects of Paris and London. In India, the city lacks the rationalistic order and pleasured expansiveness of Western cities. Cities here present a spectacle of wretchedness rather than splendour. Saundarya, accordingly, is a peculiarly difficult concept to apply to an aesthetics dealing with it as a special subject. There was also a more specific problem with the city of Calcutta. After a century of subimperialist expansion with colonial power, by the 1940s the Bengali middle class faced the unprecedented prospect of a sharp downturn in their prosperity. It remained a numerically large part of Bengali society, and particularly dominated Calcutta, but its prospects of economic prosperity shrank drastically. A life like Jibanananda Das’s, in which a highly sensitive and educated man, endowed with an expansive and generous culture drawn from the whole world, was crushed into a life of misery, economic stringency, and humiliation, where the society which encouraged this cultivation lacked the means to reward it, became increasingly common. High literature after Tagore had also passed a kind of class barrier. By the 1940s most literary writers came from the disillusioned, embittered lower middle class, precariously balanced on the borders of real poverty and trying increasingly, unavailingly, to protect their sense of gentility against a hostile, contracting world. Though Tagore’s art was an indispensable part of this obligatory Bengali bildung, for the more sensitive and thinking members of this petty bourgeoisie, it constituted a form of betrayal. It was impossible to see this art and its ideals realized in the real world of Calcutta’s lower-middle-class life. It lacked, from the very start, almost by definition, the hopeful expansiveness it contained, and some of its vital aspects—its urban poise, its access to nature, its sense of peace, its confidence in finding love. The desolation of middle-class consciousness demanded a literary language of a different kind. It could not be worked out by writing imitations of Tagore.

The intensifying dissatisfaction with Tagore, a poet who had in a way given Bengalis their language for an aesthetic transaction with the world, left a huge emptiness and led naturally to a search for alternative models. Readers of English literature were drawn towards Eliot and some other modern poets; but the solution came unexpectedly through a rather untidy discussion about what modern poetry was. Buddhadev Basu, a leading post-Tagore poet and one of the finest critics of his time, began the transformation with a translation of Baudelaire. He recommended Baudelaire’s seeing of Paris, the city of ‘steeples and chimneys’, and the darkly pessimistic emotions of his ‘flowers of evil’, as a model of modern poetic sensibility. This instantly set up a powerful contrast between Tagore’s aesthetic world and Baudelaire’s, mainly their utterly different principles of selection of themes in modern poetic art. Some of the most searching discussions of the meaning of poetic modernity took place in response to Basu’s programmatic preface to his book of translations, particularly his claim that Tagore’s poetry, though deservingly famous and indispensable, had undergone a strangely rapid obsolescence; and though the poet was still alive and writing significant work, he was already a part of the past. Bengalis needed modernity in their poetry, a poetry closer in spirit to Baudelaire, with loss, melancholy, a soiled romance, and degradation as its primary themes. This went directly against Tagore’s aesthetic doctrine that it was only those things that evoked mangal which deserved a place in art, particularly poetic art. Abu Sayed Ayub, one of the foremost literary critics of that generation and an admirer of Tagore’s poetry, wrote a spirited rejoinder—a series of interlinked essays published as a single text, Rabindranath and Modernity.

Younger poets began frantic experimentation with ways of getting out of a world dominated by Tagore. The finest response to the city as an aesthetic problem in Bengali poetry came from the ‘poet of loneliness’ Jibanananda Das.¹³ Jibanananda was a loner, not much involved in the social circles of patrician or middle-class intelligentsia—unlike Sudhin Datta, Buddhadev Basu, or Bishnu De. Like several other Bengali poets, he was a teacher of English literature in suburban colleges in Calcutta, and, for a short while, in an unsatisfactory stint in Delhi. He published a first book of poems, which was not substantial in either its content or style, staying within the safe boundaries of post-Tagore Bengali poetry. But his second collection discovered a startlingly different poetic language for an artistic imagery that was exactly at the opposite pole from Tagore’s—decay in nature, degradation in human beings, and the recurrent theme of death. Death, of course, was not a new theme in Bengali poetry; but poetic death was always meaningful—fantasies of death in unrequited love, normal death transcended by remembrance, at times a reconciliation with death as a natural end which brought a conclusion and a meaning to a life. Jibanananda’s deaths were very different: death as a natural condition of things, the violent death of deer playing in the forest at the hand of a hunter, the death of an apparently successful middle-class man by suicide sleeping at last on the dissecting table in the morgue, the death of innocence, desires, and loves. In one sense Das worked out a simple solution to the poetic problems of the city by simply radicalizing Tagore’s distinction. For Das too, there was no poetry which could find a single language to cover the lives of the city and the countryside. As a consequence, he simply divided his poetic world into two radically dissimilar parts. In one part he began to write about rural Bengal, especially its natural world, with an astonishing, almost Keatsian sensibility—observing dewdrops on leaves, the fragrances of nature, the night of birds, green light under deep foliage, the murmur of running water—and crafted a language of infinitely loving sensuousness.

His poetry of the city was an entirely different matter. I shall discuss two examples. It is possible and tempting to compose an artificial poem out of fragments of his poems. His artistic style invites this by its sameness of metre and subject of vision and reflection. Poems seem to end only provisionally: the unconcluded themes are taken up again in subsequent compositions. In one of his well-known poems, ‘Ratri’ (Night), the city is seen at midnight, after the ceaseless activity, crowding, and traffic of daytime in Calcutta have ended. There is a subtle suggestion that the night is in a sense the real time of the city, when it can be seen for what it really is. After daytime’s frenzy is taken away, what is left are the irreducible elements of modern life, and these are captured in unforgettable figures of emptiness and degradation. The most renowned lines run:

 

Hydrant khule diye kushtharogi chete ney jal

Athaba se hydrant haitoba giyechhila phense

Ekhan dupto rat magarite dalbendhe name

Ekti motorcar gadoler mata gelo keshe

 

A leper drags himself to a hydrant and licks water

Or perhaps that hydrant had sprung a leak

Now the deep night descend on this city in droves

A motorcar goes past coughing like a lout.¹⁴

 

The distance from Tagore’s evocation of sundar and mangal could not be greater.¹⁵ The poem does not give us time to prepare for its images: it begins like some forms of modern music with an image of great shocking power: the leper licking water from the hydrant—our first acquaintance with both nature and culture, with night and the city. The iconic figure is the leper; a common sight in cities in Das’s time, they were symbols in which several layers of degradation could be condensed—begging, friendless, helpless, socially degraded, physically decaying, the utmost sign of fallenness. The leper is depicted in his most abject state—dragging himself to a hydrant, not to drink water as ordinary people do, but to lick it from its filthy drip.

Another famous poem captures, better than anything else in modern Bengali poetry, the despair and pointlessness of lower-middle-class Bengali life. It describes a corpse lying on a table in the morgue: initially titled, ‘One day eight years back’ (At bacchar ager ekdin) it was later changed to the more deliberate ‘In the morgue’ (but in Bengali ‘lashkata ghare’—the image is more gruesome; it translates literally as ‘in the room for cutting corpses’). The poem, as appropriate, wonders why a man apparently happily married, with a stable family, unaccountably committed suicide: because of what indefinable sorrow seeping out of his apparently settled life, out of what ineradicable tiredness?

 

Last night, when the five-day old moon

Had drowned in the darkness of night

He felt an urge to die [maribar sadh halo tar]

His wife was lying next to him, and his child

There was love, was hope—still in that wash of moonlight

What ghost came to his sight?

Why did he wake from his sleep?

Or he had not slept for a long, long time

And now in the morgue he finds some sleep.

Maybe he wanted precisely this sleep:

Like a pestilential rat, with blood foaming from his mouth,

In a dark corner, he sleeps now.

Never to wake again.¹⁶

 

There is something interesting in this poem that goes beyond the merely sociological point made earlier. The emptiness in it is not linked to material restrictions but to a metaphysical taste of modernity. In some of its lines Das makes it clear that this man was not condemned to a poor life in the ordinary sense: he was not frustrated in unrequited love: there was no dross in his marital life; he had tasted the sweetness of intellection (mananer madhu); he never knew the withering cold of the winter of poverty and hunger. The poem, however, finds a reason for his choosing this socially unaccountable death:

 

I know, I know despite this

A woman’s heart, love, child, home—these are not all:

Not wealth, not success, not affluence—

There is another fearful, wounding wonder

That plays inside our inmost blood.

That makes us tired, tired, tired.

The morgue does not have that tiredness.¹⁷

 

The sense of desolation of modern life is dissociated from material loss; it becomes a fearful sense of wonder that plays inside our blood. Clearly, this desolation does not admit of the sense of good that brings transcendence through music in Tagore’s poems. It is an untranscended sense of despair. Tagore’s aesthetic would find inhabitance in this dark world impossible. Jibanananda wrote comparatively little explanatory or self-interpretive prose: but his poetry constantly attempts intellectual clarification of itself, constantly painting emotions and giving reasons for them. In another poem we find a statement that in a way addresses our aesthetic question. ‘Bodh’, which in Bengali bears a complex connotation that mixes the meanings of sense, intelligence, awareness:

 

Alo-andhakare jai—mathar bhitare

Svapna nai, kon ek bodh kaj kare,

Svapna nai, santi nai, bhalobasa nai,

hrdayer majhe ek bodh janma lay (Bodh)¹⁸

 

Jibanananda is notoriously difficult to translate, but a rough literal rendering is:

 

I walk through light and darkness—inside my head/mind

Not a dream, but an intelligence starts its work

Not dreams, not quiet, not love.

In my heart an intelligence takes birth.

 

The third line, I think, is his poetic answer to Tagore’s aesthetic doctrine, a rejection of transcendence in every form. A poetry of modernity cannot retreat inside dreams into an untroubled tranquillity, even into love which, in most troubled poetry, still reveals poetry’s untroubled centre. What modern art achieves is not a sense of beauty but an intelligence. Jibanananda’s world is most fatally disenchanted, without god, and bereft of the three consolations of dream, peace, and love which helped man to ward off bitterness. However, in this world in which god has been murdered, man’s search for meaning does not cease:

 

Manush kauke chaye, tar sei nihata ujjval

Isvarer parivarte anya kono sadhanar phal

 

Man desires someone—instead of his murdered luminous God,

some fulfilment which stand at the end of a different search.¹⁹

 

In my reading, Jibanananda’s poetry displaces the ideal of the beautiful, in particular, the ideal of beauty affiliated to the good, in its search for an aesthetic of the modern. The world of modernity contains, ineradicably, too much evil, degradation, and an unspectacular desolation of uncomplaining everyday lives filled with meaninglessless, rendering obsolete the earlier aesthetic of beauty. Tagore, the creator of Bengali’s modern idiom, despite his inexhaustible genius, struggled with it in vain. Jibanananda Das, in his shorter, intenser oeuvre, succeeded at least in capturing this aspect of a modern sensibility by fashioning an unmistakably beautiful language for the expression of bitterness. Ironically, traditional Indian aesthetics, with its clear conception that artistic rasas can include the adbhuta and the bibhatsa, may have found it easier to understand this aspect of modern sensibility. Tagore’s replacement of this more flexible, capacious aeshethic doctrine by a stricter, narrower and purer ideal of beauty made the aesthetic distillation of modernity’s dark side more difficult.

References

Ayub, Abu Saiyad. 1968. Adhunikata O Rabindranath. Calcutta: Dey’s Publishing.

Das, Jibanananda. 1988. Jibanananda Daser Sreshtha Kabita. Calcutta: Bharavi.

Gangopadhyay, Sunil. 1999. Amar Jibanananda Aviskar O Anyanya. Calcutta: Ananda Publishers.

Kant, Immanuel. 1988. Critique of Judgement. Trans. James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kaviraj, Sudipta. 2000. Laughter and Subjectivity: The Self-ironical Tradition in Bengali Literature. In Modern Asian Studies. December.

———. 2003. Two Histories of Bangla Literary Culture. In Literary Cultures in South Asia. Ed. Sheldon Pollock. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Majumdar, Samares. n.d. Uttarpurush. Calcutta: Ananda Publishers.

Tagore, Rabindranath. 1972. Sanchayita. Calcutta: Visva Bharati.

———. 2000a. Saundaryabodh. Sahitya. Calcutta: Visva Bharati.

———. 2000b. Saundarya o Sahitya. Sahitya. Calcutta: Visva Bharati.

First published in Harsha V. Dehejia and Makarand Paranjape, eds, Saundarya, New Delhi: Samvad India Foundation, 2003.

¹ This is true of the Islamic ingestion of Aristotelian aesthetics as well. Ibn Sina’s writing on pleasure and wonder retains this wider definition of the aesthetic.

² I am emphasizing literary for a purely technical reason. In recent historical research revisionist historians have argued compellingly that the eighteenth century was a period of distinct protomodernity, that ‘modern’ processes like commercialization had already started apace in India before the colonial impact of Western institutions. But that changing socio-economic world could still be depicted in a pre-modern aesthetic style—which is what we find in Bharatchandra’s Vidyasundar.

³ I have discussed some instances of this literary strand, in particular in Bankim, Rabindranath, and Sukumar Ray, in Kaviraj 2000.

⁴ Bhudev Mukhopadhyay, in his social analysis of Bengali domesticity, Parivarik Prabandha, uses an interesting phrase to capture this: kritrim svajanata, artificial kinship.

⁵ An excellent example of this pattern of narrative structure can be found in Tagore’s famous novel Gora. But this structural form of narrative acquaintance with the city is repeated in thousands of stories—from Bankimchandra’s social novels to contemporary fiction. An example from relatively recent fiction is Samares Majumdar’s highly acclaimed novel of a Naxalite rite of passage, Uttarpurush.

⁶ The work of these three poets will fall into that category, though in the case of Hemchandra’s Vrtrasamhar and Madhusudan’s Meghanadvadh and Tilottama the themes are mythological and in Navinchandra’s Palasir Yuddha the narrative is historical.

⁷‘Ekdin rate ami svapna dekhinu, Chhadar Chhabi’. Tagore 1972: 759.

⁸ In many instances, it seems, Tagore’s poetic phrasing carries an unfaded memory of Kalidasa’s famous description of the distant earth in the Raghuvamsam:

 

durat ayascakranibhasya tanvi vanarajinila

abhati vela lavanmburaser dhara nivaddheva kalankarekha.

 

In Tagore’s writing there are recurrent references to the earth as ‘vanarajinila’.

⁹ However, avil in Bengali suggests not just dusty or dirty, but also morally impure. And modernity’s power to soil not just the earthly world, but also svarga (not just the sky, but also heaven, the transcending foil for the fallen earth), is a new powerfully unconventional trope.

¹⁰ Kon mayamrga kothai nitya/ svarna/ halake karichhe nrtya/ tahare bandhite lolupcitta chhitichhe vrddha-balake (Where some golden hind is carrying out its uneasing dance; and old and young are running maddened by the desire to catch it: 242).

¹¹ I have discussed the question of modernity and the problem of evil in my essay on Bengali literature in Pollock 2003. It is particularly instructive to look at the complex arguments in defence of Tagore by the distinguished literary critic, Abu Saiyad Ayub. See Ayub 1968.

¹² Ibid. I have discussed this more fully in Kaviraj 2003.

¹³ Das has been given various sobriquets. The most commonly repeated is the apt description by Buddhadev Bose in introducing his poetry to readers unfamiliar with his style: nirjanatama kavi (the loneliest of poets), which gestured towards his ability to listen to an inner silence, as also his difference from others in style and his personal aloofness. Clinton Seely’s excellent study, A Poet Apart, plays on Bose’s phrase. Abdul Mannan Saiyad has a set of interesting essays with the title Shuddhatama Kavi (The Purest of Poets).

¹⁴ Das 1988: 97.

¹⁵ Sunil Gangopadhyay wrote an excellent essay on the poetic contrast between Tagore and Jibanananda Das, ‘Prajjvalanta surya ebam satti tarar timir’ (The Effulgent Sun and a Darkness Made by Seven Stars), in his Amar Jibanananda Aviskar O Anyanya (My Discovery of Jibanananda and Other Essays).

¹⁶ Das 1988: 77.

¹⁷ Ibid.

¹⁸ Ibid.: Bodh.

¹⁹ Ibid.: ‘Suranjana’, 56.