Abstract
In the early twentieth century Bengal, a group of young artists called Kallol poets introduced modernism in Bengali literature through their experimental writings, and called for a revision of the traditional spiritual idealism Tagore and others held so far. This generation of poets truly captures the essence of the time, its general mode of depression though they are in some way associated with Rabindranath either through their appreciation or negation. The poetry of Jibanananda Das along with Kavi Nazrul Islam who belongs to the Kallol era fundamentally departs from the Tagorean ideal of humanism and consolidates literary modernism in Bengal. Das’s poetry is sensuous, surreal filled with violent imagery, creaturely human/non-human relationships and especially death thoughts. It argues that the poet Jibanananda is difficult to detangle from the person Jibanananda as he had to go through poverty, loss, and existential dilemma. The paper, therefore, would attempt to explore the poetic self of Jibanananda inscribed in that modern chaotic time. How his complex, nihilistic poetic expression, the theme of despair, remorse, and death, which are characteristics of the modern poetry merging the personal and political, nature and culture, and worldly and metaphysical would be the main thrust of this paper.
Keyword: Despair, Beastial Nature, Suicide, Poetic Self, Kallol Poets
The Kallol Era and Jibanananda Das
In the wake of the post-World Wars crisis, abject poverty, and anti-colonial insurgencies Bengali literature went through a radical shift. Coupled with the awareness of global literary tradition and socio-political commitment a group of young Bengali poets introduced a movement what we can call modernism in Bengali literature. They established Catuskala club (Four Arts club) in 1921 referring to literature, music, painting, and crafts/drama to foster their artistic approach. When their ideal bidhrahi Kavi (rebel poet) Kaji Nazrul Islam was arrested for writing Marxist poetry and started a hunger strike in jail later on, these young poets felt an urgency to revolutionize Bengali literature and Culture (Manjapra 328). The Club’s literary journal called Kallol which means in Bengali stormy musical waves becomes the emblem of vitality and revisionism they uphold. The journal which had been appearing between 1923 to 1929 under the editorship of Gokulchandra Nag and Dineshranjan Das played a major role to stimulate new ideological underpinning in Bengal. The Kallol group with their avant-garde, experimental wirings ensued a bitter literary feud with the traditional, conservative camp chiefly led by Ashok Chattopadhyay and Sajanikanta Das then. Therefore, Kallol as Sudipta Kaviraj has rightly pointed out became a manifesto of revolutionary youth force as well as incepted artistic modernism in Bengal (559). One of the key founders of this journal, Buddhadeva Bose has recalled in an interview that
Immediately after Tagore, there was a group that tried to write very much in his style. But, beginning in the 1920's, a reaction against Tagore started. I call this the revolt of the Kallol Group. These poets, who are now regarded as the older representatives of modern poetry in Bengal, were, with the exception of one, deeply influenced by Tagore. At the same time, they broke away from the ethical and spiritual ideals, and the conception of universal harmony, harmony of man and nature, with which Rabindranath's poems and writings are permeated. (43)
This anti-Rabindranath modernist perspective of the Kallol generation can be considered as the “[w]edding to Freud to Marx” that “saw the human entity as the combination of Biological Man and Economic Man” (Ghosh 230). It provoked so much controversy that Rabindranath himself had to hold a meeting at Bichitra premises in 1928. Tagore’s final statement on this rebellious group comes through his novel, Sesher Kobita (The final Poem) in 1929 where the faith remains intact on higher idealized humanism.
Interestingly most of the poets in the Kallol era were associated with Tagorean sensibilities whether through their acceptance or negation of him. Jibanananda Das along with Nazrul was the only poet who had been able to create his distinctive poetic style even under the overwhelming presence of Rabindranath. Though somewhat obscure in his lifetime, Das is considered the greatest Bengali poet and the true pioneer of modernism in Bengali literature since Tagore. In one of the powerful Bengali creative biographies called Ekjon Kamalalebu (Someone, an Orange) published recently in 2017 Shahaduz Zaman mentions that Jibanananda sent a copy of his first collection of poems, Jhara Palak (Cast-off Feathers) to Tagore. He with his munificence wrote a letter to young Jibanananda mentioning that Das has poetic prowess that is marred by his ostadi (needless stylization) over language, and he must remember that the great work always provides peace (34). Without being disheartened Jibanananda wrote in response:
In many high arts I often find a great thirst for happiness or sorrow. Often the poet strives hard to embrace the stars of the sky – sometimes he wonders in the poison-infested netherworld. … I think, people act in various ‘moods’ in different circles. Under the effect of these moods people sometimes regard death as his bride, find motherly love in darkness, show courage to string Veena even within the hopeless decay. … In this process, a spark of melody ignites where the serenity often does not exist – then why on earth this cannot be considered as enduring and beautiful. (Zaman 35-6; translation mine)
This challenging response of young Jibanananda shows his demystified perception of art; his ideology which concerns artistic sensibility and the call of the ‘time’ simultaneously. The initial rift with the traditional Bengali poetry becomes far more complex, finds nihilistic expression in later Jibanananda charged with ghastly images, unusual metaphors, and sensual rendition of the man and nature. The poet Jibanananda cannot be differentiated from the individual Jibanananda as this reclusive man went through poverty, personal crisis, and existential quest. The subjectivity of an artist is inscribed in materiality and Das deftly translates his disharmonious everyday existence into poetic sensibility. Therefore, this paper through the close reading of his select poems attempts to explore the poetic self of Jibanananda Das in broad. It would show how his poems that produce a dialectic of subjectivity and mundanity steer literary modernism in Bengal. How the theme of despair, death-thoughts, poverty, beastiality, and sexuality, characteristic to modern poetry, that integrates personal and political in Das’ poems would be the plethora of this paper.
Modern Bengali poets have drawn inspiration from western poetry, notably in terms of form and their experimental approach. Buddhadev Bose, Jibanananda Das, Sudhindranath Datta, Bishnu De, and Amiya Chakravarty were among the prominent modern poets who gained widespread recognition in Bengal during the 1930s. They, like their European progenitors, Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, Cecil Day Lewis, and T. S. Eliot, were affected by global financial contingency, post-war cataclysm, and a shared spiritual bankruptcy exacerbated by colonial repression. The prior generation of Bengali poets, for instance, Jatindranath Sengupta’s cynicism, Pramatha Chaudhuri’s objectivity, Nazrul’s rebellion, and Satyendranath Dutta’s satire and parody, had also left an everlasting mark on their psyche. Among them, Motilal Mazumdar, who was influenced by John Donne’s metaphysical poetry and the Pre-Raphaelites such as Swinburne and Rossetti, can be placed in the transition period between prior romantic ideals of Bengali poetry and its modernist turn. Due to their preoccupation with Freudian psychoanalysis, the Kallol generation poets undermines the everlasting ideology of abstract love as well as drastically alters the style and content of mainstream Bangla poetry. The logical order of imagery in a poem has been abandoned in favour of an emotive order and a suggestive declaration of suppressed longing. Thus, Buddhadeva Bose realizes that Tagore's mystic and formless philosophy eludes the reality of physical desire, and turns to D.H Lawrence instead. Shudhindranath is attracted to the French symbolists by his quest for classical discipline and sculpture-like firmness. Bishnu De emulates T.S. Eliot in his poems, and also implements his concepts into his poetic expression. Another poet, Amiya Chakravarty despite being a mystic with a philosophic mind lacks Tagore's serenity. After being influenced by G.M Hopkins, Chakravarty achieves a sort of enlightened spiritualism, but he is unable to suppress the whirlwind and suffering that modern man inherits.
Jibanananda Das, Bengal's most prominent exponent of avant-garde poetry, was influenced by a wide range of European poets. In his book Kabitar Kotha (On Poetry), he defends Bengali modern poetry by stating that these poems embody the corpse of contemporary society and culture. Whether their perspective is optimistic or negative, they find refuge in the poetry of French symbolists such as Baudelaire, Mallarme Verlaine, Rossenr, to Yeats, Eliot, or Pound rather than patronizing Rabindranath (Das 22-3). It can be observed that similar to Eliot's ‘Waste Land,’ Jibanananda’s poem uses the image of fall to symbolise decadence, banality, and barrenness. It was not possible for him to replicate Keatsian sensuousness and richness of Autumnal beauty in the contemporary setting. T.S. Eliot believes that a traditional writer is distinguished by his or her ‘historical awareness’, which embraces both the transcendent and the ephemeral aspects of life. The poet must build an awareness of the past as well as the ability to imagine in order to communicate this awareness through poetry – an assemblage of tradition and individual talent. Eliot’s definition of ‘tradition’ is something Das adheres to his poetic craftsmanship in his entire life. He has also been influenced by the French symbolist, Imagist and the Surrealist movement.
In his book Jibanananda, published in 1984, Amalendu Basu laments that, despite people’s deep affection and respect for Jibanananda’s poetry, it is strange that neither a biography nor an anthology has been entirely devoted to his poetry. However, many chapters in various critical editions particularly on Bengali modern poetry have focused on his poems (Basu 13). Later, A Poet Apart: A Literary Biography of the Bengali Poet Jibanananda Das (1899-1954) by Clinton B. Seely, published in 1990, and Shahaduz Zaman’s Ekjon Kamalalebu (Someone, an Orange), released in 2017, fill this fissure to some extent. Nonetheless, the world reader is still unfamiliar with Das’s lyrical realm. In Bengali, essayists like Amalendu Basu, who had a personal relationship with Das, wrote about Jibanananda’s Sathti Tarar Timir, in which he explored the anthology’s unusual title and traced Das’s profound poetic thought, the source of such poetic consciousness, and its depth behind its naming. Bitoshok Bhattacharya, eminent poet and writer, introduced I. A. Richard's technique of ‘close reading’ in Jibanananda's poetry in his works Akashlina: Ekti Sarbanamer Samasya (Akashlina: The Problem of a Pronoun) in 1982 and Jibanananda in 2000. In his Prasanga Jibanananda (On Behalf of Jibanananda), Professor Sibaji Bandyopadhyay defines the poet’s haunting sense of solitude as a representation of Bengal’s collective psyche in the 1930s. Aside from these book-length studies, numerous scholarly papers have been written about Jibanananda's suicidal ideas, surrealist tendencies, existential quest, nature and melancholiac vision, and so on. Manas Ray and Kazi Ashraf Uddin have both used psychoanalysis to analyse Das’s ‘One Day Eight Years Ago.’ Professor Ray offers a philosophical viewpoint on Jibanananda's self-consciousness in his article, positing beastiality as the constitutive force of nature and life, whereas Professor Uddin attempted to identify the notions of ‘sublime’ and ‘real’ in Das’s poetry primarily from the Freudian perspective. These studies, it can be argued, either give a broad perspective centred on close textual reading or a well-knitted critique of his poetry from a specific theoretical vantage point. Jibanananda’s poetry, I would say, resides in a period of transition in Bengali literature on the one hand, and a moment of self-doubt, bitterness, poverty, and chaos on the other, necessitating simultaneous consideration of historicity and subjectivity. In terms of content and ideology, Bengali poetry takes a distinct path after Jibanananda. As a result, in this study, I have attempted to situate Jibanananda within a larger historical context before moving on to analyse his ideas about nature, sense of despair in the loveless world, and death thoughts from the personal, political and philosophical perspective.
Naked Lonely Hand: Love, Loss and Bodh (Sensation)Not a dream, not peace, not love,A sensation born in my very being.I cannot escape it. (Das 11)
Jibanananda Das could have gained national repute in the 1930s if he had not preferred to live a solitary life being immersed into self-inwardness. The self-imposed isolation comes through a series of failures though including the loss of the job more than once at City College, Calcutta and Delhi Ramjas College later on, and more importantly his love for his cousin Shobhona. He always finds the cityscape of Kolkata and Delhi hostile, unwelcoming, and tormenting. The lonesomeness becomes his artistic expression, his poetry of inadequacies, unspoken desires, hidden disgust, and even the thought of death.
Many a firm resolve, a hopeful hope burned out, ashes brushed aside –And perhaps that’s the way it’ll always be.…Love is no more. Its true instantiation in this vacuous worldIs an utter failure, like that of half-truths or that which is not true at all. (Das 35)
Like this poem “The Eclipse of All Eclipse” Das’s poems do often talk about the bewilderment of earthly existence. He was a man who always found himself in such bewilderment, tearing apart with the sense of transitoriness. His sense of wandering can be perceived in either way, travelling across the rural Bengal to find the beauty of the earth which is equally dark and alluring or striving hard to find some solace in his agonizing life. The eternal search is somewhat parallel to the romanticism of Keats albeit differently. While Keats tries to escape from the world of fever and fret in an alternative world of transcendence, Das wants to experience the physical world with blood and flesh. Dhurjati Mukherjee rightly observes in this context, “[t]he eternity of motion breaks and the universality of vision takes an individual shape. It is through this inviting look of the other—of Bonolata Sen—that the poet realizes what he is and that bid him to relent” (98).
For thousands of years I roamed the paths of this earth,From waters round Sri Lanka in dead of night to Malayan seas.Much have I wandered. I was there in the gray world of AshokaAnd of Bimbisara, pressed on through darkness to the city of Vidarbha.I am a weary heart surrounded by life’s frothy ocean.To me she gave a moment’s peace – Banalata Sen from Natore. (Das 47)
Banalata Sen is a commonplace name in the Bengali households. By placing such a mofussil name in the vast realm of historical time makes it banal, local as well as imaginative, a distinct personal prototype of Das’s angst. The speaker like the poet has trotted far and wide but nothing could provide peace to him. Once again, his quest, his eternal wandering lurks him into the countryside of Bengal, Natore in the poem, where he finds refuge in Banalata Sen. The image he uses here are fantastical, evocative, impressionistic, and often surrealistic. Like the other modernist poets who adhere to Imagism in the 1920s, Jibanananda skilfully juxtaposes emotional and intellectual complexity in his images. But, the image like ‘her bird’s-nest-like eyes’ or ‘a hawk wipes the scent of sunlight from its wings’ suggests that Das tries to create surreal effects in his poetry, a kind of spontaneity that is free from rational restrictions. Surrealism can be alternatively thought of in terms of repressed sexual desire. In such a way the Freudian notion of ‘Id’ refers to the chaotic, spontaneous state of our conscious mind unlike the structured, rational, conscious ‘super ego’, the surrealist talks about super reality independent of the binary of dream and reality. It provides liberty to the poet from the strict poetic diction and the restraint of language what Andre Brenton would call ‘Psychological Automation’. Jibanananda’s poetry is like the union of the conscious and subconscious mind (more in Joycean fashion) that visualizes the world in abstraction with the sense of wonder.
The long reflective sentences in Das’s poetry sometimes break into short, quick cadences. The rhythmic pattern starts to fall into some violent, painful imagery as if the poet again awakes into the bleeding reality from the ethereal world. A strain of melancholy, fragmentation, and a pervasive sense of meaninglessness sets in. Love, loss, agony, death – all come together in the poet’s mind and wash him beyond the tempo-spatial boundary into the world of despair and nothingness. The darkness engulfs the night plunging into the realm of the eternal tragedy of man, of hope and struggle.
For how many hundreds of centuries have I not seen the beauty of your face,Have not searched.…Sweat of ruddy sun, smeared on curtains, carpets,Watermelon wine in red glasses!Your naked lonely hand.Your naked lonely hand. (Das 45)
In 1949 Jibanananda Das wrote an essay, ‘Bengali Poetry Today’ in the leading Bengali newspaper, ‘the Statesman’ where he mentions,
It is difficult to pick one’s way through the welter of economic industrial – social and other dissertations issuing from the endless dubious clinics our age is cumbered with. A mature artist – however – does not propose to evade the riddles around him. He takes stock of the significant directions and purpose of his age and of their more clear and concrete embodiments in the men of his age. He arrives at his own philosophy and builds his own world – which is never a negation of the actual one – but this is the same living world organised more truly and proportionately by the special reading of it by the special poet. (Sarkar 171)
The Kallol era poets poignantly capture the essence of the 20th century, its skepticism in collective belief, modern, meaningless existence, and so on. Buddhadeva Bose keeps believing in love, Bishnu de relies on social equality, Premendra Mitra, Sukanta Bhattacharya, Dinesh Das, and Shubhash Mukhopadhyay upholds the plight of the working class, Amiya Chakravarty even if expects an unoppressive society still has faith in divine consciousness whereas the poetry of Jibanananda Das has no fixed dimension, no absolute beliefs or even no secure shelter. Das’s “poems also carried an acutely historical sense of a twentieth-century “crisis” in Bengali lives. It was as if by holding the historical and the nonhistorical together that Das could heal the wounds of the historical present. It also has to be noted that Das’s sentiments remained personal” (Chakrabarty 679).
The reading of Jibanananda is often being limited to the poet’s subjective crisis and inner reflection on the visible world. It is not that the post-World War economic depression, capitalist turn of the British Empire, helplessness of the general mass, and their subsequent anguish did not touch Jibanananda, only the expression became unconventional. On the personal level, Das himself went through the dire financial conditions. Neither as a teacher, he did prove himself someone remarkable nor he succeed in small business. He even tried his luck in selling insurance and umbrella handle. He confronts the great depression of the 1920s and 30s through his own turbulent life. His poetry, therefore, posits the poetic self as a unique, singular subject that also performs as an extension of historical time. Das’s poems should be seen as the juncture of personal ‘I’ and the objective ‘I’ amidst the whirlpool of political change and crisis. The austere objectivism of modern poetry, its scientific analysis of reality has been mixed with Das’s subjectivity. Sibaji Bandyopadhyay in his critical treatise, Prasanga Jibanananda (On Jibanananda) has pointed out that the reason for the poet’s prolonged sense of despair could be found in the society’s collective sense of predicament. He suggests that Das’s extreme solitariness although meditatively personal is closely associated with the political crisis Colonial Bengal has been going through.
Alienation can take place if the experience is shattered by the abrupt societal transformation. On the other hand, limited understanding of society can lead to alienation or even the deeper realization of society can also do the same. A sensitive poet like Jibanananda conceives this alienation through his haunting sense of nihilistic experience. This bare, acute consciousness of time and politics forms Das’s perception of historicity.
Hearts of countless travellersForever search in desperation, their way not found,Their feet shackled by authority’s firm chains.…Tattered clothes, shaven-headed mendicants, pitiless this highway,This prison for the millions about to die… (Das 9)
It is a trap, high prison walls in which human being is eternally thrown into damnation. In every turn cruelty awaits; there is no respite, no deceive. We are all striving hard only to find merciless thrashing at the end. His poems like ‘On City Sidewalks’, ‘Beggar’, and ‘The Hunt’ reflects Das’s hostile understanding of life that is constantly marked by deprivation and humiliation. It is pertinent to mention here that in these poems lines like “A world’s mistake: a beggar ignored. A failure of the world (Das 79), “From one Calcutta sidewalk to another, from sidewalk to sidewalk, / As I walk along, my life’s blood feels the vapid, venomous touch” (Das 75) show how Jibanananda was profoundly conscious for the urban working-class people, their everyday drudgery, hunger and poverty. An Unflinching depiction of reality suggests why he despises universal human bonding or any cosmic divine order. The absurd truth of the world is that the great hunter calculates every trajectory, and the hunted is bound to take that path of terror, anxiety and death. This dichotomy of hunter/hunted is a quite a recurring motif in Jibanananda’s poetry. His long poem, ‘In Camp’ is particularly significant because the infinite interplay between hunter and hunted is fully developed here. The poem, on the other hand, draws some scandals for the charge of obscenity especially targeted by popular poet like Sajanikanta Dey. But the quintessential Jibanananda and his political awareness of unforgivable time are well discernible here.
You too had learned from someone!And we lie here, our flesh like that of dead animals.All come, then fall in the face of separation – separation and death –Like those slain deer.By living-loving-longing for love, we are hurt, we hate and die,Do we not? (Das 23)
Jibanananda’s Birds, Animals and Creaturely Nature
Jibanananda’s substantial reading of European literature for instance the poetry of Robert Browning, W. B. Yeats and others, bitter life experience, deep engagement with the rural Bengal, social turmoil – everything collides with each other and produces an intricate piece of art. Under the overwhelming destitution, he moves back to the natural bounty of bucolic Bengal. His poetry curiously repletes with some unattractive, lowly creatures and birds like shakun (vulture), idur (rat), pecha (owl), hash (duck), charui (sparrow) and other insignificant animals. Before Jibanananda Rabindranath Tagore extensively deals with the natural beauty of Bengal in almost all of his poems and songs, where the general description is romantic, symbolic, and spiritual at times. Perhaps almost all Bengali poets try to portray the beauty of rustic Bengal in their writings. However, Jibanananda’s association with nature and his depiction of its various objects are specific, wild, sensuous and uncanny. So, if Tagore’s verse especially his communion with nature is marked by transcendence, Jibanananda’s poetry would be of immanence.
In his thoughtful introduction to A Certain Sense, a collection of Jibanananda Das's poetry, Sisirkumar Das draws attention to the fact that Jibanananda’s poetic world is vibrant and sensual, dark and melancholy, and entirely dissimilar the geography lauded in Bengali poetry by both his forefathers and contemporaries. Spring and monsoon, two of Bengali poets’ favourite seasons especially of Tagore, are conspicuously absent from Das. He chooses Hemanta instead, the season that falls between Sarat, which is noted for its beautiful blue skies, lush green meadows, new paddy, and bloated rivers, and winter, which is known for its delicate sunlight and sumptuous corps. Hemanta is the season marked by mist and fog, dreary light, and pastureland. In his poetry, he creates this dismal landscape surrounded by mists and gloominess (Das 6).
Again I shall return to the Dhansiri’s banks, to this Bengal,Not as a man, perhaps, but as a shalik bird, or a white hawk.As, perhaps, a crow of dawn in this land of autumn’s new rice harvest,I’ll float the breast of fog one day in the shade of a jackfruit tree. (Das 95)
Nature in Das’ poetry might be tactile and verdant, but it is like a prolonged lamentation, sombre music, and deep soulful attachment. His Rupasi Bangla (Bengal the Beautiful) can be considered as a dirge, an intense requiem for losing one’s self and desire for coming back again. The reader stands transfixed with the aroma of evening flowers, the moonlit river banks, the sight of the lush green meadows, or the sound of hedge cricket in the dark. There is a great feast of senses, an unbridled celebration of passion almost unequalled in Bengali poetic diction. The colour imagery of these sixty-odd lined sonnets is remarkable. Nil chaya (azure shadows), nil Sandhya (bluish eve), nil supurir ban (bluish betel palms), akasmat garo nil (sudden intense blue) – the visual image of blue is repetitive while blue is the rarest colour in nature. So, ‘blue’ in his poetry symbolizes calmness, mystery, and death. “Rarely does the resplendent nature his poems so evocatively portrayed come without a mention of the cavorting, devilish world of thanatos as part of nature’s organic cycle of life and death” (Ray 156). Perhaps Jibanananda is acutely aware of the creaturely vulnerability of life with its marvellous bountiful side. Consequently, his poetry produces a dialectic of an individual who yearns for love, peace, and death, and universal diabolicality.
I was your companion, time and again, meandering among banyan, asvatha trees.I strewed paddy and puffed rice many a day in the courtyards for the shalik birds.I plucked the duck from ponds at twilight, brought it to you on more than oneOccasion.... (Das 104)
Here, the poet finds himself amidst nature, not as an outside part rather an integral component of it, that creates ontological tensions. This profound object relation in Jibanananda’s poem can be understood from the perspective of object-oriented ontology (OOO) which puts objects at the centre deprioritizing human subjectivity. The critical school of thought under the influence of Martin Heidegger rejects the anthropocentric and correlational idea of the world and takes the non-human phenomenon independent of human perception and cognition. Object-oriented philosophy was first developed by Graham Herman and later Levi Bryant coined the term, ‘object-oriented ontology’. Jibanananda’s nature in a similar fashion exists in its violent primordial state, unadulterated by human ‘overmining’. Das does not see himself as the privileged subject who projects his subjectivity upon it, only as the neutral object as tress, rice or twilight is.
The Ecstasy of Death: Jibanananda, Suicide and Being
It was heardThey took him to the morgueLast night in the February darkWhen the crescent moon, five days toward full, had setHe’d had the urge to die. (Das 59)
Jibanananda’s poetry is charged with death imagery whether he portrays the urban poverty-stricken pedestrians or the dreamy landscape of the countryside. Although, his death thoughts can be understood by the collective loss in the crisis period of the great economic and political depression, its repetitiveness in his poetry, particularly his final act of suicide under the tramcars in Kolkata calls for deeper philosophical investigation. The discourse in turn would explore the general psyche of the modern poet in Bengal.
Spinoza tries to show logically that an individual cannot be a killer and killed at the same time. Still, every day people commit suicide in large numbers around the world. Perhaps Spinoza is philosophically right, but death is dissimilarly uncertain, irrational, and absurd. Death by choice is even harder to define. Death even being unforeseeable could be understood as life comes to its closure with death whereas death by choice questions this natural process of life cycle. It fissures the pathological end to the body; it is act of violation of life and transgression of death itself. Durkheim in his seminal book, Suicide repudiates extra-social causes of suicide by claiming that it is not a subjective act rather being determined by some social power or something ‘super individual’. “It is made up of the currents of egoism, altruism or anomy running through the society under consideration with the tendencies to languorous melancholy, active renunciation or exasperated weariness derivative from these currents…. cause them to commit suicide” (Durkheim 264). On the other hand, French philosopher, Albert Camus rightly considers suicide as the only and most significant philosophical issue. He maintains that suicide is neither the adequate resolution of a human being’s existential dilemma nor life have its fruitful meaning. He states,
It is that divorce between the mind that desires and the world that disappoints, my nostalgia for unity, this fragmented universe and the contradiction that binds them together…There can be no question of masking the evidence, of suppressing the absurd by denying one of the terms of its equation. It is essential to know whether one can live with it or whether, on the other hand, logic commands one to die of it. (Camus 50)
In Jibanananda’s poetry, there has been an infinite desire to live sensuously with equal dangerous attraction to death, ending something violently. His landmark poem, ‘Eight Years Ago a Day’ is about a man who without any apparent cause hangs himself to an ashwatha tree at midnight leaving his wife and children in bed. The poem speculates deeply about death and suicide. It provides little causal explanation of such act, but the night owl with its creaturely feast and other beastial action of nature suggest such premonition. There are many images in Rupasi Bangla too where nature and individuals are drawn to each other, transforming their fundamental element producing new unity. “A kind of contract of alliance, a hideous pact, is made; there is the institution of an assemblage, a war machine or criminal machine, which can reach the point of self-destruction” (Deleuze 233). The narrator of this poem reflects Das’s state of mind; indicates the poet’s darkest realization of life and its inevitable path through purgatory. Suicide is being committed for suicide itself, not for any self-projected goal. In this sense, Jibanananda’s death drive is much closer to Camus’s absurdist idea of life but differs in his resolution of rebellious living. Manas Ray observes in this connection that “[H]ere destruction is not termination; it is a state of being. The act of suicide declares as it were the impossibility of termination, which also in a way means the impossibility of dialectical resolution” (161). Das’s poetry in a way reflects the shared psyche of the Bengali modern poets in the early twentieth century who is caught in a similar unresolved dilemma between the towering Tagorean sensibility and the general mode of depression.
Never again will you wakeNever again will you knowThe unremitting, unrelenting grievousPain of Waking. (Das 59)
I have attempted not to limit my reading of Jibanananda to a single dimension in this article because there is always the potential of reconsidering his poem from a different perspective. The way Jibanananda’s poetry portrays the process of mind or organic speech through a kind of stream-of-consciousness technique, it can be reinterpreted from the postmodernist perspective. Postmodern poetry typically expresses an existential void and deals with themes of meaninglessness or absence of reality, that largely shares Das’s conception of poetry. On the other hand, his primordial, creaturely vision of nation can be understood from the ecocritical theory as well.
It's important to keep in mind that Jibanananda's poetry defies easy generic categorization. Despite the fact that his poetry is romantic and particularly modern, the poet saw himself primarily as a lyric poet. Das consolidates literary modernism in post-Tagorean Bengal, which is being pursued by the Kallol generation poets. His poetry establishes a dialectic of poetic subjectivity that is both distinctive and opens up the prospect of projecting the mirror onto the 'self' trapped in historical moment. At times, Jibanananda's poetry has been criticised for its lack of nationalist thought. However, he was highly aware of his surroundings, and his nationalism derives from a yearning to return to the quintessential Bengal. As a result, his despair, or death drive, is profoundly rooted in this period of depression, as well as linked to individual existential crisis. Das desires to 'become' the disorderly human being from an ontological standpoint. In his poetry, the individual and culture, nature and metaphysics, the human and non-human blend into an organic union that completely modifies Bengali poetry’s diction and pushes us to recognise life’s absurd vulnerability. His poetry, therefore, I feel, would act like the flesh of a tangerine to the decomposing corpse of contemporary life.
If only I might returnUpon a winter’s eveningTaking on the compassionate flesh of a cold tangerineAt the bedside of some dying acquaintance. (Das 3)
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