Seasons through Tagore’s eyes
Dr.
Mizanur Rahman Shelley
From
time immemorial, the Bengali seasons and
festivals have blended in a mosaic of thrilling
colours. Bangladesh in particular and Bengal
in general happen to be featured by clearly
marked seasons. As every Bengali child knows,
six evenly spaced seasons are part and parcel
of life in these territories.
The seasons travel their pre-designed paths:
scorching summer, 'Grishma', the months
of 'Baishakh' and 'Jyaishtha' (mid-April
to mid-June), gets submerged in downpours
of the rainy season, Barsha--'Asharh' and
'Shravan' (mid-June to mid-August). The
rains give way to the early autumn, 'Sharat',
of blue skies, 'Bhadra' and 'Ashwin' (mid-August
to mid-October). Then comes the late autumn,
'Hemanta', 'Kartik' and 'Agrahayan' (mid-October
to mid-December) when fleecy clouds, laze
in the sky, bright in radiant sun. Then
it is the turn of sun-warmed winter, 'Sheet',
'Poush' and 'Magh' (mid-December to mid-February).
Finally it is time for the Bengali spring,
'Basanta', the months of 'Falgun' and 'Chaitra'
(mid-February to mid-April): the season
of colourful flowers and love.
Seasons
and life create a multi-coloured melange
which is integral to the Bengali psyche.
That's why the nation welcomes and bids
farewell to each of the six seasons with
appropriate festivals. Poets and lyricists
join the people to sing in and sing out
each season. Some of the most eloquent and
touching poems and songs adoring the seasons
of Bengal are found in the timeless creations
of poet Rabindranath Thakur. Other prominent
Bengali poets, such as, Kazi Nazrul Islam
and Jibanananda Das, contributed their quota
to the exquisite process of ringing in and
ringing out the unique seasons of Bengal.
Rabindranath was not profuse in writing
about seasons. This may sound strange in
view of the fact that his creative writings
richly reflected the infinite variety of
nature enveloping the entire existence of
the people of Bengal. Rabindranath had a
special nische in his mind for the rain-drenched
days of Asharh and Shravan. His exquisite
poem on 'Asharh', the first month of rains,
strikes a responsive chord in every mind
that knows the Bengali monsoon:
"Neel
nabaghono Asharh gogone til thain aar nahire
Ogo aaj tora jasne ghorer bahire."
(There is virtually no space in the new
deep dark-blue of the Asharh skies,
Take heed all of you, don't venture out
of your homes).
Nevertheless,
Rabindranath also wrote poems and songs
extolling the season of rains.
Festivals
marking other seasons find their place of
pride in the writings of the great poet.
Baishakh, heralding the beginning of the
Bangla year and summer, was also the month
in which the poet was born. The songs and
poems he composed on Baishakh and the new
Bangla year constitute a treasure-house
in Bengali literature. An adorer of dynamism,
Rabindranath found in the 'absconding clouds'
of Baishakh, the dream of the mountains,
which wanted to float like them. For him
summer was the veritable beginning of it
all. It stood for all that was new. He engraved
in timeless letters an ode to his month
of birth and wrote:
"Chiro
notunere dilo dak
Panchishe Baishakh."
(The twenty-fifth of Baishakh sounds a clarion
call
To that which is ever new).
He
sought to usher in the first month of Bengali
summer 'Baishakh' thus:
"Esho
hey Baishakh, Esho Esho,
Taposh O nishasho Baye . . ."
(Come, oh Baishakh! come,
Breathing the fragrance of meditation. .
. . .”
For
Rabindranath the festivities of the Bangla
New Year are charged with the significance
of a dynamic renewal, forever and eternally
a new beginning.
He
also wrote in praise of Hemontika, the eternal
feminine entity that one finds in the beauties
of the late Bengali autumn.
Winter
wears a cheerful and festive look in Rabindranath's
writings. He does not find the winter-wind
mercilessly cold as they find it in the
West. On the contrary, the wintry breeze
in Bengal makes the branches of the 'Amloki'
tree dance in delight.
"Shiter
Haway laglo Nachon, laglo Nachon Amlokir
Oy daley daley . . ".
He finds himself one with the festivals
of winter harvest and new-food, 'Nobanno'.
"Poush
toder dak diechhe aai re chole aai aai aai
..."
(Poush, the first month of the winter, has
heralded a call for all of you,
Come one and come all).
This call is for participating in a festival
of plenitude:
"Dala je tor bhorechhe
aaj paka Phashale..."
(Your container is full today with ripe
harvest).
Finally,
the Bengali spring found its rightful place
in a riot of colours in Rabindranath's writings.
He writes cheerfully of the gifts that people
make as Falgun walks-in with spring in its
hands.
"Fagun hawai hawai
Korechijey daan,
Amar apon hara pran,
Amar badhan chara pran ..."
(I have contributed my selfless
soul,
My soul bereft of all ties
To the Falgun breeze).
In
other songs and poems also, the poet portrayed
the joys and delights of the festival of
spring, which he always found to be a season
of everlasting hope.
The
six seasons of Bengal throb with the pulsations
of varied life in Rabindranath's moving
poems and songs. These are indivisible from
existence. That's why he wrote:
Jabar
agay jani jeno
Amai dekechhilo keno
Aakash pane noyon mele
Shyamol Bashumoti ...
" ...Jeno amar ganer sheshey
Thamtey pari shame eshey..."
... Chhoyti ritur
Phule phale
Bhorte pari dala ..."
(So that I may know
Before I leave
Why the green Earth
Looked up at the sky
And call me to her lap
....Before I depart
I pray that
I may end my song at its peak.
...Have the fortune of
Filling my container
With the fruits and flowers of six seasons).
......................................................
The writer currently head of a development
research centre is a litterateur.
Jibanananda
: Poet of autumnal
shadows
Loken
Bose
JIBANANANDA Das was my first
youthful wonder. To quote Jibanananda himself,
'endangered wonder'. To qualify a state
of mind like astonishment and wonder by
the verbal adjective 'endangered' is just
one spark of the creativity which set Jibanananda
apart from the rest of the poets and which
he pursued for 25 years. To express wonder
and to feel endangered are two kinds of
emotional experience. Jibanananda excelled
in uniting divergent sensibilities for their
concentrated effect upon the mind. This
is one reason why his poetry makes such
overpowering appeal upon the reader. Besides,
his poetry relocates the designated tasks
of the sense-organs and alters perceptivity
in order to enhance sensuousness. The visible
is made olfactory and the tactile is made
out to be visible. This transposition of
the sense-organs was nothing new in world
poetry but it was Jibanananda who prompted
the Bangalee reader to look at his familiar
ambience with a new glow of strangeness
and mystery. And also to hone his perception
to a much finer grade so that he may appreciate
'green wind', 'smell of sunlight' and 'salty
woman'. Some other examples 'The smell of
meadow grass in its breasts / the smell
of dew in the eyes -- / their savour induces
the paddy to grow.' Few poets depicted the
natural surounding of Bengal as penetratingly
as Jibanananda did, although in novels Bibhutibhushan
Bandopaddhya stands a comparison.
Our familiar surrounding
is not cluttered up with objects lyrical
the fountains and rainbows, the peacocks
and gazelles. And it is not possible to
go on writing poetry eternally on the colours
of the rainbow and the dark wistful eyes
of the gazelle. Poetry must break out of
its traditional mould and chart a new direction.
That is what Modernism is all about. Jibanananda's
poetry contemplates such 'un-poetical' elements
as the rat and the owl. And he also creates
a juxtaposition of the beautiful and the
ugly in order to produce a wrenching effect
upon the reader's mind. In one of his poems
perhaps the most controversial one he ever
wrote in the woods a doe on her heat is
being used by men as a bait to lure the
stags who will rush, only to fall prey to
the gunshots of hunters lying in wait. And
this repulsive incident takes place in spring
moonlight, to heighten the duality of emotion.
At that time (1932) the poem touched off
furious controversy. What was the poet depicting?
Deception, cruelty, helplessness of beautiful
creatures in the wilds or helplessness of
the human situation? No other poem of Jibanananda's
engendered such commotion. The uncomprehending
public, not yet moulded in the Modernist
tradition, dismissed the poem as lustful,
crude, ugly. In fact the poet was celebrating
pessimism and helplessness as ordained by
nature. Before Jibanananda and his contemporaries
of the 'Thirties, the syrupy lyricism and
maudlin sentimentality of Rabindranath were
what people thought to be poetry.
The imagery Jibanananda
constructed is often outlandish. Imagery
such as 'In her body the turbidity of afternoon',
'silence like the shoulder of a camel'.
In the poem 'Cat' (Title may remind one
of Baudelaire's famous poem but nothing
else is common) we find lines like
In autumn afternoon
in the soft body of saffron-coloured sunlight
I see the cat playing
by affectionately running upon it
its light paws.
And there is a Baudelairesque
attraction for what is putrid and rotten
the rotted cucumber, foul-smelling pumpkin.
Jibanananda believede, like a few other
contemporary poets, that 'the world today
is sunk in deep, deep sickness'.
In Jibanananda's poetry
the recurrent theme is that depicting the
penumbra of twilight, the setting where
objects are darkened and shadowy. The grey
mist of dusky shadows go to combine beauty
with a dismal philosophy of life. A man
who apparently lacked no fulfilment of life
is driven by some dark mysterious force
to hang himself. No one can tell why he
did so.
It is common knowledge that
autumn is Jibanananda's most favourite season
and his poetry is eminently suffused by
autumnal shadows. In the climatology of
Bengal the spring season is very inconspicuous
and passes unnoticed while early winter
is a cheerful time. The shorn trees, harvested
stubble, receding sunlight and shadowed
fields and farms posses a quiet beauty which
does not fail to reveal itself to a truly
discerning mind. But Jibanananda sees far
more in them. Tagore is a poet ofr monsoon
rain and itsa fullness and profusion. Jibanananda
is a poet of autumn, its greyness, its sombreness
and desolation. The Bengali month kartik
(mid-October to mid-November) is a recurring
element in Jibanananda. It should not be
supposed that he sang praise of autumn the
way the older poets eulogised the spring.
The darkened autumn landscape is not without
its rats and owls and 'lazy flies'. Jibanananda,
a Modernist that he is, sees Nature through
an individualised prism with the result
that all perspectives and proportions are
warped and all poetical conventions are
thrown to the winds. And the familiar objects
are invested with weirdness and mystery.
Jibanananda's earliest poems
few in number were written in English. These
were a teen-ager's endeavour and are seldom
read or even mentioned today. But it is
significant that one English sonnet was
on autumn. It begins
I have felt the breath of
autumn wind,
With the fragrance of spring still in my
heart
I have touched shiveringly the skirt
Of Autumn her treasures nervously grinned.
His leitmotif is of course the river Dhansiri.
But this is double entendre. Dhansiri may
be a proper noun denoting a river near his
home Barisal. But the word which means paddy-banked
river can also be a metonymy representing
rural Bengal. The translator is hard put
to it to take a decision, since in Bangla
there is no use of capital letter. This
will remain an eternal puzzle.
Jibanananda was a lonely
man, had few close friends, attended no
assembly or adda, belonged to no goshthi
or literary group. Buddhadev Bose who was
instrumental in giving exposition of Jibanananda's
literary excellence to the indifferent readers
calls him the loneliest poet. No one has
any explanation why Jibanananda kept his
prose works -- novels and short stories
-- secret. In his lifetime it was thought
that he wrote nothing else except poetry,
barring an occasional essay or review in
Bangla or English. Almost every important
person has marital problem. Jibanananda
Das-Labonya Das (née Gupta) had three
children and nothing unusual was suspected
in the beginning. But Labonya Das who was
surpassingly beautiful woman was also ambitious
in a gross sense. Maybe she was an untamed
shrew. Because of estranged relations with
wife Jibanananda was said to be subjected
to sexual repression. Finally he allotted
a portion of his residence to a lady of
easy virtue. At night after the children
were asleep Jibanananda used to enter her
room. Labonya perhaps knew this. Conjugal
tension intensified. Whether his death from
fatal injury under the wheels of a tramcar
was accident or suicide will never be known.
His life itself was an enigma.
......................................................
The author, a literature critic writes under
a pen name.
