Jibanananda Das (February 17, 1899 - October 22, 1954) is the most popular Bengali poet after Rabindranath Tagore and Kazi Nazrul Islam. He is considered one of the innovators who introduced modernist poetry to Bengali Literature, at a period when it was influenced by Rabindranath Tagore's Romantic poetry. Born in a literary family, with a schoolmaster father and a poet mother, he was raised and educated as a writer. After completing his MA degree in English at Calcutta University in 1921, he began an intermittent teaching career, frequently interrupted by political unrest and personal circumstances. He published his first poem in 1919, and continued to publish poems, collections and novels throughout his life.
In the early days of the twentieth century, Jibanananda was at the forefront of efforts to come out from under the dominating influence of the romantic poetry of Rabindranath Tagore. Jibanananda Das received little attention during his lifetime, and many considered his poetry incomprehensible. Readers, including his contemporary literary commentators, criticized his style and diction. Jibanananda broke the traditional circular structure of poetry (intro-middle-end), and the pattern of logical sequence of words, lines and stanzas. The thematic connotation was often hidden under a rhythmic narrative that requires careful reading between the lines.
Early Life
Jibanananda Das was born Febrary 17, 1899, in the small district town of Barisal, located in the south of Bangladesh, a part of East Bengal of the undivided India at that time. His ancestors came from the Bikrampur region of Dhaka district, from a now-extinct village called Gaupara on the banks of the river Padma. Jibanananda's grandfather, Sarbananda Dasgupta, was the first to settle permanently in Barisal.
Jibanananda's mother Kusumkumari Das was a poet and the author of a famous poem called “Adorsho Chhele” (The Ideal Boy).
Jibanananda was the eldest son of his parents, and was called by the nickname Milu. A younger brother Ashokananda Das was born in 1908, and a sister called Shuchorita in 1915. Milu fell violently ill in his childhood, and his parents feared for his life. Kusumkumari took her ailing child and traveled to health resorts all over India, in Lucknow, Agra and Giridih. They were accompanied on these journeys by their uncle Chandranath.
In January 1908, Milu, now eight years old, was admitted to the fifth grade in Brojomohon School. The delay was due to his father's opposition to admitting children into school at too early an age. Milu's childhood education was therefore sustained mostly at home, under his mother's tutelage. His school life passed by relatively uneventfully. In 1915, he successfully completed his Matriculation examination from Brojomohon, obtaining a first division in the process. He repeated the feat two years later when he passed the Intermediate exams from Brajamohan College. Evidently an accomplished student, he now left his rural Barisal to go to university in Calcutta, the teeming city at the heart of the British Raj.
Life in Calcutta
Jibanananda enrolled in Presidency College, then, as now, one of the most prestigious seats of learning in India. He studied English Literature and graduated with a BA (Honors) degree in 1919. That same year, his first poem appeared in print in the Boishakh issue of the journal Brahmobadi. Fittingly, the poem was called Borsho-abahon (Arrival of the New Year). This poem was published anonymously, with only the honorific Sri in the byline. However, the annual index in the year-end issue of the magazine revealed his full name: "Sri Jibanananda Das, BA."
In 1921, he completed his MA degree in English from Calcutta University, obtaining a second class degree. He also studied law. At this time, he lived in the Hardinge student quarters next to the university. Just before his exams, he fell ill with bacillary dysentery and this hampered his exam preparations.
The following year, he began his teaching career. He joined the English department of Calcutta's City College as a tutor. By this time, he had given up his law studies, left Hardinge and moved to a boarding house in Harrison Road. It is thought that he also lived in a house in Bechu Chatterjee Street for some time with his brother Ashokanananda, who had come up from Barisal for his MSc studies.
Travels and Travails
His literary career began to take off. When Deshbondhu Chittaranjan Das died in June 1925, Jibanananda wrote a poem called Deshbondhu'r Proyan'e (On the Death of the Friend of the Nation) which was published in Bongobani magazine. This poem was later included in the collection, Jhora Palok (1927). On reading it, the poet Kalidas Roy said that he had thought the poem the work of a mature, accomplished poet hiding behind a pseudonym. Jibanananda's earliest printed prose work, an obituary entitled Kalimohon Das'er Sraddho-bashorey, was also published in 1925 in serialized form in Brahmobadi magazine. His poetry began to be widely published in various literary journals and little magazines in Calcutta, Dhaka and elsewhere. These included Kallol, perhaps the most famous literary magazine of the era, Kalikolom (Pen and Ink), Progoti (Progress) (co-edited by Buddhadeb Bose) and others. At this time, he occasionally used the surname Dasgupta instead of Das.
In 1927, he published Jhora Palok (Fallen Feathers), his first collection of poems. came out. A few months later, Jibanananda lost his job at City College. The college had been struck by student unrest surrounding a religious festival, and enrolment had suffered as a result. Still in his late twenties, Jibanananda was the youngest member of the faculty and therefore the most dispensable . In the literary circle of Calcutta, he also came under serious attack, when the critic Shojonikanto Das began to write aggressive critiques of his poetry in the review pages of Shonibarer Chithi (The Saturday Letter) magazine.
With nothing to keep him in Calcutta, Jibanananda left for the small town of Bagerhat in the far south, to continue his teaching career at Profullo Chondro College, but lasted there only about three months before returning to the big city. He was now in dire financial straits. In order to make ends meet, he gave private tuition to students, and kept applying for full-time positions in academia. In December 1929, he moved to Delhi to take up a teaching post at Ramjosh College. This position also lasted no more than a few months. In his home town of Barisal, his family had been making arrangements for his marriage. Once Jibanananda arrived in Barisal, he failed to go back to Delhi and consequently lost the job.
In May, 1930, he married Labonya, a girl whose ancestors came from Khulna. At the subsequent reception in Dhaka's Ram Mohan Library, leading literary lights of the day such as Ajit Kumar Dutta and Buddhadeb Bose assembled. A daughter, called Monjusree, was born to the couple in February of the following year.
Around this time, Das published one of his most controversial poems. Camp'e (At the Camp) in Sudhindranath Dutta's Porichoy magazine and immediately caused a firestorm in literary circles. The poem's ostensible subject was a deer hunt by moonlight. Many accused Jibanananda of promoting indecency and incest through this poem. More and more, he turned in secrecy, to the short story format.
In 1934, he wrote the series of poems that would form the basis of the collection called Ruposhi Bangla. These poems were not discovered during his lifetime and Ruposhi Bangla was only published in 1957, three years after his death.
Back in Barisal
In 1935, Jibanananda, by now familiar with professional disappointment and poverty, returned to his alma mater, Brajamohan College as a lecturer in the English department. In Calcutta, Buddhadeb Bose, Premendra Mitra and Samar Sen were starting a brand new poetry magazine called Kobita.
The following year, his second volume of poetry, Dhushor Pandulipi, was published. Jibanananda was by now well settled in Barisal. A son Samarananda was born in November, 1936. His impact in the world of Bengali literature continued to increase. In 1938, Tagore compiled a poetry anthology entitled Bangla Kabbyo Porichoy (Introduction to Bengali Poetry) and included an abridged version of Mrittu'r Aagey, the same poem that had moved him three years ago. Another important anthology came out in 1939, edited by Abu Sayeed Ayub and Hirendranath Mukhopadhyay; Jibanananda was represented with four poems: Pakhira, Shokun, Banalata Sen, and Nogno Nirjon Haat.
In 1942, the same year that his father died, his third volume of poetry Banalata Sen was published under the aegis of Kobita Bhabon and Buddhadeb Bose. A ground-breaking modernist poet in his own right, Bose was a steadfast champion of Jibanananda's poetry, providing him with numerous platforms for publication. Moha Prithibi was published in 1944; the Second World War had had a profound impact on Jibanananda's poetic vision. The following year, Jibanananda provided his own translations of several of his poems for an English anthology to be published under the title Modern Bengali Poems. The editor Debiprasad Chattopadhyay considered these translations to be sub-standard, and instead commissioned Martin Kirkman to translate four of Jibanananda's poems for the book.
Life in Calcutta
In the aftermath of the war, demands for Indian independence heightened. Muslim politicians led by Jinnah wanted an independent homeland for the Muslims of the subcontinent. Bengal was uniquely vulnerable to partition; its western half was majority-Hindu, its eastern half majority-Muslim. Yet adherents of both religions spoke the same language, came from the same ethnic stock, and lived in close proximity to each other in town and village. Jibanananda had emphasized the need for communal harmony at an early stage in his first book Jhora Palok, which included a poem called Hindu Musalman.
In the summer of 1946, Das traveled to Calcutta from Barisal on three months' paid leave, and stayed at his brother Ashokananda's house through the bloody riots that swept the city. Just before partition in August, 1947, Jibanananda quit his job at Brajamohan College and said goodbye to his beloved Barisal. He and his family were among the refugees who took part in the largest cross-border exchange of peoples in history. For a while he worked for a magazine called Swaraj as its Sunday editor, but left the job after a few months.
In 1948, he completed two of his novels, Mallyaban and Shutirtho, neither of which were discovered during his life. Shaat'ti Tarar Timir was published in December 1948. The same month, his mother Kusumkumari Das passed away in Calcutta.
By now, Das was well-established in the Calcutta literary world. He was appointed to the editorial board of yet another new literary magazine, Dondo (Conflict). However, in a reprise of his early career, he was dismissed from his job at Kharagpur College in February of 1951. In 1952, Signet Press published Banalata Sen. The book received widespread acclaim and won the Book of the Year award from the All-Bengal Tagore Literary Conference. Later that year, the poet found another job at Borisha College (today known as Borisha Bibekanondo College). This job, too, he lost within a few months. He took up a post at Howrah Girl's College (today known as Vijaykrishna College), where, as the head of the English department, he was entitled to a 50-taka monthly bonus on top of his salary.
By the last year of his life, Jibanananda was acclaimed as one of the best poets of the post-Tagore era. He was constantly in demand for literary conferences, poetry readings, and radio recitals. In May 1954, he published a volume titled 'Best Poems' (Sreshttho Kobita).
Death
On October 14, 1954, he was crossing a road near Calcutta's Deshpriyo Park when he was hit by a tram. Seriously injured, he was taken to Shombhunath Pundit Hospital. Sajanikanta Das, who had been one of his fiercest critics, was tireless in his efforts to secure the best treatment for the poet, and even persuaded Dr Bidhan Chandra Roy (then chief minister of West Bengal) to visit him in hospital. Jibanananda died from is injuries on October 22, 1954.
His body was cremated the following day at Keoratola crematorium. Following popular belief, it has been alleged in some biographical accounts that his accident was actually an attempt at suicide. [6]. However, none of the Jibanananda biographers have indicated that this was true.
Jibanananda and Bengali Poetry
During the later half of the twentieth century, Jibanananda Das emerged as the most popular poet of modern Bengali literature. Jibanananda Das distinguished himself as an extraordinary poet, presenting a paradigm hitherto unknown to his readers, who took time to accustom themselves to his unfamiliar poetic diction, choice of words and thematic preferences. Today the poetry of Jibanananda has become the defining essence of modernism in twentieth-century Bengali poetry.
As of 2007, Bengali is the mother tongue of more than 290 million people living mainly in Bangladesh and India. Bengali poetry of the modern age flourished on the foundation laid by Michael Madhusudan (1824-1873) and Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941). Tagore, a literary giant, dominated Bengali poetry and literature for more than half a century, inevitably influencing contemporary poets. Bengali literature caught the attention of the international literary world when poet Rabindranath Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913, for Gitanjali, an anthology of poems rendered into English with the title Song Offering. Bengali poetry has traveled a long way in almost a century. It has evolved its own tradition, responded to the poetry movements around the world, and has assumed a variety of tones, colors and essences.
In Bengal, efforts to come out from under the dominating influence of the Tagorian worldview and stylistics started in the early days of twentieth century. Poet Quazi Nazrul Islam [1899-1976] popularized himself on a wide scale with his patriotic themes and musical tone and tenor. However, towards the end of the nineteenth century, a number of new-generation poets began consciously attempting to align Bengali poetry with the modernism emerging around the world, and to follow the trends emerging in contemporary Europe and America. Five poets who are particularly acclaimed for their contribution in creating a post-Tagorian poetic paradigm and infusing modernism in Bengali poetry are Sudhindranath Dutta [1901-1960], Buddhadeva Bose [1908-1974], Amiyo Chakravarty [1901-1986], Jibanananda Das [1899-1954] and Bishnu Dey [1909-1982]. The contour of modernism in twentieth century Bengali poetry was drawn by these five pioneers and some of their contemporaries.
Jibanananda’s early poems bear the influence of Quazi Nazrul Islam and some other poets like Satyandranath Dutta. Before long, however, he thoroughly overcame all influences and created a new poetic diction. Buddhadeva Bose was among the few who first recognized his extraordinary style and thematic novelty. However, as his style and diction matured, his message appeared to be obscured. Readers, including critics, began to complain that his poems were illegible and question his sensibility.
It is only after his unfortunate and accidental death, in 1954, that a competent readership started to emerge who not only was comfortable with Jibanananda's style and diction but also enjoyed his poetry with great pleasure. Questions were no longer raised about the obscurity of his poetic message. By the time his centenary was celebrated in 1999, Jibanananda Das was the most popular and the most well read poet of Bengali literature. Even when the last quarter of the twentieth century ushered in the post-modern era, Jibanananda Das continued to be relevant, because his poetry had undergone many cycles of change, and later poems contained elements responding to post-modern characteristics.
Jibanananda successfully integrated Bengali poetry with the slightly older Euro-centric international modernist movement of the early twentieth century. His success as a modern Bengali poet may be attributed to his exposure to both the ancient traditions of India and the cultural clashes of the twentieth century. His poetry explored the slowly evolving, twentieth-century modern mind, sensitive and reactive, full of anxiety and tension. He invented his own diction, rhythm and vocabulary with unmistakably indigenous roots, and maintained a self-styled lyricism and imagery. He was at once a classicist and a romantic and created an appealing and unfamiliar world:
For thousands of years I roamed the paths of this earth,
From waters round Ceylon in dead of night
to Malayan seas.
Much have I wandered. I was there
in the gray world of Asoka
And 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.
(Banalata Sen)
A sense of time and history was an unmistakable element in Jibanananda’s poetic world. Unlike many of his peers, who blindly imitated the renowned western poets in a bid to create a new poetic domain, Jibanananda remained anchored in his own soil and time, and successfully assimilated all experiences. His Best Poems won the Indian Sahitya Akademi Award in 1955
Major works
Poetry
Jhôra Palok (Fallen Feathers), 1927.
Dhushor Pandulipi (Grey Manuscript), 1936.
Bônolôta Sen, 1942
Môhaprithibi (Great Universe), 1944
Shaat-ti Tarar Timir, (Darkness of Seven Stars), 1948.
Shreshtho Kobita, (Best Poems), Navana, Calcutta, 1954.
Rupôshi Bangla (Bengal, the Beautiful), written in 1934, published posthumously in 1957.
Bela Obela Kalbela (Times, Bad Times, End Times), 1961
Alo Prithibi (The World of Light), 1984.
Manobihangam (The Bird that is my Heart)
Oprkashitô Ekanno (Unpublished Fifty-one), 1999, Mawla Brothers, Dhaka.
Fiction
Novels
Malyabaan (novel), New Script, Calcutta, 1973 (posthumuously published).
Purnima
Kalyani
Chaarjon
Bibhav
Mrinal
Nirupam Yatra
Karu-Bashona
Jiban-Pronali
Biraaj
Pretinir Kotha
Jalpaihati
Sutirtha
Bashmatir Upakhyan.
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