THE POETRY OF BANGLADESH

What can we call the poetry of Bangladesh? The land was always here, even before history was written, even before the language arrived. Today Bangla stands for the Bengali language. In broad strokes, one can assume that Bengali poetry would mean the poetry of Bangladesh. However, there is no meaning to this generalization in the political sense. In history and geography, there may have been Bengal and East Bengal and Bangladesh, too. But there was never an Independent Bengal. The Bengal Sultanate may have been nominally independent but they too were under the rule of the Center. Today the parts of Bengal that aren’t under the rule of Delhi is Bangladesh. There is a Bengal, then, outside of the country too, with its own literature and its own sensibility, where the Center’s gaze remains. It begs the question; can we divide a language and its literature the same way we partition off a country and its land? How is it possible to classify the Bengali literature from both these ends? Perhaps through its subject matter we can make some distinctions in regards to geography, politics, religion and culture. But when the poetry and literature deals with love, lust, jealousy, anxiety, and a myriad of other aspects of humanity, what to do then? Not just literature in one’s own language, we wouldn’t be able to make distinctions in all languages put together. Still, my discussion would be centered around Bangladeshi poetry. Therefore, it is vital to clarify certain points.

There is a risk in launching into a discussion of Bangladeshi Poetry without much prior thought. It leaves open the door for misunderstandings. Still, we are processes of our time and place, unable to move out of our surroundings whenever we feel like it. Wherever we go, our language and country remain with us. The language is the accumulation of all the words we are familiar with, the sounds we use to communicate with everyone around us. It is through this language that we can equivalate ourselves with others. The place we are born in is the closest to our identity. It’s wind, flowers, birds and rivers constitute our environment. When a poet expresses these feelings, he cannot shy away from language and environment around him. And in this way, time and place becomes one with language and emotion. No matter the abstraction, one can always notice the time and place a poem had been constructed. There, it isn’t entirely inconsistent to regard Bangladeshi poetry as a distinct, separate movement of work. However, there is some exception of the Bengali language and peoples with the other peoples and languages of the world, for the language goes beyond the territory of Bengal. Almost an equal number of Bengalis live outside of Bangladesh as they do within. There is a great number of Bengali literatures, coming out of these places. But we can’t call these texts Bengali literature. There is a distinction between the two just as the Ganges and Jamuna may flow beside one another and still retain their distinct flow.

Of course, we do not want to accept this. The lines of Bengali poetry and Bangladeshi poetry are obviously seen as a political project. While poetry might always seem like an innocuous aesthetic activity, there is always a strain of politics going through it. It is not possible to go beyond politics and geography. Even our internationalism deals with our localities. Not just that, there is always some weak nationalism hiding under this internationalism. As a result, when we talk about Bangladeshi poetry, we talk about the poetry written within the land, populated by people who have a different way of life than those living beyond. A different politics, culture, eating habits, way of talking, even religious celebrations. Before 1947, Bengal was united, even during British and Mughal rule. Therefore, all of Bengali poetry would be considered as part of the heritage of Bangladeshi poetry. That is to say, it is quite reasonable to assume that before the forties, all of Bengali poetry was encased within the undivided land. To lay claim to it on the basis of east and west would be baseless. However, the partition of India has nevertheless enriched and diversified the tradition of Bengali poetry, creating two broad strains of development.

Before the partition of India, the inheritors of Bengali poetry were Rabindranath Tagore and Kazi Nazrul Islam. Though numerous debates of their inclusion and exclusion arise from time to time, they have always been an essential part of Bengali poetry. And not only Tagore and Nazrul, but many of the poets before them could rightfully be claimed as Bangladeshi poetry. It is true in the political sense as much as it is in the geographic sense. But with the partition of India, that undivided line of legacy could not be kept alive. Therefore, Bengali poetry written outside of Bangladesh may be part of this legacy but are completely different in terms of geo-politics. It could be called a foreign poem of the same language. A bit like Spanish poetry and Latin American poetry in Spanish. Or the differences between English and American literature.

Then which era should we claim for Bangladeshi poetry? Like I’ve said before, Bangladeshi poetry was created due to India’s partition, even as Bangladesh did not exist in 1947. The land was part of greater Pakistan.

After the British left, East Bengal was in such tatters that it could not for any reason accept the Urdu speaking regions now part of their own. There was no way to reunite with India’s West Bengal. Even today, the relations that the two sides have garnered couldn’t have been possible in the years before in Hindi and Urdu circles. There was an isolation the country went through after ’47. It’s the pain and cries of this isolation that has helped give birth and transformed into the language of protest and poetry. This is how we got Bangladeshi poetry. An early division was made possible by the British. Lord Curzon’s attempts at partitioning Bengal was to separate the Hindu and Muslim Bengalis and to rule by division.

However, the anti-colonial poetry of the 1920s, made popular by Nazrul had to be adopted by Bangladeshi poets for a long while after partition. For East Bengal, it was only transition to becoming another colony, under the rule of West Pakistan. Religion made it so that Bangladesh had to remodel itself as East Pakistan. But it wasn’t possible to confine itself into one narrow definition. Two hundred years of colonial rule it had to accept. Before a year could pass, the nation had to get on the streets for the rights of its language. The Bengal under Indian-rule did not have to go through the same struggle. They had to compromise with Bangla becoming a regional language under the supremacy of Hindi.

The nation had fought for its language and literature from the start. The ruling class and aristocracy were against it from the start. From the age of Apabhraṃśa to Sanskrit, the litterateurs of Bangla had to face them all. There was fear set in that anyone composing the puranas or hearing them in the language would have to burn in hell. Even in the Sultanate years of the middle age, when the language received some patronage in the royal court, the upper-born Muslims did not see it in a positive light. Users of the language were considered inferior. Seeing such behavior, the mediaeval poet Abdul Hakim had given them a good bollocking. However, it is not hard to understand the opposition against the language. It was the only tongue of the general public. The upper-class Bengalis are never comfortable with having Bangla as their tongue. And the ruling class only accept it as a populist means of being part of the public tongue. It is only a tactical move, as such. Therefore, we can say that the Bengali language from its birth had the ire of the elite and a revolutionary streak built in. The dangers of its extinction can only make sense when the fire of rebellion is dimmed out. After the partition of 1947, East Bengal was able to keep this fire burning. Besides this, the tragedy of the divide between language and politics began to take root. The same language began to branch out in two different places. Before partition could make it official, the poets of the forties had already started the process. They were mainly idealists, believing in a positive outcome from their work. They dreamt of a hunger-free, egalitarian state, free of exploitation.

However, their philosophical basis was not the same. While much of the poetry was steeped in Marxist tendencies, the fact that Pakistan was going to be built on religious grounds made it so that many of the poetry took on an Islamic tone, emphasizing on the equality that the belief system possesses. Farrukh Ahmed is a good example of this. He was a powerful poet of the forties. He believed that if we were to have a state based on Islamic values, we would get a hunger-free, exploitation-free society. The kernel of this ideal was a result of the Pakistan movement. Even though the establishment of Pakistan did not prove great for the Bengali populace. Farrukh’s dreams failed to materialize. The imagery and beauty of his poetry may have been enjoyable, but politically his stance on Bangladesh was a done deal. In the opposite strain, we had Subhash Mukherjee, Sukanto, Golam Kuddus, who used Marxist language in their poetry. Their poetic aspirations may not have come to fruition but they were able to find a positive sensibility of Bengali poetry. The other poets of his era do not seem relevant to the discussion. Moreover, Syed Ali Ahsan, Ahsan Habib and even Abul Hosen, even though they started their writerly journeys before partition, could be termed as penning the first of Bangladeshi poetry. Most of these poets may have started their careers in Kolkata, but had moved over to Dhaka after partition and worked to make it the new literary capital of Bengal.

In fact, Bangladesh found its own poets in the fifties. Dhaka was, of course, only a provincial capital at the time. But it was gearing up to become the sole literary capital of the region. Jinnah’s proclamations of Urdu being the state language had enraged Dhaka, accelerating a renewed nationalist consciousness in the literature of Bengal. At the same time, Bengalis were left angry at the one-sided rule of the West Pakistanis. The poetry of the time reflected that struggle, that independent streak. The poetry of Dhaka in the fifties had very little similarities with the ones written on the Indian side of the border. Martyrdom based on language had stirred the Bengali consciousness further. Though poets of this time were driven in no small part by urbanization and individualism, resentment and rebellion does separate the poetry of this place from others. Most importantly, many an important poet were born in Bangladesh at the time, who helped created a strong foundation for Bangladeshi poetry to take root. Poets such as Shamsur Rahman and Al Mahmud were instrumental in merging these two phases. Shamsur Rahman encapsulated the love, loss and alienation of a burgeoning city like Dhaka, even the middle-class struggles of the city and its independence movements. Al Mahmud represented the stories of leaving the village for the city. Bangladesh gets quite its due in the poetry of these two. One could defiantly say without any comparisons that their works are truly Bangladeshi. Besides them, there were Abdul Goni Hazari, Hasan Hafizur Rahman, Fazal Shahabuddin and others, who had left their mark in Bangladeshi poetry.

The struggles of the fifties continued till the end of the sixties. The poets of that era were quite adept in Bangladeshi poetry. They were able to fully internalize the indigenous components and make their voices heard in the international arena. Any limitations it might have were stamped out by the poets of the sixties. The poetry of Bangladesh had found its grip in the conscious sphere of our world.

Mozid Mahmud is a poet, novelist and essayist based in Bangladesh. Some of his notable works include In Praise of Mahfuza (1989), Nazrul–Spokesman of the Third World (1996) and Rabindranath’s Travelogues (2010). He has been awarded the Rabindra-Nazrul Literary Prize, Bangladesh Writers Club Prize and the country’s National Press Club Award, among others.