Jibanananda Das: The advent of a new era in Bangla Literature

For Bengali translation by native translator contact www.indianscripts.com    

Certainly the most prominent modernist poet of Bengali literature, Jibanananda Das entered the Bangla literature domain when modernism was at full swing in the West.

Based on the four pillars of natural beauty, rural Bengal, love and humanism, his poems manifest a lyrical beauty that according to some is only second to Rabindranath Tagore. But there’s one point where he has become almost parallel to Tagore; the anthology Banalata Sen is now as popular as Geetanjali.

For Bengali translation by native translator contact www.indianscripts.com    

A great paradigm shift can be noticed in Jibananada’s works when he repositioned his vision from the rural, natural beauty of Bengal and as a whole, India; evident from his poems in Mahaprithivi i.e. The Great World and then, from a steadily increasing number of poems focused on international affairs and the future of the human civilization, they are, to say the least, far more complex than his previous works. A probable reason behind could be the Second World War as well as the Bengal famine of 1943, the communal riots and the partition of India that moved him deeply to reflect the failures of the human civilization. This is when he developed the style based on laments and his book Sat-ti Tarar Timir (or the darkness caused by seven stars) based on the incidents of WWII is a burning example of the cerebrations.

For Bengali translation by native translator contact www.indianscripts.com    

Even with a hundred short stories and more than a dozen novels in his roster, Jibanananda never gave much importance to the idea of getting them published; it was not till 1968 that his masterpieces saw the daylights and had the recognition which they so duly deserved. May be it was his innate fear that the new styles would be far beyond the comprehension of the common man (the style of his fictions avoiding the structured plots consciously can be held as an example), since not many during that era used to think in his lines of unpredictability; it was a theory that he gave birth to and claimed that since life doesn’t follow a defined structure, a realistic story should also lack a structure that is planned. However, fact remains that the specific style has undoubtedly broadened the appeal of Bengali literature as a whole.