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.
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