I remember having read my first Nirendranath Chakraborty (or, Niren Chakraborty, as Bengalis always liked to call him) poem, Batasi, in a Bengali literary weekly, probably in the magazine’s annual Durga Puja number. A rough-and-ready English translation reads somewhat like this:
‘Batasi! Batasi?’ – The man shrieked
even as he ran behind the bus-station.
I only caught a quick glimpse of him from the speeding train.
Who is Batasi? Why does that burly man
call out to her again and again, furiously? Why
with his shock of wild hair
flailing in the wind
does he run around like that, screaming, ‘Batasi! Batasi?’…
I will never get my arms around the whole story.
I will only listen in. Here and there,
in a bustling mandi, inside a crowded bus,
on an open ground, or a sidewalk,
or from a train window, scraps of conversation
will reach me, and I will keep listening, always, only listening. And
suddenly, on some lonesome, lazy afternoon
the cry will ring in my ears: ‘Batasi! Batasi?’
I was in my early teens then, and these lines haunted me for some days thereafter. Maybe I was getting to a stage myself just then when one found it hard to get one’s arms around many stories, most sensations. About the same time, unless my memory deceives me, I also read his Amanush (The Sub-human), a witty little tale about a Chimpanzee in a zoo that turns the tables on us, ‘true humans’, who think nothing of jeering at a morose chimp who does not feel like entertaining the milling, fun-hunting crowds on a winter day.
Chakraborty’s was an easy colloquial idiom, but the strong lyrical undertone was unmistakable in these poems. Soon enough, one started looking forward to his poems with much the same anticipation as those of Subhash Mukhopadhyay and Shakti Chattopadhyay, the two poets who helped widen the horizons of Bengali poetry more than any of their contemporaries.
Also read: The King is Naked: Nirendranath Chakraborty’s Poetry is More Relevant Than Ever
It was not until a few years later, curiously, that I discovered Niren Chakraborty’s earlier work – that from the late-1940s through the 1950s. It was a revelation. Here was an intensely lyrical poet who stood in a direct line of descent from Sudhindranath Dutta, Amiya Chakraborty and Buddhadev Bose (and, through them, from Rabindranath Tagore), who yet had found his own voice very early on. Neel Nirjan (The Blue Wilderness), his first anthology, collates poems from 1947 to 1953-54, marking the arrival of an accomplished artist who was also a craftsman of great skill.
Indeed, by age twenty-five, Niren could do what he wished with rhyme patterns and stanza structures, at the same time never allowing his cleverness with form to get the better of the emotional core of his poems:
No wave breaks here, no one loves, the heart
smoulders who knows with what pain, night and day, the stiff wind
hurts awfully, no one knows why, no one , they know not how to
draw close to others. Who knows where they all go
with gleaming robes covering their faces, look with what great care
they pick up shards of useless glass, not knowing glass from gold.
The heart is puny here, like a miser’s, here that light
never shines, not one wave breaks here – let me not be here anymore.
No one has used enjambment – the spilling-over of thought and speech to a second, sometimes also to a third or even a fourth line of a poem, without a pause or a final stop sign – with greater dexterity than Niren Chakraborty. Indeed, his craft is so highly finessed that you hardly notice it, although no fewer than 30 of the 42 poems making up Neel Nirjan use this trick. What enjambment does is that it subtly builds up tension between an expectation of finality and the experience of continuity, releasing the tension when the syntax is completed.
This makes for a sense of speed, of restlessness, used to great effect in the poem – titled Dheu (Waves)– I just quoted from, where the rising and the falling-away of the sea’s waves is neatly mirrored in the syntactic structure. When the closure eventually comes – as in ‘….let me not be here anymore’ – its sense of finality is heightened, too. In Ashomoy (The Unpropitious Hour), on the other hand, Niren uses enjambment sparingly, mixing it up with alliterative tone repetitions:
The morning sky was blue, at dusk the storm arrived –
you came then,
when it was all dark, when in the Casuarina trees
the wind breathed low, plaintively.
You thought you’d light up the pitch-black sky,
you thought hope blossomed in even a deadened soul,
oh, stupid hope, if some of that hope could be got together
everyone would dip their two hands
in that hope. You came now, why didn’t you come in the morning?
By the time his second book of poems – Ondhokar Baranda (The Unlit Balcony) – came along, Niren Chakraborty had picked up an altogether new skill – that of mixing up, effortlessly, the spoken word with the purely literary turn of phrase. This helped significantly widen the range of his subjects and the spectrum of the colours he used to depict them. Irony he always handled particularly well, and his enlarged – and enriched – diction now added a piquancy, a salty tang to his verses:
He hoped to live in peace,
but his hope, alas, was belied.
For, nestled inside his head,
an enormous bee-hive thrived.
And that white could not be black,
black not blue, nor red –
since, on all this, he wasn’t so sure
and such doubts he failed to shed
If only he’d listen to his friends,
and doused with cool discretion
the doubts that nagged at his brain,
prickly, like many an inflammation –
he would’ve been better off. And since
between potency and desire
to build bridges he wasn’t ever keen,
and, though beaten every now and then,
with his tiny boat he’d set sail still
over and over and all over again,
for destinations strange and beyond the pale …
And since of this in all his mind
there never was a doubt of any kind
that all that glitters and sparkles bright
is not all gold –
so, his hopes for a life of peace,
alas, they were all belied.
For, of course, deep inside his head,
an enormous bee-hive thrived !
Though Niren was at the peak of his powers in the turbulent 1960s and the even more tumultuous 1970s, his poetry references contemporary life only obliquely, even elliptically. He was inclined to engage more readily with the individual’s sensibilities, rather than with the community’s hopes, aspirations and frustrations. The rumbling of wheels is sometimes heard in the distance, of course – sometimes, its echo resonates strongly, too, as in Asia:
The light has dimmed now. In the eerie, shadowy dark
forests, oceans, lakes and night’s dew-laden fields
quiver with eager anticipation, day comes, the dark gates
all crumble down…..
But, overall, he stays invested in the broad, universal themes of loneliness, the enjoyment of nature and its many moods, hope and the loss of hope. Two of his most celebrated poems – Ulanga Raja (The Naked King) and Kolkatar Jisu (Kolkata’s Jesus), both written in 1969 – bear testimony to his preferred mode of engagement with the spatial and temporal boundaries of contemporary life.
Both are well-crafted poems, the first one clearly a deeply-felt piece, too. Ulanga Raja presages the rise of authoritarianism and the cult of the Superman, but seems in the end to veer away into a somewhat idealised symbol of protest. Kolkatar Jisu, on the other hand, transposes a not unusual urban scene on to the plane of the universal, one can almost say the metaphysical. Interestingly in both these poems, the protagonist is an unclothed human – the king in one and a homeless little child in the other.
But, while the naked infant seems to stand for humanity at large groping for the way forward, the disrobed regent embodies the arrogant delusions of power. While both these are important works, the urge to reduce Nirendranath Chakraborty’s oeuvre to poems like these only is to completely misread him.
Also read: Bengali Poet Nirendranath Chakraborty Dead
For a few years in the mid-to-late 1980s, I used to live in pretty much the same part of Kolkata that the poet had made his home. In fact, I used to see him often, walking down the main street of the locality or shopping for fish and fruit in the same market that provided for my family’s larder as well.
A tall, handsome man, he clearly enjoyed the simple pleasures of life and always came across as relaxed and convivial, like the poetry he was writing at the period. I believe this was also when he started translating the Tintin tales into Bengali. He wrote his memoirs, reminisced about food he loved as a child, reviewed books and composed verse drama. His work as much as he himself seemed to exude a joie de vivre that was as endearing as it was reassuring.
It would be hard to imagine then that the same man could write the exquisite Purborag (First Love), a magical evocation of the joy as well as the pain, the hope as much as the hopelessness of a poet’s life. It is impossible to capture the elusive beauty of this early (1950) poem in translation, and the best I can do is pick out bits and pieces from here and there in this longish piece:
For how much longer, oh, tell me, must I keep pushing at my pen,
how many more years, each morning and night, must I play at writing, then?
How many more years, oh, tell me how many years more
from far away must I peep
as night’s thick veil lifts and the golden morning rises from its sleep,
and a young sun is framed in the branches of the Hisal tree?…
So then I don’t
belong anywhere? Not to the morning, nor the day
nor even to the night? Then, tell me, oh, tell me,
the blinding sun that burns all through the long day,
and the million rubies that shimmer in the sky at night,
I don’t know them, then? Then, oh, then,
how much longer must I keep pushing at my pen,
for how many years more, morning and night, must I keep playing at writing, then?
Anjan Basu freelances as a translator of poetry, literary critic and commentator. He can be reached at basuanjan52@gmail.com