Goethe’s “Welt” poet in Bengal: The Influence of World Literature on Jibanananda Das and other Bengali Poets of the 1930s-40s

This study aims to establish a link between the concept of “Weltliteratur” or World Literature, in terms of the free movement of literary themes and ideas between nations in original form or translation, and the Bengali poets of the thirties and forties who actively translated French and German poets. It identifies Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's (1749-1832) concept of World Literature as a vehicle for the Kallol Jug poets. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe introduced the concept of “Weltliteratur” in a few of his essays in the first half of the nineteenth century to describe the international circulation and reception of literary works in Europe, including works of non-Western origin. My emphasis will be on Jibanananda Das (1899-1954) arguably the most celebrated poet in Bengali literature who was well versed in the contemporary Western Canons of Poetry. Jibanananda’s defamiliarization of the rural Bengal Landscape, his use of exotic foreign images owe a debt to contemporary European poets. Interestingly, Jibanananda had reviewed an English translation of German author Thomas Mann’s novel “Dr Faustus’ for a Bengali magazine “Chaturanga”. In the Bengali review he states that despite prevalent misconceptions (some critics considering the novel to be superior to the original Faust epic by Goethe) Goethe’s Faust was the first text to capture the hope, despair and crisis in the modern world and articulate it in such a manner that “true” literature of the age was created in its new light. In Jibanananda’s estimation, Thomas Mann deserves credit for treating the Faust legend in a unique and creative way.

Introduction

This introductory chapter introduces James Long, an Anglo-Irish missionary who was active in schoolbook production and fascinated by Bengali literature, who published A Catalogue of Bengali Newspapers and Periodicals from 1818 to 1855. As the author of this text, he was in a good position to argue, two years later, that had the British paid more heed to the discontent on view in Indian periodicals, they might have prevented the 1857 Rebellion. With such argument, the chapter unveils the impact of the 1857 Rebellion into the Press and Registration of Books Act of 1867, an official acknowledgment of the power of the Indian press, and how it metastasized into a full-fledged culture of surveillance. It investigates how politics and affect became “officially” (legally) coupled at a crucial historical juncture, and the wide-ranging effects of this coupling on politics, literary culture, and ideas of criticism. The chapter also focuses on what British administrators thought Indian affect was, how they sought to control it and the effects this had on print culture and the colonial public sphere. For this reason, the chapter uses the words “affect” and “emotion” interchangeably, reflecting the way they were used in colonial courtrooms, as prosecutors sought to find evidence and proof of disaffection. Ultimately, it analyses the way censorship influenced conceptions of the public sphere and of the politics of empire.

Author–Screenwriter– Director (1930s–1950s): Articulating Authorship Through Self-Adaptations and Film Novelisations in Bengali

During the 1930s, one of the significant factors that strengthened the connection between Bengali literature and film was the emergence of certain key figures who straddled overlapping roles as author–screenwriter–director, frequently adapting their own literary works and reframing the contentious ‘authorship issue’ that arises between writer and filmmaker. By focusing on three such figures—Premankur Atorthy (1890–1964), Sailajananda Mukhopadhyay (1901–1976) and Premendra Mitra (1904–1988)—this essay examines the manner in which self-adaptations served to transfer the power of the literary author to the nascent cinematic auteur, particularly through the intermediary process of screenwriting. The essay also draws attention to the practice of film novelisations that was mobilised since the mid-1940s by Mitra and others like Jyotirmoy Roy and Panchugopal Mukhopadhyay, where novels were written based on cinematic works, akin to French cinéromans and contrary to ‘authorless’ novelisations by ghostwriters. In subsequent years, film novels were written by director Hemen Gupta, writers Tarashankar Bandopadhyay, Shaktipada Rajguru and Kalkut, which brings to light a largely unexplored dimension of the relationship between Bengali film and literature.

Book Review: A Primal Issue: Stories of Women by Subrata Basu

The book, “A Primal Issue: Stories of Women”, is a gripping, enthralling anthology of analytical stories, translated by Subrata Basu, and written originally in Bengali by Jagdish Gupta, a “trailblazer” (p. xv) of modernist movement in India. With its epicentric plunge on the word “primal”, the book very meticulously exhibits a valorous investigation of interdictions and anathemas existing in the splendid post-Tagore chapter of Bengali literature. This revelatory compendium stresses on Jagdish Gupta’s seven translated stories, all originally published between 1927 and 1959, with females as chief characters, scrutinizing the intense connotations of life at personal as well as societal levels. Every chapter is dedicated to one story so as to undrape the aggregation of the dilemmas, quandaries, and predicaments of Bengalis in general and women in particular for whom the repugnance of conservatism continues to exist. The stories unsparingly underscore the barbarous realities of the society, such as polygamy, child-marriage, widow-remarriage, women’s oppression and marginalization

Bengali Literature of Arakan

Between the 16th and the 18th centuries, Middle Bengali became a major idiom of literary expression in the kingdom of Arakan. It is within the domain of this coastal kingdom, which then comprised the region of Chittagong in today’s Bangladesh, that Muslim subjects of the Buddhist kings started using the courtly vernacular that was previously cultivated by Hindu dignitaries of the Ḥusayn Shāhī sultans of Bengal. By the mid-17th century, which constituted a moment of economic prosperity and maximum territorial expansion, all genres of Middle Bengali poetry were represented in the corpus of texts written by authors living in the urban and rural areas of the kingdom. The many treatises on Muslim beliefs and meditative practices, the hagiographic literature, and the courtly romances testify to the formation of a local Islamic cultural ethos. After the Mughal conquest of Chittagong in 1666, local literacy was still cultivating standards set by authors of the Arakanese period such as Saiẏad Sultān and Ālāol. In Arakan itself, Bengali Muslim literature continued to be produced and transmitted until at least the first half of the twentieth century. A large number of manuscripts was collected in the first decades of the twentieth century and these are preserved in various institutions in Bangladesh. The Bengali literature of Arakan is characterized by its Indic religious idiom and Sanskritized poetics, but also by its complex intertextuality that reflects the region’s connections with north India and the Persianate trading networks of the Bay of Bengal. Up to the 2000s, the Bengali literature of Arakan has mostly been discussed within the framework of the national literary history of Bangladesh, but subsequently scholars have relocated this corpus within the cultural domain of the Bay of Bengal and the Islamicate literary traditions of South and Southeast Asia.

The Hungryalist Movement in Bengal: A Conversation with Malay Roychoudhury

Malay Roychoudhury (1939) is an Indian Bengali poet, playwright, short story writer, essayist and novelist who founded the Hungryalist movement in the 1960s which changed the course of avant-garde Bengali literature and painting. His best-known poetry collections are Medhar Batanukul Ghungur, Jakham and Matha Ketey Pathachhi Jatno korey Rekho; and his novels Dubjaley Jetuku Proshwas and Naamgandho. He has written more than hundred books. He was given the Sahitya Academy award, the Indian government's highest honour in the field, in 2003 for translating Dharamvir Bharati's Hindi fiction Suraj Ka Satwan Ghora. However, he declined to accept this award and others. This interview has been executed by the exchange of e mails with the activist-author.

Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath Tagore (in Bengali: Rabīndranāth Ṭhākur; b. 1861–d. 1941) was born in Calcutta, the capital of British India at the time. From the late 18th century onward, his extremely large family played an important role in the economic and cultural activities of the city and the whole of Bengal. Thus Rabindranath’s life and work was intimately connected to the urban humanist Bengali culture of which he was himself to become the prime representative. He was primarily known as a Bengali poet, perhaps the first really modern one. He published his earliest volumes when he was still a teenager. His very last poems he dictated in 1941 when on his deathbed. Composing poetry was his prime literary urge but by no means the only one. He successfully tried his hands at novels, short stories, plays, songs, literary essays, philosophy and liberal Hindu theology, introductory courses for Bengali grammar, travelogues, and an autobiography. Singlehandedly he created a complete modern universe of Bengali literature. Late-19th- and early-20th-century Bengali literature is dominated by the towering figure of Rabindranath. He was also an accomplished musical innovator, the creator of the so-called Rabindra-sangit: songs and dance dramas for which he also composed the music. Late in life he became known as an artist. He experimented with humanist forms of education for schoolchildren and university students. At Santiniketan (about 150 km from Calcutta in rural West Bengal) he founded a school (in 1901) and later the eponymous university (in 1921). Tagore’s global fame came as if by chance in 1913 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. This was on the basis of Gitanjali, a small English volume of prose poems. The booklet appeared in 1912 and knew overwhelming success; at that point Tagore was launched as an international writer and Indian prophet in one, a cult figure with a global impact. In order to live up to his Nobel Prize fame he began to bring out English poetry, essays, and drama. Much of this was based on or inspired by his Bengali originals. It has often been remarked that Tagore did not do his literary reputation a good service with his English translations. In the 1920s his international fame was withering away. Translations made directly from Bengali done by William Radice in 1985 caused a resurgence of global interest in Tagore as an important writer.