Bifurcating the Bosom
(For Sri Subrata Rudra)
Are you listening?
I was taken aback by your words
Whenever I got you by my side
Yet I did not understand well
then…
Now I remember…
I have seen you by the side of Sheetalkhya and Meghna
That dangerous night in front of Vairab Bazar
on which the Padma embankment broke
O, my mother
Now I remember…
Hazy, I have not seen you for long
Tears have blurred you, album
Are you listening?
Buriganga, I have not kept my head in your lap for long.
—Rittwik Kumar Ghatak
A Poem about the Division of Bengal
The newspapers want to divide Bengal. Do they?
The leaders, under the instruction of the Governor-General,
want to divide our pot for boiling the rice. Do they?
If the pot breaks, the rice will turn into ashes in the fire of the oven
Hey, we are hungry, tired labourers, what will we eat then?
What will our skinny wives, our naked, wicked children eat?
Thirty-five lakhs of us have died.
We have died only at the whims of those leaders and generals,
Will two to four crore of us die again
by the grief-stricken writings of Attlee’s affectionate heart,
scripted by expensive pen,
by the scratch of Nehru’s nail, by the sympathy of Jinnah for the poor Muslims,
by riots, curfew, failures and lies?
The leaders of the leaders want to divide Bengal.
Bengal is for the Bengalees.
God and Allah’s all the magnanimous statements of thousand years for people’s good,
Is life extra? Death is known.
Death is the last adjudicator!
The Bengalees are dying, have died, will die,
But O brother,
We can’t die any more.
We have died as much as we could, but we can’t die any more.
Upon my honour, I swear by Ma Kali, by Allah
Under no circumstances we can die any more.
So omitting God, Allah, leaders and generals from our life
Now we want to live
We want to live as humans with human beings.
Let the house get divided,
We won’t allow the division of our body, our heart.
—Manik Bandyopadhyay
None of them was a well-known poet. One is considered one of the trio that changed the face of Indian cinema after Independence and the other a novelist and a short story writer who, had he been translated properly, the Bengalees believe, could have been a strong contender for the Nobel Prize. One is Rittwik Kumar Ghatak and the other Manik Bandyopadhyay. Interestingly, both of them wrote poems about partition which have drawn the attention of the Bengali readers of late as they have been published in an anthology of Bengali poems and songs written on partition, namely Deshbhag Ebong…(Nirbachito Kabita O Gan), edited by Tanmay Bhattacharya and published by Sristisukh.
It is not only partition that ties these two poets up. There were other similarities between the two as well. Both of them in their works portrayed the lives of the lower middle class and subalterns. Both lived miserably towards the end of their lives fighting poverty and illness. Both were members of undivided Communist Party. Rittwik was, however, expelled from the party, Manik was not. Like this one, there are other dissimilarities between the two as well. Rittwik’s engagement with partition is much discussed. He is globally acclaimed for his partition trilogy consisting of Meghe Dhaka Tara, Komal Gandhar and Subornorekha. Manik, in his fiction, on the other hand, did not show that much concern for partition. His classics, such as, Padmanadir Majhi, Putul Nacher Itikatha (both novels) “Atasi Mami,” and “Chhotobakulpurer Yatri” (both short stories) are not about partition.
As an artist, Rittwik was emotional. His films show a masterly handling of melodrama. Sometimes he has also been accused of making much of it. Manik, on the other hand, is known for his precision and restrain as a craftsman. This difference in artistry is well manifested in these two poems. Rittwik’s reaction to partition is emotional; he laments for the lost motherland. Readers can almost feel him crying in the poem. Manik’s attitude to partition is more analytical. There is no excess of emotion in his treatment of it. He considers partition a conspiracy of the colonial rulers that got support from the Indian political parties because of their own vested interests. He also considers the economic crisis as the worst effect of partition on the masses. His protest looks like the typical protest of the communists, some of whom even declared Indian Independence as ‘fake.’ Though Rittwik was expelled from the Communist Party, he never lost faith in Communism. Why then this difference between these two poets? Is it only because of the difference in artistry?
The main reason for this difference between the two is that Rittwik was a refugee but Manik was not. Though Manik prioritizes the unity of the Bengalees over the differences between the two religions they mainly belong to and metaphorically envisions a borderless Bengal, his utterance is bereft of the pangs of partition that broods heavily over the poem of Ghatak. His is not a refugee’s reaction to partition, Ghatak’s is.
These two less-known poems of two well-known geniuses actually demonstrate the two main ways in which Bengali poets have written on partition. Some have written with empathy, while others with sympathy: some have written as direct or indirect victims of partition, others as agitated but helpless spectators.
(Both the poems have been translated by the author of this essay.)
(Angshuman Kar, a Bengali poet and novelist, is Professor of English at the University of Burdwan, West Bengal.)
